Take this Gospel first. Anybody who looks at it can see that it is a
fragment. It is not meant to be a biography; it is avowedly a
selection, and a selection under the influence, as I shall have to show
you presently, of a distinct dogmatic purpose. There is nothing in it
about Christ's birth, nothing in it about His baptism, nor about His
selection of His Apostles. There is scarcely anything about the facts
of His outward life at all. There is scarcely a word about the whole of
His ministry in Galilee. There is not one of His parables, there are
only seven of His miracles before the Resurrection, and two of these
occur also in the other Evangelists. There is scarcely any of His
ethical teaching; there is not a word about the Lord's Supper.
And so I might go on enumerating many remarkable gaps in this Gospel.
Nearly half of it is taken up with the incidents of one week at the end
of His life, and the incidents of and after the Resurrection. Of the
remainder-by far the larger portion consists of several conversations
which are hung upon miracles that seem to be related principally for
the sake of these. The whole of the phenomena show us at once the
fragmentary character of this Gospel as stamped upon the very surface.
And when we turn to the other three, the same thing is true, though
less strikingly so. Why was it that in the Church, after the completion
of the Scriptural canon, there sprang up a whole host of Apocryphal
Gospels, full of childish stories of events which people felt had been
passed over with strange silence, in the teachings of the four
Evangelists: stories of His childhood, for instance, and stories about
what happened between His death and His resurrection? A great many
miracles were added to those that have been told us in Scripture. The
condensed hints of the canonical Gospels received a great expansion,
which indicated how much their silence about certain points had been
felt. What a tiny pamphlet they make! Is it not strange that the
greatest event in the world's history should be told in such brief
outline, and that here, too, the mustard seed, 'less than the least of
all seeds,' should have become such a great tree? Put the four Gospels
down by the side of the two thick octavo volumes, which it is the
regulation thing to write nowadays, as the biography of any man that
has a name at all, and you will feel their incompleteness as
biographies. They are but a pen-and-ink drawing of the Sun! And yet,
although they be so tiny that you might sit down and read them all in
an evening over the fire, is it not strange that they have stamped on
the mind of the world an image so deep and so sharp, of such a
character as the world never saw elsewhere? They are fragments, but
they have left a symmetrical and an unique impression on the
consciousness of the whole world.
And then, if you turn to the whole Book, the same thing is true, though
in a modified sense there. I have no time to dwell upon that fruitful
field, but the silence of Scripture is quite as eloquent as its speech.
Think, for instance, of how many things in the Bible are taken for
granted which one would not expect to be taken for granted in a book of
religious instruction. It takes for granted the being of a God. It
takes for granted our relations to Him. It takes for granted our moral
nature. In its later portions, at all events, it takes for granted the
future life. Look at how the Bible, as a whole, passes by, without one
word of explanation or alleviation, a great many of the difficulties
which gather round some of its teaching. For instance, we find no
attempt to explain the divine nature of our Lord; or the existence of
the three Persons in the Godhead. It has not a word to say in
explanation of the mystery of prayer; or of the difficulty of
reconciling the Omnipotent will of God on the one hand, with our own
free will on the other. It has not a word to explain, though many a
word to proclaim and enforce, the fact of Christ's death as the
atonement for the sins of the whole world. Observe, too, how scanty the
information on points on which the heart craves for more light. How
closely, for instance, the veil is kept over the future life! How many
questions which are not prompted by mere curiosity, our sorrow and our
love ask in vain!
Nor is the incompleteness of Scripture as a historical book less
marked. Nations and men appear on its pages abruptly, rending the
curtain of oblivion, and striding to the front of the stage for a
moment, and then they disappear, swallowed up of night. It has no care
to tell the stories of any of its heroes, except for so long as they
were the organs of that divine breath, which, breathed through the
weakest reed, makes music. The self-revelation of God, not the acts and
fortunes of even His noblest servants, is the theme of the Book. It is
full of gaps about matters that any sciolist or philosopher or
theologian would have filled up for it. There it stands, a Book unique
in the world's history, unique in what it says, and no less unique in
what it does not say.
'Many other things truly did' that divine Spirit in His march through
the ages, 'which are not written in this book; but these are written
that ye might believe.'
II. And so that brings me next to say a word or two about the more
immediate purpose which explains all these gaps and incompletenesses.
John's Gospel, and the other three Gospels, and the whole Bible, New
Testament and Old, have this for their purpose, to produce in men's
hearts the faith in Jesus as 'the Christ' and as 'the Son of God.'
I need not speak at length about this one Gospel with any special
regard to that thought. I have already said that the Evangelist avows
that his work is a selection, that he declares that the purpose that
determined his selection was doctrinal, and that he picked out facts
which would tend to represent Jesus Christ to us in the twofold
capacity,--as the Christ, the Fulfiller of all the expectations and
promises of the Old Covenant, and as the Son of God. The one of these
titles is a name of office, the other a name of nature; the one
declares that He had come to be, and to do, all to which types and
prophecies and promises had dimly pointed, and the other declares that
He was 'the Eternal Word,' which 'in the beginning was with God and was
God,' and was manifest here upon earth to us.
This was his purpose, and this representation of Jesus Christ is that
which shapes all the facts and all the phenomena of this Gospel, from
the very first words of it to its close.
