'These things were done, that the Scripture should be fulfilled, A bone
of Him shall not be broken.'--JOHN xix. 36.
The Evangelist, in the words of this text, points to the great Feast of
the Passover and to the Paschal Lamb, as finding their highest
fulfilment, as he calls it, in Jesus Christ. For this purpose of
bringing out the correspondence between the shadow and the substance he
avails himself of a singular coincidence concerning a perfectly
unimportant matter--viz., the abnormally rapid sinking of Christ's
physical strength in the crucifixion, by which the final indignity of
breaking the bones of the sufferers was avoided in His case. John sees,
in that entirely insignificant thing, a kind of fingerpost pointing to
far more important, deeper, and real correspondences. We are not to
suppose that he was so purblind, and attached so much importance to
externals, as that this outward coincidence exhausted in his conception
the correspondence between the two. But It was a trifle that suggested
a greater matter. It was a help aiding gross conceptions and common
minds to grasp the inward relation between Jesus and that Passover
rite. But just as our Lord would have fulfilled the prophecy about the
King coming 'meek, and having salvation,' though He had never ridden on
a literal ass into the literal Jerusalem, so our Lord would have
'fulfilled' the shadow of the Passover with the substance of His own
sacrifice if there had never been this insignificant correspondence, in
outward things, between the two.
But whilst my text is the Evangelist's commentary, the question arises,
How did he come to recognise that our Lord was all which that Passover
signified? And the answer is, he recognised it through Christ's own
teaching. He does not record the institution of the Lord's Supper. It
did not fall into his scheme to deal with external events of that sort,
and he knew that it had been sufficiently taught by the three earlier
Gospels, to which his is a supplement. But though he did not narrate
the institution, he takes it for granted in the words of my text, and
his vindication of his seeing the fulfilment of 'A bone of Him shall
not be broken' in the incident to which I have referred, lies in this,
that Jesus Christ Himself swept away the Passover and substituted the
memorial feast of the Lord's Supper. 'This do in remembrance of Me,'
said at the table where the Paschal lamb had been eaten, sufficiently
warrants John's allusion here.
So then, marking the fact that our Evangelist is but carrying out the
lesson that he had learned in the upper room, we may fairly take the
identification of the Paschal lamb with the crucified Christ as being
the last instance in which our Lord Himself laid His hand upon Old
Testament incidents and said, 'They all mean Me.' And it is from that
point of view, and not merely for the purpose of dealing with the words
that I have read as our starting-point, that I wish to speak now.
I. Now then, the first thing that strikes me is that in this
substitution of Himself for the Passover we have a strange instance of
Christ's supreme authority.
Try to fling yourself back in imagination to that upper room, where
Jesus and a handful of Galileans were sitting, and remember the
sanctity which immemorial usage had cast round that centre and apex of
the Jewish ritual, established at the Exodus by a solemn divine
appointment, intended to commemorate the birth of the nation, venerable
by antiquity and association with the most vehement pulsations of
national feeling, the centre point of Jewish religion. Christ said:
'Put it all away; do not think about the Exodus; do not think about the
destroying Angel; do not think about the deliverance. Forget all the
past; do this in remembrance of Me.' Take into account that the
Passover had a double sacredness, as a religious festival, and also as
commemorating the birthday of the nation, and then estimate what a
strange sense of His own importance the Man must have had who said:
'That past is done with, and it is _Me_ that you have to think of now.'
If I might venture to take a very modern illustration without
vulgarising a great thing, suppose that on the other side of the
Atlantic somebody were to stand up and say, 'I abrogate the Fourth of
July and Independence Day. Do not think about Washington and the
establishment of the United States any more. Think about me!' That is
exactly what Jesus Christ did. Only instead of a century there were
millenniums of observance which He thus laid aside. So I say that is a
strange exercise of authority.
What does it imply? It implies two things, and I must say a word about
each of them. It implies that Christ regarded the whole of the ancient
system of Judaism, its history, its law, its rites of worship, as
pointing onwards to Himself, that He recognised in it a system the
whole _raison d'etre_ of which was anticipatory and preparatory of
Himself. For Him the Decalogue was given, for Him priests were
consecrated, for Him kings were anointed, for Him prophets spake, for
Him sacrifices smoked, for Him festivals were appointed, and the nation
and its history were all one long proclamation: 'The King cometh! go ye
forth to meet Him.' You cannot get less than that out of the way in
which He handled, as is told in this Gospel, Jacob's ladder, the
Serpent in the wilderness, the Manna that fell from Heaven, the Pillar
of Cloud that led the people, the Rock that gushed forth water, and
now, last of all, the Passover, which was the very shining apex of the
whole sacrificial and ritual system.
