'And after this Joseph of Arimathea, being a disciple of Jesus, but
secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away
the body of Jesus; ... And there came also Nicodemus which at the first
came to Jesus by night.'--JOHN xix. 38, 39.
While Christ lived, these two men had been unfaithful to their
convictions; but His death, which terrified and paralysed and scattered
His avowed disciples, seems to have shamed and stung them into courage.
They came now, when they must have known that it was too late, to
lavish honour and tears on the corpse of the Master whom they had been
too cowardly to acknowledge, whilst acknowledgment might yet have
availed. How keen an arrow of self-condemnation must have pierced their
hearts as they moved in their offices of love, which they thought that
He could never know, round His dead corpse!
They were both members of the Sanhedrim; the same motives, no doubt,
had withheld each of them from confessing Christ; the same impulses
united them in this too late confession of discipleship. Nicodemus had
had the conviction, at the beginning of Christ's ministry, that He was
at least a miraculously attested and God-sent Teacher. But the fear
which made him steal to Jesus by night--the unenviable distinction
which the Evangelist pitilessly reiterates at each mention of
him--arrested his growth and kept him dumb when silence was treason.
Joseph of Arimathea is described by two of the Evangelists as 'a
disciple'; by the other two as a devout Israelite, like Simeon and
Anna, 'waiting for the Kingdom of God.' Luke informs us that he had not
concurred in the condemnation of Jesus, but leads us to believe that
his dissent had been merely silent. Perhaps he was more fully convinced
than Nicodemus, and at the same time even more timid in avowing his
convictions.
We may take these two contrite cowards as they try to atone for their
unfaithfulness to their living Master by their ministrations to Him
dead, as examples of secret disciples, and see here the causes, the
misery, and the cure of such.
I. Let us look at them as illustrations of secret discipleship and its
causes.
They were restrained from the avowal of the Messiahship of Jesus by
fear. There is nothing in the organisation of society at this day to
make any man afraid of avowing the ordinary kind of Christianity which
satisfies the most of us; rather it is the proper thing with the bulk
of us middle-class people, to say that in some sense or other we are
Christians. But when it comes to a real avowal, a real carrying out of
a true discipleship, there are as many and as formidable, though very
different, impediments in the way to-day, from those which blocked the
path of these two cowards in our text. In all regions of life it is
hard to work out into practice any moral conviction whatever. How many
of us are there who have beliefs about social and moral questions which
we are ashamed to avow in certain companies for fear of the finger of
ridicule being pointed at us? It is not only in the Church, and in
reference to purely religious belief, that we find the curse of secret
discipleship, but it is everywhere. Wherever there are moral questions
which are yet the subject of controversy, and have not been enthroned
with the hallelujahs of all men, you get people that carry their
convictions shut up in their own breasts, and lock their lips in
silence, when there is most need of frank avowal. The political,
social, and moral conflicts of this day have their 'secret disciples,'
who will only come out of their holes when the battle is over, and will
then shout with the loudest.
But to turn to the more immediate subject before us, how many men and
women, I wonder, are there who ought to be and are not, distinctly and
openly united with the Christian community?
I do not mean to say--God forbid that I should--that connection with
any existing church is the same as a connection with Jesus Christ, or
that the neglect to be so associated is tantamount to secret
discipleship; I know there are plenty of other ways of acknowledging
Him than that, but I am quite sure that this is one department in which
a large number of men, in all our congregations--and there are not a
few in this congregation--need a very plain word of earnest
remonstrance. It is one way of manifesting whose you are, that you
should unite yourselves openly with those who belong to Him, and who
try to serve Him. I do not dwell upon this matter, because I do not
wish to be misunderstood, as if I supposed that union to a church is
equivalent to union with Him; or that a connection with a church is the
only, or even the principal way of making an open avowal of Christian
principle; but I am certain that amongst us in this day there is a
laxity in this matter which is doing harm both to the Church and to
some of you. Therefore I say to you, dear friends, suffer the word of
exhortation as to the duty of openly uniting yourselves with the
Christian community.
