Christ Comforting Himself
I. These words, although spoken, it would seem, to an audience, read like a soliloquy. Jesus Christ, we may say, is here heard comforting Himself, comforting Himself with the reflection that some one loves Him, and with the sense of His power, He could not get on without the assurance that He was loved, any more than we can, least of all, perhaps, the richest, finest natures among us. Some persons are constantly craving and crying out for affection, and devote themselves to the task of choosing their utterances, and framing their conduct, with the view of gaining and keeping as much of it as possible; they scheme and fret for you to fondle them, and are mortified and unhappy if you do not. That is small and weak, and that was not Christ; but to be loved was sweet to Him, and the thought that He was loved, contributed to sustain and animate Him in His work.
II. But the Lord Jesus comforts Himself also, you see, with His full possession of power. It is quite natural and legitimate to contemplate with satisfaction our unrecognised worth and quality, and to retire upon it for consolation; to feel the excellence of the gift in us that is not perceived. We may need to do this occasionally, in encountering depreciation and disparagement, in the presence of supercilious and scornful glances, in order to preserve our self-possession and to keep ourselves from fainting.
III. Observe (1) what it was in Christ which called forth the Father's love. God loved Him, He states, because He laid down His life in order that He might take it again: not, mark, simply because He surrendered it, but because of the motive that actuated Him, the object He had in view in making the surrender. That was Christ's grand idea: to die out that He might revive; to be lost, that He might be restored, as the first-born of many brethren, no longer separate and solitary in His filial standing, but influential to gather others into it. (2) The power of Christ. He was capable of taking up and bearing this terrible cross. He was certain, not only that He could bear the cross set before Him, but that He should reap the full, the anticipated fruit of it. And what the secret of it was, He tells us in the words, "This commandment have I received of my Father."
S. A. Tipple, Echoes of Spoken Words,p. 1.
Victim and Priest
I. The perfect freedom or voluntariness of Christ's death is most plainly declared by Himself in the words which we have selected for our text. They express the abiding purpose of His life. We measure the strength of anyone's will to suffer, first and most easily, by its deliberate formation and persistent endurance. It is important therefore to see, in the historical evidence of the Gospels, that our Saviour's resolution to lay down His life was neither an impulse, born of excited feeling and liable to fail before calmer thought, nor a thing of necessity for which He was gradually prepared, and to which He was at last shut up through circumstances; but was a habitual purpose quietly contemplated from the very first, steadily kept in view all along; a protracted life-long will which could never be long absent from his mind by night or day, till in the end it grew to be almost a passion, and burst out at times in such words of vehement desire as these: "How am I straitened till it be accomplished."
II. This is not all. To know how strong was Jesus' will to suffer death, we must add a new element: the element of self-determination to die. While resignation was a habitual attitude of his soul, there was always more than resignation; there was choice; there was intention. We are apt, I think, to underestimate the priestly act of Jesus in His passion, by thinking rather of His willingness than of His will to suffer. As the reasonable and acceptable victim, He is willing, He consents. But as the Priest or Sacrificer, He does more; He wills, He offers. Even the martyr's choice of death before sin is less absolute and free by far than the choice of Christ. He was a Martyr; but He was more, a Priest; and offered Himself to His suffering with a perfection of liberty which we most distantly approach by these human parallels, and therefore with an intensity of will which we have no power to measure.
III. The self-sacrificing will of our Victim-Priest was crossed by hindrances from the weakness of the flesh, and it overcame them. Free choice and fixed will triumphed over the last resistance from the flesh, and His strong crying and tears was what the writer to the Hebrews calls it a sacrificial oblation offered up to Him who could have delivered Him from that great death.
J. Oswald Dykes, Sermons,p. 164.
"I have power to take it again." Of the considerations which our Lord's self-resurrection suggests; let us content ourselves with these:
I. We are reminded by it what Christianity really and truly means. It is, before all things, devotion to a living Christ. to a Christ who lives now as energetically as He lived on the morning of the resurrection.
II. Next we see the foundation of our confidence in the future of Christianity. It is based on a risen Christ.
III. Easter brings with it a consolation which no serious Christian will miss. He who could at will resume the life which He had laid down on the cross, can surely quicken at pleasure the bodies which have mingled with the dust, and can reunite them to the spirits with which they were joined from the earliest moments of their existence.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 1138.
References: John 10:17; John 10:18. T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons,p. 199; G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount,p. 65.John 10:18. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 46. John 10:22; John 10:23. Homiletic Magazine,vol. xvi., p. 18. John 10:22-42. Ibid.,vol. xvii., p. 106.