And remember, too, that this way of dealing with all the institutions
of the nation as meaning, in their inmost purpose, Himself, is exactly
parallel to His way of dealing with the sacred words of Mosaic
commandment and prohibition in the Sermon on the Mount, where He set
side by side as of equal--I was going to say, and I should have been
right in saying, identical--authority what was 'said to them of old
time' and what 'I say unto you.' Amidst the dust of our present
controversies as to the processes by which, and the times at which, the
Old Testament books assumed their present form, there is grave danger
that the essential thing about the whole matter should be obscured. The
way in which what is called Higher Criticism may finally locate the
origins and dates of the various parts of that ancient record and that
ancient system does not in the slightest degree affect the outstanding
characteristic of the whole, that it is the product of the divine hand,
working (if you will) through men who had more freedom of action whilst
they were its organs than our grandfathers thought. Be it so; but still
that divine Hand shaped the whole in order that, besides its
educational effects upon the generations that received it, there should
shine through it all the expectation of the coming King. And I venture
to say that, however grateful we may be to modern investigation for
light upon these other points to which I have referred, the ignorant
reader that reads Jesus Christ into all the Old Testament may be very
uncritical and mistaken in regard to details, but he has got hold of
the root of the matter, and is nearer to the apprehension of the
essence and spirit and purpose of the ancient Revelation than the most
learned critic who does not see that it is the preparation for, and the
prophecy of, Jesus Christ Himself. And the vindication of such a
position lies in this, among other facts, that He in the upper room, in
harmony with, and in completion of, all that He had previously spoken
about His relation to the Old Testament, claimed the Passover as the
prophecy of Himself, and said, 'I am the Lamb of God.'
I need not dwell, I suppose, on the other consideration that is
involved in this strange exercise of authority--viz., the naturalness,
as without any sense of doing anything presumptuous or extraordinary,
with which Christ assumes His right to handle divine appointments with
the most perfect freedom, to modify them, to reshape them, to divert
them from their first purpose, and to enjoin them with an authority
equal to that with which the Lord said unto Moses, 'Keep ye this day
through your generations.' There is only one supposition on which I,
for my part, can understand that conduct--that He was the possessor of
authority the same as the Authority that had originally instituted the
rite.
And so, dear brethren! when our Lord said, 'Do this in remembrance of
Me,' I pray you to ask yourselves, What did that involve in regard to
His nature and the source of His authority over us? And what did it
involve in regard to His relation to that ancient Revelation?
II. And now another point that I would suggest is--we have, in this
substitution of the new rite for the old, our Lord's clear declaration
of what was the very heart of His work in the world.
'This do in remembrance of Me.' What is it, then, to which He points?
Is it to the wisdom, the tenderness, the deep beauty, the flashing
moral purity that gleamed and shone lambent in His words? No! Is it to
the gracious self--oblivion, the gentle accessibility, the loving pity,
the leisurely heart always ready to help, the eye ready to fill with
tears, the hand ever outstretched and ever laden with blessings? No! It
is the death on the Cross which He, if I might so say, isolates, at
least which He underscores with red lines, and which He would have us
remember, as we remember nothing else. Brethren, rites are
insignificant in many aspects, but are often of enormous importance as
witnesses to truths. And I point to the Lord's Supper, the one rite of
the Christian Church, which is to be repeated over and over and over
again, and see in it the great barrier which has rendered it
impossible, and will render it impossible, as I believe, for evermore,
that a Christianity, which obscures the atoning sacrifice of Christ on
the Cross, should ever pose as the full representation of the Master's
mind, or as the full expression of the Saviour's word.
What do men and churches that falter in their allegiance to the truth
of Christ's redemptive death do with the Lord's Supper? Nothing! For
the most part they ignore it, or if they retain it, do not, for the
life of them, know how to explain it, or why it should be there. The
explanation of why it is there is the great truth, of which it is the
clear utterance and the strong defence, the truth that 'Jesus Christ
died for our sins according to the Scriptures,' and that 'the Son of
Man came... to give His life a ransom for the many.'
