If we take no higher view of this most pathetic incident than that the
words come from a man's lips, even then all its beauty will not be
lost. There are some sins against friendship in which the manner is
harder to bear than the substance of the evil. It must have been a
strangely mean and dastardly nature, as well as a coarse and cold one,
that could think of fixing on the kiss of affection as the concerted
sign to point out their victim to the legionaries. Many a man who
could have planned and executed the treason would have shrunk from
that. And many a man who could have borne to be betrayed by his own
familiar friend would have found that heartless insult worse to endure
than the treason itself. But what a picture of perfect patience and
unruffled calm we have here, in that the answer to the poisonous,
hypocritical embrace was these moving words! The touch of the traitor's
lips has barely left His cheek, but not one faint passing flush of
anger tinges it. He is perfectly self-oblivious--absorbed in other
thoughts, and among them in pity for the guilty wretch before Him.
His words have no agitation in them, no instinctive recoil from the
pollution of such a salutation. They have grave rebuke, but it is
rebuke which derives its very force from the appeal to former
companionship. Christ still recognises the ancient bond, and is true
to it. He will still plead with this man who has been beside Him long;
and though His heart be wounded yet He is not wroth, and He will not
cast him off. If this were nothing more than a picture of human
friendship it would stand alone, above all other records that the
world cherishes in its inmost heart, of the love that never fails, and
is not soon angry.
But we, I hope, dear brethren, think more loftily and more truly of
our dear Lord than as simply a perfect manhood, the exemplar of all
goodness. How He comes to be that, if He be not more than that, I do
not understand, and I, for one, feel that my confidence in the
flawless completeness of His human character lives or dies with my
belief that He is the Eternal Word, God manifest in the flesh.
Certainly we shall never truly grasp the blessed meaning of His life
on earth until we look upon it all as the revelation of God. The
tears of Christ are the pity of God. The gentleness of Jesus is the
long-suffering of God. The tenderness of Jesus is the love of God.
'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father'; and all that life so
beautiful but so anomalous as to be all but incredible, when we
think of it as only the life of a man, glows with a yet fairer
beauty, and corresponds with the nature which it expresses, when we
think of it as being the declaration to us by the divine Son of the
divine Father--our loftiest, clearest, and authentic revelation of
God.
How that thought lifts these words before us into a still higher
region! We are now in the presence of the solemn greatness of a
divine love. If the meaning of this saying is what we have
suggested, it is pathetic even in the lower aspect, but how
infinitely that pathos is deepened when we view it in the higher!
Surely if ever there was a man who might have been supposed to be
excluded from the love of God, it was Judas. Surely if ever there
was a moment in a human life, when one might have supposed that even
Christ's ever open heart would shut itself together against any one,
it was this moment. But no, the betrayer in the very instant of his
treason has that changeless tenderness lingering around him, and
that merciful hand beckoning to him still.
And have we not a right to generalise this wonderful fact, and to
declare its teaching to be--that the love of God is extended to us
all, and cannot be made to turn away from us by any sins of ours?
Sin is mighty; it can work endless evils on us; it can disturb and
embitter all our relations with God; it can, as we shall presently
have to point out, make it necessary for the tenderest 'grace of God
to come disciplining'--to 'come with a rod,' just because it comes
in 'the spirit of meekness.' But one thing it cannot do, and that
is--make God cease to love us. I suppose all human affection can be
worn out by constant failure to evoke a response from cold hearts. I
suppose that it can be so nipped by frosts, so constantly checked in
blossoming, that it shrivels and dies. I suppose that constant
ingratitude, constant indifference can turn the warmest springs of
our love to a river of ice. 'Can a mother forget her child?--Yea,
she may forget.' But we have to do with a God, whose love is His
very being; who loves us not for reasons in us but in Himself; whose
love is eternal and boundless as all His nature; whose love,
therefore, cannot be turned away by our sin--but abides with us for
ever, and is granted to every soul of man. Dear brethren, we cannot
believe too firmly, we cannot trust too absolutely, we cannot
proclaim too broadly that blessed thought, without which we have no
hope to feed on for ourselves, or to share with our fellows--the
universal love of God in Christ.
