XIII.

_NOT SERVANTS, BUT FRIENDS._

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life

for his friends. Ye are My friends, if ye do the things which I

command you. No longer do I call you servants; for the servant

knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for

all things that I heard from My Father I have made known unto you.

Ye did not choose Me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that ye

should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide: that

whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in My name, He may give it

you. These things I command you, that ye may love one

another."--JOHN xv. 13-17.

These words of our Lord are the charter of our emancipation. They give

us entrance into true freedom. They set us in the same attitude towards

life and towards God as Christ Himself occupied. Without this

proclamation of freedom and all it covers we are the mere drudges of

this world,--doing its work, but without any great and far-reaching aim

that makes it worth doing; accepting the tasks allotted to us because we

must, not because we will; living on because we happen to be here, but

without any part in that great future towards which all things are

running on. But this is of the very essence of slavery. For our Lord

here lays His finger on the sorest part of this deepest of human sores

when He says, "The slave knows not what his master does." It is not that

his back is torn with the lash, it is not that he is underfed and

overworked, it is not that he is poor and despised; all this would be

cheerfully undergone to serve a cherished purpose and accomplish ends a

man had chosen for himself. But when all this must be endured to work

out the purposes of another, purposes never hinted to him, and with

which, were they hinted, he might have no sympathy, this is slavery,

this is to be treated as a tool for accomplishing aims chosen by

another, and to be robbed of all that constitutes manhood. Sailors and

soldiers have sometimes mutinied when subjected to similar treatment,

when no inkling has been given them of the port to which they are

shipped or the nature of the expedition on which they are led. Men do

not feel degraded by any amount of hardship, by going for months on

short rations or lying in frost without tents; but they do feel degraded

when they are used as weapons of offence, as if they had no intelligence

to appreciate a worthy aim, no power of sympathising with a great

design, no need of an interest in life and a worthy object on which to

spend it, no share in the common cause. Yet such is the life with which,

apart from Christ, we must perforce be content, doing the tasks

appointed us with no sustaining consciousness that our work is part of a

great whole working out the purposes of the Highest. Even such a spirit

as Carlyle is driven to say: "Here on earth we are soldiers, fighting in

a foreign land, that understand not the plan of campaign and have no

need to understand it, seeing what is at our hand to be

done,"--excellent counsel for slaves, but not descriptive of the life we

are meant for, nor of the life our Lord would be content to give us.

To give us true freedom, to make this life a thing we choose with the

clearest perception of its uses and with the utmost ardour, our Lord

makes known to us all that He heard of the Father. What He had heard of

the Father, all that the Spirit of the Father had taught Him of the need

of human effort and of human righteousness, all that as He grew up to

manhood He recognised of the deep-seated woes of humanity, and all that

He was prompted to do for the relief of these woes, He made known to His

disciples. The irresistible call to self-sacrifice and labour for the

relief of men which He heard and obeyed, He made known and He makes

known to all who follow Him. He did not allot clearly defined tasks to

His followers; He did not treat them as slaves, appointing one to this

and another to that: He showed them His own aim and His own motive, and

left them as His friends to be attracted by the aim that had drawn Him,

and to be ever animated with the motive that sufficed for Him. What had

made His life so glorious, so full of joy, so rich in constant reward,

He knew would fill their lives also; and He leaves them free to choose

it for themselves, to stand before life as independent, unfettered,

undriven men, and choose without compulsion what their own deepest

convictions prompted them to choose. The "friend" is not compelled

blindly to go through with a task whose result he does not understand or

does not sympathise with; the friend is invited to share in a work in

which he has a direct personal interest and to which he can give himself

cordially. All life should be the forwarding of purposes we approve, the

bringing about of ends we earnestly desire: all life, if we are free

men, must be matter of choice, not of compulsion. And therefore Christ,

having heard of the Father that which made Him feel straitened until the

great aim of His life could be accomplished, which made Him press

forward through life attracted and impelled by the consciousness of its

infinite value as achieving endless good, imparts to us what moved and

animated Him, that we may freely choose as He chose and enter into the

joy of our Lord.

