'I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night
cometh when no man can work.'—JOHN ix. 4.
'The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off
the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.'—ROMANS
xiii. 12.
The contrast between these two sayings will strike you at once. Using
the same metaphors, they apply them in exactly opposite directions. In
the one, life is the day, and the state beyond death the night; in the
other, life is the night, and the state beyond death the day.
Remarkable as the contrast is, it comes to be still more so if we
remember the respective speakers. For each of them says what we should
rather have expected the other to say. It would have been natural for
Paul to have given utterance to the stimulus to diligence caused by the
consciousness that the time of work was brief; and it would have been
as natural for Jesus, who, as we believe, came from God, from the place
of the eternal supernal glory, to have said that life here was night as
compared with the illumination that He had known. But it is the divine
Master who gives utterance to the common human consciousness of a brief
life ending in inactivity, and it is the servant who takes the higher
point of view.
So strange did the words of my first text seem as coming from our
Lord's lips, that the sense of incongruity seems to have been the
occasion of the remarkable variation of reading which the Revised
Version has adopted when it says '_We_ must work the works of Him that
sent Me.' But that thought seems to me to be perfectly irrelevant to
our Lord's purpose in this context, where He is vindicating His own
action, and not laying down the duty of His servants. He is giving here
one of these glimpses, that we so rarely get, into His own inmost
heart. And so we have to take the sharp contrast between the Master's
thought and the servant's thought, and to combine them, if we would
think rightly about the present and the future, and do rightly in the
present.
I. Let me ask you to look at the Master's thought about the present and
the future.
As I have already said, our Lord gives utterance here to the very
common, in fact, universal human consciousness. The contrast between
the intense little spot of light and the great ring of darkness round
about it; between 'the warm precincts of the cheerful day' and the cold
solitudes of the inactive night has been the commonplace and
stock-in-trade of moralists and thoughtful men from the beginning; has
given pathos to poetry, solemnity to our days; and has been the ally of
base as well as of noble things. For to say to a man, 'there are twelve
hours in the day of life, and then comes darkness, the blackness that
swallows up all activity,' may either be made into a support of all
lofty and noble thoughts, or, by the baser sort, may be, and has been,
made into a philosophy of the 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die' kind; 'Gather ye roses while ye may'; 'A short life and a merry
one.' The thought stimulates to diligence, but it does nothing to
direct the diligence. It makes men work furiously, but it never will
prevent them from working basely. 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do,
do it with thy might,' is a conclusion from the consideration that
'there is neither wisdom nor knowledge nor device in the grave whither
we go,' but what the hand should find to do must be settled from
altogether different considerations.
Our Lord here takes the common human point of view, and says, 'Life is
the time for activity, and it must be the more diligent because it is
ringed by the darkness of the night.' What precisely does our Lord
intend by His use of that metaphor of the night? No figures, we know,
run upon all-fours. The point of comparison may be simply in some one
feature common to the two things compared, and so all sorts of mischief
may be done by trying to extend the analogy to other features. Now,
there are a great many points in which day and night may respectively
be taken as analogues of Life and Death and the state beyond death.
There is a 'night of weeping'; there is a 'night of ignorance.' But our
Lord Himself tells us what is the one point of comparison which alone
is in His mind, when He says, 'The night cometh, when no man can work.'
It is simply the night as a season of compulsory inactivity that
suggests the comparison in our text. And so we have here the
presentation of that dear Lord as influenced by the common human
motive, and feeling that there was work to be done which must be
crowded into a definite space, because when that space was past, there
would be no more opportunity for the work to be done.
Look at how, in the words of my first text, we have, as I said, a
glimpse into His inmost heart. He lets us see that all His life was
under the solemn compulsion of that great _must_ which was so often
upon His lips, that He felt that He was here to do the Father's will,
and that that obligation lay upon Him with a pressure which He neither
could, nor would if He could, have got rid of.
There are two kinds of 'musts' in our lives. There is the unwelcome
necessity which grips us with iron and sharpened fangs; the needs-be
which crushes down hopes and dreams and inclinations, and forces the
slave to his reluctant task. And there is the 'must' which has passed
into the will, into the heart, and has moulded the inmost desire to
conformity with the obligation which no more stands over against us as
a taskmaster with whip and chain, but has passed within us and is there
an inspiration and a joy. He that can say, as Jesus Christ in His
humanity could, and did say: 'My meat'—the refreshment of my nature,
the necessary sustenance of my being—'is to do the will of my Father';
that man, and that man alone, feels no pressure that is pain from the
incumbency of the necessity that blessedly rules His life. When 'I
will' and 'I choose' coincide, like two of Euclid's triangles atop of
one another, line for line and angle for angle, then comes liberty into
the life. He that can say, not with a knitted brow and an unwilling
ducking of his head to the yoke, 'I must do it,' but can say, 'Thy law
is within my heart,' that is the Christlike, the free, the happy man.
