We have seen that the unknown companion of Andrew was probably the
Evangelist himself, who, in accordance with his uniform habit,
suppresses his own name, and that that omission points to John's
authorship of this Gospel. Another morsel of evidence as to the date
and purpose of the Gospel lies in the mention here of Andrew as 'Simon
Peter's brother.' We have not yet heard anything about Simon Peter. The
Evangelist has never mentioned his name, and yet he takes it for
granted that his hearers knew all about Peter, and knew him better than
they did Andrew. That presupposes a considerable familiarity with the
incidents of the Gospel story, and is in harmony with the theory that
this fourth Gospel is the latest of the four, and was written for the
purpose of supplementing, not of repeating, their narrative. Hence a
number of the phenomena of the Gospel, which have troubled critics, are
simply and sufficiently explained.
But that by the way. Passing that, notice first the illustration that
we get here of how instinctive and natural the impulse is, when a man
has found Jesus Christ, to tell some one else about Him. Nobody said to
Andrew, 'Go and look for your brother,' and yet, as soon as he had
fairly realised the fact that this Man standing before him was the
Messiah, though the evening seems to have come, he hurries away to find
his brother, and share with him the glad conviction.
Now, that is always the case. If a man has any real depth of
conviction, he cannot rest till he tries to share it with somebody
else. Why, even a dog that has had its leg mended, will bring other
limping dogs to the man that was kind to it. Whoever really believes
anything becomes a propagandist.
Look round about us to-day! and hearken to the Babel, the wholesale
Babel of noises, where every sort of opinion is trying to make itself
heard. It sounds like a country fair where every huckster is shouting
his loudest. That shows that the men believe the things that they
profess. Thank God that there is so much earnestness in the world! And
now are Christians to be dumb whilst all this vociferous crowd is
calling its wares, and quacks are standing on their platforms shouting
out their specifics, which are mostly delusions? Have you not a
medicine that will cure everything, a real heal-all, a veritable
pain-killer? If you believe that you have, certainly you will never
rest till you share your boon with your brethren.
If the natural effect of all earnest conviction, viz. a yearning and an
absolute necessity to speak it out, is no part of your Christian
experience, very grave inferences ought to be drawn from that. This
man, before he was four-and-twenty hours a disciple, had made another.
Some of you have been disciples for as many years, and have never even
tried to make one. Whence comes that silence which is, alas, so common
among us?
It is very plain that, making all allowance for changed manners, for
social difficulties, for timidity, for the embarrassment that besets
people when they talk to other people about religion, which is 'such an
awkward subject to introduce into mixed company,' and the like,—making
all allowance for these, there is a deplorable number of Christian
people who ought to be, in their own circles, evangelists and
missionaries, who are, if I may venture to quote very rude words which
the Bible uses, 'Dumb dogs lying down, and loving to slumber.' 'He
first findeth his own brother, Simon!'
Now, take another lesson out of this witness of the disciple, as to the
channel in which such effort naturally runs. 'He _first_ findeth _his
own brother_'; does not that imply a second finding by the other of the
two? The language of the text suggests that the Evangelist's tendency
to the suppression of himself, of which I have spoken, hides away, if I
may so say, in this singular expression, the fact that he too went to
look for a brother, but that Andrew found his brother before John found
his. If so, each of the original pair of disciples went to look for one
who was knit to him by close ties of kindred and affection, and found
him and brought him to Christ; and before the day was over the
Christian Church was doubled, because each member of it, by God's
grace, had added another. Home, then, and those who are nearest to us,
present the natural channels for Christian work. Many a very earnest
and busy preacher, or Sunday-school teacher, or missionary, has
brothers and sisters, husband or wife, children or parents at home to
whom he has never said a word about Christ. There is an old proverb,
'The shoemaker's wife is always the worst shod.' The families of many
very busy Christian teachers suffer wofully for want of remembering 'he
first findeth his own brother.' It is a poor affair if all your
philanthropy and Christian energy go off noisily in Sunday-schools and
mission-stations, and if your own vineyard is neglected, and the people
at your own fireside never hear anything from you about the Master whom
you say you love. Some of you want that hint; will you take it?