This, then, is the point of this great utterance: Jesus takes our lives

up into partnership with His own. He sets before us the same views and

hopes which animated Himself, and gives us a prospect of being useful to

Him and in His work. If we engage in the work of life with a dull and

heartless feeling of its weariness, or merely for the sake of gaining a

livelihood, if we are not drawn to labour by the prospect of result,

then we have scarcely entered into the condition our Lord opens to us.

It is for the merest slaves to view their labour with indifference or

repugnance. Out of this state our Lord calls us, by making known to us

what the Father made known to Him, by giving us the whole means of a

free, rational, and fruitful life. He gives us the fullest satisfaction

moral beings can have, because He fills our life with intelligent

purpose. He lifts us into a position in which we see that we are not the

slaves of fate or of this world, but that _all things are ours_, that

we, through and with Him, are masters of the position, and that so far

from thinking it almost a hardship to have been born into so melancholy

and hopeless a world, we have really the best reason and the highest

possible object for living. He comes among us and says, "Let us all work

together. Something can be made of this world. Let us with heart and

hope strive to make of it something worthy. Let unity of aim and of work

bind us together." This is indeed to redeem life from its vanity.

He says this, and lest any should think, "This is fantastic; how can

such an one as I am forward the work of Christ? It is enough if I get

from Him salvation for myself," He goes on to say, "Ye have not chosen

Me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you that ye should go and bring

forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain. It was," He says,

"precisely in view of the eternal results of your work that I selected

you and called you to follow Me." It was true then, and it is true now,

that the initiative in our fellowship with Christ is with Him. So far as

the first disciples were concerned Jesus might have spent His life

making ploughs and cottage furniture. No one discovered Him. Neither

does any one now discover Him. It is He who comes and summons us to

follow and to serve Him. He does so because He sees that there is that

which we can do which no one else can: relationships we hold,

opportunities we possess, capacities for just this or that, which are

our special property into which no other can possibly step, and which,

if we do not use them, cannot otherwise be used.

Does He, then, point out to us with unmistakable exactness what we are

to do, and how we are to do it? Does He lay down for us a code of rules

so multifarious and significant that we cannot mistake the precise piece

of work He requires from us? He does not. He has but one sole

commandment, and this is no commandment, because we cannot keep it on

compulsion, but only at the prompting of our own inward spirit: He bids

us love one another. He comes back and back to this with significant

persistence, and declines to utter one other commandment. In love alone

is sufficient wisdom, sufficient motive, and sufficient reward for human

life. It alone has adequate wisdom for all situations, new resource for

every fresh need, adaptability to all emergencies, an inexhaustible

fertility and competency; it alone can bring the capability of each to

the service of all. Without love we beat the air.

That love is our true life is shown further by this--that it is its own

reward. When a man's life is in any intelligible sense proceeding from

love, when this is his chief motive, he is content with living, and

looks for no reward. His joy is already full; he does not ask, What

shall I be the better of thus sacrificing myself? what shall I gain by

all this regulation of my life? what good return in the future shall I

have for all I am losing now? He cannot ask these questions, if the

motive of his self-sacrificing life be love; just as little as the

husband could ask what reward he should have for loving his wife. A man

would be astounded and would scarcely know what you meant if you asked

him what he expected to get by loving his children or his parents or his

friends. Get? Why he does not expect to get anything; he does not love

for an object: he loves because he cannot help it; and the chief joy of

his life is in these unrewarded affections. He no longer looks forward

and thinks of a fulness of life that is to be; he already lives and is

satisfied with the life he has. His happiness is present; his reward is

that he may be allowed to express his love, to feed it, to gratify it by

giving and labouring and sacrificing. In a word, he finds in love

eternal life--life that is full of joy, that kindles and enlivens his

whole nature, that carries him out of himself and makes him capable of

all good.

