Jesus Christ is not speaking merely to that little handful of men in
the upper chamber, but to all generations and to all lands, to the end
of time and round the world. The authoritative tone which He assumes
here is very noteworthy. He speaks as Jehovah spoke from Sinai, and
quotes the very words of the old law when He speaks of 'keeping My
commandments.' There are distinctly involved in this quite incidental
utterance of Christ's two startling things—one the assumption of His
right to impose His will upon every human being, and the other His
assumption that His will contains the all-sufficient directory for
human conduct.
What, then, are His commandments? Those which He spoke are plain and
simple; and people who wish to pick holes in the greatness of Christ's
work in the world tell us that you can match almost all His precepts up
and down amongst moralists and philosophers, and they crow very loud
if, scratching amongst Rabbinical dust-heaps, they find something that
looks like anything that He once said. Be it so! What does that matter?
Christ's 'commandments' are Christ Himself. This is the originality and
uniqueness of Christ as a moral Teacher, that He says, not 'Do this,
that, and the other thing,' but 'Copy Me.' 'Take My yoke upon you and
learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.' His commandments are
Himself; and the sum of them all is this—a character perfectly
self-oblivious, and wholly penetrated and saturated with joyful, filial
submission to the Father, and uttermost and entire giving Himself away
to His brethren. That is Christ's commandment which He bids us keep,
and His law is to be found in His life.
And then, if that be so, what a change passes on the aspect of law,
when we take Christ as being our living embodiment of it! Everything
that was hard, repellent, far-off, cold, vanishes. We have no longer
'tables of stone,' but 'fleshy tables of the heart'; and the Law stands
before us, a Being to be loved, to be clung to, to be trusted, and whom
it is blessedness to know and perfection to resemble. The rails upon
which the train travels may be rigid, but they mean safety, and they
carry men smoothly into otherwise inaccessible lands. So the life of
Jesus Christ brought to us is the firm and plain track along which we
are to travel; and all that was difficult and hard in the cold thought
of _duty_ becomes changed into the attraction of a living Pattern and
Example. This living and breathing and loving commandment is
all-sufficient for every detail and complexity of human life. It is so
by the confession of believers and of unbelievers, by the joyful
confession of the one, and by the frank acknowledgment of many of the
others. Listen to one of them. 'Whatever else may be taken away from us
by rational criticism, Christ is still left, a unique Figure, not more
unlike all His predecessors than all His followers…. Religion cannot be
said to have made a bad choice in selecting this Man as the ideal
Representative and Guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy,
even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of
virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavour so to live
that Christ would approve our life.'
It is enough for conduct, it is enough for character, it is enough in
all perplexities of conflicting duties, that we listen to and obey the
voice that says, 'Keep My commandments.'