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

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

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So, dear friends, whilst here we have a promise which specially
applies, no doubt, to these twelve Apostles, and the result of which
in them was different from its result in us, inasmuch as the Spirit's
teaching, recorded in the New Testament, becomes for us the
authoritative rule of faith and practice, the promise still applies
to each of us in a secondary and modified sense. For there is nothing
in these great valedictory words of our Lord's which has not a
universal bearing, and is not the revelation of a permanent truth in
regard to the Christian Church. And, therefore, here we have the
promise of a universal gift to all Christian men and women, of an
actual divine Spirit to dwell with each of us, to speak in our
hearts.

And what will He speak there? He will teach us a deeper knowledge of
Jesus Christ. He will help us to understand better what He is. He
will show us more and more of the whole sweep of His work, of the
whole infinite truth for morals and religion, for politics and
society, for time and for eternity, about men and about God, which is
wrapped up in that great saying which we first of all, perhaps under
the pressure of our own sense of sin, grasp as our deliverance from
sin: 'God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting
life.' That is the sum of truth which the Spirit of God interprets to
every faithful heart. And as the days roll on, and new problems rise,
and new difficulties present themselves, and new circumstances emerge
in our personal life, we find the truth, which we at first dimly
grasped as life and salvation, opening out into wisdom and depth and
meaning that we never dreamed of in the early hours. A Spirit that
bears witness of Christ and will make us understand Him better every
day we live, if we choose, is the promise that is given here, for all
Christian men and women.

Then note that this inward witness of Christ's depth and preciousness
is our true weapon and stay against a hostile world. A little candle
in a room will make the lightning outside almost invisible; and if I
have burning in my heart the inward experience and conviction of what
Jesus Christ is and what He has done and will do for me--Oh! then,
all the storm without may rage, and it will not trouble me.

If you take an empty vessel and bring pressure to bear upon it, in go
the sides. Fill it, and they will resist the pressure. So with
growing knowledge of Christ, and growing personal experience of His
sweetness in our souls, we shall be able, untouched and undinted, to
throw off the pressure which would otherwise have crushed us.

Therefore, dear friends, here is the true secret of tranquillity, in
an age of questioning and doubt. Let me have that divine Voice
speaking in my heart, as I may have, and no matter what questions may
be doubtful, this is sure--'We know in whom we have believed'; and we
can say, 'Settle all your controversies any way you like: one thing I
know, and that divine Voice is ever saying it to me in my deepest
consciousness--the Son of God is come and hath given us an
understanding that we may know Him that is true; and we are in Him
that is true.' Labour for more of this inward, personal conviction of
the preciousness of Jesus Christ to strengthen you against a hostile
world.

And remember that there are conditions under which this Voice speaks
in our souls. One is that we attend to the instrument which the
Spirit of God uses, and that is 'the truth.' If Christians will not
read their Bibles, they need not expect to have the words of these
Bibles interpreted and made real to them by any inward experience. If
you want to have a faith which is vindicated and warranted by your
daily experience, there is only one way to get it, and that is, to
use the truth which the Spirit uses, and to bring yourself into
contact, continual and reverent and intelligent, with the great body
of divine truth that is conveyed in these authoritative words of the
Spirit of God speaking through the first witnesses.

And there must be moral discipline too. Laziness, worldliness, the
absorption of attention with other things, self-conceit, prejudice,
and, I was going to say, almost above all, the taking of our religion
and religious opinions at secondhand from men and teachers and books
--all these stand in the way of our hearing the Spirit of God when He
speaks. Come away from the babble and go by yourself, and take your
Bibles with you, and read them, and meditate upon them, and get near
the Master of whom they speak, and the Spirit which uses the truth
will use it to fortify you.

III. And, lastly, note the consequent witness with which the
Christian may win the world.

'And ye also shall bear witness of Me, because ye have been with Me
from the beginning.' That 'also' has, of course, direct reference to
the Apostles' witness to the facts of our Lord's historical
appearance, His life, His death, His resurrection, and His ascension;
and therefore their qualification was simply the companionship with
Him which enabled them to say, 'We saw what we tell you; we were
witnesses from the beginning.'