Is there a _worst_ man on earth at this moment? If there be,
he, too, has a share in that love. Harlots and thieves, publicans
and sinners, leprous outcasts, and souls tormented by unclean
spirits, the wrecks of humanity whom decent society and respectable
Christianity passes by with averted head and uplifted hands,
criminals on the gibbet with the rope round their necks--and those
who are as hopeless as any of these, self-complacent formalists and
'Gospel-hardened professors'--all have a place in that heart. And
that, not as undistinguished members of a class, but as separate
souls, singly the objects of God's knowledge and love. He loves all,
because He loves each. We are not massed together in His view, nor
in His regard. He does not lose the details in the whole; as we,
looking on some great crowd of upturned faces, are conscious of all
but recognise no single one. He does not love a class--a world--but
He loves the single souls that make it up--you and me, and every one
of the millions that we throw together in the vague phrase, 'the
race.' Let us individualise that love in our thoughts as it
individualises us in its outflow--and make our own the 'exceeding
broad' promises, which include us, too. 'God loves _me_; Christ
gave Himself for _me_. _I_ have a place in that royal, tender
heart.'
Nor should any sin make us doubt this. He loved us with exceeding
love, even when we were 'dead in trespasses.' He did not begin to
love because of anything in us; He will not cease because of
anything in us. We change; 'He abideth faithful, He cannot deny
Himself.' As the sunshine pours down as willingly and abundantly on
filth and dunghills, as on gold that glitters in its beam, and
jewels that flash back its lustre, so the light and warmth of that
unsetting and unexhausted source of life pours down 'on the
unthankful and on the good.' The great ocean clasps some black and
barren crag that frowns against it, as closely as with its waves it
kisses some fair strand enamelled with flowers and fragrant with
perfumes. So that sea of love in which we 'live, and move, and have
our being,' encircles the worst with abundant flow. He Himself sets
us the pattern, which to imitate is to be the children of 'our
Father which is in heaven,' in that He loves His enemies, blessing
them that curse, and doing good to them that hate. He Himself is
what He has enjoined us to be, in that He feeds His enemies when
they hunger, and when they thirst gives them drink, heaping coals of
fire on their heads, and seeking to kindle in them thereby the glow
of answering love, not being overcome of their evil, so that He
repays hate with hate and scorn with scorn, but in patient
continuance of loving kindness seeking to overcome evil with good.
He is Himself that 'charity' which 'is not easily provoked, is not
soon angry, beareth all things, hopeth all things, and never
faileth.' His love is mightier than all our sins, and waits not on
our merits, nor is turned away by our iniquities. 'God so loved the
world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.'
II. Then, secondly, we have here--the pleading of Christ's patient
love.
I have been trying to say as broadly and strongly as I can, that our
sins do not turn away the love of God in Christ from us. The more
earnestly we believe and proclaim that, the more needful is it to
set forth distinctly--and that not as limiting, but as explaining
the truth--the other thought, that the sin which does not avert,
does modify the expression of, the love of God. Man's sin compels
Him to do what the prophet calls his 'strange work'--the work which
is not dear to His heart, nor natural, if one may so say, to His
hands--His work of judgment.
The love of Christ has to come to sinful men with patient pleading
and remonstrance, that it may enter their hearts and give its
blessings. We are familiar with a modern work of art in which that
long-suffering appeal is wonderfully portrayed. He who is the Light
of the world stands, girded with the royal mantle clasped with the
priestly breastplate, bearing in His hand the lamp of truth, and
there, amidst the dew of night and the rank hemlock, He pleads for
entrance at the closed door which has no handle on its outer side,
and is hinged to open only from within. 'I stand at the door and
knock. If any man open the door, I will come in.'
