Joel Chandler Harris - "Uncle Remus His Songs and His Sayings"

William Shakespeare - "Cymbeline"

Stephen Crane - "War is Kind"

Jules Verne - "The Master of the World"

Expositions of Holy Scripture

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions of Holy Scripture




This, then, was the vision that lay before the Christ in that upper
room, the vision of Himself glorified in His extreme shame, because
His Cross manifested His love and His saving power; of God glorified
in Him above all other of His acts of manifestation when He died on
the Cross, and revealed the very heart of God; and of Himself
glorified in the Father when, exalted high above all creatures, He
sitteth upon the Father's throne and rules the Father's realm.

And yet from that high, and, to us, inaccessible and all but
inconceivable summit of His elevation, He looks down ready to bless
each poor creature here, toiling and moiling amidst sufferings, and
meannesses, and commonplaces, and monotony, if we will only put our
trust in Him, and love Him, and see the brightness of the Father's
face in Him. He cares for us all; and if we will but take Him as our
Saviour, His all-prevalent prayer, presented within the veil for us,
will certainly be fulfilled at last: 'Father, I will that they also
whom Thou hast given Me may be with Me where I am, that they may
behold My glory.'




CANNOT AND CAN

'Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek Me:
and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go ye cannot come; so now I say
to you.'--JOHN xiii. 33.

The preceding context shows how large and black the Cross loomed
before Jesus now, and how radiant the glory beyond shone out to Him.
But it was only for a moment that either of these two absorbed His
thoughts; and with wonderful self-forgetfulness and self-command, He
turned away at once from the consideration of how the near future was
to affect Him, to the thought of how it was to affect the handful of
helpless disciples who had to be left alone. Impending separation
breaks up the fountains of the heart, and we all know the instinct
that desires to crowd all the often hidden love into some one last
token. So here our Lord addresses His disciples by a name that is
never used except this once, 'little children,' a fond diminutive that
not only reveals an unusual depth of tender emotion, but also breathes
a pitying sense of their defencelessness when they are to be left
alone. So might a dying mother look at her little ones.

But the words that follow, at first sight, are dark with the sense of
a final and complete separation. 'Ye shall seek Me'--and not only so,
but He seems to put back His humble friends into the same place as had
been occupied by His bitter foes--'as I said to the Jews, whither I go
ye cannot come; so now I say to you.' There was something that
prevented both classes alike from keeping Him company; and He had to
walk His path both into the darkness and into the glory, alone.

The words apply in their fullness only to the parenthesis of time
whilst He lay in the grave, and the disciples despairingly thought
that all was ended. It was a brief period: it was a revolutionary
moment; and though it was soon to end, they needed to be guarded
against it. But though the words do not apply to the permanent
relation between the glorified Christ and us, His disciples, yet
partly by similarity, and still more by contrast, they do suggest
great Christian blessedness and imperative Christian duties. These
gather themselves mainly round two contrasts, a transitory 'cannot'
soon to be changed into a permanent 'can'; and a momentary seeking,
soon to be converted into a blessed seeking which finds. I now deal
only with the former.

We have here a transitory 'cannot' soon to be changed into a permanent
'can.'

'Whither I go ye cannot come.' Does not one hear a tone of personal
sorrow in that saying? Jesus had always hungered for understanding and
sympathetic companions, and one of His lifelong sorrows had been His
utter loneliness; but He had never, in all the time that He had been
with them, so put out His hand, feeling for some warm clasp of a human
hand to help Him in His struggle, as He did during the hours
terminating with Gethsemane. And perhaps we may venture to say that we
hear in this utterance an expression of Christ's sorrow for Himself
that He had to tread the dark way, and to pass into the brightness
beyond, all alone. He yearned for the impossible human companionship,
as well as sorrowed for the imperfections which made it impossible.