But then, the principle is one that might be fairly expanded beyond the
home circle. The natural relationships into which we are brought by
neighbourhood and by ordinary associations prescribe the direction of
our efforts. What, for instance, are we set down in this swarming
population of Lancashire for? For business and personal ends? Yes,
partly. But is that all? Surely, if we believe that 'there is a
divinity that shapes our ends' and determines the bounds of our
habitation, we must believe that other purposes affecting other people
are also meant by God to be accomplished through us, and that where a
man who knows and loves Christ Jesus is brought into neighbourly
contact with thousands who do not, he is thereby constituted his
brethren's keeper, and is as plainly called to tell them of Christ as
if a voice from Heaven had bid him do it. What is to be said of the
depth and vital energy of the Christianity that neither hears the call
nor feels the impulse to share its blessing with the famishing Lazarus
at its gate? What will be the fate of such a church? Why, if you live
in luxury in your own well drained and ventilated house, and take no
heed to the typhoid fever or cholera in the slums at its back, the
chances are that seeds of the disease will find their way to you, and
kill your wife, or child, or yourself. And if you Christian people,
living in the midst of godless people, do not try to heal them, they
will infect you. If you do not seek to impress your conviction that
Christ is the Messiah upon an unbelieving generation, the unbelieving
generation will impress upon you its doubts whether He is; and your
lips will falter, and a pallor will come over the complexion of your
love, and your faith will become congealed and turn into ice.
Notice again the simple word which is the most powerful means of
influencing most men.
Andrew did not begin to argue with his brother. Some of us can do that
and some of us cannot. Some of us are influenced by argument and some
of us are not. You may pound a man's mistaken creed to atoms with
sledge-hammers of reasoning, and he is not much the nearer being a
Christian than he was before; just as you may pound ice to pieces and
it is pounded ice after all. The mightiest argument that we can use,
and the argument that we can all use, if we have got any religion in us
at all, is that of Andrew, 'We have found the Messias.'
I recently read a story in some newspaper or other about a minister who
preached a very elaborate course of lectures in refutation of some form
of infidelity, for the special benefit of a man that attended his place
of worship. Soon after, the man came and declared himself a Christian.
The minister said to him, 'Which of my discourses was it that removed
your doubts?' The reply was, 'Oh! it was not any of your sermons that
influenced me. The thing that set me thinking was that a poor woman
came out of the chapel beside me, and stumbled on the steps, and I
stretched out my hand to help her, and she said "Thank you!" Then she
looked at me and said, "Do you love Jesus Christ, my blessed Saviour?"
And I did not, and I went home and thought about it; and now I can say
_I_ love Jesus.' The poor woman's word, and her frank confession of her
experience, were all the transforming power.
If you have found Christ, you can say that you have. Never mind about
the how! Any how! Only say it! A boy that is sent on an errand by his
father has only one duty to perform, and that is to repeat what he was
told. Whether we have any eloquence or not, whether we have any logic
or not, whether we can speak persuasively and gracefully or not, if we
have laid hold of Christ at all we can say that we have; and it is at
our peril that we do not. We can say it to somebody. There is surely
some one who will listen to you more readily than to any one else.
Surely you have not lived all your life and bound nobody to you by
kindness and love, so that they will gladly attend to what you say.
Well, then, _use_ the power that is given to you.
Remember the beginnings of the Christian Church—two men, each of whom
found his brother. Two and two make four; and if every one of us would
go, according to the old law of warfare, and each of us slay our man,
or rather each of us give life by God's grace to some one, or try to do
it, our congregations and our churches would grow as fast as, according
to the old problem, the money grew that was paid down for the nails in
the horse's shoes. Two snowflakes on the top of a mountain gather an
avalanche by the time they reach the valley. 'He first findeth his
brother, Simon.'
II. And now I turn to the second part of this text, the self-revelation
of the Master.
The bond which knit these men to Christ at first was by no means the
perfect Christian faith which they afterwards attained. They recognised
Him as the Messiah, they were personally attached to Him, they were
ready to accept His teaching and to obey His commandments. That was
about as far as they had gone. But they were scholars. They had entered
the school. The rest would come. It would be absurd to expect that
Christ would begin by preaching to them faith in His divinity and
atoning work. He binds them to _Himself_. That is lesson enough for a
beginner for one day.
It was the impression which Christ Himself made on Simon which
completed the work begun by his brother. What, then, was the
impression? He comes all full of wonder and awe, and he is met by a
look and a sentence. The look, which is described by an unusual word,
was a penetrating gaze which regarded Peter with fixed attention. It
must have been remarkable, to have lived in John's memory for all these
years. Evidently, as I think, a more than natural insight is implied.
So, also, the saying with which our Lord received Peter seems to me to
be meant to show more than natural knowledge: 'Thou art Simon, the son
of Jonas.' Christ may, no doubt, have learned the Apostle's name and
lineage from his brother, or in some other ordinary way. But if you
observe the similar incident which follows in the conversation with
Nicodemus, and the emphatic declaration of the next chapter that Jesus
knew both 'all men,' and 'what was in man'—both human nature as a
whole, and each individual—it is more natural to see here superhuman
knowledge.
So then, the first point in our Lord's self-revelation here is that He
shows Himself possessed of supernatural and thorough knowledge. One
remembers the many instances where our Lord read men's hearts, and the
prayer addressed to Him probably, by Peter, 'Thou, Lord, which knowest
the hearts of all men,' and the vision which John saw of 'eyes like a
flame of fire,' and the sevenfold 'I know thy works.'