And in this incident before us, we see represented not only the
endless patience of God's pitying love, but the method which it
needs to take in order to reach the heart.
There is an appeal to the traitor's heart, and an appeal to his
conscience. Christ would have him think of the relations that have
so long subsisted between them; and He would have him think, too, of
the real nature of the deed he is doing, or, perhaps, of the motives
that impel him. The grave, sad word, by which He addresses him, is
meant to smite upon his heart. The sharp question which He puts to
him is meant to wake up his conscience; and both taken together
represent the two chief classes of remonstrance which He brings to
bear upon us all--the two great batteries from which He assails the
fortress of our sins.
There is first, then--Christ's appeal to the heart. He tries to make
Judas feel the considerations that should restrain him. The
appellation by which our Lord addresses him does not in the original
convey quite so strongly the idea of amity, as our word 'Friend'
does. It is not the same as that which He had used a few hours
before in the upper chamber, when He said, 'Henceforth I call you
not servants, but I have called you friends.--Ye are My friends if
ye do whatsoever I command you.' It is the same as is put into the
lips of the Lord of the vineyard, remonstrating with his jealous
labourer, 'Friend, I do thee no wrong.' There is a tone, then, of
less intimate association and graver rebuke in it than in that name
with which He honours those who make His will theirs, and His word
the law of their lives. It does not speak of close confidence, but
it does suggest companionship and kindness on the part of the
speaker. There is rebuke in it, but it is rebuke which derives its
whole force from the remembrance of ancient concord and connection.
Our Lord would recall to the memory of the betrayer the days in
which they had taken sweet counsel together. It is as if He had
said--'Hast thou forgotten all our former intercourse? Thou hast
eaten My bread, thou hast been Mine own familiar friend, in whom I
trusted--canst thou lift up thy heel against Me?' What happy hours
of quiet fellowship on many a journey, of rest together after many a
day of toil, what forgotten thoughts of the loving devotion and the
glow of glad consecration that he had once felt, what a long series
of proofs of Christ's gentle goodness and meek wisdom should have
sprung again to remembrance at such an appeal! And how black and
dastardly would his guilt have seemed if once he had ventured to
remember what unexampled friendship he was sinning against!
Is it not so with us all, dear brethren? All our evils are betrayals
of Christ, and all our betrayals of Christ are sins against a
perfect friendship and an unvaried goodness. We, too, have sat at
His table, heard His wisdom, seen His miracles, listened to His
pleadings, have had a place in His heart; and if we turn away from
Him to do our own pleasure, and sell His love for a handful of
silver, we need not cherish shuddering abhorrence against that poor
wretch who gave Him up to the cross. Oh! if we could see aright, we
should see our Saviour's meek, sad face standing between us and each
of our sins, with warning in the pitying eyes, and His pleading
voice would sound in our ears, appealing to us by loving
remembrances of His ancient friendship, to turn from the evil which
is treason against Him, and wounds His heart as much as it harms
ours. Take heed lest in condemning the traitor we doom ourselves. If
we flush into anger at the meanness of his crime, and declare, 'He
shall surely die,' do we not hear a prophet's voice saying to each,
'Thou art the man'?
The loving hand laid on the heart-strings is followed by a strong
stroke on conscience. The heart vibrates most readily in answer to
gentle touches: the conscience, in answer to heavier, as the breath
that wakes the chords of an Aeolian harp would pass silent through
the brass of a trumpet. 'Wherefore art thou come?'--if to be taken
as a question at all, which, as I have said, seems most natural, is
either, 'What hast thou come to do?'--or, 'Why hast thou come to do
it?' Perhaps it maybe fairly taken as including both. But, at all
events, it is clearly an appeal to Judas to make him see what his
conduct really is in itself, and possibly in its motive too. And
this is the constant effort of the love of Christ--to get us to say
to ourselves the real name of what we are about.
