'I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.' We do
not need to enter at any length upon the difficult question as to
what were the motives of Judas in his treachery. For my part I do
not see that there is anything in the Scripture narrative, simply
interpreted, to bear out the hypothesis that his motives were
mistaken zeal and affection for Christ; and a desire to force Him to
the avowal of His Messiahship. One can scarcely suppose zeal so
strangely perverted as to begin by betrayal, and if the object was
to make our Lord speak out His claims, the means adopted were
singularly ill-chosen. The story, as it stands, naturally suggests a
much less far-fetched explanation.
Judas was simply a man of a low earthly nature, who became a
follower of Christ, thinking that He was to prove a Messiah of the
vulgar type, or another Judas Maccabæus. He was not attracted by
Christ's character and teaching. As the true nature of Christ's work
and kingdom became more obvious, he became more weary of Him and it.
The closest proximity to Jesus Christ made eleven enthusiastic
disciples, but it made one traitor. No man could live near Him for
three years without coming to hate Him if he did not love Him. Then,
as ever, He was set for the fall and for the rise of many. He was
the 'savour of life unto life, or of death unto death.'
But be this as it may, we have here to do with the sudden revulsion
of feeling which followed upon the accomplished act. This burst of
confession does not sound like the words of a man who had been
actuated by motives of mistaken affection. He knows himself a
traitor, and that fair, perfect character rises before him in its
purity, as he had never seen it before--to rebuke and confound him.
So this exclamation of his puts into a vivid shape, which may help it to
stick in our memories and hearts, this thought--what an awful difference
there is in the look of a sin before we do it and afterwards! Before we
do it the thing to be gained seems so attractive, and the transgression
that gains it seems so comparatively insignificant. Yes! and when we
have done it the two change places; the thing that we win by it seems
so contemptible--thirty pieces of silver! pitch them over the Temple
enclosure and get rid of them!--and the thing that we did to win them
dilates into such awful magnitude!
For instance, suppose we do anything that we know to be wrong, being
tempted to it by a momentary indulgence of some mere animal impulse.
By the very nature of the case, that dies in its satisfaction and
the desire dies along with it. We do not wish the prize any more
when once we have got it. It lasts but a moment and is past. Then we
are left alone with the thought of the sin that we have done. When
we get the prize of our wrong-doing, we find out that it is not as
all-satisfying as we expected it would be. Most of our earthly aims
are like that. The chase is a great deal more than the hare. Or, as
George Herbert has it, 'Nothing between two dishes--a splendid
service of silver plate, and when you take the cover off there is no
food to eat--such are the pleasures here.'
Universally, this is true, that sooner or later, when the delirium
of passion and the rush of temptation are over and we wake to
consciousness, we find that we are none the richer for the thing
gained, and oh! so infinitely the poorer for the means by which we
gained it. It is that old story of the Veiled Prophet that wooed and
won the hearts of foolish maidens, and, when he had them in his
power in the inner chamber, removed the silver veil which they had
thought hid dazzling glory and showed hideous features that struck
despair into their hearts. Every man's sin does that for him. And to
you I come now with this message: every wrong thing that you do,
great or small, will be like some of those hollow images of the gods
that one hears of in barbarian temples--looked at in front, fair,
but when you get behind them you find a hollow, full of dust and
spiders' webs and unclean things. Be sure of this, every sin is a
blunder.
That is the first lesson that lies in these words of this wretched
traitor; but again, here is an awful picture for us of the hell upon
earth, of a conscience which has no hope of pardon. I do not suppose
that Judas was lost, if he were lost, because he betrayed Jesus
Christ, but because, having betrayed Jesus Christ, he never asked to
be forgiven. And I suppose that the difference between the traitor
who betrayed Him and the other traitor who denied Him, was this,
that the one, when 'he went out and wept bitterly,' had the thought
of a loving Master with him, and the other, when 'he went out and
hanged himself,' had the thought of nothing but that foul deed
glaring before him. I pray you to learn this lesson--you cannot
think too much, too blackly, of your own sins, but you may think too
exclusively of them, and if you do they will drive you to madness of
despair.
My dear friend, there is no penitence or remorse which is deep
enough for the smallest transgression; but there is no transgression
which is so great but that forgiveness for it may come. And we may
have it for the asking, if we will go to that dear Christ that died
for us. The consciousness of sinfulness is a wholesome consciousness.
I would that every man and woman listening to me now had it deep in
their consciences, and then I would that it might lead us all to that
one Lord in whom there is forgiveness and peace. Be sure of this,
that if Judas Iscariot, when his 'soul flared forth in the dark,'
died without hope and without pardon, it was not because his crime
was too great for forgiveness, but because the forgiveness had never
been asked. There is no unpardonable sin except that of refusing the
pardon that avails for all sin.