It may be a very awful thought, 'Thou, God, seest me.' It is a very
unwelcome thought to a great many men, and it will be so to us unless
we can give it the modification which it receives from the belief in
the divinity of Jesus Christ, and feel sure that the eyes which are
blazing with divine omniscience are dewy with divine and human love.
Do you believe it? Do you feel that Christ is looking at you, and
searching you altogether? Do you rejoice in it? Do you carry it about
with you as a consolation and a strength in moments of weakness and in
times of temptation? Is it as blessed to you to feel 'Thou Christ
beholdest me now,' as it is for a child to feel that, when it is
playing in the garden, its mother is sitting up at the window watching
it, and that no harm can come? There have been men driven mad in
prisons because they knew that somewhere in the wall there was a little
pinhole, through which a gaoler's eye was always, or might be always,
glaring down at them. And the thought of an absolute Omniscience up
there, searching me to the depths of my nature, may become one from
which I recoil shudderingly, and will not be altogether a blessed one
unless it comes to me in this shape:—'My Christ knows me altogether and
loves me better than He knows. And so I will spread myself out before
Him, and though I feel that there is much in me which I dare not tell
to men, I will rejoice that there is nothing which I need to tell to
Him. He knows me through and through. He knew me when He died for me.
He knew me when He forgave me. He knew me when He undertook to cleanse
me. Like this very Peter I will say, "Lord, Thou knowest all things,"
and, like him, I will cling the closer to His feet, because I know, and
He knows, my weakness and my sin.'
Another revelation of our Lord's relation to His disciples is given in
the fact that He changes Simon's name. Jehovah, in the Old Testament,
changes the names of Abraham and of Jacob. Babylonian kings in the Old
Testament change the names of their vassal princes. Masters impose
names on their slaves; and I suppose that even the marriage custom of
the wife's assuming the name of the husband rests originally upon the
same idea of absolute authority. That idea is conveyed in the fact that
our Lord changes Peter's name, and so takes absolute possession of him,
and asserts His mastery over him. We belong to Him altogether, because
He has given Himself altogether for us. His absolute authority is the
correlative of His utter self-surrender. He who can come to me and say,
'I have spared not my life for thee,' and He only, has the right to
come to me and say, 'yield yourself wholly to Me.' So, Christian
friends, your Master wants all your service; do you give yourselves up
to Him out and out, not by half and half.
Lastly, that change of name implies Christ's power and promise to
bestow a new character and new functions and honours. Peter was by no
means a 'Peter' then. The name no doubt mainly implies official
function, but that official function was prepared for by personal
character; and in so far as the name refers to character, it means
firmness. At that epoch Peter was rash, impulsive, headstrong,
self-confident, vain, and therefore, necessarily changeable. Like the
granite, all fluid and hot, and fluid because it was hot, he needed to
cool in order to solidify into rock. And not until his self-confidence
had been knocked out of him, and he had learned humility by falling;
not until he had been beaten from all his presumption, and tamed down,
and sobered and steadied by years of difficulty and responsibilities,
did he become the rock that Christ meant him to be. All _that_ lay
concealed in the future, but in the change of his name, while he stood
on the very threshold of his Christian career, there was preached to
him, and there is preached to us, this great truth, that if you will go
to Jesus Christ He will make a new man of you. No man's character is so
obstinately rooted in evil but that Christ can change its set and
direction. No man's natural dispositions are so faulty and low but that
Christ can develop counterbalancing virtues, and out of the evil and
weakness make strength. He will not make a Peter into a John, or a John
into a Paul, but He will deliver Peter from the 'defects of his
qualities,' and lead them up into a higher and a nobler region. There
are no outcasts in the view of the transforming Christ. He dismisses no
people out of His hospital as incurable, because anybody, everybody,
the blackest, the most rooted in evil, those who have longest indulged
in any given form of transgression, may all come to Him; with the
certainty that if they will cleave to Him, He will read all their
character and all its weaknesses, and then with a glad smile of welcome
and assured confidence on His face, will ensure to them a new nature
and new dignities. 'Thou art Simon—thou shalt be Peter.'
The process will be long. It will be painful. There will be a great
deal pared off. The sculptor makes the marble image by chipping away
the superfluous marble. Ah! and when you have to chip away superfluous
flesh and blood it is bitter work, and the chisel is often deeply dyed
in gore, and the mallet seems to be very cruel. Simon did not know all
that had to be done to make a Peter of him. We have to thank God's
providence that we do not know all the sorrows and trials of the
process of making us what He wills us to be. But we may be sure of
this, that if only we keep near our Master, and let Him have His way
with us, and work His will upon us, and if only we will not wince from
the blows of the Great Artist's chisel, then out of the roughest block
He will carve the fairest statue; and He will fulfil for us at last His
great promise: 'I will give unto him a white stone, and in the stone a
new name written, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it.'