But then, again, I say that there is no word here that belongs only
to the Apostles; it belongs to us all, and so here is the task of the
Christian Church in all its members. They receive the witness of the
Spirit, and they are Christ's witnesses in the world.

Note what we have to do--to bear witness; not to argue, not to adorn,
but simply to attest. Note what we have to attest--the fact, not of
the historical life of Jesus Christ, because we are not in a position
to be witnesses of that, but the fact of His preciousness and power,
and the fact of our own experience of what He has done for us. Note,
that that is by far the most powerful agency for winning the world.
You can never make men angry by saying to them, 'We have found tho
Messias.' You cannot irritate people, or provoke them into a
controversial opposition when you say, 'Brother, let me tell you my
experience. I was dark, sad, sinful, weak, solitary, miserable; and I
got light, gladness, pardon, strength, companionship, and a joyful
hope. I was blind--you remember me when my eyes were dark, and I sat
begging outside the Temple; I was blind, now I see--look at my
eyeballs.' We can all say that. This is the witness that needs no
eloquence, no genius, no anything except honesty and experience; and
whosoever has tasted and felt and handled of the Word of Life may
surely go to a brother and say, 'Brother, I have eaten and am
satisfied. Will you not help yourselves?' We can all do it, and we
ought to do it. The Christian privilege of being witnessed to by the
Spirit of God in our hearts brings with it the Christian duty of
being witnesses in our turn to the world. That is our only weapon
against the hostility which godless humanity bears to ourselves and
to our Master. We may win men by that; we can win them by nothing
else. 'Ye are My witnesses, saith the Lord, and My servants whom I
have chosen.' Christian friend, listen to the Master, who says, 'Him
that confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess before My
Father in heaven.'

WHY CHRIST SPEAKS

'These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be
offended. They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time
cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God
service. And these things will they do unto you, because they
have not known the Father, nor Me. But these things have I told
you, that, when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told
you of them. And these things I said not unto you at the
beginning, because I was with you. But now I go My way to Him
that sent Me; and none of you asketh Me, Whither goest Thou? But
because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled
your heart.'--JOHN xvi. 1-6.

The unbroken flow of thought, and the many subtle links of connection
between the parts, of these inexhaustible last words of our Lord make
any attempt at grouping them into sections more or less
unsatisfactory and artificial. But I have ventured to throw these,
perhaps too many, verses together for our consideration now, because
a phrase of frequent recurrence in them manifestly affords a key to
their main subject. Notice how our Lord four times repeats the
expression, 'These things have I spoken unto you.' He is not so much
adding anything new to His words, as rather contemplating the reasons
for His speech now, the reasons for His silence before, and the
imperfect apprehension of the things spoken which His disciples had,
and which led to their making His announcement, thus imperfectly
understood, an occasion for sorrow rather than for joy. There is a
kind of landing place or pause here in the ascending staircase. Our
Lord meditates for Himself, and invites us to meditate with Him,
rather upon His past utterances than upon anything additional to
them. So, then, whilst it is true that we have in two of these verses
a repetition, in a somewhat more intense and detailed form, of the
previous warnings of the hostility of the world, in the main the
subject of the present section is that which I have indicated. And I
take the fourfold recurrence of that clause to which I have pointed
as marking out for us the leading ideas that we are to gather from
these words.

I. There is, first, our Lord's loving reason for His speech.

This is given in a double form. 'These things have I spoken unto you,
that ye should not be offended.' And, again, 'These things have I
told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told
you of them.' These two statements substantially coalesce and point
to the same idea.

They are separated, as I have said, by a reiteration, in more
emphatic form, of the dark prospect which He has been holding out to
His disciples. He tells them that the world which hates them is to be
fully identified with the apostate Jewish Church. 'The synagogue' is
for them 'the world.' There is a solemn lesson in that. The organised
body that calls itself God's Church and House may become the most
rampant enemy of Christ's people, and be the truest embodiment on the
face of the earth of all that He means by 'the world.' A formal
church is the true world always; and to-day as then. And such a body
will do the cruellest things and believe that it is offering up
Christ's witnesses as sacrifices to God. That is partly an
aggravation and partly an alleviation of the sin. It is possible that
the inquisitor and the man in the _San Benito_, whom he ties to the
stake, may shake hands yet at His side up yonder. But a church which
has become, the world will do its persecution and think that it is
worship, and call the burning of God's people an _auto-da-fe_ (act of
faith); and the bottom of it all is that, in the blaze of light, and
calling themselves God's, 'they do not know' either God or Christ.
They do not know the one because they will not know the other.

