_THE CORN OF WHEAT._
"Now there were certain Greeks among those that went up to worship
at the feast: these therefore came to Philip, which was of Bethsaida
of Galilee, and asked him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus. Philip
cometh and telleth Andrew: Andrew cometh, and Philip, and they tell
Jesus. And Jesus answereth them, saying, The hour is come, that the
Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by
itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit. He that loveth
his life loseth it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall
keep it unto life eternal."--JOHN xii. 20-26.
St. John now introduces a third incident to show that all is ripe for
the death of Jesus. Already he has shown us that in the inmost circle of
His friends He has now won for Himself a permanent place, a love which
ensures that His memory will be had in everlasting remembrance. Next, he
has lifted into prominence the scene in which the outer circle of the
Jewish people were constrained, in an hour when their honest enthusiasm
and instincts carried them away, to acknowledge Him as the Messiah who
had come to fulfil all God's will upon earth. He now goes on to tell us
how this agitation at the centre was found rippling in ever-widening
circles till it broke with a gentle whisper on the shores of the isles
of the Gentiles. This is the significance which St. John sees in the
request of the Greeks that they might be introduced to Jesus.
These Greeks were "of those that came up to worship at the feast." They
were proselytes, Greeks by birth, Jews by religion. They suggest the
importance for Christianity of the leavening process which Judaism was
accomplishing throughout the world. They may not have come from any
remoter country than Galilee, but from traditions and customs separate
as the poles from the Jewish customs and thoughts. From their heathen
surroundings they came to Jerusalem, possibly for the first time, with
wondering anticipations of the blessedness of those who dwelt in God's
house, and feeling their thirst for the living God burning within them
as their eyes lighted on the pinnacles of the Temple, and as at last
their feet stood within its precincts. But up through all these desires
grew one that overshadowed them, and, through all the petitions which a
year or many years of sin and difficulty had made familiar to their
lips, this petition made its way: "Sir, we would see Jesus."
This petition they address to Philip, not only because he had a Greek
name, and therefore presumably belonged to a family in which Greek was
spoken and Greek connections cultivated, but because, as St. John
reminds us, he was "of Bethsaida of Galilee," and might be expected to
understand and speak Greek, if, indeed, he was not already known to
these strangers in Jerusalem. And by their request they obviously did
not mean that Philip should set them in a place of vantage from which
they might have a good view of Jesus as He passed by, for this they
could well have accomplished without Philip's friendly intervention. But
they wished to question and make Him out, to see for themselves whether
there were in Jesus what even in Judaism they felt to be
lacking--whether He at last might not satisfy the longings of their
Divinely awakened spirits. Possibly they may even have wished to
ascertain His purposes regarding the outlying nations, how the Messianic
reign was to affect them. Possibly they may even have thought of
offering Him an asylum where He might find shelter from the hostility of
His own people.
Evidently Philip considered that this request was critical. The
Apostles had been charged not to enter into any Gentile city, and they
might naturally suppose that Jesus would be reluctant to be interviewed
by Greeks. But before dismissing the request, he lays it before Andrew
his friend, who also bore a Greek name; and after deliberation the two
make bold, if not to urge the request, at least to inform Jesus that it
had been made. At once in this modestly urged petition He hears the
whole Gentile world uttering its weary, long-disappointed sigh, "We
would see." This is no mere Greek inquisitiveness; it is the craving of
thoughtful men recognising their need of a Redeemer. To the eye of
Jesus, therefore, this meeting opens a prospect which for the moment
overcomes Him with the brightness of its glory. In this little knot of
strangers He sees the firstfruits of the immeasurable harvest which was
henceforth to be continuously reaped among the Gentiles. No more do we
hear the heart-broken cry, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!" no longer the
reproachful "Ye will not come to Me, that ye might have life," but the
glad consummation of His utmost hope utters itself in the words, "The
hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified."
But while promise was thus given of the glorification of the Messiah by
His reception among all men, the path which led to this was never absent
from the mind of our Lord. Second to the inspiriting thought of His
recognition by the Gentile world came the thought of the painful means
by which alone He could be truly glorified. He checks, therefore, the
shout of exultation which He sees rising to the lips of His disciples
with the sobering reflection: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a
corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it
die, it bringeth forth much fruit." As if He said, Do not fancy that I
have nothing to do but to accept the sceptre which these men offer, to
seat Myself on the world's throne. The world's throne is the Cross.
