them, Do ye inquire among yourselves of that I said, A little while,
and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see
me?_' He knew that they were desirous to ask Him, because He had
taught them to ask. The processes of their minds were under His
guidance, as well as the issues of the processes. He determined
nothing for them till He had led them to feel after it. So their
conversations have become lesson-books for all ages; not resolutions
of doubts by peremptory decisions, but histories of transactions in
the hearts of men like ourselves, whom the Divine Word chose as
instances of the method by which He educates us. And the sentences
which follow show us something more of this method, and make us
understand how little even the most celestial food can nourish us if
it is taken in without being digested.
'_Verily, verily, I say unto you, That ye shall weep and lament, but
the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow
shall be turned into joy. A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow,
because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the
child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born
into the world. And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you
again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from
you._'
Their thoughts of the '_little while_' had been half sad, half
frivolous. They supposed that He could at once tell them what He meant
by telling them how long He would be absent, and in what place and
under what circumstances He would meet them again. He presents the
subject in an altogether different light; for He tells them that the
little while in which He shall be hidden from them will be an hour of
travail and of death, and that the little while of His reappearance
will be the hour of the birth of a man into the world. We feel at once
that these cannot be metaphors; that if the death of Christ is
anything, and the resurrection of Christ is anything, this must be
_the_ language, the most exact and living which Christ Himself could
speak, or we could hear, to determine the signification of them. Here,
as throughout the conversation, our Lord connects the world with His
disciples, and at the same time contrasts the one with the other. They
will mourn that they have lost a friend; the world will rejoice that
it has got rid of an enemy. But their ultimate joy must be that a MAN,
_the_ Man for whom the world has been waiting so long, has been born
into it. They can have no joy for themselves which is not a joy for
mankind, which is not a thanksgiving for its victory. '_And ye now
therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart
shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you._' They should see
Him returning the Conqueror of death, the Conqueror of man's enemy;
that should be a joy not dependent upon the sight of their eyes, not
dependent upon His visible continuance with them; it should be a joy
of the heart, and it should be a joy which no man could take from
them. Their own weakness, or sin, or death, could not, for this joy
would raise them above themselves; this would give them an inheritance
in One in whom was no sin or ignorance, and over whom death had no
power. The unbelief of others could not, for the fact of His triumph
would remain the same whether men confessed it or no.
He goes on: '_And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily,
I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, He will
give it you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye
shall receive, that your joy may be full._' This was the secret,
half-understood cause of their grief, as it is one cause of the grief
of all who are about to lose a friend. We can go to him no more; we
can tell him of no more difficulties; we can ask him no more
questions. 'But in that day,' He says, 'when you shall see me
again,--in that day of full, satisfying joy,--you will not feel this
want; you will not be longing to ask that which only concerns
yourselves; you will feel yourselves bound together in my name, a
family of brothers in an Elder Brother. The vision of a Father will
open clearly upon you; and verily whatever you ask Him in my name,--in
the name of Him who binds you to one another, and binds you all to the
Father of heaven and earth,--He will give it you. For you will desire
that which He desires, that which I have died and risen again to work
out, the glory of His name, the coming of His kingdom, the doing of
His will. Hitherto you have not entered into this joy. Your thoughts
have been narrow, weak, limited to yourselves. When you pray to the
Father in my name, when you enter into communion with Him, your joy
will be full; you will attain the highest blessedness of which man is
capable.'
'_These things_,' He continues, '_have I spoken unto you in proverbs:
but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs,
but I shall shew you plainly of the Father. At that day ye shall ask
in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for
you: for the Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and
have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father,
and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the
Father._'
This is the climax of His discourse, one may say of all human
discourse; though prayer, as I think we shall find in the next
chapter, may take us into a higher region still. He has been speaking
to them in symbols, proverbs, parables. He has been showing them how
all nature, how human transactions, how their own lives, all implied a
kingdom of heaven, were ladders upon which angels were ascending and
descending. The ladder would not be thrown down; parables and proverbs
would remain everlastingly true. But now His voice could be heard who
was at the top of the ladder. The Father, who had been declared
through all subordinate relations, would Himself be revealed. And
though all prayers are ascending up to Him, yet His love would be
discovered as itself the fountain of them all. Even the Son, the great
Intercessor, will not say to them that He will pray for them, if they
take prayer to mean anything which is to alter the Father's purpose,
or augment His love. For of His will His own words are the utterance
and expression. He came forth from the Father, and is come into the
world. He is going back to the Father to unite the world to Him.
