the intelligence in a man, is a modern one, not the one which we
should naturally derive from the Old Testament. I think, if we study
those passages in the Old Testament which refer to angels, we shall
find that it is exactly _this_ notion which is the result of them, and
that any other is a modern one, either derived directly from heathen
sources, or from a mixture of heathen feelings with the lore of the
New Testament. In the patriarchal times, we hear of angels appearing
to Abraham to tell him of blessings which were coming upon his
descendants; of angels seen by Jacob in a vision, of one who wrestled
with him till the break of day. The stories leave upon us the
impression that there are beings who minister to the unseen Lord of
the whole earth; who are interested in the well-doing of men; who are
different from men, but not so different as to be incapable of
converse with them--not so different that they may not present
themselves even to the human senses. The effect of those visions and
revelations was to take away from the old shepherds the feeling that
they were merely surrounded by natural forms or by animal existences
which were beneath them; that there was a world near them, though not
visible to them, which might have fellowship with them, and which
elevated them above their flocks and herds. In the next age,--the age
of legal and national life,--there are intimations of an angel going
with the people through the wilderness; angels admonish warriors that
they should be courageous in fighting the battles of the Lord; angels
remind the people of their departures from the law of God; angels
arouse humble men to deliver their people from idolatry and from
slavery. Here the lessons respecting the nature and work of angels are
not changed, but expanded. These messengers communicate more with the
spirit of men, present themselves more rarely to the eye. They are
witnesses of a permanent divine order, belonging not to the
individuals to whom they come, but to their race; of an order from
which they have departed, and into which it is the Divine will that
they should be brought back. In the regal period, the war or the
pestilence,--the direction of natural agencies to the punishment of
human crime,--is referred to angels. The effect of _this_ teaching
upon the thoughtful Jew was, that he could never suppose himself the
mere sport of outward influences of earth, or of air, or of fire. All
these had a purpose; all were directed by the wisdom of Him who had
entered into covenant with the nation. In the Book of Psalms, which
illustrates this period, He is said to '_make His angels spirits, His
ministers a flame of fire_.' All natural powers are felt to be angels
of God, because they are under the direction of an intelligent and
righteous Ruler. In the Books of the Prophets, before the captivity,
the angel is not lost sight of; but the Word of God who comes to the
Prophet, more and more gathers up all powers and ministries into
Himself, while the human teacher to whom he speaks is himself treated
as a messenger of the Most High,--as no less His angel than any
creature who has not the weeds of mortality. In the Prophets, after
the captivity, new functions are assigned to angels. They watch over
different lands; provinces of the earth are committed to them by the
Lord of all;--it is hinted that some of them may have failed in their
trust, as human sovereigns fail in theirs. These lessons seem
especially appropriate to the time when the Jew was to feel his
connexion with other nations, and to find that each of them supposed
itself to be governed by some divine king or demigod.
Is not the doctrine of this chapter entirely consistent with the
lessons which St. John had learnt from his fathers? Those lessons, I
have urged, can neither be confuted nor confirmed by physical science.
