'Ye are they which have continued with Me in My
temptations'--LUKE xxii 28.
We wonder at the disciples when we read of the unseemly strife for
precedence which jars on the tender solemnities of the Last Supper.
We think them strangely unsympathetic and selfish; and so they were.
But do not let us be too hard on them, nor forget that there was a
very natural reason for the close connection which is found in the
gospels between our Lord's announcements of His sufferings and this
eager dispute as to who should be the greatest in the kingdom. They
dimly understood what He meant, but they did understand this much,
that His 'sufferings' were immediately to precede His 'glory'--and
so it is not, after all, to be so much wondered at if the apparent
approach of these made the settlement of their places in the
impending kingdom seem to them a very pressing question. We should
probably have thought so too, if we had been among them.
Perhaps, too, the immediate occasion of this strife who should be
accounted the greatest, which drew from Christ the words of our text,
may have been the unwillingness of each to injure his possible claim
to pre-eminence by doing the servant's tasks at the modest meal. May
we not suppose that the basin and the towel were refused by one after
another, with muttered words growing louder and angrier: 'It is not
my place,' says Peter; 'you, Andrew, take it--and so from hand to
hand it goes, till the Master ends the strife and takes it Himself to
wash their feet. Then, when He had sat down again, He may have spoken
the words of which our text is part--in which He tells the wrangling
disciples what is the true law of honour in His kingdom, namely,
_service_, and points to Himself as the great example. With what
emphasis the pathetic incident of the foot-washing invests the clause
before our text: 'I am among you as he that serveth.' On that
disclosure of the true law of pre-eminence in His kingdom there
follows in this and following verses the assurance, that, unseemly as
their strife, there was reward for them, and places of dignity there,
because in all their selfishness and infirmity, they had still clung
to their Master.
This being the original purpose of these words, I venture to use
them for another. They give us, if I mistake not, a wonderful
glimpse into the heart of Christ, and a most pathetic revelation of
His thoughts and experiences, all the more precious because it is
quite incidental and, we may say, unconscious.