'Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the Prince of this world
cometh, and hath nothing in Me.' One of the other Gospels tells us, in
finishing its account of our Lord's temptation in the wilderness, that
when Satan had ended all these temptations 'he departed from Him for a
season.' And now we have the second and the intenser form of that
assault. The first was addressed to desires, and sought to stimulate
ambition and ostentation and the animal appetites, and so, through the
cravings of human nature, to shake the Master's fixed faith. The second
used sharper and more fatal weapons, and appealed, not to desire of
enjoyment, or ease, or good, but to the natural human shrinking from
pain and suffering and shame and death. He that was impervious on the
side of natural necessities and more subtle spiritual desires might yet
be reached through terror. And so the second form of the assault,
instead of tempting the traveller by the sunshine to cast aside his
cloak, tempted him by storm and tempest to fling it aside; and the one,
as the other, was doomed to failure.
Note how the Master, with that clear eye which saw to the depths as
well as the heights, and before which men and things were but, as it
were, transparent media through which unseen spiritual powers wrought,
just as He discerns the Father's will as supreme and sovereign, sees
here—beneath Judas's treachery, and Pharisees' and priests' envy, and
the people's stolid indifference, and the Roman soldiers' impartial
scorn—the workings of a personal source and centre of all. The 'Prince
of this world,' who rules men and things when they are severed from
God, 'cometh.' Christ's sensitive nature apprehends the approach of the
evil thing, as some organisations can tell when a thunderstorm is about
to burst. His divine Omniscience, working as it did, even within the
limits of humanity, knows not only when the storm is about to burst
upon Him, but knows who it is that has raised the tempest. And so He
says, 'The Prince of this world cometh.'
But note, as yet more important, that tremendous and unique
consciousness of absolute invulnerability against the assaults. 'He
hath nothing in Me.' He is 'the Prince of the world,' but His dominion
stops outside My breast. He has no rule or authority there. His writs
do not run, nor is His dominion recognised, within that sacred realm.
Was there ever a man who could say that? Are there any of us, the
purest and the noblest, who, standing single-handed in front of the
antagonistic power of evil, and believing it to be consolidated and
consecrated in a person, dare to profess that there is not a thing in
us on which he can lay his black claw and say—'That is mine?' Is there
nothing inflammable within us which the 'fiery darts of the wicked' can
kindle? Are there any of us who bar our doors so tightly as that we can
say that none of his seductions will find their way therein, and that
nothing there will respond to them? Christ sets Himself here against
the whole embattled and embodied power of evil, and puts Himself in
contrast to the universal human experience, when He calmly declares 'He
hath nothing in Me.' It is an assertion of His absolute freedom from
sinfulness, and it involves, as I take it, the other assertion—that as
He is free from sin, so He is not subject to that consequence of sin,
which is death, as we know it. Another part of Scripture speaks to us
in strange language, which yet has in it a deep truth, of 'him that had
the power of death, that is, the devil.' Men fall under the rightful
dominion of the king of evil when they sin, and part of the proof of
his dominion is the fact of physical death, with its present
accompaniments. Thus, in His calm anticipation, Jesus stands waiting
for the enemy's charge, knowing that all its forces will be broken
against the serried ranks of His immaculate purity, and that He will
come from the dreadful close unwounded all, and triumphant for
evermore.
But do not let us suppose that because Christ, in His anticipation of
suffering and death, knew Himself invulnerable, with not even a spot on
His heel into which the arrow could go, therefore the conflict was an
unreal or shadowy one. It was a true fight, and it was a real struggle
that He was anticipating, thus calmly in these solemn words, as knowing
Himself the Victor ere He entered on the dreadful field.
II. So note, secondly, in these words, our Lord's unveiling of the
motive and aim of His apparent defeat.
'But that the world might know that I love the Father, and, as the
Father gave Me commandment, even so I do.' There may be some
uncertainty about the exact grammatical relation of these clauses to
one another, with which I need not trouble you, because it does not
affect their substantial meaning. However we solve the mere grammatical
questions, the fundamental significance of the whole remains
unaffected, and it is this: that Christ's sufferings and death were, in
one aspect, for the purpose that the world might know His love to the
Father, and, in another aspect, were obedience to the Father's
commandment. And if we consider these two aspects, I think we shall get
some thoughts worth considering as to the way in which the Master
Himself looks upon these sufferings and that death.
The first point I note in this division of my discourse is that Christ
would have us regard His sufferings and His death as His own act. Note
that remarkable phrase, 'thus I _do_.' A strange word to be used in
such a connection, but full of profound meaning. We speak, and rightly,
of the solemn events of these coming days as the passion of our Lord,
but they were His action quite as much as His passion. He was no mere
passive sufferer. In them all He acted, or, as He says here, we may
look upon them all, not as things inflicted upon Him from without by
any power, however it might seem to have the absolute control of His
fate, but as things which He did Himself.