But the analogy which we derive from our ordinary experience is all in
favour of them. It is a shock to the conscience and reason of man to
feel that he is indebted to moral agents,--to spiritual agents,--in a
very great degree, for the health and comfort which he enjoys here;
but that the whole world which lies beyond his ken is only peopled
with physical forces which act upon him blindly and care nothing for
him. Men never have been able to persuade themselves of this. The
_people_ have always held the opposite faith. Surely it is time to ask
ourselves whether that faith must be merely set at nought,--whether
its manifest falsehoods and mistakes do not conceal precious
truths,--whether those truths can be at variance with any
others,--whether we are not bound to bring them into light, as the
only means of dislodging the errors to which they have given
countenance, and also of overthrowing some of those idols of the cave
which the student worships no less ignominiously than the multitude
worships the idols of the market-place? I believe St. John tells us
how his Master did this work at the Pool of Bethesda: '_A certain man
was there which had had an infirmity thirty and eight years. When
Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that
case, He saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole? The impotent man
answered Him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put
me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before
me. Jesus saith to him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. And
immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed and walked._'
This was a sign indeed,--a sign addressed to a man who had been
waiting day after day, perhaps year after year, for some outward
accident to make him well,--that health and disease are dependent upon
no accidents; that the power of life is an inward power; that there is
One in whom it dwells; that He in whom it dwells is near to the
weakest, the most helpless, even the most sinful. It would seem, from
the words which our Lord spoke to this man afterwards, '_Go, and sin
no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee_,' as if He had selected a
man in whom all these conditions met, who was the oldest and most
powerless of all the sufferers there, and had brought the sufferings
upon himself by his misdoings. The demonstration, therefore, was
complete. Men--the very lowest men--are not the dependants upon
outward things, no, nor upon the visitations of angels. Such
visitations may be appointed; but there is One who has a right to call
Himself a Son--One in whom the mind and purpose of the Lord of angels
is expressed--One who fulfils, not occasionally but continually, His
purposes of health and restoration to men--One who is the Son of
Man--who has sympathy with men, and can take away their infirmities,
because He knows them, enters into them, suffers them.
Thus this cure is bringing us to the point to which St. John has been
bringing us in all the previous passages of his Gospel. This sign at
the Pool of Bethesda, like all the other signs we have been
considering, reveals to us the Word who is the Source of life and
health to all creatures. We are led from the messenger, visible or
invisible, to Him who was with God and was God. We are led from the
mere friends or helpers of man to that Word made flesh, the Son of
Man. We are led finally to a Son who has come to reveal a Father.
I have chosen my text from the latter part of the chapter, because it
brings _this_ subject so directly before us, and because I believe
that in doing so it gives us the real moral and explanation of the
narrative of which I have just been speaking. Two cures are recorded
by St. John as done by our Lord in the city of Jerusalem: one is that
at the Pool of Bethesda; the other, that of the blind man at the Pool
of Siloam. They are very different in their incidents and their
object: the latter we shall have to consider attentively hereafter.
But they have this in common,--both were wrought on the Sabbath-day.
In both cases, St. John fixes our thoughts upon this point; in both,
this circumstance is the cause of the bitterest indignation against
Jesus; here it is said to be the motive of a conspiracy against him.
'_Immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked:
and on the same day was the sabbath. The Jews therefore said unto him
that was cured, It is the sabbath-day: it is not lawful for thee to
carry thy bed. He answered them, He that made me whole, the same said
unto me, Take up thy bed, and walk. Then asked they him, What man is
that which said unto thee, Take up thy bed, and walk? And he that was
healed wist not who it was: for Jesus had conveyed Himself away, a
multitude being in that place. Afterward Jesus findeth him in the
temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more,
lest a worse thing come unto thee. The man departed, and told the Jews
that it was Jesus which had made him whole. And therefore did the Jews
persecute Jesus, and sought to slay Him, because He had done these
things on the sabbath-day. But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh
hitherto, and I work. Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him
because He not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God
was His Father, making Himself equal with God._'
Two points present themselves to us here, and demand some earnest
consideration. The first is, Why should the Sabbath-day have been
especially chosen by our Lord for these acts of healing? The second
is, What connexion was there in the Jewish mind, or in our Lord's own
words, between the charge of breaking the Sabbath and the charge of
calling God His Father?
The belief in angels had a good effect upon the people of the Jews, in
so far as it led them to believe that the Most High cared for them
individually as well as nationally,--that He Himself, and not some
outward thing, was the Author of their blessings, the Restorer of
their health. It was perverted to a bad use by the people, in so far
as it led them to depend upon accidental interferences, not upon a
continual living Helper. How Christ's sign brought out the good,
counteracted the evil, of this faith, I have endeavoured to show you.
