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Gilbert Parker - "The Translation of a Savage, Volume 3."

Algernon Charles Swinburne - "The Duke of Gandia"

Clara Rayleigh - "The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters"

Georg Ebers - "The Sisters, v2"

Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI




The union between Christ and His disciples has been tenderly set
forth in the parable of the Vine and the branches. We now turn to the
union between the disciples, which is the consequence of their common
union to the Lord. The branches are parts of one whole, and
necessarily bear a relation to each other. We may modify for our
present purpose the analogous statement of the Apostle in reference
to the Lord's Supper, and as He says, 'We being many, are one body,
for we are all partakers of that one bread,' so we may say--The
branches, being many, are one Vine, for they are all partakers of
that one Vine. Of this union amongst the branches, which results from
their common inherence in the Vine, the natural expression and
manifestation is the mutual love, which Christ here gives as _the_
commandment, and commends to us all by His own solemn example.

There are four things suggested to me by the words of our text--the
Obligation, the Sufficiency, the Pattern, and the Motive, of
Christian love.

I. First, the Obligation of love.

The two ideas of commandment and love do not go well together. You
cannot pump up love to order, and if you try you generally produce,
what we see in abundance in the world and in the Church, sentimental
hypocrisy, hollow and unreal. But whilst that is true, and whilst it
seems strange to say that we are commanded to love, still we can do a
great deal, directly and indirectly, for the cultivation and
strengthening of any emotion. We can either cast ourselves into the
attitude which is favourable or unfavourable to it. We can either
look at the facts which will create it or at those who will check it.
We can go about with a sharp eye for the lovable or for the unlovable
in man. We can either consciously war against or lazily acquiesce in
our own predominant self-absorption and selfishness. And in these and
in a number of other ways, our feelings towards other Christian
people are very largely under our own control, and therefore are
fitting subjects for commandment.

Our Lord lays down the obligation which devolves upon all Christian
people, of cherishing a kindly and loving regard to all others who
find their place within the charmed circle of His Church. It is an
obligation because He commands it. He puts Himself here in the
position of the absolute Lawgiver, who has the right of entire and
authoritative control over men's affections and hearts. And it is
further obligatory because such an attitude is the only fitting
expression of the mutual relation of Christian men, through their
common relation to the Vine. If there be the one life-sap circling
through all parts of the mighty whole, how anomalous and how
contradictory it is that these parts should not be harmoniously
concordant among themselves! However unlike any two Christian people
are to each other in character, in culture, in circumstances, the
bond that knits those who have the same relations to Jesus Christ one
to another is far deeper, far more real, and ought to be far closer,
than the bond that knits either of them to the men or women to whom
they are likest in all these other respects, and to whom they are
unlike in this central one. Christian men! you are closer to every
other Christian man, down in the depths of your being, however he may
be differenced from you by things that are very hard to get over,
than you are to the people that you like best, and love most, if they
do not participate with you in this common love to Jesus Christ.

I dread talking mere sentiment about this matter, for there is
perhaps no part of Christian duty which has been so vulgarised and
pawed over by mere unctuous talk, as that of the fellowship that
should subsist between all Christians. But I have one plain question
to put,--Does anybody believe that the present condition of
Christendom, and the relations to one another even of good Christian
people in the various churches and communions of our own and of other
lands, is the sort of thing that Jesus Christ meant, or is anything
like a fair and adequate representation of the deep, essential unity
that knits us all together?

We need far more to realise the fact that our emotions towards our
brother Christians are not matters in which our own inclinations may
have their way, but that there is a simple commandment given to us,
and that we are bound to cherish love to every man who loves Jesus
Christ. Never mind though he does not hold your theology; never mind
though he be very ignorant and narrow as compared with you; never
mind though your outlook on the world may be entirely unlike his.
Never mind though you be a rich man and he a poor one, or you a poor
one and he rich, which is just as hard to get over. Let all these
secondary grounds of union and of separation be relegated to their
proper subordinate place; and let us recognise this, that the
children of one Father are brethren. And do not let it be possible
that it shall be said, as so often has been said, and said truly,
that 'brethren' in the Church means a great deal less than _brothers_
in the world. Lift your eyes beyond the walls of the little sheepfold
in which you live, and hearken to the bleating of the flocks away out
yonder, and feel--'Other sheep He has which are not of this fold';
and recognise the solemn obligation of the commandment of love.