Why was it that they could not 'follow Him now'? The answer to that
question is found in the consideration of whither it was that He went.
When that bright Shekinah-cloud at the Ascension received Him into its
radiant folds, it showed why they could not follow Him, because it
revealed that He went unto the Father, when He left the world. So we
are brought face to face with the old, solemn thought that character
makes capacity for heaven. 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the
Lord, or who shall stand in His holy place?' asked the Psalmist; and a
prophet put the question in a still sharper form, and by the very form
of the question suggested a negative answer--'Who among us shall dwell
with the devouring fire; who among us shall dwell with everlasting
burnings?' Who can pass into that Presence, and stand near God,
without being, like the maiden in the old legend, shrivelled into
ashes by the contact of the celestial fire? 'Holiness' is that
'without which no man shall see the Lord.' And we, all of us, in the
depths of our own hearts, if we rightly understand the voices that
ever echo there, must feel that the condition which is, obviously and
without any need for arguing it, required for abiding with God, and so
going into the glory where Christ is, is a condition which none of us
can fulfil. In that respect the imperfect and immature friends, the
little children, the babes who loved and yet knew not Him whom they
loved, and the scowling enemies, were at one. For they had all of them
the one human heart, and in that heart the deep-lying alienation and
contrariety to God. Therefore Christ trod the winepress alone, and
alone 'ascended up where He was before.'

But let us remember that this 'cannot' was only a transitory cannot.
For we must underscore very deeply that word in my text 'so _now_ I
say to you,' and a moment afterwards, when one of the Apostles puts
the question: 'Why cannot I follow Thee now?' the answer is: 'Thou
canst not follow Me now; but thou shalt follow Me afterwards.' The
text, too, is succeeded immediately by the wonderful parting
consolations and counsels spoken to the disciples, through all of
which there gleams the promise that they will be with Him where He is,
and behold His glory. Set side by side with these sad words of our
Lord in the text, by which He unloosed their clasping hands from Him,
and turned His face to His solitary path, the triumphant language in
which habitually the rest of the New Testament speaks of the Christian
man's relation to Christ. Think of that great passage: 'Ye are come
unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, ... and to
God the Judge of all, ... and to Jesus the Mediator of the new
Covenant.' What has become of the impossibility? Vanished. Where is
the 'cannot'? Turned into a blessed 'can.' And so Apostles have no
scruple in saying, 'Our citizenship is in Heaven,' nor in saying, 'We
sit together with Him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.' The path
that was blocked is open. The impossibility that towered up like a
great black wall has melted away; and the path into the Holiest of all
is made patent by the blood of Christ. For in that death there lies
the power that sweeps away all the impediments of man's sin, and in
that life of the risen, glorified, indwelling Christ there lies the
power which cleanses the inmost heart from 'all filthiness of flesh
and spirit,' and makes it possible for our mortal feet to walk on the
immortal path, and for us, with all our unworthiness, with all our
shrinking, to stand in His presence and not be ashamed or consumed.
'Ye cannot come' was true for a few days. 'Ye can come' is true for
ever; and for all Christian men.

But let us not forget that the one attitude of heart and mind, by
which a poor, sinful man, who dare not draw near to God, receives into
himself the merit and power of the death, and the indwelling power of
the life, of Jesus Christ, is personal faith in Jesus Christ. To trust
Him is to come to Him, and it is represented in Scripture as
conferring an instantaneous fitness for access to God. People pray
sometimes that they may be made 'meet for the inheritance of the
saints in light,' and the prayer is, in a sense, wise and true. But
they too often forget that the Apostle says, in the original
connection of the words which they so quote: 'He _hath_ translated us
from the tyranny of the darkness, and _hath_ made us meet for the
inheritance of the saints in light.' That is to say, whenever a poor
soul, compassed and laden with its infirmity and sin, turns itself to
that Lord whose Cross conquers sin, and whose blood infused into our
veins--the Spirit of whose life granted to us--gives us to partake of
His own righteousness, that moment that soul can tread the path that
brings into the presence of God, and 'has access with confidence by
the faith of Him.' So, brethren, seeing that thus the incapacity may
all be swept away, and that instead of a 'cannot,' which relegates us
to darkness, we may receive a 'can' which leads us into the light, let
us see to it that this communion, which is possible for all Christian
men, is real in our cases, and that we use the access which is given
to us, and dwell for ever in, and with, the Lord.