II. So much, then, for this first picture and the lessons that come
out of it. In the next place we take Pilate, as the representative
of what I have ventured to call the shufflings of a half-awakened
conscience.
'I am innocent of the blood of this just Person,' says he: 'see ye
to it.' He is very willing to shuffle off his responsibility upon
priests and people, and they, for their part, are quite as willing
to accept it; but the responsibility can neither be shuffled off by
him nor accepted by them. His motive in surrendering Jesus to them
was probably nothing more than the low and cowardly wish to humour
his turbulent subjects, and so to secure an easy tenure of office.
For such an end what did one poor man's life matter? He had a great
contempt for the accusers, which he is scarcely at the pains to
conceal. It breaks out in half-veiled sarcasms, by which he
cynically indemnifies himself for his ignoble yielding to the
constraint which they put upon him. He knows perfectly well that the
Roman power has nothing to fear from this King, whose kingdom rested
on His witness to the Truth. He knows perfectly well that unavowed
motives of personal enmity lie at the bottom of the whole business.
In the words of our text he acquits Christ, and thereby condemns
himself. If Pilate knew that Jesus was innocent, he knew that he, as
governor, was guilty of prostituting Roman justice, which was Rome's
best gift to her subject nations, and of giving up an innocent man
to death, in order to save himself trouble and to conciliate a
howling mob. No washing of his hands will cleanse them. 'All the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that hand. But his words let us
see how a man may sophisticate his conscience and quibble about his
guilt.
Here, then, we get once more a vivid picture that may remind us of
what, alas! we all know in our own experience, how a man's
conscience may be clearsighted enough to discern, and vocal enough
to declare, that a certain thing is wrong, but not strong enough to
restrain from doing it. Conscience has a voice and an eye; alas! it
has no hands. It shares the weakness of all law, it cannot get
itself executed. Men will get over a fence, although the board that
says, 'Trespassers will be prosecuted' is staring them in the face
in capital letters at the very place where they leap it. Your
conscience is a king without an army, a judge without officers. 'If
it had authority, as it has the power, it would govern the world,'
but as things are, it is reduced to issuing vain edicts and to
saying, 'Thou shalt not,' and if you turn round and say, 'I will,
though,' then conscience has no more that it can do.
And then here, too, is an illustration of one of the commonest of
the ways by which we try to slip our necks out of the collar, and to
get rid of the responsibilities that really belong to us. 'See ye to
it' does not avail to put Pilate's crime on the priests' shoulders.
Men take part in evil, and each thinks himself innocent, because he
has companions. Half-a-dozen men carry a burden together; none of
them fancies that he is carrying it. It is like the case of turning
out a platoon of soldiers to shoot a mutineer--nobody knows whose
bullet killed him, and nobody feels himself guilty; but there the
man lies dead, and it was somebody that did it. So corporations,
churches, societies, and nations do things that individuals would
not do, and each man of them wipes his mouth and says, 'I have done
no harm.' And even when we sin alone we are clever at finding
scapegoats. 'The woman tempted me, and I did eat,' is the formula
universally used yet. The schoolboy's excuse, 'Please, sir, it was
not me, it was the other boy,' is what we are all ready to say.
Now I pray you, brethren, to remember that, whether our consciences
try to shuffle off responsibility for united action upon the other
members of the firm, or whether we try to excuse our individual
actions by laying blame on our tempers, or whether we adopt the
modern slang, and talk about circumstances and heredity and the
like, as being reasons for the diminution or the extinction of the
notion of guilt, it is sophistical trifling; and down at the bottom
most of us know that we alone are responsible for the volition which
leads to our act. We could have helped it if we had liked. Nobody
compelled us to keep in the partnership of evil, or to yield to the
tempter. Pilate was not forced by his subjects to give the
commandment that 'it should be as they required.' They had their own
burden to carry. Each man has to bear the consequences of his
actions. There are many 'burdens' which we can 'bear for one
another, and so fulfil the law of Christ'; but every man has to bear
as his own the burden of the fruits of his deeds. In that harvest,
he that soweth and he that reapeth are one, and each of us has to
drink as we ourselves have brewed. You have to pay for your share,
however many companions you may have had in the act.
So do not you sophisticate your consciences with the delusion that
your responsibility may be shifted to any other person or thing.