These men will not know My power until I die. The manifestation of
Divine presence in My life, has been distinct enough to win them to
inquiry; they will be for ever won to Me by the Divine presence revealed
in My death. Like the corn of wheat, I must die if I would be abundantly
fruitful. It is through death My whole living power can be disengaged
and can accomplish all possibilities.
Two points are here suggested: (I.) That the life, the living force that
was in Christ, reached its proper value and influence through His death;
and (II.) that the proper value of Christ's life is that it propagates
similar lives.
I. The life of Christ acquired its proper value and received its fit
development through His death. This truth He sets before us in the
illuminating figure of the corn of wheat. "Except a corn of wheat fall
into the ground and die, it abideth alone." There are three uses to
which wheat may be put: it may be stored for sale, it may be ground and
eaten, it may be sown. For our Lord's purposes these three uses may be
considered as only two. Wheat may be eaten, or it may be sown. With a
pickle of wheat or a grain of oats you may do one of two things: you may
eat it and enjoy a momentary gratification and benefit; or you may put
it in the ground, burying it out of sight and suffering it to pass
through uncomely processes, and it will reappear multiplied a
hundredfold, and so on in everlasting series. Year by year men sacrifice
their choicest sample of grain, and are content to bury it in the earth
instead of exposing it in the market, because they understand that
except it die it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much
fruit. The proper life of the grain is terminated when it is used for
immediate gratification: it receives its fullest development and
accomplishes its richest end when it is cast into the ground, buried out
of sight, and apparently lost.
As with the grain, so is it with each human life. One of two things you
can do with your life; both you cannot do, and no third thing is
possible. You may consume your life for your own present gratification
and profit, to satisfy your present cravings and tastes and to secure
the largest amount of immediate enjoyment to yourself--you may eat your
life; or you may be content to put aside present enjoyment and profits
of a selfish kind and devote your life to the uses of God and men. In
the one case you make an end of your life, you consume it as it goes; no
good results, no enlarging influence, no deepening of character, no
fuller life, follows from such an expenditure of life--spent on yourself
and on the present, it terminates with yourself and with the present.
But in the other case you find you have entered into a more abundant
life; by living for others your interests are widened, your desire for
life increased, the results and ends of life enriched. "He that loveth
his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall
keep it unto life eternal." It is a law we cannot evade. He that
consumes his life now, spending it on himself--he who cannot bear to let
his life out of his own hand, but cherishes and pampers it and gathers
all good around it, and will have the fullest present enjoyment out of
it,--this man is losing his life; it comes to an end as certainly as the
seed that is eaten. But he who devotes his life to other uses than his
own gratification, who does not so prize self that everything must
minister to its comfort and advancement, but who can truly yield himself
to God and put himself at God's disposal for the general good,--this
man, though he may often seem to lose his life, and often does lose it
so far as present advantage goes, keeps it to life everlasting.
The law of the seed is the law of human life. Use your life for present
and selfish gratification and to satisfy your present cravings, and you
lose it for ever. Renounce self, yield yourself to God, spend your life
for the common good, irrespective of recognition or the lack of it,
personal pleasure or the absence of it, and although your life may thus
seem to be lost, it is finding its best and highest development and
passes into life eternal. Your life is a seed now, not a developed
plant, and it can become a developed plant only by your taking heart to
cast it from you and sow it in the fertile soil of other men's needs.
This will seem, indeed, to disintegrate it and fritter it away, and
leave it a contemptible, obscure, forgotten thing; but it does, in fact,
set free the vital forces that are in it, and give it its fit career and
maturity.
Looking at the thing itself, apart from figure, it is apparent that "he
that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this
world shall keep it unto life eternal." The man who most freely uses his
life for others, keeping least to himself and living solely for the
common interests of mankind, has the most enduring influence. He sets in
motion forces which propagate fresh results eternally. And not only so.
He who freely sows his life has it eternally, not only in so far as he
has set in motion an endless series of beneficent influences, but
inasmuch as he himself enters into life eternal. An immortality of
influence is one thing and a very great thing; but an immortality of
personal life is another, and this also is promised by our Lord when He
says (ver. 26), "Where I am, there shall also My servant be."