But that is all parenthetical in the present section, and so I say
nothing more about it; and ask you, rather, just to look at the
loving reasons which Christ here suggests for His present speech--
'that ye should not be offended,' or stumble. He warns them of the
storm before it bursts, lest, when it bursts, it should sweep them
away from their moorings. Of course, there could be nothing more
productive of intellectual bewilderment, and more likely to lead to
doubt as to one's own convictions, than to find oneself at odds with
the synagogue about the question of the Messiah. A modest man might
naturally say, 'Perhaps I am wrong and they are right.' A coward
would be sure to say, 'I will sink my convictions and fall in with
the majority.' The stumbling-block for these first Jewish converts,
in the attitude of the whole mass of the nation towards Christ and
His pretensions, is one of such a magnitude as we cannot, by any
exercise of our imagination, realise. 'And,' says Christ, 'the only
way by which you will ever get over the temptation to intellectual
doubt or to cowardly apostasy that arises from your being thrown out
of sympathy with the whole mass of your people, and the traditions of
the generations, is to reflect that I told you it would be so, before
it came to pass.'

Of course all that has a special bearing upon those to whom it was
originally addressed, and then it has a secondary bearing upon
Christians, whose lot it is to live in a time of actual persecution.
But that does not in the slightest degree destroy the fact that it
also has a bearing upon every one of us. For if you and I are
Christian people, and trying to live like our Master, and to do as He
would have us to do, we too shall often have to stand in such a very
small minority, and be surrounded by people who take such an entirely
opposite view of duty and of truth, as that we shall be only too much
disposed to give up and falter in the clearness, fullness, and
braveness of our utterance, and think, 'Well, perhaps after all it is
better for me to hold my tongue.'

And then, besides this, there are all the cares and griefs which
befall each of us, with regard to which also, as well as with regard
to the difficulties and dangers and oppositions which we may meet
with in a faithful Christian life, the principles of my text have a
distinct and direct application. He has told us in order that we
might not stumble, because when the hour comes and the sorrow comes
with it, we remember that He told us all about it before.

It is one of the characteristics of Christianity that Jesus Christ
does not try to enlist recruits by highly-coloured, rosy pictures of
the blessing and joy of serving Him, keeping His hand all the while
upon the weary marches and the wounds and pains. He tells us plainly
at the beginning, 'If you take My yoke upon you, you will have to
carry a heavy burden. You will have to abstain from a great many
things that you would like to do. You will have to do a great many
things that your flesh will not like. The road is rough, and a high
wall on each side. There are lovely flowers and green pastures on the
other side of the hedge, where it is a great deal easier walking upon
the short grass than it is upon the stony path. The roadway is
narrow, and the gateway is very strait, but the track goes steadily
up. Will you accept the terms and come in and walk upon it?'

It is far better and nobler, and more attractive also, to tell us
frankly and fully the difficulties and dangers than to try and coax
us by dwelling on pleasures and ease. Jesus Christ will have no
service on false pretences, but will let us understand at the
beginning that if we serve under His flag we have to make up our
minds to hardships which otherwise we may escape, to antagonisms
which otherwise will not be provoked, and to more than an ordinary
share of sorrow and suffering and pain. 'Through much tribulation we
must enter the Kingdom.'

And the way by which all these troubles and cares, whether they be
those incident and peculiar to Christian life, or those common to
humanity, can best be met and overcome, is precisely by this thought,
'The Master has told us before.' Sorrows anticipated are more easily
met. It is when the vessel is caught with all its sails set that it
is almost sure to go down, and, at all events, sure to be badly
damaged in the typhoon. But when the barometer has been watched, and
its fall has given warning, and everything movable has been made
fast, and every spare yard has been sent below, and all tightened up
and ship-shape--then she can ride out the storm. Forewarned is
forearmed. Savages think, when an eclipse comes, that a wolf has
swallowed the sun, and it will never come out again. We know that it
has all been calculated beforehand, and since we know that it is
coming to-morrow, when it does come, it is only a passing darkness.
Sorrow anticipated is sorrow half overcome; and when it falls on us,
the bewilderment, as if 'some strange thing had happened,' will be
escaped when we can remember that the Master has told us it all
beforehand.

