The Individuality of Christian Life
I. God appoints a course of life for each individual Christian. "Lord, what shall this man do?" "What is that to thee?" No words could mark more emphatically the great difference which was henceforth to exist between the paths of those two men, who had hitherto followed Christ side by side. They seem to express a kind of impassable solitude, in which each man was to live. John could not lead the life of Peter; Peter could not fulfil the destiny of John. In different and lonely ways they were each to travel till the end should come. The life of Peter was to be action crowned by suffering; the life of John, a patient waiting for the manifestation of Christ, there, in the difference between labouring and watching, lay the difference in their respective courses. Thus, to each class of men, to each infinitely varied soul, the path of life is divinely adapted.
II. Believing in a divinely ordered course, the question comes: By what rule is that course fulfilled? By what means are we to detect our path? The answer comes in Christ's own words: "Follow thou Me." That simple command guides us all. To follow Christ is, like Him, to obey whenever God's will is clear, to be patient like Him when it is dark. And this is a rule which applies to allcircumstances, and one which can be obeyed in defiance of all results. Follow Christ in His perfect, unmurmuring obedience; and, as you follow, a fuller light will come. The command to Peter was a command to challenge all issues. Although "another shall gird thee, and carry thee where thou wouldst not follow thou Me."
III. We find in Christ's words to Peter the strength which will help us to fulfil our course. "Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou Me." It is the will of Christ which gives us power, for it implies knowledge of and sympathy with us. In another part of the gospel Christ says, "My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me." There we have the picture of feeble human life, elevated, strengthened, shielded from danger, and guided into repose by the ever-watchful sympathy of the strong Son of God.
E. L. Hull, Sermons,3rd series, p. 230.
We have here
I. The revelation of the risen Christ as the Lord of life and death, in that majestic "If I will." In His charge to Peter, Christ had asserted His right absolutely to control His servant's conduct and fix his place in the world, and His power at least to foresee and forecast his destiny and his end. But in these words He goes a step further. "I will that he tarry." To communicate life and to sustain life is a Divine prerogative; to act by the bare utterance of His will upon physical nature is a Divine prerogative. And Jesus Christ here claims that His will goes out with sovereign power amongst the perplexities of human history, and into the depths of that mystery of life; and that He, the Son of Man, quickens whom He will, and has power to kill and to make alive. The words would be absurd, if not something worse, upon any but Divine lips, that opened with conscious authority, unless their utterer knew that His hand was laid upon the innermost springs of being.
II. The service of patient waiting. "If I will that he tarry, what is that to thee?" Christ's charge to John to tarry did not only, as his brethren misinterpreted it, mean that his life was to be continued, but it prescribed the manner of his life. It was to be patient contemplation a dwelling in the house of the Lord; a keeping of his heart still, like some little tarn amongst the silent hills, for heaven with all its blue to mirror itself in. In all times of the world's history that form of Christian service needs to be pressed upon busy people. The men who are to keep the freshness of their Christian zeal, and of the consecration which they will ever feel is being worn away by the attrition even of faithful service, can only renew and refresh it by resorting again to the Master, and imitating Him who prepared Himself for a day of teaching in the Temple by a night of communion on the Mount of Olives.
III. The lesson of patient acquiescence in the Master's undisclosed will. The error into which the brethren of the apostle fell, as to the meaning of the Lord's words, was a very natural one, especially when taken with the commentary which his unusually protracted life seemed to append to it. John did not know exactly what his Master meant. He acquiesces quietly in the certainty that it shall be as his Master wills. The calm acceptance of His will, and patience with Christ's "If," is the reward of tarrying in silent communion with Him.
A. Maclaren, Christian Commonwealth,April 23rd, 1885.
References: John 21:21; John 21:22. Church of England Pulpit,vol. xviii., p. 265; Preacher's Monthly,vol. i., p. 307; Homiletic Magazine,vol. xi., p. 365.