But the belief of angels and spirits, which distinguished the
Pharisees from the opposing sect, had most of the mischief, little of
the truth, which clung to it among the crowd whom they despised. The
tenet, that angels had interfered and might interfere, did not make
them think that God was concerned for His creatures,--that He loved
them. It only suggested the thought that there were certain persons
and certain places that might receive favours which were withheld from
others. It did not bring them to believe that any union between God
and man existed or was possible. Rather angels were the dispensers of
those laws, and the executors of those punishments, which marked the
separation between God and His creatures, and the wrath of God against
them. God was the Author of statutes which had been written in tables
of stone, and could not be changed. God was the Judge and Condemner of
those who broke these statutes. God might dispense with the punctual
fulfilment of them, or accept sacrifices as a compensation for the
breach of them, in the case of His favourites. But one claim to be
such favourites would be the rigorous enforcement of them, as His
commandments, against the nation generally, and the ignorant,
miserable, sinful portion of it particularly.
Was not this zeal for the laws and ordinances of the Most High a good
zeal? Did not Christ come to fulfil the law?--did He wish to set it
aside? Consider, my brethren, what the law was. I do not speak of any
spiritual interpretation of it; I refer merely to the letter of the
Ten Commandments. They begin with these words, '_I am the Lord thy
God, which brought thee out of the house of bondage_.' The zeal of the
Pharisees for the law of God forgot this foundation of the law
altogether. They did not tell the Israelite that the Lord was _his_
God; they did not proclaim the Lord as a Deliverer from bondage, but
as the Author of bondage. Therefore, _every_ commandment was denied in
its very essence. The first said, '_Thou shalt worship the
Lord_,'--that is, the Lord the Deliverer, the Lord _thy_ God,--'_and
Him only shalt thou serve_.' But the Pharisee worshipped any god
rather than this only God; worshipped a god who was directly the
reverse of this only God. Everything in heaven or earth or under the
earth--money, the meanest thing of all--was more an object of worship
to him than this only God. He could not help taking His name in vain.
Every time he pronounced it he took it in vain; he substituted another
name for that of the only God; he cherished another name in his
heart.
But then came the command to keep the Sabbath-day. Here, at all
events, he could be strict to the letter; that he could keep as God
had wished it to be kept. What! when that commandment says, 'Man shall
rest because God rests; man shall work because God works?' What! when
the commandment announced the Sabbath-day as a blessing to the
man-servant, and the maid-servant, and the cattle? A Pharisee construe
this commandment literally? A Pharisee keep this commandment strictly?
Impossible. There was none which he must distort more, in which he
must suppress more vital words, which he must more habitually disobey.
The denial of the sentence which introduces the commandments--the
determination to regard the Lord as a forger of chains, when He
declares Himself to be the breaker of them--necessarily led to a
greater and grosser violation of this statute and ordinance of the
Lord than of all the rest.
And yet there were obvious reasons why the Pharisee should take his
stand on the fourth commandment rather than on any other. As our Lord
tells him elsewhere, he made it part of his religion to set aside the
honour of fathers and mothers. To bear false witness against a
neighbour, if he was not a religious man, not one of their sect, was a
merit rather than a crime. Covetousness is spoken of in the Gospels as
the very principle of their acts towards men and towards God.
And--without inquiring how far they were guilty of secret treasons
against life, against marriage, against property--since the enforcing
of punishments on open crimes, which disturbed the peace of society,
was taken out of their hands, there was no way left them of
signalizing their care for what they called God's law and God's
honour, but by a pitiless rigour in enforcing the customs and
traditions which had connected themselves with the Sabbath-day, the
reason and the purpose of the day having been forgotten.
Here was the ground which the Jewish teachers had chosen for the
exhibition of their morality and religion; it was on this ground that
Jesus encountered them. To the first question, then, I answer, that He
selected the Sabbath-day above other days for healing the sick,
because He came to vindicate the law and make it honourable; because
it had been made dishonourable, and the whole sense of it destroyed,
by the notion of the Pharisees that it proceeded from an arbitrary
Being, who had made it to coerce His creatures, and not from a loving
Being who had formed them in His image, and desired that they should
be sharers of His blessedness; because, unless the day of the rest
could be reclaimed from their perversions, and restored to its right
place and dignity in God's gracious economy, the law never could be a
schoolmaster to bring men to Christ the Son of Man, but must always be
a hard taskmaster to keep them from Him. It was not a single point of
truth which was involved in this controversy--least of all the
question, whether a commandment might be relaxed in one particular.