We cloak our sins from ourselves with many wrappings, as they swathe
a mummy in voluminous folds. And of these veils, one of the thickest
is woven by our misuse of words to describe the very same thing by
different names, according as we do it, or another man does it.
Almost all moral actions--the thing to which we can apply the words
right or wrong--have two or more names, of which the one suggests
the better and the other the worse side of the action. For instance
what in ourselves we call prudent regard for our own interest, we
call, in our neighbour, narrow selfishness; what in ourselves is
laudable economy, in him is miserable avarice. We are impetuous, he
is passionate; we generous, he lavish; we are clever men of
business, he is a rogue; we sow our wild oats and are gay, he is
dissipated. So we cheat ourselves by more than half-transparent
veils of our own manufacture, which we fling round the ugly features
and misshapen limbs of these sins of ours, and we are made more than
ever their bond-slaves thereby.
Therefore, it is the office of the truest love to force us to look at
the thing as it is. It would go some way to keep a man from some of
his sins if he would give the thing its real name. A distinct conscious
statement to oneself, 'Now I am going to tell a lie'--'This that I am
doing is fraud'--'This emotion that I feel creeping with devilish
warmth about the roots of my heart is revenge'--and so on, would
surely startle us sometimes, and make us fling the gliding poison
from our breast, as a man would a snake that he found just lifting
its head from the bosom of his robe. Suppose Judas had answered the
question, and, gathering himself up, had looked his Master in the face,
and said--'What have I come for?' 'I have come to betray Thee for
thirty pieces of silver!' Do you not think that putting his guilt into
words might have moved even him to more salutary feelings than the
remorse which afterwards accompanied his tardy discernment of what he
_had_ done? So the patient love of Christ comes rebuking, and
smiting hard on conscience. 'The grace of God that bringeth salvation
to all men hath appeared disciplining'--and His hand is never more
gentle than when it plucks away the films with which we hide our sins
from ourselves, and shows us the 'rottenness and dead men's bones'
beneath the whited walls of the sepulchres and the velvet of the coffins.
He must begin with rebukes that He may advance to blessing. He must
teach us what is separating us from Him that, learning it, we may
flee to His grace to help us. There is no entrance for the truest
gifts of His patient love into any heart that has not yielded to His
pleading remonstrance, and in lowly penitence has answered His
question as He would have us answer it, 'Friend and Lover of my
soul, I have sinned against Thy tender heart, against the unexampled
patience of Thy love. I have departed from Thee and betrayed Thee.
Blessed be Thy merciful voice which hath taught me what I have done!
Blessed be Thine unwearied goodness which still bends over me! Raise
me fallen! forgive me treacherous! Keep me safe and happy, ever true
and near to Thee!'
III. Notice the possible rejection of the pleading of Christ's
patient love.
Even that appeal was vain. Here we are confronted with a plain
instance of man's mysterious and awful power of 'frustrating the
counsel of God'--of which one knows not whether is greater, the
difficulty of understanding how a finite will _can_ rear itself
against the Infinite Will, or the mournful mystery that a creature
should desire to set itself against its loving Maker and Benefactor.
But strange as it is, yet so it is; and we can turn round upon
Sovereign Fatherhood bidding us to its service, and say, '_I will
not_.' He pleads with us, and we can resist His pleadings. He
holds out the mercies of His hands and the gifts of His grace, and
we can reject them. We cannot cease to be the objects of His love,
but we can refuse to be the recipients of its most precious gifts.
We can bar our hearts against it. Then, of what avail is it to us?
To go back to an earlier illustration, the sunshine pours down and
floods a world, what does that matter to us if we have fastened up
shutters on all our windows, and barred every crevice through which
the streaming gladness can find its way? We shall grope at noontide
as in the dark within our gloomy house, while our neighbours have
light in theirs. What matters it though we float in the great ocean
of the divine love, if with pitch and canvas we have carefully
closed every aperture at which the flood can enter? A hermetically
closed jar, plunged in the Atlantic, will be as dry inside as if it
were lying on the sand of the desert. It is possible to perish of
thirst within sight of the fountain. It is possible to separate
ourselves from the love of God, not to separate the love of God from
ourselves.
