in this simple and minute narrative, by vulgar efforts of the fancy to
give it what is called a spiritual signification. Our spirits want to
know that they have a Lord who has shared earthly food, and does not
disdain us for partaking it, but who Himself bestows it and blesses
it. Our spirits do not want to know why the number of fishes caught
was one hundred and fifty-three; they cannot live upon meagre,
childish analogies about those who were to be caught in the Gospel
net. Our Lord had promised His disciples that they should be fishers
of men, and they were speedily to become so. But He was teaching them
and us that the higher duty glorifies, instead of degrading, the
lower; that every business in which men can be engaged is a calling
and a ministry; that the bread which sustains the eternal life in man
hallows the bread which sustains the life that is to pass away.
Our Lord did not allow His disciples to forget that grander office to
which He had destined them, while He was putting this honour upon the
one to which for a time they had returned. But instead of taking His
comparison from the work of the fisherman, He takes another, with
which His own lessons and the lessons of the old Scriptures had made
them quite as familiar.
'_So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of
Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord;
thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs. He
saith to him again the second time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou
me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He
saith unto him, Feed my sheep. He saith unto him the third time,
Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because He said
unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him,
Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus
saith unto him, Feed my sheep._'
We are wont to dwell, perhaps, too much upon the thrice-repeated
questions to him who had thrice denied. There is a meaning in all such
correspondences; every hint to the conscience is worth something. But
the meaning is always subordinate to a higher one; the hint brings a
train of thought, or it fails of its purpose. Peter had boasted of his
love; his sore discipline had been to show him how little it was good
for, how utterly it must fail. Now he was asked, '_Lovest thou me more
than these_?' He had loved Christ just as he had loved other people;
more intensely, it might be, but with a love going out from himself.
Had he learnt yet that he needed One who could bestow love upon him,
One in whom he must trust and to whom he must cling, because he was so
poor in that wherein he had fancied he was rich? Did he love his
Master now with this dependent, trusting love, instead of that
self-confident love? with a love that sought to be always replenished
from the Fountain whence it proceeded, instead of with a love which he
could call _his_, and which therefore must continually run dry? Simon
Peter appears to answer boldly; he does answer humbly. He would have
said in former days, 'I know that I love thee.' He now says, '_Thou
knowest that I love thee_.' It is an appeal from himself to his
Master. It is saying, 'My love is but the fruit of that knowledge
which thou hast taken of me. I love thee so long as thou knowest me,
and no longer.'
And then comes the command which shows that the loving Him more than
these implied anything rather than loving these less. He had been told
at the former supper, that if he loved Christ, he was to keep His
commandments. To obey a loving Being is to love Him. His love works in
the man who is content to do His will. That love must go forth to His
sheep. Here, then, was the minister's commission and his power. The
Chief Shepherd had taken care of the sheep, and had died for them; the
under shepherd was to do His work for them. So far as he did it, he
would feel how scanty and wretched his own love for them was. He could
not feed them at all unless he was possessed by his Master's love.
You see how remarkably these commands are in accordance with the
doctrine which our Lord set forth in the conversation which is
recorded in the 10th chapter of this Gospel, and also with that
language which He addressed to the disciples generally, to Peter
especially, at the Passover, because he had in the highest degree that
trust in his own love which was infecting them all: '_Ye have not
chosen me; but I have chosen you_.' And you will see how the idea
which is contained in that sentence, is expressed and expounded in the
words that follow the command to feed the lambs and the sheep.
'_Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst
thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be
old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee,
and carry thee whither thou wouldest not._'
This doctrine of a divine compulsion acting upon the heart and will of
a man, of a wisdom ordaining every step for him, of a love imposing
upon him duties which of himself he would be least willing to
undertake, bearing him on to sufferings from which he would most
shrink, is the one which St. Peter needed to learn, which every
minister of Christ and every Christian man must, by one discipline or
another, be taught. St. John intimates that his brother-disciple was
to be led along in the exact path which his Master had trodden before
him.
'_This spake He, signifying by what death he should glorify God. And
when He had spoken this, He saith unto him, Follow me._'
But the Evangelist goes on to show, by another example, that Christ
prepares the most different lots for different men; that two may be
standing close to each other, may be intended during a part of their
lives to work together, who may in the close of their earthly
pilgrimage be the most remarkable contrasts to each other, though they
may be following the same crucified Lord, and one may be bearing as
heavy a cross as the other.