The whole truth of the old covenant was involved in it; the whole life
and work of the Son of Man was involved in it; the purpose for which
the Son of God had taken flesh was involved in it.
The other Evangelists make these assertions sufficiently clear. They
tell us how Christ claimed to be the Lord of the Sabbath, because
'_the sabbath was made for man_;' and, because He was the '_Son of
Man_;' how He was more angered at the hardness of heart which
displayed itself in the apparent zeal of the Pharisees for the
Sabbath, than at all their other exhibitions of the same hardness;
how the Jewish rulers met His divine anger with theirs, and decided
that the only adequate answer to the demand, '_Is it right to do good
on the sabbath-day, or to do evil?_' must be a conspiracy to put Him
to death. St. John could not say more on these points. But there was a
subject which it was his especial office to handle. He shows us how
Jesus made the defence of the fourth commandment, in its letter and
its spirit, a means of asserting His own relation to God. '_My Father
worketh hitherto, and I work._' Man was bidden to work because God
worked. Had GOD ceased to work, then, on the day of rest? Was He not
nourishing the earth, and causing it to bring forth and bud on that
day? Was He suspending His labours for His creatures on that day? The
argument, like those about the ox and the ass falling into the pit,
was broad, simple, direct; one of those which men who have lost their
life, their humanity, their godliness, in their books, are tormented
by hearing; one which opens the deepest abysses of thought and
consolation to those who are seeking for a living God, for a Father of
their spirits. But such seekers cannot be content with a command to
work because God works, to rest because God rests,--they must know how
the command can be obeyed. They must know on what foundation the
command stands. If there is a Son of Man who can say, 'I work because
He works; I do as my Father does;' He may give the sons of men power
to work and power to rest. His union to them and to God is the
foundation of both.
I have replied, then, to our second question as well as to the first.
I have showed you how the act by which Christ, in the judgment of the
Jews, broke the Sabbath-day, naturally led to what was in their
judgment an act of blasphemy. It was not that He dispensed with a law
of God because He was the Son of God. It was not that He put a new
sense into the law of God because He was the Son of God. It was that
He could interpret the law of God fully. It was that He could
accomplish the law fully. It was that He could unfold the Gospel which
was hidden in the law. It was that He could show in what God's rest
consists, by showing in what His own rest consisted; what God's work
was, by the works which He did Himself in the might of God's Spirit.
And thus, by one sign, He declared that men are not the servants of
angels, and that they are the children of a Father.
O brethren, may those to whom God has given a better and a nobler
Sabbath, which commemorates God's rest in the risen Son of Man and Son
of God, never forget the truth which He taught the Jewish people
respecting their Sabbath, or repeat the Jewish sin by making it a mere
legal day instead of His day!
DISCOURSE XII.
THE SON DOING THE FATHER'S WORK.
[Lincoln's Inn, 4th Sunday after Easter, April 20, 1856.]
ST. JOHN V. 43.
_I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another
shall come in his own name, him ye will receive._
I spoke to you last week upon these words,--'_Therefore the Jews
sought to kill Jesus, because He not only had broken the sabbath, but
said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God_.' I
tried to ascertain what connexion there was in their minds between
these two offences; I tried also to show you how their feelings
respecting the Sabbath-day were involved in their general feelings
respecting the Law and respecting the dominion of angels. If there was
a Son who was higher than angels, who could express the very mind of
God--if that Son was actually in the nature of man--all their thoughts
of God and of man must be changed; they must regard Him whom they
worshipped as something else than a mere lawgiver, removed to an
immeasurable distance from His creatures, only holding occasional
intercourse with them through beings of a different order from their
own. They must look upon human beings,--that is to say, not only upon
themselves, but upon publicans and heathens, upon those whom they
regarded as utterly cut off from God,--as standing in a very near and
close relation with Him. This, therefore, was the most horrible of all
conceptions to them, one which struck at the root of their pride, of
that which they called their faith. They might suspect Jesus before,
they might despise Him; but the moment He called God His Father,
suspicion and contempt gave way to hatred. It was clear enough why He
was setting institutions at nought; it was clear enough why He claimed
to heal sick men, whom the ministrations of angels could not heal. By
His words and His acts He was bringing God and man into the most
dangerous proximity. He, '_being a man, was making Himself equal with
God_.'