II. Note, secondly, the Sufficiency of love.

Our Lord has been speaking in a former verse about the keeping of His
commandments. Now He gathers them all up into one. 'This is my
commandment, that ye love one another' All duties to our fellows, and
all duties to our brethren, are summed up in, or resolved into, this
one germinal, encyclopaediacal, all-comprehensive simplification of
duty, into the one word 'love.'

Where the heart is right the conduct will be right. Love will soften
the tones, will instinctively teach what we ought to be and do; will
take the bitterness out of opposition and diversity, will make even
rebuke, when needful, only a form of expressing itself. If the heart
be right all else will be right; and if there be a deficiency of love
nothing will be right. You cannot help anybody except on condition of
having an honest, beneficent, and benevolent regard towards him. You
cannot do any man in the world any good unless there is a shoot of
love in your heart towards him. You may pitch him benefits, and you
will neither get nor deserve thanks for them; you may try to teach
him, and your words will be hopeless and profitless. The one thing
that is required to bind Christian men together is this common
affection. That being there, everything will come. It is the germ out
of which all is developed. As we read in that great chapter to the
Corinthians--the lyric praise of Charity,--all kinds of blessing and
sweetness and gladness come out of this, It is the central force
which, being present, secures that all shall be right, which, being
absent, ensures that all shall be wrong.

And is it not beautiful to see how Jesus Christ, leaving the little
flock of His followers in the world, gave them no other instruction
for their mutual relationship? He did not instruct them about
institutions and organisations, about orders of the ministry and
sacraments, or Church polity and the like. He knew that all these
would come. His one commandment was, 'Love one another,' and that
will make you wise. Love one another, and you will shape yourselves
into the right forms. He knew that they needed no exhortations such
as ecclesiastics would have put in the foreground. It was not worth
while to talk to them about organisations and officers. These would
come to them at the right time and in the right way. The 'one thing
needful' was that they should be knit together as true participators
of His life. Love was sufficient as their law and as their guide.

III. Note, further, the Pattern of love.

'As I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends.' Christ sets Himself forward then,
here and in this aspect, as He does in all aspects of human conduct
and character, as being the realised Ideal of them all. And although
the thought is a digression from my present purpose, I cannot but
pause for a moment to reflect upon the strangeness of a man thus
calmly saying to the whole world, 'I am the embodiment of all that
love ought to be. You cannot get beyond Me, nor have anything more
pure, more deep, more self-sacrificing, more perfect, than the love
which I have borne to you.'

But passing that, the pattern that He proposes for us is even more
august than appears at first sight. For, if you remember, a verse or
two before our Lord had said, 'As the Father hath loved Me so I have
loved you.' Now He says, 'Love one another as I have loved you.'
There stand the three, as it were, the Father, the Son, the disciple.
The Son in the midst receives and transmits the Father's love to the
disciple, and the disciple is to love his fellows, in some deep and
august sense, as the Father loved the Son. The divinest thing in God,
and that in which men can be like God, is love. In all our other
attitudes to Him we rather correspond than copy. His fullness is met
by our emptiness, His giving by our recipiency, His faithfulness by
our faith, His command by our obedience, His light by our eye. But
here it is not a case of correspondence only, but of similarity. My
faith _answers_ God's gift to me, but my love is _like_ God's love.
'Be ye, therefore, imitators of God as beloved children'; and having
received that love into your hearts, ray it out, 'and walk in love as
God also hath loved us.'