I have said that the act of faith, by associating a man with Jesus
Christ in the power of His death and of His life, makes any who
exercise it capable of passing into the presence of God. But I would
remind you, too, that to make us more fit for more full and habitual
communion is the very purpose for which all the discipline of our
earthly life, its sorrows and its joys, its tasks and its repose, is
exercised upon us--'He for our profit, that we might be partakers of
His holiness.' Surely if we habitually took that point of view in
reference to our work, in reference to our joys, in reference to our
trials, everything would be different. We are being prepared with
sedulous love, with patient reiteration of 'line upon line, precept
upon precept,' with singularly varied methods but a uniform purpose,
by all that meets us in life, to be more capable of treading the
eternal path into the eternal light. Is that how we daily think of our
own circumstances? Do we bring that great thought to bear upon all
that we, sometimes faithlessly, call mysterious or murmuringly think
of--if we dare not speak our thought--as being cruel and hard? What
does it matter if some precious things be lifted off our shoulders,
and out of our hearts, if their being taken away makes it more
possible for us to tread with a lighter step the path of peace? What
matters it though many things that we would fain keep are withdrawn
from us, if by the withdrawal we are sent a little further forward on
the road that leads to God? As George Herbert says, sorrows and joys
are like battledores that drive a shuttlecock, and they may all 'toss
us to His breast.' In faith, however infantile it may be, there is an
undeveloped capacity, a germ of fitness, for dwelling with God. But
that capacity is meant to be increased, and the little children are
meant to be helped to grow up into full-grown men, 'the measure of the
stature of the fullness of Christ,' by all that comes here to them on
earth. Do you not think we should understand life better, do you not
think it would all be flashed up into new radiance, do you not think
we should more seldom stand bewildered at what we choose to call the
inscrutable dispensations of Providence, if this were the point of
view from which we looked at them all--that they were fitting us for
perpetual abiding with our Father God?

Nor let us forget that there was a transient 'cannot' of another sort.
For 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.' So, as life
is changed when we think of it as helping us toward Him, death is
changed when we think of it as being, if I may so say, the usher in
attendance on the Presence-chamber, who draws back the thin curtain
that separates us from the throne, and takes us by the hands and leads
us into the Presence. Surely if we habitually thought thus of that
otherwise grim chamberlain, we should be willing to put our hands into
His, as a little child will, when straying, into the hands of a
stranger who says, 'Come with me and I will take you home to your
father.' 'As I said unto the Jews ... so now I say to you, whither I
go, ye cannot come.'

Let us press on you and on myself the one thought that comes out of
all that I have been saying, the blessed possibility, which, because
it is a possibility, is an obligation, to use far more than most of us
do, the right of access to the King who is our Father. There are
nobles and corporate bodies, who regard it as one of their chief
distinctions that they have always the right of _entree_ to the court
of the sovereign. Every Christian man has that. And in old days, when
a baron did not show himself at court, suspicion naturally arose, and
he was in danger of being thought disaffected, if not traitorous. Ah!
if you and I were judged according to that law, what would become of
us? We can go when we like. How seldom we do go! We can live in the
heavens whilst our work lies down here. We prefer the low earth to the
lofty sky. 'We are come'--ideally, and in the depths of our nature,
our affinities are there--'unto God, the Judge of all, and to Jesus
the Mediator of the new Covenant.' Are we come? Are we day by day, in
all the pettiness of our ordinary lives, when compassed by hard
duties, weighed upon by sore distress--still keeping our hearts in
heaven, and our feet familiar with the path that leads us to God? 'Set
your affection on things above, where Jesus is, sitting at the right
hand of God.' For there is no 'cannot' for His servants in regard to
their access to any place where He is.




SEEKING JESUS

'... Ye shall seek Me.'--JOHN xiii. 33.

In the former sermon on this verse I pointed out that it, in its
fullness, applies only to the brief period between the crucifixion and
the resurrection, but that, partly by contrast and partly by analogy,
it suggests permanent relations between Christ and His disciples.
These relations were mainly--as I pointed out then--two: there was
that one expressed by the subsequent words of the verse, 'Whither I
go, ye cannot come'--a brief 'cannot,' soon to be changed into a
permanent 'can'; and there was a second, a brief, sad, and vain
seeking, soon to be changed into a seeking which finds. It is to the
latter that I wish to turn now.

'Ye shall seek Me' fell, like the clods on a coffin-lid, with a hollow
sound on the hearts of the Apostles. It comes to us as a permission
and a command and a promise. I do not dwell on that sad seeking, which
was so brief but so bitter. We all know what it is to put out an empty
hand into the darkness and the void, and to grope for a touch which we
know, whilst we grope, that we shall not find. And these poor,
helpless disciples, by their forlorn sense of separation, by their
yearning that brought no satisfaction, by their very listless despair,
were saying, during these hours of agony into which an eternity of
pain was condensed, 'Oh! that He were beside us again!'