But far higher and more important than that--do you ever say anyhow
that you belong to Jesus Christ? In a society like ours, in which the
influence of Christian morality affects a great many people who have no
personal connection with Him, it is not always enough that the life
should preach, because over a very large field of ordinary daily life
the underground influence, so to speak, of Christian ethics has
infiltrated and penetrated, so that many a tree bears a greener leaf
because of the water that has found its way to it from the river,
though it be planted far from its banks. Even those who are not
Christians live outward lives largely regulated by Christian principle.
The whole level of morality has been heaved up, as the coastline has
sometimes been by hidden fires slowly working, by the imperceptible,
gradual influence of the gospel.
So it needs sometimes that you should _say_ 'I am a Christian,' as well
as that you should live like one. Ask yourselves, dear friends! whether
you have buttoned your greatcoat over your uniform that nobody may know
whose soldier you are. Ask yourselves whether you have sometimes held
your tongues because you knew that if you spoke people would find out
where you came from and what country you belonged to. Ask yourselves,
Have you ever accompanied the witness of your lives with the commentary
of your confession? Did you ever, anywhere but in a church, stand up
and say, 'I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, _my_ Lord'?
And then ask yourselves another question: Have you ever dared to be
singular? We are all of us in this world often thrust into
circumstances in which it is needful that we should say, 'So do not I
because of the fear of the Lord.' Boys go to school; they used always
to kneel down at their bedsides and say their prayers when they were at
home. They do not like to do it with all those critical and cruel
eyes--and there are no eyes more critical and more cruel than young
eyes--fixed upon them, and so they give up prayer. A young man comes to
Manchester, goes into a warehouse, pure of life, and with a tongue that
has not blossomed into rank fruit of obscenity and blasphemy. And he
hears, at the next desk there, words that first of all bring a blush to
his cheek, and he is tempted into conduct that he knows to be a denial
of his Master. And he covers up his principles, and goes with the
tempters into the evil. I might sketch a dozen other cases, but I need
not. In one form or other, we have all to go through the same ordeal.
We have sometimes to dare to be in a minority of one, if we will not be
untrue to our Master and to ourselves.
Now the reasons for this unfaithfulness to conviction and to Christ,
are put by the Apostle here in a very blunt fashion--'For fear of the
Jews.' That is not what we say to ourselves; some of us say, 'Oh! I
have got beyond outward organisations. I find it enough to be united to
Christ. The Christian communities are very imperfect. There is not any
of them that I quite see eye to eye with. So I stand apart,
contemplating all, and happy in my unsectarianism.' Yes, I quite admit
the faults, and suppose that as long as men think at all they will not
find any Church which is entirely to their mind; and I rejoice to think
that some day we shall all outgrow visible organisations--when we get
there where the seer 'saw no temple therein.' Admitting all that, I
also know that isolation is always weakness, and that if a man stand
apart from the wholesome friction of his brethren, he will get to be a
great diseased mass of oddities, of very little use either to himself,
or to men, or to God. It is not a good thing, on the whole, that people
should fight for their own hands, and the wisest thing any of us can do
is, preserving our freedom of opinion, to link ourselves with some body
of Christian people, and to find in them our shelter and our home.
But these two in our text were moved by 'fear.' They dreaded ridicule,
the loss of position, the expulsion from Sanhedrim and synagogue,
social ostracism, and all the armoury of offensive weapons which would
have been used against them by their colleagues. So, ignobly they kept
their thumb on their convictions, and the two of them sat dumb in the
council when the scornful question was asked, 'Have any of the rulers
or of the Pharisees believed on Him?' when they ought to have started
to their feet and said 'Yes, we have!' And when Nicodemus ventured a
feeble remonstrance, which he carefully divested of all appearance of
personal sympathy, and put upon the mere abstract ground of fair
play--'Doth our law judge any man before it hear him?'--one
contemptuous question was enough to reduce him to silence. 'Art thou
also of Galilee?' was enough to cow him into dropping his timid plea
for Him whom in his heart he believed to be the Messiah.
