A peculiar interest must ever attach to these words in the record of the events that led up to, and immediately preceded, the passion of our Lord. It is impossible to read this incident in St. John's narrative, without being struck by its intensely graphic features, and its inimitable originality. It has been compared to one of those deep fissures in the crust of the earth's surface, which enable us to fathom the depths below. The Speaker suffers us to look down into the inmost centre of His being. In the courts of the Temple, in the presence of many witnesses, after a moment of ecstatic triumph, after an anticipation of coming triumph, suddenly there is a pause, and He who is generally so calm and self-controlled, Himself testifies to an inward conflict. His soul is troubled to its lowest depths. He gives utterance to a cry, a petition, and though that cry is instantly hushed in uttermost submission, yet it is uttered and it is real.
I. In a certain sense, of course, we all acknowledge that our Lord predicted His sad future; but it may be doubted whether we are accustomed to make the fact sufficiently real to ourselves; for it is one to which history affords no adequate parallel. It confronts us with a phase of human experience, in which our Lord stands absolutely alone, and which it is not too much to say that neither design nor imagination would ever have thought of attributing to Him. For it is to be remembered that the evangelists had nothing in the past that could form a precedent for such personal predictions. It is a fact of universal experience that to none of the children of men is it given to pierce the veil of his personal future. No man can tell what tomorrow or next week, or next year, may have in store for him. In the whole range of the prophets, from Isaiah to Malachi, no one is recorded to have essayed to predict the mode or the manner of his own death.
II. What had never been realised before since the world began is in the Gospel narrative set forth, simply, artlessly, without any strain or effort, and we are assured that a foreknowledge of His end, with all its attendant circumstances, was not only claimed by our Lord and affirmed just before His passion, but unfolded long before in a series of orderly and progressive predictions. We find that from the first this consciousness was present with Him. Sometimes He speaks of it darkly and enigmatically, affirming now that the Temple of His body shall be destroyed, and on the third day restored; now that, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up. Sometimes, but not till His disciples were able to bear it, He had spoken of it openly, clearly, without the intervention of type or figure or dark saying. Calmly, deliberately, He affirms not that He maynot that He willbut that He must,go up to Jerusalem and there suffer and die. As the crisis draws nearer and nearer, so His anticipations of the immediate future increase in number and definiteness; now He declares in the presence of multitudes His speedy departure from the world; now He warns His Apostles that one among them will prove the traitor; now He definitely marks out that traitor by a whispered sign; now He sums up all previous hints, dark sayings, mysterious soliloquies, clear predictions, in the institution of the Holy Eucharist.
III. The prescience of suffering receives perhaps its highest expression in the Agony in the Garden. On human principles that agony is wholly misplaced. It comes before the time. It anticipates the occasion which human experience would have suggested. There have indeed been signal triumphs won by the genius of poetical imagination. But in all literature there is no other instance of the ascription to the hero of the story of a series of predictions pointing to and describing the circumstances of his own decease, as by the Saviour of the world, much less an attempt to harmonise them with the details of a narrative, the interest of which shifts from place to place, and involves a multiplicity of incidents, persons, places, occasions. These predictions, I venture to think, have an evidential value of their own, and constitute another link in the chain of evidence that our Lord was indeed all that He claimed to be Son of Man and Son of God, the Foreknowing Saviour, the Predestined Sacrifice.
D. Maclear, Oxford and Cambridge Journal,Nov. 9th, 1882.
References: John 12:27; John 12:28. Contemporary Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 193; S. Cox, Expositions,2nd series, p. 299; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. vii., p. 332. Joh 12:27-31. Homilist,new series, vol. iii., p. 142.