That sad seeking ended when He came to them, and 'then were the
disciples glad when they saw the Lord.' But another kind of seeking
began, when 'the cloud received Him out of their sight'; as joyful as
the other was laden with sorrow, as sure to find the object of its
quest as the other was certain to be disappointed. What He said in the
darkness to them, He says in the light to us: What 'I say unto you I
say unto all,' _Seek!_ So now we have to deal with that joyful search
which is sure of finding its object, and is only a little, if at all,
less blessed than the finding itself.

I. Every Christian is, by his very name, a seeker after Christ.

There are two kinds of seeking, one like that of a bird whose young
have been stolen away, which flutters here and there, because it knows
not where that is which it seeks; another, like the flight of the same
bird, when the migrating instinct rises in its little breast, and
straight as an arrow it goes, not because it knows not its goal, but
because it knows it, yonder where the sun is warm and the sky is blue,
and winter is left behind in the cold north. 'Ye shall seek Me' is the
word of promise, which changes the vain search that is ignorant of
where the object of its quest is, into a blessed going out of the
heart towards that which it knows to be the home of its homelessness.
Thus the text brings out the very central blessedness and peculiarity
of the Christian life, that it has no uncertainty in its aims, and
that, instead of seeking for things which may or may not be found, or
if found may or may not prove to be what we dreamt them to be. It
seeks for a Person whom it knows where to find, and of whom it knows
that all its desires will be met in Him. We have, then, on the one
side the multifarious, divergent searchings of man; and on the other
side the one quest in which all these others are gathered up, and
translated into blessedness--the seeking after Jesus Christ.

Men know that they need, if I may so put it, four things: truth for
the understanding, love round which the heart may coil, authority for
the will which may direct and restrain, and energy for the practical
life. But, apart from the quest after Christ, men for the most part
seek these necessary goods in divers objects, and fragmentarily look
for the completion of their desires. But fragments will never satisfy
a man's soul, and they who have to go to one place for truth, and to
another for love, and to another for authority, and to another for
energy, are wofully likely never to find what they search for. They
are seeking in the manifold what can be found only in the One. It is
as if some vessel, full of precious stones, were thrown down before
men, and whilst they are racing after the diamonds, they lose the
emeralds and the sapphires. But the wise concentrate their seekings on
the 'one Pearl of great price,' in whom is truth for the brain, love
for the heart, authority for the will, power for the life, and all
summed in that which is more blessed than all, the Person of the
Brother who died for us, the Christ who lives to fill our hearts for
ever. One sun dims all the stars; and the 'one entire and perfect
Chrysolite' beggars and reduces to fragments 'all the precious things
that thou canst desire.'

To seek Him is the very hall-mark of a Christian, and that seeking
comes to be an earnest desire and effort after more conscious
communion with Him, and a more entire possession of His imparted life
which is righteousness and peace and joy and power. According to the
Rabbis, the manna tasted to each man what each man most desired. The
manifoldness of the one Christ is far more manifold than the
manifoldness of the multiplicity of fragmentary and partial aims which
foolish men perceive.

The ways of seeking are very plain. First of all, we seek if, and in
proportion as, we make the effort to occupy our thoughts and minds,
not with theological dogmas, but with the living Christ Himself. Ah!
brethren, it is hard to do, and I daresay a great many of you are
thinking that it is far harder for you, in the distractions and rush
and conflict of business and daily life, than it is for people like
me, whom you imagine as sitting in a study, with nothing to distract
us. I do not know about that; I fancy it is about equally hard for us
all; but it is possible. I have been in Alpine villages where, at the
end of every squalid alley, there towered up a great, pure, silent,
white peak. That is what our lives may be; however noisome, crowded,
petty the little lane in which we live, the Alp is at the end of it
there, if we only choose to lift our eyes and look. It is possible
that not only 'into the sessions of sweet silent thought,' but into
the rush and bustle of the workshop or the exchange, there may come,
like 'some sweet, beguiling melody, so sweet we know not we are
listening to it,' the thought that changes pettiness into greatness,
that makes all things go smoothly and easily, that is a test and a
charm to discover and to destroy temptation, the thought of a present
Christ, the Lover of my soul, and the Helper of my life.