This, then, being the law of human life, Christ, being man, must not
only enounce but observe it. He speaks of Himself even more directly
than of us when He says, "He that loveth his life shall lose it." His
disciples thought they had never seen such promise in His life as at
this hour: seedtime seemed to them to be past, and the harvest at hand.
Their Master seemed to be fairly launched on the tide that was to carry
Him to the highest pinnacle of human glory. And so He was, but not, as
they thought, by simply yielding Himself to be set as King and to
receive adoration from Jew and Gentile. He saw with different eyes, and
that it was a different exaltation which would win for Him lasting
sovereignty: "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." He knew
the law which governed the development of human life. He knew that a
total and absolute surrender of self to the uses and needs of others was
the one path to permanent life, and that in His case this absolute
surrender involved death.
A comparison of the good done by the life of Christ with that done by
His death shows how truly He judged when He declared that it was by His
death He should effectually gather all men to Him. His death, like the
dissolution of the seed, seemed to terminate His work, but really was
its germination. So long as He lived, it was but His single strength
that was used; He abode alone. There was great virtue in His life--great
power for the healing, the instruction, the elevation, of mankind. In
His brief public career He suggested much to the influential men of His
time, set all men who knew Him a-thinking, aided many to reform their
lives, and removed a large amount of distress and disease. He
communicated to the world a mass of new truth, so that those who have
lived after Him have stood at quite a different level of knowledge from
that of those who lived before Him. And yet how little of the proper
results of Christ's influence, how little understanding of Christianity,
do you find even in His nearest friends until He died. By the visible
appearance and the external benefits and the false expectations His
greatness created, the minds of men were detained from penetrating to
the spirit and mind of Christ. It was expedient for them that He should
go away, for until He went they depended on His visible power, and His
spirit could not be wholly received by them. They were looking at the
husk of the seed, and its life could not reach them. They were looking
for help from Him instead of themselves becoming like Him.
And therefore He chose at an early age to cease from all that was
marvellous and beneficent in His life among men. He might, as these
Greeks suggested, have visited other lands and have continued His
healing and teaching there. He might have done more in His own time than
He did, and His time might have been indefinitely prolonged; but He
chose to cease from all this and voluntarily gave Himself to die,
judging that thereby He could do much more good than by His life. He was
straitened till this was accomplished; He felt as a man imprisoned and
whose powers are held in check. It was winter and not spring-time with
Him. There was a change to pass upon Him which should disengage the
vital forces that were in Him and cause their full power to be felt--a
change which should thaw the springs of life in Him and let them flow
forth to all. To use His own figure, He was as a seed unsown so long as
He lived, valuable only in His own proper person; but by dying His life
obtained the value of seed sown, propagating its kind in everlasting
increase.
II. The second point suggested is, that the proper value of Christ's
life consists in this--that it propagates similar lives. As seed
produces grain of its own kind, so Christ produces men like Christ. He
ceasing to do good in this world as a living man, a multitude of others
by this very cessation are raised in His likeness. By His death we
receive both inclination and ability to become with Him sons of God.
"The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge that if one
died for all, then all died; and that He died for all, that they which
live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him that died
for them." By His death He has effected an entrance for this law of
self-surrender into human life, has exhibited it in a perfect form, and
has won others to live as He lived. So that, using the figure He used,
we may say that the company of Christians now on earth are Christ in a
new form, His body indeed. "That which thou sowest, thou sowest not that
body which shall be, but bare grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath
pleased Him, and to every seed his own body." Christ having been sown,
lives now in His people. They are the body in which He dwells. And this
will be seen. For standing and looking at a head of barley waving on its
stalk, no amount of telling would persuade you that that had sprung from
a seed of wheat; and looking at any life which is characterised by
selfish ambition and eagerness for advancement and little regard for the
wants of other men, no persuasion can make it credible that that life
springs from the self-sacrificing life of Christ.
