WORDS OF LIFE
‘The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.’
John 6:63 (R.V.)
In John’s Gospel the prooemium, standing where it does, effects a great purpose. A great life is not sufficiently recounted by anecdotes and dates. How can we link its facts together, and present to ourselves and others an organic whole? John, in the prooemium of his Gospel, presents us with that which proves itself the right key by fitting all the wards of the lock, by supplying a principle which harmonises all the facts. The prooemium does this for all in our Lord’s earthly life.
I. The personality of Christ.—The acceptance of views of the Person of Christ as worked out upon principles different from the Divine Society known as the Church ultimately, leads to a moral impasse of a destructive nature. An example of this is now before our eyes. A book, whose very name is startling, has lately been published in France. Its title is The Irreligion of the Future, and it is in the highest degree laudatory of irreligion. For all its hostility to religion, it sinks at times to a melancholy sentimentalism and despair, masquerading in the garb of resignation—all, however, with apparently not very unsatisfactory issues, until we come to a difficulty which is supposed by many to underlie the whole purpose of the work. There are two Chapter s of which the headings are, ‘Religion and Irreligion in Women,’ ‘Religion and Irreligion in connection with the Fecundity and Future of Races.’ ‘It is sad,’ says the writer, ‘to find that one out of the three or four great peoples which, even taken by itself, counts as something in what chances there are of human happiness, sets to work in gaiety of heart to annihilate itself. In connection with the chapter of “Religion and Irreligion in Women,” the author turns, with the triumphant modesty of the successful missionary, to the spiritual history of a lady. She was married to a husband whom she loved, as he loved her, truly and deeply. She had, indeed, married partly from a desire to win him to Christ. One day her husband asked her if she might not think it a congenial task to read the Bible through carefully in an impartial spirit. She accepted the idea, starting with the extreme postulate that every word of the Bible was dictated by God; that it was an instrument vibrating through and through with a Divine and deathless music. She went on upon her course not without many doubts and misgivings. When the first part of her task was over, she turned to the pages of the New Testament with a throb of expectation. She came with especial delight to the Gospel according to John, which she had studied carefully in past years. Alas! she no longer found the Man without a stain, the Lamb of God. She detected “blemishes, contradictions, credulities, superstitions, moral imperfections.” She cried with an exceeding great, bitter cry, “My belief has faded away—my God has deceived me!” ’ May God forgive her! One naturally asks, Was this lady capable of judging the matter? Did she know anything of the language in which the original was written by John? Had she access to the sources from which she might have learned much? Had any one ever pointed out to her in that Gospel truths not yet developed, seen only in the far away like the golden trees of the distant hills? Evidently she must have heard from her husband the triumphant cry of Strauss in a company where Darwin’s name was mentioned. ‘Darwin!—the man who drove the miraculous out of the universe!’ But did he? Did he drive out anything but a shallow interpretation of the miraculous? Did she understand what Jesus said to the Jews?—‘My Father worketh even until now, and I work,’ the miracle of continual creation. Was she ever taught to find in another Book by John a thought derived from a natural fact as yet unknown to the sons of men? ‘He that hateth is in the darkness, and walketh in the darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because the darkness hath blinded his eyes’—the unused eyes atrophied. Had she ever considered the appeal to womanhood—‘The woman, when she is in travail hath sorrow because her hour is come; but when she is delivered of the child she remembereth no more the anguish for the joy that a man is born into the world’? Is there no underlying glory there? ‘The woman,’ not this or that woman, but all the sex that has not unsexed itself. The world, as it is even now, with its lachrymae rerum, its inseparable sorrows, but also its inseparable joys—a healthy and serene conviction that the child is after all a little prince, with his own little place in a great assembly where he may play a not unhappy part. And so the Virgin-born surveyed a birth of births, and deaths, and their issues, with that steady unshrinking Virgin eye, which is also the eye of God. As our knowledge of John deepens, our knowledge of his interpretation deepens.