These may diminish, or may modify your responsibility, and God takes
all these into account. But after all these have been taken into
account there is this left--that you yourselves have done the act,
which you need not have done unless you had so willed, and that
having done it, you have to carry it on your back for evermore. 'See
thou to that,' was a heartless word, but it was a true one. 'Every
one of us shall give an account of himself to God,' and as the old
Book of Proverbs has it, 'If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for
thyself: and if thou scornest, thou alone shalt bear it.'
III. And so, lastly, we have here another group still--the priests
and people. They represent for us the torpor and misdirection of
conscience.
'Then answered all the people and said, His blood be on us and on
our children.' They were perfectly ready to take the burden upon
themselves. They thought that they were 'doing God service' when
they slew God's Messenger. They had no perception of the beauty and
gentleness of Christ's character. They believed Him to be a
blasphemer, and they believed it to be a solemn religious duty to
slay Him then and there. Were they to blame because they slew a
blasphemer? According to Jewish law--no. They were to blame because
they had brought themselves into such a moral condition that that
was all which they thought of and saw in Jesus Christ. With their
awful words they stand before us, as perhaps the crowning instances
in Scripture history of the possible torpor which may paralyse
consciences.
I need not dwell, I suppose, even for a moment, upon the thought of
how the highest and noblest sentiments may be perverted into
becoming the allies of the lowest crime. 'O Liberty! what crimes
have been done in thy name!' you remember one of the victims of the
guillotine said, as her last words. 'O Religion! what crimes have
been done in _thy_ name!' is one of the lessons to be gathered
from Calvary.
But, passing that, to come to the thing that is of more consequence
to each of us, let us take this thought, dear brethren, as to the
awful possibility of a conscience going fast asleep in the midst of
the wildest storm of passion, like that unfaithful prophet Jonah,
down in the hold of the heathen ship. You can lull your consciences
into dead slumber. You can stifle them so that they shall not speak
a word against the worst of your sins. You can do so by simply
neglecting them, by habitually refusing to listen to them. If you
keep picking all the leaves and buds off the tree before they open,
it will stop flowering. You can do it by gathering round yourself
always, and only, evil associations and evil deeds. The habit of
sinning will lull a conscience faster than almost anything else. We
do not know how hot a room is, or how much the air is exhausted,
when we have been sitting in it for an hour and a half. But if we
came into it from outside we should feel the difference. Styrian
peasants thrive and fatten upon arsenic, and men may flourish upon
all iniquity and evil, and conscience will say never a word. Take
care of that delicate balance within you; and see that you do not
tamper with it nor twist it.
Conscience may be misguided as well as lulled. It may call evil
good, and good evil; it may take honey for gall, and gall for honey.
And so we need something outside of ourselves to be our guide, our
standard. We are not to be contented that our consciences acquit us.
'I know nothing against myself, yet I am not hereby justified,' says
the apostle; 'he that judgeth me is the Lord.' And it is quite
possible that a man may have no prick of conscience and yet have
done a very wrong thing. So we want, as it seems to me, something
outside of ourselves that shall not be affected by our variations.
Conscience is like the light on the binnacle of a ship. It tosses up
and down along with the vessel. We want a steady light yonder on
that headland, on the fixed solid earth, which shall not heave with
the heaving wave, nor vary at all. Conscience speaks lowest when it
ought to speak loudest. The worst man is least troubled by his
conscience. It is like a lamp that goes out in the thickest
darkness. Therefore we need, as I believe, a revelation of truth and
goodness and beauty outside of ourselves to which we may bring our
consciences that they may be enlightened and set right. We want a
standard like the authorised weights and measures that are kept in
the Tower of London, to which all the people in the little country
villages may send up their yard measures and their pound weights,
and find out if they are just and true. We want a _Bible_, and
we want a _Christ_ to tell us what is duty, as well as to make
it possible for us to do it.
These groups which we have been looking at now, show us how very
little help and sympathy a wounded conscience can get from its
fellows. The conspirators turn upon each other as soon as the
detectives are amongst them, and there is always one of them ready
to go into the witness-box and swear away the lives of the others to
save his own neck. Wolves tear sick wolves to pieces.
Round us there stand Society, pitiless and stern, and Nature, rigid
and implacable; not to be besought, not to be turned. And when I, in
the midst of this universe of fixed law and cause and consequence,
wail out, 'I have sinned,' a thousand voices say to me, 'What is
that to us? See thou to that.' And so I am left with my guilt--it
and I together. There comes One with outstretched, wounded hands,
and says, 'Cast all thy burden upon Me, and I will free thee from it
all.' 'Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows!'
Trust in Him, in His great sacrifice, and you will find that His
'innocent blood' has a power that will liberate your conscience from
its torpor, its vain excuses, its agony and despair.