This truth, then, that whatever a man does from love is its own reward,

is the solution of the question whether virtue is its own reward. Virtue

is its own reward when it is inspired by love. Life is its own reward

when love is the principle of it. We know that we should always be happy

were we always loving. We know that we should never weary of living nor

turn with distaste from our work were all our work only the expression

of our love, of our deep, true, and well-directed regard for the good

of others. It is when we disregard our Lord's one commandment and try

some other kind of virtuous living that joy departs from our life, and

we begin to hope for some future reward which may compensate for the

dulness of the present--as if a change of time could change the

essential conditions of life and happiness. If we are not joyful now, if

life is dreary and dull and pointless to us, so that we crave the

excitement of a speculative business, or of boisterous social meetings,

or of individual success and applause, then it should be quite plain to

us that as yet we have not found life, and have not the capacity for

eternal life quickened in us. If we are able to love one human being in

some sort as Christ loved us--that is to say, if our affection is so

fixed upon any one that we feel we could give our life for that

person--let us thank God for this; for this love of ours gives us the

key to human life, and will better instruct us in what is most essential

to know, and lead us on to what is most essential to be and to do than

any one can teach us. It is profoundly and widely true, as John says,

that every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. If we love

one human being, we at least know that a life in which love is the main

element needs no reward and looks for none. We see that God looks for no

reward, but is eternally blessed because simply God is eternally love.

Life eternal must be a life of love, of delight in our fellows, of

rejoicing in their good and seeking to increase their happiness.

Sometimes, however, we find ourselves grieving at the prosperity of the

wicked: we think that they should be unhappy, and yet they seem more

satisfied than ourselves. They pay no regard whatever to the law of life

laid down by our Lord; they never dream of living for others; they have

never once proposed to themselves to consider whether His great law,

that a man must lose his life if he is to have it eternally, has any

application to them; and yet they seem to enjoy life as much as anybody

can. Take a man who has a good constitution, and who is in easy

circumstances, and who has a good and pure nature; you will often see

such a man living with no regard to the Christian rule, and yet enjoying

life thoroughly to the very end. And of course it is just such a

spectacle, repeated everywhere throughout society, that influences men's

minds and tempts all of us to believe that such a life is best after

all, and that selfishness as well as unselfishness can be happy; or at

all events that we can have as much happiness as our own disposition is

capable of by a self-seeking life. Now, when we are in a mood to compare

our own happiness with that of other men, our own happiness must

obviously be at a low ebb; but when we resent the prosperity of the

wicked, we should remember that, though they may flourish like the green

bay tree, their fruit does not remain: living for themselves, their

fruit departs with themselves, their good is interred with their bones.

But it is also to be considered that we should never allow ourselves to

get the length of putting this question or of comparing our happiness

with that of others. For we can only do so when we are ourselves

disappointed and discontented and have missed the joy of life; and this

again can be only when we have ceased to live lovingly for others.

But this one essential of Christian service and human freedom--how are

we to attain it? Is it not the one thing which seems obstinately to

stand beyond our grasp? For the human heart has laws of its own, and

cannot love to order or admire because it ought. But Christ brings, in

Himself, the fountain out of which our hearts can be supplied, the fire

which kindles all who approach it. No one can receive His love without

sharing it. No one can dwell upon Christ's love for him and treasure it

as his true and central possession without finding his own heart

enlarged and softened. Until our own heart is flooded with the great and

regenerating love of Christ, we strive in vain to love our fellows. It

is when we fully admit it that it overflows through our own satisfied

and quickened affections to others.

And perhaps we do well not too curiously to question and finger our

love, making sure only that we are keeping ourselves in Christ's

fellowship and seeking to do His will. Affection, indeed, induces

companionship, but also companionship produces affection, and the honest

and hopeful endeavour to serve Christ loyally will have its reward in a

deepening devotion. It is not the recruit but the veteran whose heart is

wholly his chief's. And he who has long and faithfully served Christ

will not need to ask where his heart is. We hate those whom we have

injured, and we love those whom we have served; and if by long service

we can win our way to an intimacy with Christ which no longer needs to

question itself or test its soundness, in that service we may most

joyfully engage. For what can be a happier consummation than to find

ourselves finally overcome by the love of Christ, drawn with all the

force of a Divine attraction, convinced that here is our rest, and that

this is at once our motive and our reward?