'_His disciples said unto Him, Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and
speakest no proverb. Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and
needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou
camest forth from God._' It seemed to the disciples as if all clouds
were now scattered. They thought the Man was already born into the
world. Alas! it was in their own faith they were still in part
believing, not in Him. The travail-hour must be passed through by them
as by us; that which would scatter all trust in themselves, that which
would leave them only God to trust in. '_Jesus answered them, Do ye
now believe? Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, in which ye
shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone._'
Their hour of weakness was at hand. It would be also His. They would
be deserted, and He would be deserted. And yet He adds, '_I am not
alone, because the Father is with me_.' 'Your faith will perish. Even
I shall cry, "_My God, why hast thou forsaken me?_" And yet that
eternal union which I have been declaring to you, which I have come
into the world to manifest, will be unshaken. This desertion will make
it manifest. And because that is unshaken, your union with me will be
unshaken also. Nothing which I have said to you will prove untrue.
"_These things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have
peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation_,"--that world which
surrounds you, and in the evils and faithlessness of which you share.
"_But be of good cheer; I have overcome the world._" Its wars and
divisions and hatreds have not vanquished me; I have vanquished them.
Not the king whom the world has chosen for itself, but the Son whom
the Father has set over it, shall reign in it for ever and ever.'
DISCOURSE XXVI.
THE PRAYER OF THE HIGH PRIEST.
[Lincoln's Inn, 10th Sunday after Trinity (Afternoon), July 27, 1856.]
ST. JOHN XVII. 1.
_These words spake Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven,
and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that
thy Son also may glorify thee._
The more we enter into our Lord's teaching, the more profound is our
apprehension of the dignity, the awfulness, the divinity of words; the
more we confess their insufficiency. If He who was in the beginning
with God is the Word, if words have been the expression of His mind,
they awaken those thoughts in our minds which they are intended to
clothe. But if the Word has spoken of Himself as a Son; if He has said
that He has come from a Father; if He has promised a Comforter, He has
taken us out of the region of words into the heart of the realities
which they represent. It is the Son Himself who reveals the Father:
what could words effect without His Person? The Father Himself, He has
said, draws us to the Son: words would be spoken in vain if there were
not that wonderful and loving attraction upon the hearts of the
creatures whom He has formed in the image of the Son. The Spirit's
work is to produce that inward conviction which words cannot produce,
to act upon the man himself, to bind those into fellowship whom the
diversities of speech and custom have made unintelligible to each
other, to testify to men of the Father and the Son, as the ground of
all speech, thought, and being. But here, as throughout this Gospel,
the deepest revelation is the commonest and simplest. As we enter into
the region of the divine relations, of divine communion, all must
tremble; none are forbidden to approach. Intellectual differences
disappear; here every spirit may find its home.
We sometimes ask ourselves, as we read the prayer in this chapter--and
it is good that we should ask ourselves--'Is this the model of our
prayer? Is Christ giving us an example here that we should follow in
His steps? Or does it stand awfully alone, separated from every other
that ever has been or can be offered; one which we are to wonder at
the more, because so vast a chasm separates it from all our acts and
efforts of devotion?' I believe that if we have _not_ understood the
acts and discourses on the Paschal night, there can be but one answer
to this question. 'The Son of God praying to His Father the night
before His Passion,--how entirely isolated,' we should say, 'must such
intercourse be from all that ever has been, from all that can be
conceived of! What blasphemy to connect it, even in thought, with the
petitions of those who have little to do but to confess their sins,
and supplicate forgiveness!' But if we have studied these chapters; if
we have learnt that when the disciples saw Christ they saw the Father;
if we have understood that He is the Vine, and they the branches; if
we have known what He meant when He told them that they were to ask in
His name, that their joy might be full; if we have observed how He
distinguishes the disciples from the world, and yet how He teaches
them that everything they do is to be done for the world, and as a
witness of God's love to the world; then, I think, we shall feel that
it is the greatest of all contradictions to suppose that this prayer
does not contain in itself the essence and meaning of all prayer, that
it is not the one which best expresses the wants and longings of every
man, that it is not the prayer of all the children of God, in all
places and in all ages, because it is the prayer of the only-begotten
Son of God.