And again, sorrow foretold gives us confidence in our Guide. We have
the chart, and as we look upon it we see marked 'waterless country,'
'pathless rocks,' 'desert and sand,' 'wells and palm-trees.' Well,
when we come to the first of these, and find ourselves, as the map
says, in the waterless country; and when, as we go on step by step,
and mile after mile, we find it is all down there, we say to
ourselves, 'The remainder will be accurate, too,' and if we are in
'Marah' to-day, where 'the water is bitter,' and nothing but the wood
of the tree that grows there can ever sweeten it, we shall be at
'Elim' to-morrow, where there are 'the twelve wells and the seventy
palm trees.' The chart is right, and the chart says that the end of
it all is 'the land that flows with milk and honey.' He _has_ told us
_this_; if there had been anything worse than this, He would have
told us _that_. 'If it were not so I would have told you.' The sorrow
foretold deepens our confidence in our Guide.

Sorrow that comes punctually in accordance with His word plainly
comes in obedience to His will. Our Lord uses a little word in this
context which is very significant. He says, 'When _their hour_ is
come.'

'Their hour'--the time allotted to them. Allotted by whom? Allotted
by Him. He could tell that they would come, because it was as His
instruments that they came. 'Their time' was His appointment. It was
only an 'hour,' a definite, appointed, and brief period in accordance
with His loving purpose. It takes all sorts of weathers to make a
year; and after all the sorts of weathers are run out, the year's
results are realised and the calm comes. And so the good old hymn,
with its rhythm that speaks at once of fear and triumph, has caught
the true meaning of these words of our Lord's--

'Why should I complain
Of want or distress,
Temptation or pain?
He told me no less.'

'These things have I spoken unto you that ye might not be offended.'

II. Still further, note our Lord's loving reasons for past silence.
'These things I said not unto you from the beginning, because I was
with you.'

Of course there had been in His early ministry hints, and very plain
references, to persecutions and trials, but we must not restrict the
'these things' of my text to that only, but rather include the whole
of the previous chapter, in which He sets the sorrow and the
hostility which His servants have to endure in their true light, as
being the consequences of their union with Him and of the closeness
and the identity of life and fate between the Vine and the branches.
In so systematic and detailed fashion, and with such an exhibition of
the grounds of its necessity, our Lord had not spoken of the world's
hostility in His earlier ministry, but had reserved it to these last
moments, and the reason why He had given but passing hints before was
because He was there. What a superb confidence that expresses in His
ability to shield His poor followers from all that might hurt and
harm them! He spreads the ample robe of His protection over them, or
rather, to go back to His own metaphor, 'as a hen gathereth her
chickens under her wings' so He gathers them to His own breast, and
stretches over them that which is at once protection and warmth, and
keeps them safe. As long as He is there, no harm can come to them.
But He is going away, and so it is time to speak, and to speak more
plainly.

That, too, yields for us, dear brethren, truths that apply to us
quite as much as to that little group of silent listeners. For us,
too, difficulties and sorrows, though foretold in general terms, are
largely hidden till they are near. It would have been of little use
for Christ to have spoken more plainly in those early days of His
ministry. The disciples managed to forget and to misunderstand His
plain utterances, for instance, about His own death and resurrection.
There needs to be an adaptation between the hearing ear and the
spoken word, in order that the word spoken should be of use, and
there are great tracts of Scripture dealing with the sorrows of life,
which lie perfectly dark and dead to us, until experience vitalises
them. The old Greeks used to send messages from one army to another
by means of a roll of parchment twisted spirally round a baton, and
then written on. It was perfectly unintelligible when it fell into a
man's hands that had not a corresponding baton to twist it upon. Many
of Christ's messages to us are like that. You can only understand the
utterances when life gives you the frame round which to wrap them,
and then they flash up into meaning, and we say at once, 'He told us
it all before, and I scarcely knew that He had told me, until this
moment when I need it.'

