The Messiah is here represented as having the tongue of 'them that are
taught,' and as having it, because morning by morning He has been
wakened to hear God's lessons. He is thus God's scholar--a thought of
which an unreflecting orthodoxy has been shy, but which it is necessary
to admit unhesitatingly and ungrudgingly, if we would not reduce the
manhood of Jesus to a mere phantasm. He Himself has said, 'As the
Father taught Me, I speak these things.' With emphatic repetition, He
was continually making that assertion, as, for instance, 'I have not
spoken of Myself, but the Father which sent Me, He gave Me a
commandment what I should say, and what I should speak ... the things
therefore which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto Me, so I
speak.'
The Gospels tell us of the prayers of Jesus, and of rare occasions in
which a voice from heaven spoke to Him. But while these are palpable
instances of His communion with God, and precious tokens of His true
brotherhood with us in the indispensable characteristics of the life of
faith, they are but the salient points on which the light falls, and
behind them, all unknown by us, stretches an unbroken chain of like
acts of fellowship. In that subordination as of a scholar to teacher,
both His divine and His human nature concurred, the former in filial
submission, the latter in continual, truly human derivation and
reception. The man Jesus was taught and, like the boy Jesus, 'increased
in wisdom.'
But while He learned as truly as we learn from God, and exercised the
same communion with the Father, the same submission to Him, which other
men have to exercise, and called 'us brethren, saying, I will put my
trust in Him,' the difference in degree between His close fellowship
with God the Father, and our broken and always partial fellowship,
between His completeness of reception of God's words and our imperfect
comprehension, between His perfect reproduction of the words He had
heard and our faint, and often mistaken echo of them, is so immense as
to amount to a difference in kind. His unity of will and being with the
Father ensured that all His words were God's. 'Never man spake like
this man.' The man who speaks to us once for all God's words must be
more than man. Other men, the highest, give us fragments of that mighty
voice; Jesus speaks its whole message, and nothing but its message. Of
that perfect reproduction He is calmly conscious, and claims to give
it, in words which are at once lowly and instinct with more than human
authority: 'All things that I have heard of My Father I have made known
unto you.' Who besides Him dare make such a claim? Who besides Him
could make it without being met by incredulous scorn? His utterance of
the Father's words was unmarred by defect on the one hand, and by
additions on the other. It was like pure water which tastes of no soil.
His soul was like an open vessel plunged in a stream, filled by the
flow and giving forth again its whole contents.
That divine communication to Jesus was no mere impartation of
abstractions or 'truths,' still less of the poor words of man's speech,
but was the flowing into His spirit of the living Father by whom He
lived. And it was unbroken. 'Morning by morning' it was going on. The
line was continuous, whereas for the rest of us, at the best, it is a
series of points more or less contiguous, but with dark spaces between.
'God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto Him.'
So, then, let us hold fast by Him, the Son in whom God has spoken to
us, and to all voices without and within that would woo us to listen,
let us answer with the only wise answer: 'To whom shall we go? Thou
hast the words of eternal life.'