Again, we seek Him when, by aspiration and desire, we bring Him--as He
is always brought thereby--into our hearts and into our lives. The
measure of our desire is the measure of our possession. Wishing is the
opening of our hearts, but, alas, often we wish and desire, and the
heart opens and nothing enters. Wishes are like the tentacles of some
marine organism waving about in a waste ocean, feeling for the food
that they do not find. But if we open our hearts for Him, that is
simultaneous with the coming of Him to us. 'Ye have not, because ye
ask not.' Do not forget, dear friends, that desire, if it is genuine,
will take a very concrete form and will be prayer. And it is
prayer--by which I do not mean the utterance of words without desire,
any more than I mean desire without the direct casting of it into the
form of supplication--it is prayer that brings Christ into any, and it
is prayer that will bring Him into every, life.

Nor let us forget that there is another way of seeking besides these
two, of looking up to Him through, and in the midst of, all the shows
and trifles of this low life, and the reaching out of our desires
towards Him, as the roots of a tree beneath the soil go straight for
the river. That other way is imitation and obedience. It is vain to
think of Him, and it is unreal to pretend to desire Him, if we are not
seeking Him by treading in the path that He has trod, and which leads
to Him. Imitation and obedience--these are the steps by which we go
straight through all the trivialities of life into the presence of the
Lord Himself. The smallest deflection from the path that leads to Him
will carry us away into doleful wastes. The least invisible cloud that
steals across the sky will blot out half a hemisphere of stars; and we
seek not Christ unless, thinking of Him, and desiring Him, we also
walk in the path in which He has walked, and so come where He is. He
Himself has said that if His servant follows Him, where He is there
shall also His servant be. These things make up the seeking which
ought to mark us all.

I note that--

II. The Christian seeker always finds.

I pointed out in my last sermon the strange identity of our Lord's
words to His humble friends, with those which on another occasion He
used to His bitter enemies. He reminds the disciples of that identity
in the verse from which my text comes: 'As I said to the Jews ... so
now I say to you.' But there was one thing that He said to the Jews
that He did not say to them. To the former He said, 'Ye shall seek Me,
and shall not find Me'; and He did not say that--even for the sad
hours it was not quite true--He did not say that to His followers, and
He does not say it to us.

If we seek we shall find. There is no disappointment in the Christian
life. Anything is possible rather than that a man should desire Christ
and not have Him. That has never been the experience of any seeking
soul. And so I urge upon you what has already been suggested, that
inasmuch as, by reason of His infinite longing to give truth and love
and guidance and energy and His whole Self, to all of us, the amount
of our possession of the power and life of Jesus Christ depends on
ourselves. If you take to the fountain a tiny cup, you will only bring
away a tiny cupful. If you take a great vessel you will bring _it_
away full. As long as the woman in the old story held out her vessels
to the miraculous flow of the oil, the flow continued. When she had no
more vessels to take, the flow stopped. If a man holds a flagon
beneath a spigot with an unsteady hand, half of the precious liquor
will be spilt on the ground. Those who fulfil the conditions, of which
I have already been speaking, may make quite sure that according to
their faith will it be unto them. And if you, dear friend, have not in
your experience the conscious presence of a Christ who is all that you
need, there is no one in heaven or earth or hell to blame for it but
only your own self. 'I have never said to any of the seed of Jacob,
Seek ye My face in vain'; and when the Lord said, 'Ye shall seek Me,'
He was implicitly binding Himself to meet the seeking soul, and give
Himself to the desiring heart.

Remember, too, that this seeking, which is always crowned with
finding, is the only search in which failure is impossible. There is
only one course of life that has no disappointments. We all know how
frequently we are foiled in our quests; we all know how often a prize
won is a bitterer disappointment than a prize unattained. Like a
jelly-fish in the water, as long as it is there its tenuous substance
is lovely, expanded, tinged with delicate violets and blues, and its
long filaments float in lines of beauty. Lay it on the beach, and it
is a shapeless lump, and it poisons and stings. You fish your prize
out of the great ocean, and when you have it, does it disappoint, or
does it fulfil, the raised expectations of the quest? There is One who
does not disappoint. There is one gold mine that comes up to the
prospectus. There is one spring that never runs dry. The more deep our
Christian experience is, the more we shall take the rapturous
exclamation of the Arabian queen to ourselves: 'The half was not told
us!'

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.