'If the blind lead the blind both shall fall into the ditch.' 'The
disciple is not greater than his master.' 'It is enough for the
disciple that he be as his master.' If that be a true principle,
that the best that can happen to the scholar is to tread in his
teacher's footsteps, to see with his eyes, to absorb his wisdom, to
learn his truth, we may apply it in two opposite directions. First,
it teaches us the limitations, and the misery, and the folly of
taking men for our masters; and then, on the other hand, it teaches
us the large hope, the blessing, freedom, and joy of having Christ
for our Master.
Now, first, look at the principle as bearing upon the relation of
disciple and human teacher. All such teachers have their
limitations. Each man has his little circle of favourite ideas that
he is perpetually reiterating. In fact, it seems as if one truth was
about as much as one teacher could manage, and as if, whensoever God
had any great truth to give to the world, He had to take one man and
make him its sole apostle. So that teachers become mere fragments,
and to listen to them is to dwarf and narrow oneself.
The chances are that no scholar shall be on his master's level. The
eyes that see truth directly and for themselves in this world are
very few. Most men have to take truth at second-hand, and few indeed
are they who, like a perfect medium, receive even the fragmentary
truth that human lips can impart to them, and transmit it as pure as
they receive it. Disciples present exaggerations, caricatures,
misconceptions, the limitations of the master becoming even more
rigid in the pupil. Schools spring up which push the founder's
teaching to extremes, and draw conclusions from it which he never
dreamed of. Instead of a fresh voice, we have echoes, which, like
all echoes, give only a syllable or two out of a sentence. Teachers
can tell what they see, but they cannot give their followers eyes,
and so the followers can do little more than repeat what their
leader said he saw. They are like the little suckers that spring up
from the 'stool' of a cut-down tree, or like the kinglets among
whose feebler hands the great empire of an Alexander was divided at
his death.
It is a dwarfing thing to call any man master upon earth. And yet
men will give to a man the credence which they refuse to Christ. The
followers of some of the fashionable teachers of to-day--Comte,
Spencer, or others--protest, in the name of mental independence,
against accepting Christ as the absolute teacher of morals and
religion, and then go away and put a man in the very place which
they have denied to Him, and swallow down his _dicta_ whole.
Such facts show how heart and mind crave a teacher; how discipleship
is ingrained in our nature; how we all long for some one who shall
come to us authoritatively and say, 'Here is truth--believe it and
live on it.' And yet it is fatal to pin one's faith on any, and it
is miserable to have to change guides perpetually and to feel that
we have outgrown those whom we reverence, and that we can look down
on the height which once seemed to touch the stars--and, if we cut
ourselves loose from all men's teaching, the isolation is dreary,
and few of us are strong enough of arm, or clear enough of eye, to
force or find the path through the tangled jungles of error.
So take this thought, that the highest hope of a disciple is to be
like the master in wisdom, in its bearing on the relation between us
and Christ, and look how it then flashes up into blessedness and
beauty.
Such a teacher as we have in Him has no limitations, and it is safe
to follow Him absolutely and Him alone. All others have plainly
borne the impress of their age, or their nation, or their
idiosyncrasy, in some way or another; Christ Jesus is the only
teacher that the world has ever heard of, in whose teaching there is
no mark of the age or generation or set of circumstances in which it
originated. This water does not taste of any soil through which it
has passed, it has come straight down from Heaven, and is pure and
uncontaminated as the Heaven from which it has come. This teacher is
safe to listen to absolutely: there are no limitations there; you
never hear Him arguing; there is no sign about His words as if He
had ever dug out for Himself the wisdom that He is proclaiming, or
had ever seen it less distinctly than He sees it at the moment. The
great peculiarity of His teaching is that He does not reason, but
declares that His 'Verily! Verily!' is the confirmation of all His
message. His teaching is Himself; other men bring lessons about truth;
He says, 'I am the Truth.' Other teachers keep their personality in
the background; He clashes His down in the foreground. Other men say,
'Listen to what I tell you, never mind about me.' He says, 'This is
life eternal, that ye should believe on Me.' This Teacher has His
message level to all minds, high and low, wise and foolish, cultivated
and rude. This Teacher does not only impart wisdom by words as from
without, though He does that too, but He comes into men's spirits, and
communicates Himself, and so makes them wise. Other teachers fumble at
the outside, but 'in the hidden parts He makes me to know wisdom.' So
it is safe to take this Teacher absolutely, and to say, 'Thou art my
Master, Thy word is truth, and the opening of Thy lips to me is wisdom.'