Further, our Lord here, in His thoughts of the present and the future,
lets us see what He thought that the work of God in the world was. The
disciples looked at the blind man sitting by the wayside, and what he
suggested to them was a curious, half theological, half metaphysical
question, in which Rabbinical subtlety delighted. 'Who did sin, this
man or his parents?' They only thought of talking over the theological
problem involved in the fact that, before he had done anything in this
world to account for the calamity, he was _born_ blind. Jesus Christ
looked at the man, and He did not think about theological cobwebs. What
was suggested to Him was to fight against the evil and abolish it. It
is sometimes necessary to discuss the origin of an evil thing, of a
sorrow or a sin, in order to understand how to deal with and get rid of
it. But unless that is the case, our first business is not to say, 'How
comes this about?' but our business is to take steps to make it cease
to come about. Cure the man first and then argue to your heart's
content about what made him blind, but cure him first. And so Jesus
Christ taught us that the meaning of the day of life was that we should
set ourselves to abolish the works of the devil, and that the work of
God was that we should fight against sin and sorrow, and in so far as
it was in our power, abolish these, in all the variety of their forms,
in all the vigour of their abundant growth. Sorrow and sin are God's
call to every one of His sons and daughters to set themselves to cast
them out of His fair creation; and 'the day' is the opportunity for
doing that.
Our Lord here, as I have already suggested, shows us very touchingly
and beautifully, how entirely He bore our human nature, and had entered
into our conditions, in that He, too, felt that common human emotion,
and was spurred to unhasting and yet unresting diligence by the thought
of the coming of the night. I suppose that although we have few
chronological data in this Gospel of John, the hour of our Lord's death
was really very near at that time. He had just escaped from a
formidable attempt upon His life. 'They took up stones to stone Him,
but He, passing through the midst of them, went His way,' is the
statement which immediately precedes the account of His meeting with
this blind man. And so under the pressure, perhaps, of that immediate
experience which revealed the depths of hatred that was ready for
anything against Him, He gives utterance to this expression: 'If it be
the case that the time is at hand, then the more need that, Sabbath day
as it is, I should pause here.' Though the multitude were armed with
stones to stone Him, He stopped in His flight because there was a poor
blind man there whom He felt that He needed to cure. Beautiful it is,
and drawing Him very near to us,—and it should draw us very near to
Him—that thus He shared in that essentially human consciousness of the
limitation of the power to work, by the ring of blackness that
encircled the little spot of illuminated light.
But some will say, 'How is it possible that such a consciousness as
this should really have been in the mind of Jesus Christ?' 'Did He not
know that His death was not to be the end of His work? Did He not know,
and say over and over again, in varying forms, that when He passed from
earth, it was not into inactivity? Is it not the very characteristic of
His mission that it is different from that of all other helpers and
benefactors and teachers of the world, in that His death stands in the
very middle of His work, and that on the one side of it there is
activity, and on the other side of it there is still, and in some sense
loftier and greater, activity?' Yes; all that is perfectly true, and I
do not for a moment believe that our Lord was forgetting that the life
on the earth was but the first volume of His biography, and of the
records of His deeds, and that He contemplated them, as He contemplated
always, the life beyond, as working in and on and over and through His
servants, even unto the end of the world.
But you have only to remember the difference between the earthly and
the heavenly life of the Lord fully to understand the point of view
that He takes here. The one is the basis of the other; the one is the
seedtime, the other is the harvest. The one has only the limited years
of the earthly life, in which it can be done; the other has the endless
years of Eternity, through which it is to be continued. And if any part
of that earthly life of the Lord had been void of its duty, and of its
discharge of the Father's will, not even He, amidst the blaze of the
heavenly glory, could have thereafter filled up the tiny gap. All the
earthly years were needed to be filled with service, up to the great
service and sacrifice of the Cross, in order that upon them might be
reared the second stage and phase of His heavenly life. With regard to
the one, He said on the Cross, 'It is finished.' But when He died He
passed not into the night of inactivity, but into the day of greater
service. And that higher and heavenly form of His work continues, and
not until 'the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our
God and of His Christ,' and the whole benefit and effect of His earthly
life are imparted to the whole race of man, will it be said, 'It is
done,' and the angels of heaven proclaim the completion of His work for
man. But seeing that that work has its twofold forms, Jesus, like us,
had to be conscious of the limitations of life, and of the night that
followed the day.