There is one Man who died, not of physical necessity, but because of
free choice. There is one Man who chose to be born, and who chose to
die; who, in His choosing to be born, chose humiliation, and who, in
choosing to die, chose yet deeper humiliation. This sacrifice was a
voluntary sacrifice, or, to speak more accurately, He was both Priest
and Sacrifice, when 'through the Eternal Spirit He offered Himself
without spot unto God.' The living Christ is the Lord of Life, and
lives because He will; the dying Christ is the Lord of Death, and dies
because He chose. He would have us learn that all His bitter
sufferings, inflicted from without as they were, and traceable to a
deeper source than merely human antagonism, were also self-inflicted
and self-chosen, and further traceable to the Father's will in harmony
with His own. 'Thus I do,' and thus He did when He died.
Then, further, our Lord would have us regard these sufferings and that
death as being His crowning act of obedience to His Father's will. That
is in accordance with the whole tone of His self-consciousness,
especially as set before us in this precious Gospel of John, which
traces up everything to the submission of the divine Son to the divine
Father, a submission which is no mere external act, but results from,
and is the expression of, the absolute unity of will and the perfect
oneness of mutual love. And so, because He loved the Father, therefore
He came to do the Father's will, and the crowning act of His obedience
was this, that He was 'obedient unto death, even the death of the
Cross.' It was a voluntary sacrifice, but that voluntariness was not
self-will. It was a sacrifice in obedience to the Father's will, but
that obedience was not reluctant. Christ was the embodiment of the
divine purpose, formed before the ages and realised in time, when He
bowed His head and yielded up the ghost. The highest proof of His
filial obedience was the Cross. And to it He points us, if we would
know what it is to love and obey the Father.
Now it is to be noticed that this motive of our Lord's death is not the
usual one given in Scripture. And I can suppose the question being put,
'Why did not Jesus Christ say, in that supreme moment, that He went to
the Cross because of His love to us rather than because of His love to
the Father?' But I think the answer is not far to seek. There are
several satisfactory ones which may be given. One is that this making
prominent of His love to God rather than to us, as the motive for His
death, is in accordance with that comparative reticence on the part of
Jesus as to the atoning aspect of His death, which I have had frequent
occasion to point out, and which does not carry in it the implication
that that doctrine was a new thing in the Christian preaching after
Pentecost. Another reason may be drawn from the whole strain and tone
of this chapter, which, as I have already said, traces up everything to
the loving relations of obedience between the Father and Son. And yet
another reason may be given in that the very statement of Christ's love
to God, and loving obedience to the Father's commandment as the motive
of His death, includes in it necessarily the other thing—love to us.
For what was the Father's commandment which Christ with all His heart
accepted, and with His glad will obeyed unto death? It was that the Son
should come as the Ransom for the world. The Son of man was sent, 'not
to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a Ransom
for many.' Or, as He Himself said, in one of His earliest discourses,
'God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish.' And for what He gave
that Son is clearly stated in the context itself of that passage—'As
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of
Man be lifted up.'
To speak of Christ's acceptance of the Father's commandment, then, is
but another way of saying that Christ, in all the fullness of His
self-surrender, entered into and took as His own the great, eternal
divine purpose, that the world should be redeemed by His death upon the
Cross. The heavenward side of His love to man is His love to the
Father, God.
Now there is another aspect still in which our Lord would here have us
regard His sufferings and death, and that is that they are of worldwide
significance.
Think for a moment of the obscurity of the speaker, a Jewish peasant in
an upper room, with a handful of poor men around Him, all of them ready
to forsake Him, within a few hours of His ignominious death; and yet He
says, 'I am about to die, that the echo of it may reverberate through
the whole world.' He puts Himself forth as of worldwide significance,
and His death as adapted to move mankind, and as one day to be known
all over the world. There is nothing in history to approach to the
gigantic arrogance of Jesus Christ, and it is only explicable on the
ground of His divinity.
'This I do that _the world_ may know.' And what did it matter to the
world? Why should it be of any importance that the world should know?
For one plain reason, because true knowledge of the true nature and
motive of that death breaks the dominion of the Prince of this world,
and sets men free from his tyranny. Emancipation, hope, victory,
purity, the passing from the tyranny of the darkness into the blessed
kingdom of the light—all depend on the world's knowing that Christ's
death was His own voluntary act of submission to the infinite love and
will of the Father, which will and love He made His own, and therefore
died, the sacrifice for the world's sin.
The enemy was approaching. He was to be hoist with his own petard. 'He
digged a pit; he digged it deep,' and into the pit which he had digged
he himself fell. 'Oh, death! I will be thy plague' by entering into thy
realm. 'Oh, grave! I will be thy destruction' by dwelling for a moment
within thy dark portals and rending them irreparably as I pass from
them. The Prince of this world was defeated when he seemed to triumph,
and Christ's mighty words came true: 'Now shall the Prince of this
world be cast out.' He would have the world know—with the knowledge
which is of the heart as well as the head, which is life as well as
understanding, which is possession and appropriation—the mystery, the
meaning, the motive of His death, because the world thereby ceases to
be a world, and becomes the kingdom of Jesus Christ.