In following Christ as our absolute Teacher, there is no sacrifice
of independence or freedom of mind, but listening to Him is the way
to secure these in their highest degree. We are set free from men,
we are growingly delivered from errors and misconceptions, in the
measure in which we keep close to Christ as our Master. The Lord is
that Teacher, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there, and there
only, is liberty; freedom from self, from the dominion of popular
opinion, from the coterie-speech of schools, from the imposing
authority of individuals, and from all that makes cowardly men say
as other people say, and fall in with the majority; and freedom from
our own prejudices and our own errors, which are cleared away when
we take Christ for our Master and cleave to Him.
His teaching can never cease until it has accomplished its purpose,
and not until we have gathered into our consciousness all the truth
that He has to give, and have received all the wisdom that He can
impart unto us as to God and Himself, does His teaching cease. Here
we may grow indefinitely in the knowledge of Christ, and in the
future we shall know even as we are known. His merciful teaching
will not come to a close till we have drunk in all His wisdom, and
till He has declared to us all which He has heard of the Father. He
will pass us from one form to another of His school, but in Heaven
we shall still be His scholars; 'Every one shall sit at Thy feet,
every one shall receive of Thy words.'
So, then, let us turn away from men, from rabbis and Sanhedrins,
from authorities and schools, from doctors and churches. Why resort
to cisterns when we may draw from the spring? Why listen to men when
we may hear Christ? He is, as Dante called the great Greek thinker,
'the Master of those who know.' Why should we look to the planets
when we can see the sun? 'Call no man master upon earth, for One is
your Master, and all ye are brethren.' And His merciful teaching
will never cease until 'everyone that is perfected shall be as his
Master.'
II. Now, turn to the second application of this principle. Likeness
to the Master in life is the law of a disciple's conduct.
That pathetic and wonderful story about the foot-washing in John's
Gospel is meant for a symbol. It is the presenting, in a picturesque
form, of the very heart and essence of Christ's Incarnation in its
motive and purpose. The solemn prelude with which the evangelist
introduces it lays bare our Lord's heart and His reason for His
action. 'Having loved His own, which were in the world, He loved
them to the end.' His motive, then, was love. Again, the exalted
consciousness which accompanied His self-abasement is made prominent
in the words, 'Knowing that the Father had given all things into His
hand, and that He was come from God and went to God.' And the
majestic deliberation and patient continuance in resolved humility
with which He goes down the successive steps of the descent, are
wonderfully given in the evangelist's record of how He 'riseth from
supper, and laid aside His garments and girded Himself, and poured
water into the basin.' It is a parable. Thus, in the consciousness
of His divine authority and dignity, and moved by His love to the
whole world, He laid aside the garments of His glory, and vested
Himself with the towel of His humanity, the servant's garb, and took
the water of His cleansing power, and came to wash the feet of all
who will let Him cleanse them from their soil. And then, having
reassumed His garments, He speaks from His throne to those who have
been cleansed by His humiliation and His sacrifice, 'Know ye what I
have done to you? The servant is not greater than his lord.'
That is to say, dear brethren, in this one incident, which is the
condensation, so to speak, of the whole spirit of His life, is the
law for our lives as well. We, too, are bound to that same love as
the main motive of all our actions; we, too, are bound to that same
stripping off of dignity and lowly equalising of ourselves with
those below us whom we would help, and we, too, are bound to make it
our main object, in our intercourse with men, not merely that we
should please nor enlighten them, nor succour their lower temporal
needs, but that we should cleanse them and make them pure with the
purity that Christ gives.
A Christian life all moved and animated by self-denuding love, and
which came amongst men to make them better and purer, and all the
influence of which tended in the direction of helping poor foul
hearts to get rid of their filth, how different it would be from our
lives! What a grim contrast much of our lives is to the Master's
example and command! Did you ever strip yourself of anything, my
brother, in order to make some poor, wretched creature a little
purer and liker the Saviour? Did you ever drop your dignity and go
down to the low levels in order to lift up the people that were
there? Do men see anything of that example, as reproduced in your
lives, of the Master that lays aside the garments of Heaven for the
vesture of earth, and dies upon the Cross in order that He might
make our poor hearts purer and liker His own?
But, hard as such imitation is, it is only one case of a general
principle. Discipleship is likeness to Jesus Christ in conduct.