'_These words spake Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said,
Father, the hour is come._' He had spoken to His disciples of an hour
of travail, which was to terminate in a new birth for them and for the
world. The world knew nothing of this hour; no one of its works or
pleasures was interrupted; that night was like every other night. The
disciples had a dull sense of present oppression, a vague presentiment
of approaching calamity. But they, as little as the world, felt what
the sorrow was, still less what joy they had to expect when it was
over. He knew it all. He knew inwardly that that was the hour to
fulfil the purpose for which He was come into the world. The life and
death of the world were gathered up into it. The feeling would have
been intolerable if it had been a solitary, separate one; but the
foresight of it had been given Him by His Father; the sense that the
hour was come was imparted by Him; His prayer was the acknowledgment
of that which had been revealed to Him, His filial acceptance of that
which had been prepared for Him. And surely, brethren, all prayer must
be this. It is the acknowledging of that, be it sad or joyful, which
has been given to us; it is the casting our experience upon Him who
has brought us into it, and who understands it, because without Him we
cannot go through it, or in the least understand it ourselves.
And this is the petition which is grounded upon that confession,
'_Glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee_.' Every prayer
that had been presented since the creation-day had been a prophecy of
this. When the Psalmist cried out of the depths, '_Lord, hear my
voice_;' when he said, '_Let not any be offended or confounded because
of me_;' when he confessed his sin, that God might be justified, and
_might be clear when He was judged_, he _seemed_ to say, 'Glorify
_me_, that I may glorify thee;' he _seemed_ to pray, 'Let _me_, David,
be brought out of my ignorance and darkness and sin, that thy name may
be honoured and not blasphemed.' He did _really_ pray, '_Glorify thy
Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee_!' He prayed that not he, but
that the Son of Man, might be raised and delivered and exalted, in
order that God's own image might be exalted, and might shine forth
upon men. When the Son of Man actually in His own person prayed this
prayer, He was expressing that which was latent and could not be
expressed in those earlier petitions; He was bringing them forth into
their full clearness and power; He was actually presenting them in His
own name to Him who had known and inspired the suppliant.
'_As thou hast given Him power over all flesh, that He should give
eternal life to as many as thou hast given Him._' I do not think that
when we are occupied with the words of our Lord Himself, spoken in
prayer the night before His crucifixion, we have a right to alter them
in the slightest degree, for the sake of extracting from them what may
seem to us a more natural and obvious signification. I am quite aware
that our translators would have appeared to themselves and to many of
their readers to be using an uncouth and strange form of speech if
they had rendered the words literally, '_That all that which thou hast
given to Him, He may give to them life eternal_.' But I think they
were bound to encounter any apparent difficulty of construction,
rather than to incur the risk of contracting or perverting this sense.
It was not a time to ask themselves whether their understandings could
fully measure or take in the words. If they had faith in Him who spoke
them, they should have given them exactly, and left Him to interpret
them in His own time to those who had need of them. Christ says that
His Father has given Him power over all flesh. He speaks, again, of
all (_everything_) which His Father had given to Him. And then,
leaving the neuter, πᾶν, He uses the masculine plural, _them_,
αὔτοις, surely that He may denote the universality of the gift, as
well as the personality of those on whom it is bestowed. It seems to
me that we cannot afford to lose either of the truths which He thus
declares, because it requires a violation of the technicalities of
grammar, not of its essential laws, to utter them both. I suppose it
was only in prayer that even He could have united them; and possibly
it is only in prayer that we can apprehend them, so that they should
not clash with each other.
'_And this is the eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent._' If these words came upon
us for the first time, without any preparation, we should perhaps
think them very wonderful, but should either pass them over, or try to
reduce them under some notions or formulas of ours. But in this Gospel
we have been most carefully educated into an apprehension of their
force; they do not burst upon us suddenly, though they may be both
more full and more distinct than any with which we can compare them.
In the night dialogue with Nicodemus, by the well with the woman of
Samaria, in the synagogue at Capernaum after the feast of the five
loaves, in Jerusalem on the great day of the Feast of Tabernacles, we
have been hearing of a life which the Son of Man gives, a life of the
Spirit, a life which is not of yesterday or to-day, a life of
communion, a life of God. If what was said there was true, this must
be true; or rather, this is the truth which throws back a light upon
the words concerning the new life, and the '_water of life_,' and the
'_bread of life_.' This explains the assurance in man that he is born
to know that which is above himself, and his equally strong assurance
that he must be known before he can know. The only true God knows the
creature in all his wanderings and ignorance and falsehood, knows him
in that Son in whom He has created him. When he turns to that God of
truth, when he confesses Him and the Son, who is His image and the
Light of man, then comes the true life, the eternal life, which
Christ, who has power over all flesh, alone confers upon it.