So with us, the fear of loss of position comes into play. I have heard
of people who settled the congregation which they should honour by
their presence from the consideration of the social advantages which it
offered. I have heard of their saying, 'Oh! we cannot attach ourselves
to such and such a community; there is no society for the children.'
Then many of us are very much afraid of being laughed at. Ridicule, I
think, to sensitive people in a generation like ours, is pretty nearly
as bad as the old rack and the physical torments of martyrdom. We have
all got so nervous and high-strung nowadays, and depend so much upon
other people's good opinion, that it is a dreadful thing to be
ridiculed. Timid people do not come to the front and say what they
believe, and take up unpopular causes, because they cannot bear to be
pointed at and pelted with the abundant epithets of disparagement,
which are always flung at earnest people who will not worship at the
appointed shrines, and have sturdy convictions of their own.
Ridicule breaks no bones. It has no power if you make up your mind that
it shall not have. Face it, and it will only be unpleasant for a moment
at first. When a child goes into the sea to bathe, he is uncomfortable
till his head has been fairly under water, and then after that he is
all right. So it is with the ridicule which out-and-out Christian
faithfulness may bring on us. It only hurts at the beginning, and
people very soon get tired. Face your fears and they will pass away. It
is not perhaps a good advice to give unconditionally, but it is a very
good one in regard of all moral questions--always do what you are
afraid to do. In nine cases out of ten it will be the right thing to
do. If people would only discount 'the fear of men which bringeth a
snare' by making up their minds to neglect it, there would be fewer
'dumb dogs' and 'secret disciples' haunting and weakening the Church of
Christ.
II. I have spent too much time upon this part of my subject, and I must
deal briefly with the following. Let me say a word about the
illustrations that we have in this text of the miseries of this secret
discipleship.
How much these two men lost--all those three years of communion with
the Master; all His teaching, all the stimulus of His example, all the
joy of fellowship with Him! They might have had a treasure in their
memories that would have enriched them for all their days, and they had
flung it all away because they were afraid of the curled lip of a
long-bearded Pharisee or two.
And so it always is; the secret disciple diminishes his communion with
his Master. It is the valleys which lay their bosoms open to the sun
that rejoice in the light and warmth; the narrow clefts in the rocks
that shut themselves grudgingly up against the light, are all dank and
dark and dismal. And it is the men that come and avow their
discipleship that will have the truest communion with their Lord. Any
neglected duty puts a film between a man and his Saviour; any conscious
neglect of duty piles up a wall between you and Christ. Be sure of
this, that if from cowardly or from selfish regard to position and
advantages, or any other motive, we stand apart from Him, and have our
lips locked when we ought to speak, there will steal over our hearts a
coldness, His face will be averted from us, and our eyes will not dare
to seek, with the same confidence and joy, the light of His countenance.
What you lose by unfaithful wrapping of your convictions in a napkin
and burying them in the ground is the joyful use of the convictions,
the deeper hold of the truth by which you live, and before which you
bow, and the true fellowship with the Master whom you acknowledge and
confess. And when these men came for Christ's corpse and bore it away,
what a sharp pang went through their hearts! They woke at last to know
what cowardly traitors they had been. If you are a disciple at all, and
a secret one, you will awake to know what you have been doing, and the
pang will be a sharp one. If you do not awake in this life, then the
distance between you and your Lord will become greater and greater; if
you do, then it will be a sad reflection that there are years of
treason lying behind you. Nicodemus and Joseph had the veil torn away
by the contemplation of their dead Master. You may have the veil torn
away from your eyes by the sight of the throned Lord; and when you pass
into the heavens may even there have some sharp pang of condemnation
when you reflect how unfaithful you have been.
Blessed be His name! The assurance is firm that if a man be a disciple
he shall be saved; but the warning is sure that if he be an unfaithful
and a secret disciple there will be a life-long unfaithfulness to a
beloved Master to be purged away 'so as by fire.'