There is no discipleship worth naming which does not, at least,
attempt that likeness. What is the use of a man saying that he is
the disciple of Incarnate Love if his whole life is incarnate
selfishness? What is the use of your calling yourselves Christians,
and saying that you are followers of Jesus Christ, when He came to
do God's will and delighted in it, and you come to do your own, and
never do God's will at all, or scarcely at all, and then reluctantly
and with many a murmur? What kind of a disciple is he, the habitual
tenor of whose life contradicts the life of his Master and disobeys
His commandments? And I am bound to say that that is the life of an
enormously large proportion of the professing disciples in this age
of conventional Christianity.
'The disciple shall be as his master.' Do you make it your effort to
be like Him? If so, then the saying is not only a law, but a
promise, for it assures us that our effort shall not fail but
progressively succeed, and lead on at last to our becoming what we
behold, and being conformed to Him whom we love, and like the Master
to whose wisdom we profess to listen. They whose earthly life is a
following of Christ, with faltering steps and afar off, shall have
for their heavenly blessedness, that they shall 'follow the Lamb
whithersoever He goeth.'
III. And now, lastly, likeness to the Master in relation to the
world is the fate that the disciple must put up with.
'If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much
more shall they call them of his household?' 'The disciple is not
above his master, nor the servant above his lord.' Our Lord
reiterated the statement in another place in John's Gospel,
reminding them that He had said it before.
If we are like Jesus Christ in conduct, and if we have received His
Word as the truth upon which we repose, depend upon it, in our
measure and in varying fashions, we shall have to bear the same kind
of treatment that He received from the world. The days of so-called
persecution are over in so-called Christian countries, but if you
are a disciple in the sense of believing all that Jesus Christ says,
and taking Him for your Teacher, the public opinion of this day will
have a great many things to say about you that will not be very
pleasant. You will be considered to be 'old-fashioned,' 'narrow,'
'behind the times,' etc. etc. etc. Look at the bitter spirit of
antagonism to an earnest and simple Christianity and adoption of
Christ as our authoritative Teacher which goes through much of our
high-class literature to-day. It is a very small matter as measured
with what Christian men used to have to bear; but it indicates the
set of things. We may make up our minds that if we are not contented
with the pared-down Christianity which the world allows to pass at
present, but insist upon coming to the New Testament for our beliefs
and practices, and avow--'I believe all that Jesus Christ says, and
I believe it because He says it, and I take Him as my model'; we
shall find out that the disciple has to be 'as his Master,' and that
the Pharisees and the Scribes of to-day stand in the same relation
to the followers as their predecessors did to the Leader. If you are
like your Master in conduct, you will be no more popular with the
world than He was. As long as Christianity will be quiet, and let
the world go its own gait, the world is very well contented to let
it alone, or even to say polite things to it. Why should the world
take the trouble of persecuting the kind of Christianity that so
many of us display? What is the difference between our Christianity
and their worldliness? The world is quite willing to come to church
on Sundays, and to call itself a Christian world, if only it may
live as it likes. And many professing Christians have precisely the
same idea. They attend to the externals of Christianity, and call
themselves Christians, but they bargain for its having very little
power over their lives. Why, then, should two sets of people who
have the same ideas and practices dislike each other? No reason at
all! But let Christian men live up to their profession, and above
all let them become aggressive, and try to attack the world's evil,
as they are bound to do; let them fight drunkenness, let them go
against the lust of great cities, let them preach peace in the face
of a nation howling for war, let them apply the golden rules of
Christianity to commerce and social relationships and the like, and
you will very soon hear a pretty shout that will tell you that the
disciple who is a disciple has to share the fate of the Master,
notwithstanding nineteen centuries of Christian teaching.
If you do not know what it is to find yourselves out of harmony with
the world, I am afraid it is because you have less of the Master's
spirit than you have of the world's. The world loves its own. If you
are not 'of the world, the world will hate you.' If it does not, it
must be because, in spite of your name, you belong to it.
But if we are like Him in our relation to the world, because we are
like Him in character, our very share in 'His reproach,' and our
sense of being 'aliens' here, bear the promise that we shall be like
Him in all worlds. His fortune is ours. 'The disciple shall be as
his master.' If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. No
cross, no crown;--if cross, then crown! The end of discipleship is
not reached until the Master's image and the Master's lot are
repeated in the scholar.
Take Christ for your sacrifice, trust to His blood, listen to His
teaching, walk in His footsteps, and you shall share His sovereignty
and sit on His throne. 'It is enough,'--ay! more than enough, and
nothing less than that is enough,--'for the disciple that he be
_as_'--and _with_--'his master.' 'I shall be satisfied when I awake in
Thy likeness.'