What did that Passover say? Two things it said, the blood that was
sprinkled on the lintels and on the door-posts was the token to the
destroying Angel, as with his broad, silent pinions he swept through
the land, bringing a blacker night into Egyptian darkness, and leaving
behind him no house 'in which there was not one dead.' All the houses
of which the occupants had put the ruddy mark on the lintels and on the
doorposts, and were wise enough not to go forth from behind the shelter
of that mark on the door, were safe when the morning dawned. And so to
us all who, by our sinfulness, have brought down upon our heads
exposedness to that retribution, which, in a righteously governed
universe, must needs follow sin, and to that death which the separation
from God--the necessary result of sin--most surely is, there is
proffered in that great Sacrifice shelter from the destroying sword.
But that is not all. Whilst the blood on the posts meant security, the
Lamb on the table meant emancipation. So they who find in the dying
Christ their exemption from the last consequences of transgression,
find, in partaking of the Christ whose sacrifice is their pardon, the
communication of a new power, which sets them free from a worse than
Egyptian bondage, and enables them to shake from their emancipated
limbs the fetters of the grimmest of the Pharaohs that have wielded a
tyrannous dominion over them. Pardon and freedom, the creation of a
nation subject only to the law of Jehovah Himself--these were the facts
that the Passover festival and the Passover lamb signified, and these
are the facts which, in nobler fashion, are brought to us by Jesus
Christ. So, I beseech you, let Him teach you what His work in the world
is, as He lays His own hand on that highest of the ancient festivals,
and endorses the Baptist's declaration, 'Behold the Lamb of God, which
taketh away the sin of the world!'
III. Now, lastly, let me ask you to notice how, in this regal and
authoritative dealing by our Lord with that ancient festival, there
lies a loving provision for our weakness.
Surely we may venture to say that Jesus Christ desired to be
remembered, even by that handful of poor people, and by us, not only
for our sakes, but because His heart, too, craved that He should not be
forgotten by those whom He was leaving. As you may remember, the dying
king turned to the bishop standing by him, with the enigmatical word
which no one understood but the receiver of it--'Remember!' so did
Jesus Christ. He appeals to our thankfulness, He appeals to our
affections, He lets us see that He wishes to live in our memories,
because He delights in it, as well as because it is for our profit.
The Passover was purely and simply a rite of remembrance. I venture to
believe that the Lord's Supper is nothing more. I know how people talk
about the bare, bald, Zwinglian ideas of the Communion. They do look
very bald and bare by the side of modern notions and mediaeval notions
resuscitated. Well, I had rather have the bareness than I would have it
overlaid by coverings under which there is room for abundance of vermin
to lurk. Christ puts the Lord's Supper in the place of the Passover.
The Passover was a purely memorial rite. You Christian people will
understand the spirituality of the whole Gospel system, and the nature
of the only bond which unites men to Jesus and brings spiritual
blessings to them--viz. faith--all the better, the more you cling, in
spite of all that is going on round us to-day, to that simple,
intelligible, Scriptural notion that we commemorate the Sacrifice, not
offer the Sacrifice. Jesus Christ said that the Lord's Supper was to be
observed 'in remembrance of Me.' That was His explanation of its
purpose, and I for one am content to take as the expounder of the laws
of the feast, the feast's own Founder.
Now one more word. In the Passover men fed on the Sacrifice. Jesus
Christ presents Himself to each of us as at once the Sacrifice for our
sins and the Food of our souls. If you will keep your minds in touch
with the truth about Him, and with Him whom the truth about Him reveals
to you, if you will keep your hearts in touch with that great and
unspeakable sign of God's love, if you will keep your wills in
submission to His authority, if you will let His blood, 'which is the
life,' or as you may otherwise word it, His Spirit, come into your
lives, and be your spirit, your motive, then you will go out from the
table, not like the disciples to flee, and deny, and forget, nor like
the Israelites to wander in a wilderness, but strengthened for many a
day of joyous service and true communion, and will come at last to what
He has promised us: 'Ye shall sit with Me at My table in My Kingdom,'
whence we shall go 'no more out.'