II. The only morality strong enough to support the life of a Christian nation.—The same latent possibility in religion to do for races and nations in the last emergencies that which irreligion can never do is manifested again and again. Think how it was in the late great West Indian earthquake. I happen to have seen an account of it quite lately, traced by a hand of genius and vitalised by a heart of love—one in the long procession of Christian women, unveiled as well as veiled, unvowed as well as vowed, among whom strength and training bow down before decrepitude and decay, before the ghastly wound and the pestilential flesh. The writer to whom I refer brings us with her to the hospital, where the wounded and dying were taken, after a description of the earthquake which has all the appearance of a steadier eye and a less shaken observation than I have ever seen elsewhere. But I can only refer to some sentences directly bearing upon our present subject: ‘One of the most remarkable features was the courage and real patience displayed by all the wounded. The faith of the negroes was unfaltering, and their religion stood to them like a rock. Even the little children clung to it. Soon after the dawn of the first day, I was struck by finding upon the ground scattered leaves of a Common Prayer Book. Some one had carried it at the time of the disaster, and afterwards it had been divided into hundreds of pieces and passed from hand to hand.’ Here, again, an earthquake in lands inhabited by higher races than the negroes, is often followed by atheistic crime as commonly as by the fire that follows its footsteps.
I have endeavoured so far to illustrate the peculiar support offered by John in the prooemium of his Gospel, (1) to the true Personality of our Lord, and (2) to its evidence to the only morality strong enough to support the moral life of a Christian nation. Now I add a reference to the words of Christ.
III. The words of Christ.—In other lands a reverence, not easy to distinguish from continued worship, is offered to the Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs, at Amritsar. Day after day a succession of readers goes on reciting from this sacred volume in measured tones, or in dispersing with a golden whisk the flies from the stand on which it is placed. Aged ecclesiastics of rank sit on one side, solemn choirs upon the other. Not far outside is a lakelet, called the Pool of Immortality, there is a great golden gate; certain doors of ivory and silver. The Granth is carried in at three o’clock in the morning, and remains in the temple until eleven at night. Day and night the chamber is heavy with the scent of jasmine and marigolds. ‘That which becometh old and waxeth aged is nigh unto vanishing away.’ It is not only of meats that it is written, ‘Wherein they that occupied themselves were not profited.’
One of the noted passages in Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity used to be that in which he spoke with reverential wisdom of the reading of the Lessons in our churches. ‘Sermons,’ says the Churchman, with his stately wisdom, ‘are not the only means. Many long centuries before these our days wise men doubted not to write that by him who but readeth a Lesson in the solemn assembly as a part of Divine Service, the very office of preacher is so far first executed. With their patience, therefore, be it spoken, the Apostles preached as well when they wrote as when they spoke the Gospels of Christ; and our usual public reading of the Word of God for the people’s instruction is preaching.’ Yes! for our Word of God is ‘quick and powerful, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.’ For centuries the Apocalypse was not read in our churches. One chapter and the Epistle for Trinity Sunday, part of another for St. Michael and All Angels, a verse transported by a happy thought from the Sarum Liturgy to our Burial Service. When parts of the Apocalypse are read by a man who has made them his own, have you not seen world-worn eyes become wet with tears and like the soft eyes of a little child? Carry away the great principles—That the prophecy of the Apocalypse is not prediction (except as regards the downfall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Kingdom of Christ); that the multitudinous objects projected before our eyes as illustrations are symbols, not pictorial; that the dates and mystic numbers are not miscellaneously collected from anticipated Chapter s in history. A comparison of the first chapter of Revelation with the Gospels will lead us to a perception of the Spirit and life of Christ’s words. The Fourth Gospel contains no narrative of the Transfiguration, but let us keep Matthew’s account before us, let us compare it with the opening vision of Christ in the beginning of the Revelation, we shall not hesitate to conclude that John’s spirit is looking back to the Holy Mount: ‘Jesus was transfigured before them, and His face did shine as the sun. And, behold! a bright cloud. And a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son. And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid. And Jesus came and touched them and said, Arise, and be not afraid.’ If he who said in his simple and stately way, ‘I, John,’ was the son of Zebedee, he could not fail to have been thinking of the Transfiguration. ‘It is I—be not afraid’ reminds us also of another fear with sweet encouragement. But in the passage the Transfiguration seems transfigured and the glory glorified.
Archbishop Alexander.