But then our Lord here, in a very wonderful manner, sets forth the
very central point of His work, even His death upon the Cross for us,
as being the pattern to which our poor affection ought to aspire, and
after which it must tend to be conformed. I need not remind you, I
suppose, that our Lord here is not speaking of the propitiatory
character of His death, nor of the issues which depend upon it, and
upon it alone, viz., the redemption and salvation of the world. He is
not speaking, either, of the peculiar and unique sense in which He
lays down His life for us, His friends and brethren, as none other
can do. He is speaking about it simply in its aspect of being a
voluntary surrender, at the bidding of love, for the good of those
whom He loved, and that, He tells us--that, and nothing else--is the
true pattern and model towards which all our love is bound to tend
and to aspire. That is to say, the heart of the love which He
commands is self-sacrifice, reaching to death if death be needful.
And no man loves as Christ would have him love who does not bear in
his heart affection which has so conquered selfishness that, if need
be, he is ready to die.

The expression of Christian life is not to be found in honeyed words,
or the indolent indulgence in benevolent emotion, but in self-
sacrifice, modelled after that of Christ's sacrificial death, which
is imitable by us.

Brethren, it is a solemn obligation, which may well make us tremble,
that is laid on us in these words, 'As I have loved you.' Calvary was
less than twenty-four hours off, and He says to us, '_That_ is your
pattern!' Contrast our love at its height with His--a drop to an
ocean, a poor little flickering rushlight held up beside the sun. My
love, at its best, has so far conquered my selfishness that now and
then I am ready to suffer a little inconvenience, to sacrifice a
little leisure, to give away a little money, to spend a little
dribble of sympathy upon the people who are its objects. Christ's
love nailed Him to the Cross, and led Him down from the throne, and
shut for a time the gates of the glory behind Him. And He says, 'That
is your pattern!'

Oh, let us bow down and confess how His word, which commands us, puts
us to shame, when we think of how miserably we have obeyed.

Remember, too, that the restriction which here seems to be cast
around the flow of His love is not a restriction in reality, but
rather a deepening of it. He says, 'Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' But evidently He
calls them so from His point of view, and as He sees them, not from
their point of view, as they see Him--that is to say, He means by
'friends' not those who love Him, but those whom He loves. The
'friends' for whom He dies are the same persons as the Apostle, in
his sweet variation upon the words of my text, has called by the
opposite name, when He says that He died for His 'enemies.'

There is an old, wild ballad that tells of how a knight found,
coiling round a tree in a dismal forest, a loathly dragon breathing
out poison; and how, undeterred by its hideousness and foulness, he
cast his arms round it and kissed it on the mouth. Three times he did
it undisgusted, and at the third the shape changed into a fair lady,
and he won his bride. Christ 'kisses with the kisses of His mouth'
His enemies, and makes them His friends because He loves them. 'If He
had never died for His enemies' says one of the old fathers, 'He
would never have possessed His friends.' And so He teaches us here in
what seems to be a restriction of the purpose of His death and the
sweep of His love, that the way by which we are to meet even
alienation and hostility is by pouring upon it the treasures of an
unselfish, self-sacrificing affection which will conquer at the last.

Christ's death is the pattern for our lives as well as the hope of
our hearts.

IV. Lastly, we have here by implication, though not by direct
statement, the Motive of the love.

Surely that, too, is contained in the words, 'As I have loved you.'
Christ's commandment of love is a new commandment, not so much
because it is a revelation of a new duty, though it is the casting of
an old duty into new prominence, as because it is not merely a
revelation of an obligation, but the communication of power to fulfil
it. The novelty of Christian morality lies here, that in its law
there is a self-fulfilling force. We have not to look to one place
for the knowledge of our duty, and somewhere else for the strength to
do it, but both are given to us in the one thing, the gift of the
dying Christ and His immortal love.

That love, received into our hearts, will conquer, and it alone will
conquer, our selfishness. That love, received into our hearts, will
mould, and it alone will mould, them into its own likeness. That
love, received into our hearts, will knit, and it alone will knit,
all those who participate in it into a common bond, sweet, deep,
sacred, and all-victorious.