Oh, it is merciful that there should be a gradual unveiling of what
is to come to us, that the road should wind, and that we should see
so short a way before us. Did you never say to yourselves, 'If I had
known all this before, I do not think I could have lived to face it'?
And did you not feel how good and kind and loving it was, that in the
revelation there had been concealment, and that while Jesus Christ
had told us in general terms that we must expect sorrows and trials,
this specific form of sorrow and trial had not been foreseen by us
until we came close to it? Thank God for the loving reticence, and
for the as loving eloquence of His speech and of His silence, with
regard to sorrow.

And take this further lesson, that there ought to be in all our lives
times of close and blessed communion with that Master, when the sense
of His presence with us makes all thought of sorrows and trials in
the future out of place and needlessly disturbing. If these disciples
had drunk in the spirit of Jesus Christ when they were with Him, then
they would not have been so bewildered when He left them. When He was
near them there was something better for them to do than to be 'over
exquisite to cast the fashion of uncertain evils' in the future--
namely, to grow into His life, to drink in the sweetness of His
presence, to be moulded into the likeness of His character, to
understand Him better, and to realise His nearness more fully. And,
dear brethren, for us all there are times--and it is our own fault if
these are not very frequent and blessed--when thus, in such an hour
of sweet communion with the present Christ, the future will be all
radiant and calm, if we look into it, or, better, the present will be
so blessed that there will be no need to think of the future. These
men in the upper chamber, if they had learnt all the lessons that He
was teaching them then, would not have gone out, to sleep in
Gethsemane, and to tell lies in the high priest's hall, and to fly
like frightened sheep from the Cross, and to despair at the tomb. And
you and I, if we sit at His table, and keep our hearts near Him,
eating and drinking of that heavenly manna, shall 'go in the strength
of that meat forty days into the wilderness,' and say--

'E'en let the unknown to-morrow
Bring with it what it may.'

III. Lastly, I must touch, for the sake of completeness, upon the
final thought in these pregnant verses, and that is, the imperfect
apprehension of our Lord's words, which leads to sorrow instead of
joy.

'Now I go My way to Him that sent Me; and none of you asketh Me,
Whither goest Thou? But because I have said these things unto you,
sorrow hath filled your heart.' He had been telling them--and it was
the one definite idea that they gathered from His words--that He was
going. And what did they say? They said, 'Going! What is to become of
_us_?' If there had been a little less selfishness and a little more
love, and if they had put their question, 'Going! What is to become
of _Him_?' then it would not have been sorrow that would have filled
their hearts, but a joy that would have flooded out all the sorrow,
'and the winter of their discontent' would have been changed into
'glorious summer,' because He was going to Him that sent Him; that is
to say, He was going with His work done and His message accomplished.
And therefore, if they could only have overlooked their own selves,
and the bearing of His departure, as it seemed to them, on
themselves, and have thought of it a little as it affected Him, they
would have found that all the oppressive and the dark in it would
have disappeared, and they would have been glad.

Ah, dear brethren, that gives us a thought on which I can but touch
now, that the steadfast contemplation of the ascended Christ, who has
gone to the Father, having finished His work, is the sovereign
antidote against all sense of separation and solitude, the sovereign
power by which we may face a hostile world, the sovereign cure for
every sorrow. If we could live in the light of the great triumphant,
ascended Lord, then, Oh, how small would the babble of the world be.
If the great White Throne, and He that sits upon it, were more
distinctly before us, then we could face anything, and sorrow would
'become a solemn scorn of ills,' and all the transitory would be
reduced to its proper insignificance, and we should be emancipated
from fear and every temptation to unfaithfulness and apostasy. Look
up to the Master who has gone, and as the dying martyr outside the
city wall 'saw the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing'--
having sprung to His feet to help His poor servant--'at the right
hand of God,' so with that vision in our eyes and the light of that
Face flashing upon our faces, and making them like the angels', we
shall be masters of grief and care, and pain and trial, and enmity
and disappointment, and sorrow and sin, and feel that the absent
Christ is the present Christ, and that the present Christ is the
conquering power in us.

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