'_Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved
following; which also leaned on His breast at supper, and said, Lord,
which is he that betrayeth thee? Peter seeing Him saith to Jesus,
Lord, and what shall this man do? Jesus saith unto him, If I will that
he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me. Then went
this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not
die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, if I will
that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?_'
St. Peter was not to know what was intended for his brother-Apostle;
that Apostle was to know as little himself. Some meaning there was in
that intimate communion which he had had with his Lord on earth. So
great a gift could not have been bestowed upon him for his own sake;
it must have been meant to fit him for a work that he had to do in the
world. What it was he may have waited long to know. He was not to stay
in Jerusalem with St. James; he was not to travel to the dispersed
among the Gentiles with St. Peter; he was not to raise up Churches
among the Gentiles, like St. Paul. He was to stay upon the earth till
Jerusalem had been trodden down by the Gentiles; till St. James and
St. Peter, and all who had been most dear to him, had glorified God by
their deaths; till a Gentile society had seemed about to displace the
old Hebrew society; till the new Christian Church had been threatened
by the same discords, the same sins, the same unbelief, which were
undermining his country and the empire of the world. In some sense he
was to tarry till his Lord came. Was he then not to die? That had not
been said. Yet the words had been spoken by Him who did not deceive,
and they must be fulfilled. _Did_ he not tarry till his Lord came? Was
He not revealed in flaming fire, taking vengeance of the unrighteous
nation, of the evil world? Was He not revealed as the Alpha and Omega,
the beginning and the end, as the faithful Witness, as the Prince of
all the kings of the earth, as the Lion of the tribe of Judah, as the
Son of Man standing in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, as
the Lamb that was slain in the midst of the throne, as the Word of
God? Was it not for this revelation that St. John had tarried on
earth? Was it not that he might declare Who is the foundation of the
new heaven and the new earth which should arise out of the wreck of
the world that was perishing?
It appears as if the elders of the Church of Ephesus had added their
attestation to the Gospel in the words of the 24th verse: '_This is
the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things:
and we know that his testimony is true_.' I do not profess to decide
whether to them or to the Apostle we should ascribe the last verse.
'_And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if
they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself
could not contain the books that should be written. Amen._' Some have
wished that the verse were omitted altogether, because it seems to
them a conclusion scarcely worthy of so divine a record. I accept it
as a simple and childlike testimony to the truth of which the whole
Gospel has been bearing witness, that the acts of the Son of God do
not belong to the few years in which He dwelt visibly upon earth, but
to all ages from the beginning, when He was '_with God, and was God_,'
even to the end '_when He shall put down all rule and all authority
and power, and when the Son also Himself shall be subject to Him, who
put all things under Him, that God may be all in all_.' I accept it as
a testimony that all the books in the world cannot contain the things
which Jesus has been doing and is doing, in the hearts of human
beings, in the world which He made, in the kingdom which He rules. I
accept it as a warning to us, that we can know nothing of the Book
which explains other books, unless we ask that it may be explained to
us by Him who is, and was, and ever shall be, the Word of God.
NOTES.
DISCOURSE I.
The scheme of Baur, to which allusion is made in this sermon, is set
forth in his '_Kritische Untersuchungen über die Kanonischen
Evangelien_.' The part especially relating to St. John is contained
between pages 79 and 389. In the First Part he maintains that there is
a leading thought, a _Hauptidee_, in the Gospel. He traces this out,
beginning from the prologue; notices the testimony of the Baptist, the
comparison of Jesus with John, the first coming of Jesus into
Jerusalem, the conflict between belief and unbelief in its different
forms, the signs and works of Christ, the argumentative conflict with
the unbelief of the Jews, the raising of Lazarus, the transition to
the history of the passion and death, the final crisis of the nation's
unbelief, the discourses of Jesus with His disciples and the
sacerdotal prayer, the history of the death and resurrection,--as
different points and instances in the development of this idea. He
then goes on, in the Second Part, to consider the relation of this
Gospel to the synoptical Gospels; maintaining the absence of any
leading idea in them, and the consequent evidence that, in spite of
the historical confusions which he supposes to be in them, there is
more mixture in them of simple facts related without a purpose. Next
he enters upon the internal probability of the history in St. John.
Then he considers the relation of the Gospel to the consciousness of
the time. Finally, he maintains the identity of the Apostle with the
author of the Apocalypse; dwelling especially upon his sympathies with
the feelings of the Christians in Asia Minor respecting the keeping
of Easter; and regarding the Apocalypse as the work of a Jew
passionately attached to the traditions of his fathers, and vehemently
opposed to the spiritual doctrines of St. Paul.
Perhaps I may be allowed to explain in what relation the view I have
taken of the Gospels in these Sermons stands to that of this learned
Tübingen Professor.
