'I have declared Thy name.'
The first thing that strikes one about these words is their boldness.
Remember that they are spoken to God, at the close of a life the
heights and depths of which they sum up. They are an appeal to God's
righteous judgment of the whole character of the career. Do they
breathe the tone that we might expect? Surely the prophet or teacher
who has most earnestly tried to make himself a mirror, without spot to
darken and without dint to distort the divine ray, will be the first to
feel, as he looks back, the imperfections of his repetition of his
message. But Jesus Christ, when He looks back over His life, has no
flaw, limitation, incompleteness, to record or to confess. As always so
here, He is absolutely unconscious of anything in the nature of
weakness, error, or sin. As when He looked back upon His life as a
conflict, He had no defeats to remember with shame, so here, when He
looks upon it as the revelation of God He feels that everything which
He has received of the Father He has made known unto men.
And the strange thing is that we admit the claim, and have become so
accustomed to regard it as being perfectly legitimate that we forget
how enormous it is. He takes an attitude here which in any other man
would be repulsive, but in Him is supremely natural. We criticise other
people, we outgrow their teachings, we see where their doctrines have
deviated from truth by excess or defect, or disproportion; but when He
says 'I have declared Thy name,' we feel that He says nothing more than
the simple facts of His life vindicate and confirm.
Not less remarkable is the implication in these words, not only of the
completeness of His message, but of the fullness of His knowledge of
God, and its entirely underived nature. So He claims for Himself an
altogether special and unique position here: He has learned God from
none; He teaches God to all. 'That was the true Light which lighteth
every man that cometh into the world.'
Looking a little more closely at these words before us, we have here
Christ's own account of His whole life. The meaning of it all is the
revelation of the heart of God. Not by words, of course; not by words
only, but far more by deeds. And I would have you ask yourselves this
question--If the deeds of a man are a declaration of the name of God,
what sort of a man is He who thus declares Him? Must we not feel that
if these words, or anything like them, really came from the lips of
Jesus Christ, we are here in the presence of something other than a
holy life of a simple humanity, which might help men to climb to the
apprehension of a God who was perfect love; and that when He says 'He
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,' we stand before 'God manifest
in the flesh.'
What is that name of God which the revealing Son declares? Not the mere
syllables by which we call Him, but the manifested character of the
Father. That one name, in the narrower sense of the word, carries the
whole revelation that Jesus Christ has to make; for it speaks of
tenderness, of kindred, of paternal care, of the transmission of a
nature, of the embrace of a divine love. And it delivers men from all
their creeping dreads, from all their dark peradventures, from all
their stinging fears, from all the paralysing uncertainties which, like
clouds, always misty and often thunder-bearing, have shut out the sight
of the divine face. If this Christ, in His weakness and humanity, with
pity welling from His eyes, and making music of His voice, with the
swift help streaming from His fingers-tips to every pain and weariness,
and the gracious righteousness that drew little children and did not
repel publicans and harlots, is our best image of God, then love is the
centre of divinity, and all the rest that we call God is but
circumference and fringe of that central brightness.
'So through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, "O heart I made! a heart beats here."'
He has declared God's name, His last best name of Love.
Need I dwell for one moment on the fact that that name is only declared
by this Son? There is no need to deny the presence of manifold other
precious sources in men's experience and lives from which something may
be inferred of what God truly is. But all these, rich and manifold as
they are, fall into nothingness before the life of Jesus Christ,
considered as the making visible of God. For all the rest are partial
and incomplete. 'At sundry times and in divers manners' God flung forth
syllables of the name, and 'fragments of that mighty voice came rolling
down the wind.' But in Jesus Christ the whole name, in all its
syllables, is spoken. Other sources of knowledge are ambiguous, and
need the interpretation of Christ's life and Cross ere they can be
construed into a harmonious whole. Life, nature, our inmost being,
history, all these sources speak with two voices; and it is only when
we hear the deep note that underlies them in the word of Christ that
their discord becomes a harmony. Other sources lack authority. They
come at the most with a 'may be.' He comes with a 'Verily, verily.'
Other sources speak to the understanding, or the conscience, or to
fear. Christ speaks to the heart. Other sources leave the man who
accepts them unaffected. Christ's message penetrates to the
transforming and assimilation of the whole being.
So, dear brethren! for all generations, and for this generation most of
all, the plain alternative lies between the declaration of the name of
God in Jesus Christ and a godless and orphan world. Modern thought will
make short work of all other sources of certitude about the character
of God, and will leave men alone in the dark. Christ, the historical
fact of the life and death of Jesus Christ, is the sole surviving
source of certitude, which is blessedness, as to whether there is a
God, and what sort of a God He is.
II. Secondly, note here that strange forward look of the dying Man: 'I
have declared Thy name and _will declare it_.'
And that was said within eight and forty hours of the Cross, which, if
He had been a simple human teacher and martyr, would have ended all His
activity in the world. But here He is not merely summing up His life,
and laying it aside, writing the last sentence, as it were, which
gathers up the whole of the completed book, but He is closing the first
volume, and in the act of doing so He stretches out His hand to open
the second. 'I will declare it.' When? How? Did not earthly life, then,
put a stop to this Teacher's activity? Was there still prophetic
function to be done after death had sealed His lips? Certainly.
