'I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world.' We all talk
in a loose way about men coming into the world when they are born; but
the weight of these words and the solemnity of the occasion on which
they were spoken, and the purpose for which they were spoken--viz., to
comfort and to illuminate these disciples--forbid us to see such a mere
platitude as that in them. There would have been no consolation in them
unless they meant something a great deal more than the undeniable fact
that Jesus Christ was born, and the melancholy fact that Jesus Christ
was about to die.
'I am _come_ into the world.' There has been a Man who chose to be
born. There has been a Man who appeared here, not 'of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man,' but by His own free choice. He willed
to take upon Him the form of humanity. Now the voluntariness of the
entrance of Jesus Christ into the conditions of our human life is
all-important for us, for it underlies the whole value of that life and
its whole power to be blessing and good to us. It underlies, for
instance, the personal sinlessness of Jesus Christ, and hence His power
to bring a new beginning of pure and perfect life into the midst of
humanity. All the rest of mankind, knit together by that mysterious
bond of natural descent which only now for the first time is beginning
to receive its due attention on the part of men of science, by heredity
have the taint upon them. And if Jesus Christ is only one of the
series, then there is no deliverance in Him, for there is no
sinlessness in that life. However fair its record may seem on the
surface, there is beneath, somewhere or other, the leprosy that infects
us all. Unless He came in another fashion from all the rest of us, He
came with the same sin as all the rest of us, and He is no deliverer
from sin. Rather He is one of the series who, like the melancholy
captives on the road to Siberia, each carries a link of the hopeless
chain that binds them all together. But, if it be true that of His own
will He took to Himself humanity, and was born as the Scripture tells
us He was born, His birth being His 'coming' and not His being brought,
then, being free from taint, He can deliver us from taint, and, Himself
unbound by the chain, He can break it from off our necks. The stream is
fouled from its source downwards, and flows on, every successive drop
participant of the primeval pollution. But, down from the white snows
of the eternal hills of God, there comes into it an affluent which has
no stain on its pure waters, and so can purge that into which it
enters. Jesus Christ willed to be born, and to plant a new beginning of
holy life in the very heart of humanity which henceforth should work as
leaven.
Let me remind you, too, that this voluntary assumption of our nature is
all-important to us, for unless we preserve it clear to our minds and
hearts, the power to sway our affections is struck away from Jesus
Christ. Unless He voluntarily took upon Himself the nature which He
meant to redeem, why should I be thankful to Him for what He did, and
what right has He to claim my love? But if He willingly came down
amongst us, and 'to this end was born, and for this cause,' of His own
loving heart, 'came into the world,' then I am knit to Him by cords
that cannot be broken. One thing only saves for Jesus Christ the
unbounded and perpetual love of mankind, and that is, that from His own
infinite and perpetual love He came into the world. We talk about kings
leaving their palaces and putting on the rags of the beggar, and
learning 'love in huts where poor men lie,' and making experience of
the conditions of their lowliest subjects. But here is a fact,
infinitely beyond all these legends. It is set forth for us in a
touching fashion, in the incident that almost immediately preceded
these parting words of our Lord, when 'Jesus, knowing that He came
forth from God, laid aside His garments and took a towel, and girded
Himself,' and washed the foul feet of these travel-stained men. That
was a parable of the Incarnation. The consciousness of His divine
origin was ever with Him, and that consciousness led Him to lay aside
the garments of His majesty, and to gird Himself with the towel of
service. That He had a body round which to wrap it was more humiliation
than that He wrapped it round the body which He took. And we may learn
there what it is that gives Him His supreme right to our devotion and
our surrender--viz., that, 'being in the form of God, He thought not
equality with God a thing to be covetously retained, but made Himself
of no reputation, and was found in fashion as a Man.'