What Christ here shows us, then, is that the principle which regulates
the development of seed regulates the growth, continuance, and
fruitfulness of human life; that whatever is of the nature of seed gets
to its full life only through death; that our Lord, knowing this law,
submitted to it, or rather by His native love was attracted to the life
and death which revealed this law to Him. He gave His life away for the
good of men, and therefore prolongs His days and sees His seed
eternally. There is not one way for Him and another for us. The same law
applies to all. It is not peculiar to Christ. The work He did was
peculiar to Him, as each individual has his own place and work; but the
principle on which all right lives are led is one and the same
universally. What Christ did He did because He was living a human life
on right principles. We need not die on the cross as He did, but we must
as truly yield ourselves as living sacrifices to the interests of men.
If we have not done so, we have yet to go back to the very beginning of
all lasting life and progress; and we are but deceiving ourselves by
attainments and successes which are not only hollow, but are slowly
cramping and killing all that is in us. Whoever will choose the same
destiny as Christ must take the same road to it that He took. He took
the one right way for men to go, and said, "If any man follow Me, where
I am there will he be also." If we do not follow Him, we really walk in
darkness and know not whither we go. We cannot live for selfish purposes
and then enjoy the common happiness and glory of the race. Self-seeking
is self-destroying.
And it is needful to remark that this self-renunciation must be real.
The law of sacrifice is the law not for a year or two in order to gain
some higher selfish good--which is not self-sacrifice, but deeper
self-seeking; it is the law of all human life, not a short test of our
fidelity to Christ, but the only law on which life can ever proceed. It
is not a barter of self I make, giving it up for a little that I may
have an enriched self to eternity; but it is a real foregoing and
abandonment of self for ever, a change of desire and nature, so that
instead of finding my joy in what concerns myself only I find my joy in
what is serviceable to others.
Thus only can we enter into permanent happiness. Goodness and happiness
are one--one in the long-run, if not one in every step of the way. We
are not asked to live for others without any heart to do so. We are not
asked to choose as our eternal life what will be a constant pain and can
only be reluctantly done. The very heathen would not offer in sacrifice
the animal that struggled as it was led to the altar. All sacrifice must
be willingly made; it must be the sacrifice which is prompted by love.
God and this world demand our best work, and only what we do with
pleasure can be our best work. Sacrifice of self and labour for others
are not like Christ's sacrifice and labour unless they spring from love.
Forced, reluctant, constrained sacrifice or service--service which is no
joy to ourselves through the love we bear to those for whom we do it--is
not the service that is required of us. Service into which we can throw
our whole strength, because we are convinced it will be of use to
others, and because we long to see them enjoying it--this is the service
required. Love, in short, is the solution of all. Find your happiness in
the happiness of many rather than in the happiness of one, and life
becomes simple and inspiring.
Nor are we to suppose that this is an impracticable, high-pitched
counsel of perfection with which plain men need not trouble themselves.
_Every_ human life is under this law. There is no path to goodness or to
happiness save this one. Nature herself teaches us as much. When a man
is truly attracted by another, and when genuine affection possesses his
heart, his whole being is enlarged, and he finds it his best pleasure to
serve that person. The father who sees his children enjoying the fruit
of his toil feels himself a far richer man than if he were spending all
on himself. But this family affection, this domestic solution of the
problem of happy self-sacrifice, is intended to encourage and show us
the way to a wider extension of our love, and thereby of our use and
happiness. The more love we have, the happier we are. Self-sacrifice
looks miserable, and we shrink from it as from death and destitution,
because we look at it in separation from the love it springs from.
Self-sacrifice without love _is_ death; we abandon our own life and do
not find it again in any other. It is a seed ground under the heel, not
a seed lightly thrown into prepared soil. It is in love that goodness
and happiness have their common root. And it is this love which is
required of us and promised to us. So that as often as we shudder at the
dissolution of our own personal interests, the scattering of our own
selfish hopes and plans, the surrender of our life to the service of
others, we are to remember that this, which looks so very like death,
and which often throws around our prospects the chilling atmosphere of
the tomb, is not really the termination, but the beginning of the true
and eternal life of the spirit. Let us keep our heart in the fellowship
of the sacrifice of Christ, let us feel our way into the meanings and
uses of that sacrifice, and learn its reality, its utility, its grace,
and at length it will lay hold of our whole nature, and we shall find
that it impels us to regard other men with interest and to find our true
joy and life in serving them.