And so, although it is wide from my present subject, I may just make
one parenthetical remark, to the effect that it is ridiculous in the
face of this statement for 'critics' to say, as some of them do: 'The
author of the fourth Gospel has not told us this, that, and the other
incident in Christ's life, therefore, he did not know it.' Then some of
them will draw the conclusion that John's Gospel is not to be trusted
in the given case, because he does not give us a certain incident, and
others might draw the conclusion that the other three Evangelists are
not to be trusted because they do give it us. And the whole fabric is
built up upon a blunder, and would have been avoided if people had
listened when John said to them: 'I knew a great many things about
Jesus Christ, but I did not put them down here because I was not
writing a biography, but preaching a gospel; and what I wanted to
proclaim was that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.'
But now we may extend that a great deal further. It is just as true
about the whole New Testament. The four Gospels are written to tell us
these two facts about Christ. They are none of them merely biographies;
as such they are singularly deficient, as we have seen. But they are
biographies _plus_ a doctrine; and the biography is told mainly for the
sake of carrying this twofold truth into men's understandings and
hearts, that Jesus is, first of all, the Christ, and second, the Son of
God.
And then comes the rest of the New Testament, which is nothing more
than the working out of the theoretical and practical consequence of
these great truths. All the Epistles, the Book of Revelation, and the
history of the Church, as embodied in the Acts of the Apostles,--all
these are but the consequences of that fundamental truth; and the whole
of Scripture in its later portions is but the drawing of the inferences
and the presenting of the duties that flow from the facts that 'Jesus
is the Christ, the Son of God.'
And what about the Old Testament? Why, this about it: that whatever may
be the conclusion as to the date and authorship of any of the books in
it,--and I am not careful to contend about these at present;--and
whatever a man may believe about the verbal prophecies which most of us
recognise there,--there is stamped unmistakably upon the whole system,
of which the Old Testament is the record, an onward-looking attitude.
It is all anticipatory of 'good things to come,' and of a Person who
will bring them. Sacrifice, sacred offices, such as priesthood and
kingship, and the whole history of Israel, have their faces turned to
the future. 'They that went before, and they that followed after, cried
"Hosanna! Blessed be He that cometh in the name of the Lord!"' This
Christ towers up above the history of the world and the process of
revelation, like Mount Everest among the Himalayas. To that great peak
all the country on the one side runs upwards, and from it all the
valleys on the other descend; and the springs are born there which
carry verdure and life over the world.
Christ, the Son of God, is the centre of Scripture; and the
Book--whatever be the historical facts about its origin, its
authorship, and the date of the several portions of which it is
composed--the Book is a unity, because there is driven right through
it, like a core of gold, either in the way of prophecy and
onward-looking anticipation, or in the way of history and grateful
retrospect, the reference to the one 'Name that is above every name,'
the name of the Christ, the Son of God.
And all its incompleteness, its fragmentariness, its carelessness about
persons, are intended, as are the slight parts in a skilful artist's
handiwork, to emphasise the beauty and the sovereignty of that one
central Figure on which all lights are concentrated, and on which the
painter has lavished all the resources of his art. So God--for _God_ is
the Author of the Bible--on this great canvas has painted much in
sketchy outline, and left much unfilled in, that every eye may be fixed
on the central Figure, the Christ of God, on whose head comes down the
Dove, and round whom echoes the divine declaration: 'This is My Beloved
Son, in whom I am well pleased.'
But it is not merely in order to represent Jesus as the Christ of God
that these things are written, but it is that that representation may
become the object of our faith. If the intention of Scripture had been
simply to establish the fact that Jesus was the Christ and the Son of
God, it might have been done in a very different fashion. A theological
treatise would have been enough to do that. But if the object be that
men should not only accept with their understandings the truth
concerning Christ's office and nature, but that their hearts should go
out to Him, and that they should rest their sinful souls upon Him _as_
the Son of God and the Christ, then there is no other way to accomplish
that, but by the history of His life and the manifestation of His
heart. If the object were simply to make us know about Christ, we do
not need a Book like this; but if the object is to lead us to put our
faith in Him, then we must have what we have here, the infinitely
touching and tender Figure of Jesus Christ Himself, set before us in
all its sweetness and beauty as He lived and moved and died for us.
And so, dear friends, let me put one last word here about this part of
my subject. If this be the purpose of Scripture, then let us learn on
the one hand the wretched insufficiency of a mere orthodox creed, and
let us learn on the other hand the equal insufficiency of a mere
creedless emotion.
If the purpose of Scripture, in these Gospels, and all its parts, is
that we should believe 'that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,' that
purpose is not accomplished when we simply yield our understanding to
that truth and accept it as a great many people do. That was much more
the fault of the last generation than of this, though many of us may
still make the mistake of supposing that we are Christians because we
idly assent to--or, at least, do not deny, and so fancy that we
accept--Christian truth. But, as Luther says in one of his rough
figures, 'Human nature is like a drunken peasant; if you put him up on
the horse on the one side, he is sure to tumble down on the other.' And
so the reaction from the heartless, unpractical orthodoxy of half a
century ago has come with a vengeance to-day, when everybody is saying,
'Oh! give me a Christianity without dogma!' Well, I say that too, about
a great many of the metaphysical subtleties which have been called
Doctrinal Christianity. But this doctrine of the nature and office of
Jesus Christ cannot be given up, and the Christianity which Christ and
His Apostles taught be retained. Do you believe that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God? Do you trust your soul to Him in these
characters? If you do, I think we can shake hands. If you do not,
Scripture has failed to do its work on you, and you have not reached
the point which all God's lavish revelation has been expended on the
world that you and all men might attain.