That anticipation, which at once differentiates Him from all the brood
of merely human teachers and prophets, even the highest, does indeed
include as future, at the moment when He speaks, the swiftly coming and
close Cross; but it goes beyond it. How much of Christendom's knowledge
of God depended upon the Passion, on the threshold of which Christ was
standing? He, hanging on the Cross in weakness, and dying there amidst
the darkness that overspread the land, is a strange Revealer of the
omnipotent, infinite, ever-blessed God. But Oh! if we strike Gethsemane
and Calvary out of Christ's manifestation of the Father, how infinitely
poorer are we and the world! 'God commendeth,' (rather 'establisheth,')
'His love toward us in that whilst we were yet sinners Christ died for
us.' And so as we turn ourselves to the little knoll outside the gate,
where the Nazarene carpenter hangs faint and dying, we--wonder of
Wonders, and yet certainty of certainties!--have to say, 'Lo! this is
our God; we have waited for Him.'
But that future revelation extends beyond the Cross, and includes
resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, and the whole history of the Church
right onwards through the ages. The difference between the two volumes
of revelation--that which includes the work of Christ upon earth, and
that which includes His revelation from the heavens--is this, that the
first volume contains all the facts, and the second volume contains His
interpretation and application of the facts in the understandings and
hearts of His people. We have no more facts from which to construe God
than these which belong to the earthly life of Jesus Christ, and we
never shall have, here at all events. But whilst the first volume to
the bottom of the last page is finished and tolerates and needs no
additions, day by day, moment by moment, epoch by epoch Christ is
bringing His people to a fuller understanding of the significance of
the first volume, and writing the second more and more upon their
hearts.
So we have an ever-living Christ, still the active Teacher of His
Church. Times of unsettlement and revolutionary change and the 'shaking
of the things that are made,' like the times in which we live, are but
times in which the great Teacher is setting some new lesson from the
old Book to His slow scholars. There is always a little confusion in
the schoolroom when the classes are being rearranged and new books are
being put into old hands. The tributary stream, as it rushes in, makes
broken water for a moment. Do not let us be afraid when 'the things
that can be shaken' shake, but let us see in the shaking the attendant
of a new curriculum on which the great Teacher is launching His
scholars, and let us learn the new lessons of the old Gospel which He
is then teaching.
III. Thirdly, note the participation in the Father's love which is the
issue of the knowledge of the Father's name.
Christ says that His end, an end which is surely attained in the
declaration of the divine name, is that 'the love wherewith Thou hast
loved Me may be in them.' We are here touching upon heights too dizzy
for free and safe walking, on glories too bright for close and steady
gaze. But where Christ has spoken we may reverently follow. Mark, then,
that marvellous thought of the identity between the love which was His
and the love which is ours. 'From everlasting' that divine love lay on
the Eternal Word which in the hoary beginning, before the beginning of
creatures, 'was with God, and was God.' The deepest conception that we
can form of the divine nature is of a Being who in Himself carries the
Subject and the Object of an eternal love, which we speak of in the
deep emblem of 'the Word,' and the God with whom He eternally 'was.'
That love lay upon Christ, without limitation, without reservation,
without interruption, finding nothing there from which it recoiled, and
nothing there which did not respond to it. No mist, no thunderstorm,
ever broke that sunshine, no tempest ever swept across that calm.
Continuous, full, perfect was the love that knit the Father to the Son,
and continuous, full, and perfect was the consciousness of abiding in
that love, which lay like light upon the spirit of Him that said 'I
delight to do Thy will.' 'The Father hath not left Me alone.'
And all that love Christ gives to us as deep, as continuous, as
unreserved. Our consciousness of God's love is meant by Christ to be
like His own. Alas! alas! is that our experience, Christian people? The
sun always shines on the rainless land of Egypt, except for a month or
two in the year. The contrast between the unclouded blue and continuous
light and heat there, and our murky skies and humid atmosphere, is like
the contrast between our broken and feeble consciousness of the shining
of the divine love and the uninterrupted glory of light and joy of
communion which poured on Christ's heart. But it is possible for us
indefinitely to approximate to such an experience; and the way by which
we reach it is that plain and simple one of accepting Christ's
declaration of the Father's name.
IV. And so, lastly, notice the indwelling Christ who makes our
participation in the divine love possible: 'And I in them.'
One may well say, 'How can it be that love should be transferred? How
can it be that the love of God to me shall be identical with the love
of God to Christ?' There is only one answer. If Christ dwells in me,
then God's love to Him falls upon me by no transference, but by my
incorporation into Him. And I would urge that this great truth of the
actual indwelling of Christ in the soul is no mere piece of rhetorical
exaggeration, nor a wild and enthusiastic way of putting the fact that
the influence of His teaching and the beauty of His example can sway
us; but it is a plain and absolute truth that the divine Christ can
come into and abide in the narrow room of our poor hearts. And if He
does this, then 'he that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit'; and the
Christ in me receives the sunshine of the divine love. That does not
destroy, but heightens, my individuality. I am more and not less myself
because 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.'
So, dear brethren! it all comes to this--we may each of us, if we will,
have Jesus Christ for Guest and Inhabitant in our hearts. If we have,
then, since God loves Him, He must love me who have Him within me, and
as long as God loves Christ He cannot cease to love me, nor can I cease
to be conscious of His love to me, and whatsoever gifts His love
bestows upon Jesus, pass over in measure, and partially, to myself.
Thus immortality, heaven, glory, all blessedness in heaven and earth,
are the fruit and crystallisation, so to speak, of that oneness with
Christ which is possible for us. And the conditions are simply that we
shall with joyful trust accept His declaration of the Father's name,
and see God manifest in Him; and welcome in our inmost hearts that
great Gospel. Then His prayer, and the travail of His soul, will reach
their end even in me, and 'the love wherewith the Father loved the Son
shall be in me,' and the Son Himself shall dwell in my heart.