'_I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which
thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine
own self with the glory which I had with thee before the worlds
were._' It is impossible to say anything which will not weaken the
force of these words. All I desire is to show you how they fulfil the
idea, which St. John has been presenting to us from the beginning of
his Gospel, of a Word who was with God and was God, of a Son who had
come forth from the Father to reveal His grace and truth to men, of a
Son who was returning to that Father as to His proper home. All is
consistent from first to last; all has been divine, and all human. No
clashing of the one with the other; but the human showing forth the
divine as the perfect light from which it has been derived; the human
leading on to the divine as that in which it is satisfied.
Hitherto this prayer has had no special reference to the disciples. He
has spoken of His power over all flesh, of eternal life, of the work
which He had accomplished. Now it turns to them: '_I have manifested
thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine
they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word_.' We
have traced the use of this language through the later discourses of
this Gospel, and have seen how entirely they are in harmony with the
commencement of it. The disciples are taken out of the narrow
exclusive sect-world by which they are surrounded, to be a family of
witnesses for the Father and the Son; witnesses of that love which the
world--and no part of it so much as the religious world in
Jerusalem--was by its acts, its words, its principles, repudiating. To
those Jesus had manifested the name of His Father. He had shown them
what He was, and that they belonged to Him. Amidst all their
confusions and errors, they had kept firm hold of this word. They had
yielded to Christ's guidance; believing, when they understood Him
least, that there was none else to whom they could go; that He had the
words of eternal life. And they had now learnt a deeper lore. They had
referred His calling and guidance to the Father. '_Now they have known
that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have
given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have
received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and
they have believed that thou didst send me._' This had been the design
of all His discipline. It had been working gradually upon them and in
them. But there had been still a clinging to Him as _their_ Master;
the vision of a Father had only just dawned upon them. Now in these
last discourses they had learnt the mystery of His relation and their
relation to the invisible world. Their belief might not be strong
enough to be proof against all storms, but it had taken root. Their
position was that of friends, not servants; they were waiting for the
Comforter to tell them fully of the Father; already they had the sense
of not being born of flesh, or of blood, or of the will of men, but of
God.
'_I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou
hast given me; for they are thine._' It is not because I wish in the
least to evade the force of these words as they stand in our version,
that I plead for a more exact rendering: '_I am asking concerning
them; not concerning the world do I ask, but concerning those whom
thou hast given me_.' I believe the impression left on many minds by
our use of the preposition _for_, is that Christ is indifferent to the
world, and only solicitous on behalf of a certain select circle. I do
not say that any one will quite put that thought into words. When he
sees it stated, he will shrink from it. Still it lurks in men's minds,
and it is very desirable to remove any prop, however feeble and
unimportant in itself, which may sustain it there. If any one says,
'But the force of the words lies not in this _for_, but in the
expression, "_whom thou hast given me_,"' I say at once that, so far
from wishing to make _that_ expression less strong, I would insist
upon it vehemently, as marking the distinction between a family which
stands in its calling by God, and a world which attempts to associate
on another ground than that calling, which chooses for itself. Christ
is here praying concerning those who are to be the lights of this dark
world, the salt of this corrupting earth; those who are to teach the
world, in Whom it is constituted, the earth, by Whom it has been
created and is kept alive.
'_They are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am
glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in
the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own
name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are._'
All that has been said in the Paschal discourses, concerning the unity
of the disciples with Him and His unity with the Father, concerning
the essential and eternal dependence of the human unity upon the
divine, is here translated into prayer. And yet, _translated_ is an
unsatisfactory word. It rather finds its only root and ground in
prayer. For what is prayer but that intercourse of the Father with the
Son, of the family with its Head, which this unity makes possible? And
what is the object and result of all prayer but this, that what is
true in the mind of God may be true in the actual condition of men;
all the hindrances which self-will has opposed to the divine Will
being finally and for ever taken away?
'_While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those
that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost but the son
of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled._' Here, no doubt,
is an unfathomable abyss; we cannot see down into it; to attempt it,
is to hazard the loss of our footing. One of those whom the Father has
given to Christ (so the passage seems to say, and we cannot alter the
terms of it to fit our fancies or wishes) perishes in his own
selfishness and sin. Jesus says so. He says that that which had been
written of old had come to pass; curses had come upon the man who
loved cursing; he who had chosen death had been left to die. It is
terrible to think of. But how infinitely more terrible would this
fact, and all the facts that are daily occurring in the world's
history, be, if they were not associated with the gift of eternal
life, with the cry of the Son to the Holy Father on behalf of all whom
He has given Him! What the heights and depths of that prayer are, none
of us can know. It is enough to know who spoke and who heard, what
love is above all and beneath all, how that love has been manifested
and accomplished on this earth of ours. To dwell in it must be eternal
life; to be separated from it must be eternal death.