And so, brethren, if we would know the blessedness and the sweetness
of victory over these miserable, selfish hearts of ours, and to walk
in the liberty of love, we can only get it by keeping close to Jesus
Christ. In any circle, the nearer the points of the circumference are
to the centre, the closer they will necessarily be to one another. As
we draw nearer, each for himself, to our Centre, we shall feel that
we have approximated to all those who stand round the same centre,
and draw from it the same life. In the early spring, when the wheat
is green and young, and scarcely appears above the ground, it comes
up in the lines in which it was sown, parted from one another and
distinctly showing their separation and the furrows. But when the
full corn in the ear waves on the autumn plain, all the lines and
separations have disappeared, and there is one unbroken tract of
sunny fruitfulness. And so when the life in Christ is low and feeble,
His servants may be separated and drawn up in rigid lines of
denominations, and churches, and sects; but as they grow the lines
disappear. If to the churches of England to-day there came a sudden
accession of knowledge of Christ, and of union with Him, the first
thing that would go would be the wretched barriers that separate us
from one another. For if we have the life of Christ in any adequate
measure in ourselves, we shall certainly have grown up above the
fences behind which we began to grow, and shall be able to reach out
to all that love the Lord Jesus Christ, and feel with thankfulness
that we are one in Him.



CHRIST'S FRIENDS

'Ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth
I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his
lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I
have heard of My Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not
chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye
should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should
remain; that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in My name, He
may give it you. These things I command you, that ye love one
another.'--JOHN xv. 14-17.

A wonderful word has just dropped from the Master's lips, when He
spoke of laying down His life for His friends. He lingers on it as if
the idea conveyed was too great and sweet to be taken in at once, and
with soothing reiteration He assures the little group that they, even
they, are His friends.

I have ventured to take these four verses for consideration now,
although each of them, and each clause of them, might afford ample
material for a discourse, because they have one common theme. They
are a description of what Christ's friends are to Him, of what He is
to them, and of what they should be to one another. So they are a
little picture, in the sweetest form, of the reality, the
blessedness, the obligations, of friendship with Christ.

I. Notice what Christ's friends do for Him.

'Ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.' In the former
verse, 'friends' means chiefly those whom He loved. Here it means
mainly those who love Him. They love Him because He loves them, of
course; and the two sides of the one thought cannot be parted. But
still in this verse the idea of friendship to Christ is looked at
from the human side, and He tells His disciples that they are His
lovers as well as beloved of Him, on condition of their doing
whatsoever He commands them.

He lingers, as I said, on the idea itself. As if He would meet the
doubts arising from the sense of unworthiness, and from some dim
perception of how He towers above them, and their limitations, He
reiterates, 'Wonderful as it is, you poor men, half-intelligent
lovers of Mine, _you_ are My friends, beloved of Me, and loving Me,
if ye do whatsoever I command you.'

How wonderful that stooping love of His is, which condescends to
array itself in the garments of ours! Every form of human love Christ
lays His hand upon, and claims that He Himself exercises it in a
transcendent degree. 'He that doeth the will of My Father which is in
heaven, the same is My brother and sister and mother.' That which is
even sacreder, the purest and most complete union that humanity is
capable of--that, too, He consecrates; for even it, sacred as it is,
is capable of a higher consecration, and, sweet as it is, receives a
new sweetness when we think of 'the Bride, the Lamb's wife,' and
remember the parables in which He speaks of the Marriage Supper of
the Great King, and sets forth Himself as the Husband of humanity.
And passing from that Holy of Holies out into this outer court, He
lays His hand, too, on that more common and familiar, and yet
precious and sacred, thing--the bond of friendship. The Prince makes
a friend of the beggar.

Even if we do not think more loftily of Jesus Christ than do those
who regard Him simply as the perfection of humanity, is it not
beautiful and wonderful that He should look with such eyes of beaming
love on that handful of poor, ignorant fishermen, who knew Him so
dimly, and say: 'I pass by all the wise and the mighty, all the lofty
and noble, and My heart clings to you poor, insignificant people?' He
stoops to make them His friends, and there are none so low but that
they may be His.