1st. I have maintained, as he has done, that there is a leading idea
which may be traced through the whole of the Gospel; that what is
called the prologue is not an idle introduction to a narrative with
which it has no connexion, but is the key to the meaning of every part
of it. 'This leading idea' I have further maintained to be the leading
idea of the whole Bible, to be unfolding itself through all the Law
and the Prophets, to be that which makes the history of the Jews a
coherent history, to be that which makes that history the exposition
of all histories. Supposing it entirely absent from the mind of any
people on the face of the earth, I hold that people not to be a
nation, but a mere herd of animals, and its records a mere collection
of fragments, with nothing to bind them together. In proportion as any
people has been possessed with this idea, in that proportion has it
been a nation great in itself, one which could interpret the
conditions and destinies of other nations. That the Jewish people were
brought to know that they were under the guidance of a Divine
Word--their ever-present Teacher, and King, and Judge--is what I mean
when I speak of God calling out that nation, of God ruling it and
educating it, of God making it a blessing to all the families of the
earth.
2d. Next, with reference to the synoptical Gospels. It follows, from
what I have said, that if I did not trace any of this 'Hauptidee' in
them, I should regard them not as histories, not as Gospels, but as
that collection of fragments, partly mythical, partly historical,
which Baur and his school suppose them to be. I have contended, in a
book on 'The Unity of the New Testament,' that there is a 'Hauptidee'
in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; that they are not
biographies of a certain Man called Jesus of Nazareth, whom His
disciples supposed to be endued with supernatural powers, or to be
actually divine; but that they are the history of the way in which
that King, whom the Jewish prophets had been declaring as the
invisible Ruler over them, manifested Himself visibly to His subjects,
and claimed their obedience. By a careful examination of all the
passages which these Evangelists have in common, by an equally careful
examination of their differences, I have endeavoured to show that they
were all setting forth this King of men, that each was setting Him
forth under a distinct aspect. There may be very little of what is
called the higher criticism in such an examination as this. To that I
do not aspire. We English may be content to work on in the stupid old
Baconian method, trying to find out the meaning of facts, and not
quite indifferent to _this_ fact, that these Gospels have exercised an
influence over eighteen centuries of human beings in different lands,
which it is not very easy to understand how they could have exercised,
if they had contained a few doubtful records of journeys between
Nazareth and Capernaum, of miracles imagined by superstitious
wonder-hunters, of discourses some tenth part of which may possibly
have proceeded from a Nazarene Prophet. If they set forth a Person who
has been, and is now, and will be for ever, the King over men, there
is at least _an_ explanation of the secret of their power; whether it
is the right one may be at least worth some consideration.
3d. In the book to which I referred, I carefully abstained from any
comparison of the three Gospels with the fourth. I have, throughout
that book and this, admitted that they are widely different, and that
it confuses our impressions of all four to blend them together as the
Harmonists attempt to do. I have maintained, indeed, that the first
three Gospels assert, as distinctly as the fourth, that the King of
men whom they are proclaiming was the Son of God. I have maintained
that they would not have proved themselves to be the Jews that they
were, if they had begun with the records of the life of a Man, seeing
that every book of the Old Testament begins with God, and treats of
men only as they testify of God or are related to Him. But I have said
that in the commencement of the three Gospels, in their incidents, in
their whole framework, there is a marked and characteristic difference
from the fourth, which no faithful expositor can overlook or try to
explain away. There can be no doubt about the nature of the
difference. The prologue, as Baur truly says, at once denotes it. St.
Mark speaks of Jesus as the Son of God in his opening sentence. The
use of the name Word of God, as identical with Son of God, is found in
St. John, and perhaps in St. John only. That name belongs, the
Tübingen Professor tells us, to the _consciousness_ of the next age.
Of course, we are liable to make mistakes about the meaning of that
phrase. It is not a native or natural phrase to us; and some of us are
not eager to import it, seeing that our home manufacture of cant is
quite prolific enough. But if the consciousness of an age is what I
take it to be, I have maintained that the first century, even from its
very commencement, was the age which showed itself peculiarly
conscious of the truth which is denoted by the expressions 'Word,'
'Life,' 'Light,' and all the others which characterise this Gospel.
The evidence of this fact is so notorious, that nothing but an
elaborate theory could force a man of Baur's extraordinary learning to
cast it aside. Supposing all he says of the absence of Gnosticism in
the Christian Church in the first century were as true as I apprehend
it to be unfounded, would that prove that no such man as Philo ever
existed; that chronologers have been mistaken by a hundred years about
the date of his birth and his teaching; or that he was a solitary
phenomenon, a person who exercised no influence, and indicated no
_consciousness_ in the country and period to which he belonged?
