'In that day ye shall ask Me nothing,' and do not you think that when
the disciples heard that, they would be tempted to say, 'Then what in
all the world are we to do?' To them the thought that He was not to be
at their sides any longer, for them to go to with their difficulties,
must have seemed despair rather than advance; but in Christ's eyes it
was progress. He tells them and us that we gain by losing Him, and are
better off than they were, precisely because He does not any longer
stand at our sides for us to question. It is better for a boy to puzzle
out the meaning of a Latin book by his own brains and the help of a
dictionary than it is lazily to use an interlinear translation. And,
though we do not always feel it, and are often tempted to think how
blessed it would be if we had an infallible Teacher visible here at our
sides, it is a great deal better for us that we have not, and it is a
step in advance that He has gone away. Many eager and honest Christian
souls, hungering after certainty and rest, have cast themselves in
these latter days into the arms of an infallible Church. I doubt
whether any such questioning mind has found what it sought; and I am
sure that it has taken a step downwards, in passing from the spiritual
guidance realised by our own honest industry and earnest use of the
materials supplied to us in Christ's word, to any external authority
which comes to us to save us the trouble of thinking, and to confirm to
us truth which we have not made our own by search and effort. We gain
by losing the visible Christ; and He was proclaiming progress and not
retrogression, when He said: 'In that day ye shall ask Me no more
questions.'
For what have we instead? We have two things: a completed revelation,
and an inward Teacher.
We have a completed revelation. Great and wonderful and unspeakably
precious as were and are the words of Jesus Christ, His deeds are far
more. The death of Christ has told us things that Christ before His
death could not tell. The resurrection of Christ has cast light upon
all the darkest places of man's destiny which Christ, before His
resurrection, could not by any words so illuminate. The ascension of
Christ has opened doors for thought, for faith, for hope, which were
fast closed, notwithstanding all His teachings, until He had burst them
asunder and passed to His throne. And the facts which are substituted
for the bodily presence of Jesus with His disciples tell us a great
deal more than they could ever have drawn from Him by questionings,
however persistent and however wisely directed. We have a completed
revelation, and therefore we need 'ask Him nothing.'
And we have a divine Spirit that will come to us if we will, and teach
us by means of blessing the exercise of our own faculties, and guiding
us, not, indeed, into the uniform perception of the intellectual
aspects of Christian truth, but into the apprehension and the loving
possession, as a power in our lives, of all the truth that we need to
mould our characters and to raise us to the likeness of Himself.
Only, brother! let us remember what such a method of teaching demands
from us. It needs that we honestly use the revelation that is given us;
it needs that we loyally, lovingly, trustfully, submit ourselves to the
teaching of that Spirit who will dwell in us; it needs that we bring
our lives up to the height of our present knowledge, and make
everything that we know a factor in shaping what we do and what we are.
If thus we will to do His will, 'we shall know of the doctrine'; if
thus we yield ourselves to the divine Spirit, we shall be taught the
practical bearings of all essential truth; and if thus we ponder the
facts and principles that are enshrined in Christ's life, and the
Apostolic commentary on them, as preserved for us in the Scripture, we
shall not need to envy those that could go to Him with their questions,
for _He_ will come to us with His all-satisfying answers.
Ah! but you say experience does not verify these promises. Look at a
divided Christendom; look at my own difficulties of knowing what I am
to believe and to think. Well, as for a divided Christendom, saintly
souls are all of one Church, and however they may formulate the
intellectual aspects of their creed, when they come to pray, they say
the same things. Roman Catholic and Protestant, and Quaker and
Churchman, and Calvinist and Arminian, and Greek and Latin
Christians--all contribute to the hymn-book of every sect; and we all
sing their songs. So the divisions are like the surface cracks on a dry
field, and a few inches down there is continuity. As for the difficulty
of knowing what I am to believe and think about controverted questions,
no doubt there will remain many gaps in the circle of our knowledge; no
doubt there will be much left obscure and unanswered; but if we will
keep ourselves near the Master, and use honestly and diligently the
helps that He gives us--the outward help in the Word, and the inward
help in His teaching Spirit--we shall not 'walk in darkness,' but shall
have light enough given to be to us 'the Light of Life.'
Brother, keep close to Christ, and Christ--present though absent--will
teach you.