This friendship lasts to-day. A peculiarity of Christianity is the
strong personal tie of real love and intimacy which will bind men, to
the end of time, to this Man that died nineteen hundred years ago. We
look back into the wastes of antiquity: mighty names rise there that
we reverence; there are great teachers from whom we have learned, and
to whom, after a fashion, we are grateful. But what a gulf there is
between us and the best and noblest of them! But here is a dead Man,
who to-day is the Object of passionate attachment and a love deeper
than life to millions of people, and will be till the end of time.
There is nothing in the whole history of the world in the least like
that strange bond which ties you and me to the Saviour, and the
paradox of the Apostle remains a unique fact in the experience of
humanity: 'Jesus Christ, whom, having not seen, ye love.' We stretch
out our hands across the waste, silent centuries, and there, amidst
the mists of oblivion, thickening round all other figures in the
past, we touch the warm, throhbing heart of our Friend, who lives for
ever, and for ever is near us. We here, nearly two millenniums after
the words fell on the nightly air on the road to Gethsemane, have
them coming direct to our hearts. A perpetual bond unites men with
Christ to-day; and for us, as really as in that long-past Paschal
night, is it true, 'Ye are My friends.'

There are no limitations in that friendship, no misconstructions in
that heart, no alienation possible, no change to be feared. There is
absolute rest for us there. Why should I be solitary if Jesus Christ
is my Friend? Why should I fear if He walks by my side? Why should
anything be burdensome if He lays it upon me and helps me to bear it?
What is there in life that cannot be faced and borne--aye, and
conquered,--if we have Him, as we all may have Him, for the Friend
and the Home of our hearts?

But notice the condition, 'If ye do what I command you.' Note the
singular blending of friendship and command, involving on our parts
the cultivation of the two things which are not incompatible,
absolute submission and closest friendship. He commands though He is
Friend; though He commands He is Friend. The conditions that He lays
down are the same which have already occupied our attention in former
sermons of this series, and so may be touched very lightly. 'Ye are
My friends if ye do the things which I command you,' may either
correspond with His former saying, 'If a Man love Me he will keep My
commandments,' or with His later one, which immediately precedes our
text, 'If ye keep My commandments ye shall abide in My love.' For
this is the relationship between love and obedience, in regard to
Jesus Christ, that the love is the parent of the obedience, and the
obedience is the guard and guarantee of the love. They who love will
obey, they who obey will strengthen love by acting according to its
dictates, and will be in a condition to feel and realise more the
warmth of the rays that stream down upon them, and to send back more
fully answering obedience from their hearts. Not in mere emotion, not
in mere verbal expression, not in mere selfish realising of the
blessings of His friendship, and not in mere mechanical, external
acts of conformity, but in the flowing down and melting of the hard
and obstinate iron will, at the warmth of His great love, is our love
made perfect. The obedience, which is the child and the preserver of
love, is something far deeper than the mere outward conformity with
externally apprehended commandments. To submit is the expression of
love, and love is deepened by submission.

II. Secondly, note what Christ does for His friends.

'Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what
his lord doeth.' The slave may see what his lord does, but he does
not know his purpose in his acts--'Theirs not to reason why.' In so
far as the relation of master and servant goes, and still more in
that of owner and slave, there is simple command on the one side and
unintelligent obedience on the other. The command needs no
explanation, and if the servant is in his master's confidence he is
more than a servant. But, says Christ, 'I have called you friends';
and He had called them so before He now named them so. He had called
them so in act, and He points to all His past relationship, and
especially to the heart-outpourings of the Upper Room, as the proof
that He had called them His friends, in the fact that whatsoever He
had heard of the Father He had made known to them.

Jesus Christ, then, recognises the obligation of absolute frankness,
and He will tell His friends everything that He can. When He tells
them what He can, the voice of the Father speaks through the Son.
Every one of Christ's friends stands nearer to God than did Moses at
the door of the Tabernacle, when the wondering camp beheld him face
to face with the blaze of the Shekinah glory, and dimly heard the
thunderous utterances of God as He spake to him 'as a man speaks to
his friend.' That was surface-speech compared with the divine depth
and fullness of the communications which Jesus Christ deems Himself
bound, and assumes Himself able, to make to them who love Him and
whom He loves.

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