'As I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends.' Christ sets Himself forward then,
here and in this aspect, as He does in all aspects of human conduct and
character, as being the realised Ideal of them all. And although the
thought is a digression from my present purpose, I cannot but pause for
a moment to reflect upon the strangeness of a man thus calmly saying to
the whole world, 'I am the embodiment of all that love ought to be. You
cannot get beyond Me, nor have anything more pure, more deep, more
self-sacrificing, more perfect, than the love which I have borne to
you.'
But passing that, the pattern that He proposes for us is even more
august than appears at first sight. For, if you remember, a verse or
two before our Lord had said, 'As the Father hath loved Me so I have
loved you.' Now He says, 'Love one another as I have loved you.' There
stand the three, as it were, the Father, the Son, the disciple. The Son
in the midst receives and transmits the Father's love to the disciple,
and the disciple is to love his fellows, in some deep and august sense,
as the Father loved the Son. The divinest thing in God, and that in
which men can be like God, is love. In all our other attitudes to Him
we rather correspond than copy. His fullness is met by our emptiness,
His giving by our recipiency, His faithfulness by our faith, His
command by our obedience, His light by our eye. But here it is not a
case of correspondence only, but of similarity. My faith _answers_
God's gift to me, but my love is _like_ God's love. 'Be ye, therefore,
imitators of God as beloved children'; and having received that love
into your hearts, ray it out, 'and walk in love as God also hath loved
us.'
But then our Lord here, in a very wonderful manner, sets forth the very
central point of His work, even His death upon the Cross for us, as
being the pattern to which our poor affection ought to aspire, and
after which it must tend to be conformed. I need not remind you, I
suppose, that our Lord here is not speaking of the propitiatory
character of His death, nor of the issues which depend upon it, and
upon it alone, viz., the redemption and salvation of the world. He is
not speaking, either, of the peculiar and unique sense in which He lays
down His life for us, His friends and brethren, as none other can do.
He is speaking about it simply in its aspect of being a voluntary
surrender, at the bidding of love, for the good of those whom He loved,
and that, He tells us--that, and nothing else--is the true pattern and
model towards which all our love is bound to tend and to aspire. That
is to say, the heart of the love which He commands is self-sacrifice,
reaching to death if death be needful. And no man loves as Christ would
have him love who does not bear in his heart affection which has so
conquered selfishness that, if need be, he is ready to die.
The expression of Christian life is not to be found in honeyed words,
or the indolent indulgence in benevolent emotion, but in
self-sacrifice, modelled after that of Christ's sacrificial death,
which is imitable by us.
Brethren, it is a solemn obligation, which may well make us tremble,
that is laid on us in these words, 'As I have loved you.' Calvary was
less than twenty-four hours off, and He says to us, '_That_ is your
pattern!' Contrast our love at its height with His--a drop to an ocean,
a poor little flickering rushlight held up beside the sun. My love, at
its best, has so far conquered my selfishness that now and then I am
ready to suffer a little inconvenience, to sacrifice a little leisure,
to give away a little money, to spend a little dribble of sympathy upon
the people who are its objects. Christ's love nailed Him to the Cross,
and led Him down from the throne, and shut for a time the gates of the
glory behind Him. And He says, 'That is your pattern!'
Oh, let us bow down and confess how His word, which commands us, puts
us to shame, when we think of how miserably we have obeyed.
Remember, too, that the restriction which here seems to be cast around
the flow of His love is not a restriction in reality, but rather a
deepening of it. He says, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a
man lay down his life for his friends.' But evidently He calls them so
from His point of view, and as He sees them, not from their point of
view, as they see Him--that is to say, He means by 'friends' not those
who love Him, but those whom He loves. The 'friends' for whom He dies
are the same persons as the Apostle, in his sweet variation upon the
words of my text, has called by the opposite name, when He says that He
died for His 'enemies.'
There is an old, wild ballad that tells of how a knight found, coiling
round a tree in a dismal forest, a loathly dragon breathing out poison;
and how, undeterred by its hideousness and foulness, he cast his arms
round it and kissed it on the mouth. Three times he did it undisgusted,
and at the third the shape changed into a fair lady, and he won his
bride. Christ 'kisses with the kisses of His mouth' His enemies, and
makes them His friends because He loves them. 'If He had never died for
His enemies' says one of the old fathers, 'He would never have
possessed His friends.' And so He teaches us here in what seems to be a
restriction of the purpose of His death and the sweep of His love, that
the way by which we are to meet even alienation and hostility is by
pouring upon it the treasures of an unselfish, self-sacrificing
affection which will conquer at the last.
Christ's death is the pattern for our lives as well as the hope of our
hearts.
IV. Lastly, we have here by implication, though not by direct
statement, the Motive of the love.
Surely that, too, is contained in the words, 'As I have loved you.'
Christ's commandment of love is a new commandment, not so much because
it is a revelation of a new duty, though it is the casting of an old
duty into new prominence, as because it is not merely a revelation of
an obligation, but the communication of power to fulfil it. The novelty
of Christian morality lies here, that in its law there is a
self-fulfilling force. We have not to look to one place for the
knowledge of our duty, and somewhere else for the strength to do it,
but both are given to us in the one thing, the gift of the dying Christ
and His immortal love.
That love, received into our hearts, will conquer, and it alone will
conquer, our selfishness. That love, received into our hearts, will
mould, and it alone will mould, them into its own likeness. That love,
received into our hearts, will knit, and it alone will knit, all those
who participate in it into a common bond, sweet, deep, sacred, and
all-victorious.
And so, brethren, if we would know the blessedness and the sweetness of
victory over these miserable, selfish hearts of ours, and to walk in
the liberty of love, we can only get it by keeping close to Jesus
Christ. In any circle, the nearer the points of the circumference are
to the centre, the closer they will necessarily be to one another. As
we draw nearer, each for himself, to our Centre, we shall feel that we
have approximated to all those who stand round the same centre, and
draw from it the same life. In the early spring, when the wheat is
green and young, and scarcely appears above the ground, it comes up in
the lines in which it was sown, parted from one another and distinctly
showing their separation and the furrows. But when the full corn in the
ear waves on the autumn plain, all the lines and separations have
disappeared, and there is one unbroken tract of sunny fruitfulness. And
so when the life in Christ is low and feeble, His servants may be
separated and drawn up in rigid lines of denominations, and churches,
and sects; but as they grow the lines disappear. If to the churches of
England to-day there came a sudden accession of knowledge of Christ,
and of union with Him, the first thing that would go would be the
wretched barriers that separate us from one another. For if we have the
life of Christ in any adequate measure in ourselves, we shall certainly
have grown up above the fences behind which we began to grow, and shall
be able to reach out to all that love the Lord Jesus Christ, and feel
with thankfulness that we are one in Him.