'Jesus answered him, Wilt them lay down thy life for My sake? Verily,
verily I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied
Me thrice.'—JOHN xiii. 38.
In the last sermon I partly considered the dialogue of which this is
the concluding portion, and found that it consisted of an audacious
question: 'Why cannot I follow Thee now?' which really meant a
contradiction of our Lord; of a rash vow; 'I will lay down my life for
Thy sake'—and of a sad forecast: 'The cock shall not crow till thou
hast denied Me thrice.' I paused in the middle of considering the
second of these three stages, the rash vow. I then pointed out that,
however ignorant the Apostle was of what 'following Christ' meant, he
had hit the mark, and stumbled unknowingly upon the very essence of the
Christian life, and an eternal truth, when he recognised that, somehow
or other, to 'follow Christ' meant to die for Him. That is so, and is
so always, for there is no following Christ which is not a 'dying
daily,' by self-immolation and detachment from the world, and from the
life of sense and self. But this rash vow has to be looked at from a
somewhat different point of view, and we have to consider not only the
strangely blended right and wrong, error and deep truth, that lie in
its substance, but the strangely blended right and wrong in the state
of feeling and thought, on the part of the Apostle, which it
represents. And taking up the dropped thread, I first deal with that,
and then with the sad forecast which follows.
So then, looking at these words as being like all our words, even the
best of them, strangely mingled of right and wrong, good and evil, I
find in them—