4th. The question, I am aware, when once Philo is mentioned, is how
far so learned and accomplished a man could have affected, by his
thoughts, humble fishermen like the Apostle John? The question is
raised and answered by two different classes of people. One set is
eager to maintain that what they call the _Logos-idea_ must have been
derived from a great mystical speculator, and cannot have presented
itself naturally to an ignorant man. The other is utterly scandalized
that an inspired Apostle should be supposed to have anything to do
with that which was passing in the minds of his uninspired
contemporaries. On the question of simplicity I have spoken at
considerable length. Whether the writer of the fourth Gospel was
simple or not, whether his doctrine respecting the Word affected his
simplicity, must be ascertained from the book itself, and cannot be
learnt from any theories of mine or of any one else. But if I am right
in thinking that this (so-called) _Logos-idea_ is that which gave
simplicity and clearness to the lives of prophets and patriarchs,
because they did not think of it as an idea at all, but believed that
they were ploughing, and keeping sheep, and eating and drinking, under
the eye of a living Person, then it was surely not an unnatural thing
that an Apostle should be taught to bring out that truth in its
simplicity which had been mixed with conceits and phantasies. If it is
inconsistent with our notion of the teaching of the Spirit of God that
He should enable a Jewish Apostle--living in a heathen city, amidst
Jews and Heathens who were both confused with thoughts upon this very
subject, among Christians who did not know how to connect their
thoughts of Jesus with the Divine Word--to bring forth a Gospel which
should have this special object; I cannot find that it is inconsistent
with the promise of the Comforter which our Lord Himself gives us, or
that that promise could have been more perfectly fulfilled to His own
generation than by such an illumination of an Apostle's mind and
memory. And for those who do not believe that that promise is
withdrawn, who think that the Spirit which was given to dwell in the
Church dwells in it still, I do not know that there can be a more
cheering thought than this, that His revelations of Himself were
gradual to His own Apostles; that He taught those who were nearest to
the time of His ascension to present Him as the risen Son of God; that
He taught His disciples who lived at the end of the age to see in that
Son also the living and eternal Word who was before all worlds, who
would be manifested as the Centre of all society, as the final
Conqueror of all enemies. For there surely may be a gradual unveiling,
in the later times also, of Him who has been with us from the
beginning; and it may be given to these later ages, when kingdoms are
falling down, and ecclesiastical systems are wearing out, and scholars
are finding nothing solid remaining in heaven and earth except their
own criticisms and their own conceptions, to see the Word of God
coming forth in His living power and majesty as the King of kings and
Lord of lords, the foundation of that heaven and earth wherein
dwelleth righteousness.
5th. I have touched, in these last words, on Baur's doctrine
respecting the identity of the Apostle with the author of the
Apocalypse, and the essential differences between the Apocalypse and
the Gospel.
It is notorious that many in the Alexandrian Church agreed with Baur
in separating the author of the Apocalypse from the author of the
Gospel; but that they gave the Gospel to St. John, and the Apocalypse
to some other author. I am quite willing, with the German Professor,
to consider the Apostle as first of all the 'Apocalyptiker;' to
believe that he was regarded specially in that character by the
Churches of Asia Minor; and to take the vision of the Son of Man, in
the first chapter, as the explanation of that confused tradition
respecting John which represents him as in some manner keeping alive
the office of the high-priest after its representative in Jerusalem
had disappeared. I am most willing, also, to admit that the author of
the Apocalypse does regard himself as a true Jew, in contradistinction
from those who called themselves Jews, but did lie and were of the
synagogue of Satan. What I contend is, that the writer of the fourth
Gospel is an 'Apocalyptiker,' in the strictest sense of the word; that
the unveiling of the Son of God and the Son of Man is the subject of
one book as well as of the other; that the meaning which is given to
revelation or unveiling, in both, is not at variance with the meaning
which it bears in St. Paul's Epistles, but is the expansion and
illustration of that meaning; that the Jews who do lie in the
Apocalypse, as well as in the Gospel, were those who were content with
a visible high-priest, and were not asking as their high-priest for
Him whose eyes were as a flame of fire, who died and was alive; that
as the Epistle of the Hebrews, whether written by St. Paul or not,
explains the very ground of all St. Paul's Epistles and their unity,
so the fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse show what is the underground
of the doctrine of that Epistle, viz. that the High-Priest of the
universe is that Word of God who was with the Father before all
worlds, in whom men may ascend to His Father and their Father, to His
God and their God. I have expressed, in this Sermon, a hope that the
Apocalypse may some day be proved to be a revelation of Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, and not of certain dates and mystical numbers,
because I believe that its radical and essential harmony with the
Gospel will be more and more discovered to those who read it, and
because the two books and the Epistle will then, I think, explain to
us all the former books of the Bible--how they are related to each
other, how they are related to Him in whom alone God is unveiled to
man. I have spoken of the Gospel as a book of theology, the Apocalypse
as a book of politics, not because I believe that these artificial
distinctions of ours can represent satisfactorily their different
objects, but because I am convinced that theology will be a mere
_hortus siccus_ for schoolmen to entertain themselves with, till it
becomes associated once more with the Life of nations and humanity;
that politics will be a mere ground on which despots and democrats,
and the tools of both, play with the morality and happiness of their
fellow-beings, till we seek again for the ground of them in the nature
and purposes of the eternal God.
DISCOURSE II.