This last charge I did not dwell upon; I reserved it for our
consideration to-day. The discourse of our Lord which follows in this
chapter has reference to it. No words throw more light upon it than
those which I have taken as my text from one of the latest verses. The
answer to the charge begins in the nineteenth verse. '_Then answered
Jesus, and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can
do nothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do: for what things
soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise._' You will feel at
once that this sentence is the expansion of that plea which Jesus put
forth for the cure which He had wrought on the day of rest,--'_My
Father worketh hitherto, and I work_.' But, I think, you will feel
also how wonderfully it meets the other more awful accusation, that He
was raising Himself to a level with God. If it had been true, it would
not have been a new charge. '_Ye shall be as gods_,' was the first
temptation presented to human beings,--the temptation to which they
yielded. The ambition had never ceased in any age or in any man.
Jesus would have been but the Person who exhibited it in its highest
power, who expressed it with the greatest boldness. But if the
doctrine which St. John asserts at the beginning of his Gospel, which
he has been working out in every passage of it since, is a sound one;
if there is a Word who was with God and was God; if that Word was made
flesh, and the glory of the Only-begotten of the Father shone forth in
Him; then Jesus was the one Person in the world to whom this charge
did not apply; the one Person in whom there was no ambition of making
Himself equal with God. And this is what He declares here: 'You think
I am exalting myself; on the contrary, this proclamation which I am
making of a Father, this claim which I am putting forth to be His Son,
is the abdication of all independent greatness, the denial that I am
anything in myself. I can do _nothing of myself but what I see the
Father do_.'
Here is the new revelation, the discovery of the real ground upon
which all things stand,--the will of a Father commanding, the will of
a Son submitting. Here is that idea of Godhead which men had been
seeking for,--if haply they might feel after it and find it,--in which
they had been living and moving and having their being, yet which they
had always been rebelling against and contradicting, and which every
thought and act of self-will and pride had been putting at a distance
from them. The lowliest of all, He who was called the '_carpenter's
son_,' was able to speak it out, to translate it into language, as His
whole life translated it into act. And this union of wills, this
inward substantial Unity, He declares to have its basis in love, the
underground of Deity,--'_For the Father_ LOVETH _the Son, and sheweth
Him all things that Himself doeth_.'
We must not forget that all this bears reference to the primary
subject of the discourse. He had been working on the Sabbath-day. That
work He justifies as His Father's work, because it was a work of love,
done to fulfil that mind of the Father which He knew, with which He
was in sympathy. Now He goes on, '_And He will shew Him greater works
than these, that ye may marvel_.' The work of healing was His Father's
work. In quickening the sick man beside the Pool of Bethesda, He had
manifested a part of His will and power towards His creatures. There
would be a more august display of that will and power; '_For as the
Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth them, even so the Son
quickeneth whom He will_.' Since the whole passage refers to one of
the signs which Jesus did, it is surely most natural to take this also
as referring to another of those signs. Jesus would not only cure a
sick man, He would raise a dead man. As the cure of the sick man was
an exhibition in a single instance of all the restoring,
health-giving, life-giving influences which were at work through the
universe; as its intent was to lead men to trace all these, not to
chance, not to a dead law, not to their own merits, but to a Father
who directs the operations which look most accidental, from whose mind
law has issued, who alone enables men to work in harmony with His law;
so, by raising a man from the dead, He would show what was continually
going on in the unseen world; what the Father was doing there with
those who were lost to the sight of their fellows, and who seemed to
perish. '_The Son would quicken whom He would._' He would take an
instance here and there to illustrate the general course of His
Father's government. He would break the bonds of the grave for the
widow's son, or the brother of Martha and Mary, that man might
understand how little these chains could bind the whole universe of
human beings, if the Father pleased to set them free.