The incident before us carries another solemn lesson--how simple and
easy a thing it is to repel that pleading love. What did Judas do?
Nothing; it was enough. He merely held his peace--no more. There was
no need for him to break out with oaths and curses, to reject his
Lord with wild words. Silence was sufficient. And for us--no more is
required. We have but to be passive; we have but to stand still. Not
to accept is to refuse; non-submission is rebellion. We do not need
to emphasise our refusal by any action--no need to lift our clenched
hands in defiance. We have simply to put them behind our backs or to
keep them folded. The closed hand must remain an empty hand. 'He
that believeth not is condemned.' My friend, remember that, when
Christ pleads and draws, to do nothing is to oppose, and to delay is
to refuse. It is a very easy matter to ruin your soul. You have
simply to keep still when He says 'Come unto Me'--to keep your eyes
fixed where they were, when He says, 'Look unto Me, and be ye
saved,' and all the rest will follow of itself.
Notice, too, how the appeal of Christ's love hardens where it does
not soften. That gentle voice drove the traitor nearer the verge
over which he fell into a gulf of despair. It should have drawn him
closer to the Lord, but he recoiled from it, and was thereby brought
nearer destruction. Every pleading of Christ's grace, whether by
providences, or by books, or by His own word, does something with
us. It is never vain. Either it melts or it hardens. The sun either
scatters the summer morning mists, or it rolls them into heavier
folds, from whose livid depths the lightning will be flashing by
mid-day. You cannot come near the most inadequate exhibition of the
pardoning love of Christ without being either drawn closer to Him or
driven further from Him. Each act of rejection prepares the way for
another, which will be easier, and adds another film to the darkness
which covers your eyes, another layer to the hardness which incrusts
your hearts.
Again, that silence, so eloquent and potent in its influence, was
probably the silence of a man whose conscience was convicted while
his will was unchanged. Such a condition is possible. It points to
solemn thoughts, and to deep mysteries in man's awful nature. He
knew that he was wrong, he had no excuse, his deed was before him in
some measure in its true character, and yet he would not give it up.
Such a state, if constant and complete, presents the most frightful
picture we can frame of a soul. That a man shall not be able to say,
'I did it ignorantly'; that Christ shall not be able to ground His
intercession on, 'They know not what they do'; that with full
knowledge of the true nature of the deed, there shall be no wavering
of the determination to do it--we may well turn with terror from
such an awful abyss. But let us remember that, whether such a
condition in its completeness is conceivable or not, at all events
we may approach it indefinitely; and we do approach it by every sin,
and by every refusal to yield to the love that would touch our
consciences and fill our hearts.
Have you ever noticed what a remarkable verbal correspondence there
is between these words of our text, and some other very solemn ones
of Christ's? The question that He puts into the lips of the king who
came in to see his guests is, '_Friend, how camest thou_ in
hither, not having on a wedding garment?' The question asked on
earth shall be repeated again at last. The silence which once
indicated a convinced conscience and an unchanged will may at that
day indicate both of these and hopelessness beside. The clear vision
of the divine love, if it do not flood the heart with joy and evoke
the bliss of answering love, may fill it with bitterness. It is
possible that the same revelation of the same grace may be the
heaven of heaven to those who welcome it, and the pain of hell to
those who turn from it. It is possible that love believed and
received may be life, and love recognised and rejected may be death.
It is possible that the vision of the same face may make some break
forth with the rapturous hymn, 'Lo, this is our God, we have waited
for Him!' and make others call on the hills to fall on them and
cover them from its brightness.
But let us not end with such words. Rather, dear brethren, let us
yield to His patient beseechings; let Him teach us our evil and our
sin. Listen to His great love who invites us to plead, and promises
to pardon--'Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord:
though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;
though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.'