Chapter VI: Part 6

The Apostle could have been no ear-witness of the conversation with the woman. But he describes with such vividness, the impression made upon the disciples who returned when she was departing, that it is difficult to suppose he was not one of them. '_And upon this came His disciples, and marvelled that He talked with the woman: yet no man said, What seekest Thou? or, Why talkest Thou with her?_' The sense of astonishment which they all felt,--the look which showed to each how the other was sharing it with him, and yet the awe which restrained them from questioning Him,--the confidence that He had some great purpose, though they knew not what it was; all this came back to the old man as clearly as if he were then by the well of Sychar, not amidst the merchandise of Ephesus. And so, by a single instance, he makes clearer to us than he could by a multitude of explanations, what must have been continually in the minds of the disciples, when they stood in that presence, and heard words spoken and saw acts done which they could not sound with their plummets, and which called forth faith in Him because they could not.

But though this was so, they had no dread of speaking to Him about common earthly necessities. They knew that He had sat down weary on the well; they knew that He hungered and thirsted. He had sent them to buy food, and they could say, '_Master, eat_,' without any doubt that He would partake of it just as any of them did. Probably He took what they offered Him, even while He said, '_I have meat to eat which ye know not of_.' They had so little suspicion that He would ever work a miracle for His own support,--they were so inwardly certain that He would not,--that they said at once to each other, '_Hath any man brought Him ought to eat?_' No. He had waited for their coming. The ravens had carried no nourishment to Him; He had not commanded the stones to become bread. There must have been a special joy, an unwonted radiance in His face as He answered, '_My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work_.' He had that spring of life within Him, of which He had spoken to the woman, from which life might flow forth to her and to all. And yet He speaks of it as not an original fountain, even in Him. There was One from whom He was sent. The satisfaction of doing His will, of accomplishing his purpose,--this was His food; this was the sustaining principle within Him. St. John has taught us already, and will teach us more completely hereafter, that the relation of the Son to a Father, with all the trust, obedience, communion which it implies, is the subject of the new revelation. To be doing the will of Him that sent Him, to be in perfect sympathy with the will which is at the root of the universe, to be fulfilling the purposes of this will,--this Christ affirms to be meat to Him in a double sense; meat, as that which keeps up the strength of the man--meat, as that which gratifies and satisfies his desires.

One may feel there is great general force in such a sentiment as this; but what is its _special_ application to the story we are reading? Had His interview with the woman supplied Him with what could be called meat in either of these senses? What was there to sustain Him, what was there to delight Him, in her way of receiving His words?

The answer is given in the following passage: '_Say ye not, There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest? Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white already unto the harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal; that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours._'

Many who have gathered crowds about them, who have produced a marked impression upon those crowds, have said, and said truly, that such success was meat and drink to them. If it did not feed their vanity, but sustained them because it showed them they were doing God's will and finishing His work, they may have understood something of Christ's meaning. But the secret food He partook of certainly came from no sudden success that followed His words. First, He met with a woman who had in general answered Him with levity; then a few people of her own rank came at her call. How little would such honours satisfy the ambition of some eloquent disciple of Christ, who has the power of influencing thousands! Could it satisfy Him who came to found a kingdom of which there was to be no end? Yes; for in these first sheaves He could see the certain pledges of a nation's, of a world's, ingathering. The corn-fields which the disciples saw about them would not be reaped for four months; yet the harvest would appear, because the seed had been sown. These men whom He saw coming showed Him that the other harvest was nearer still. The fields were white already for that harvest; the disciples themselves would be reapers in it. He had sent them, and they would receive the wages of reapers. What wages? He had already told them that His own wages were to do the will of God, and to finish His work. Did they want better? They would gather in fruit,--the fruit of all His work and travail, of all God's revelations of Himself from age to age, of all the toil of patriarchs, kings, prophets. These had laboured,--they were entering into their labours. They were come in at the end of a period when all things were hastening to their consummation. They would have the reward which all these men had longed for,--the reward of seeing God's full revelation of Himself, of opening the spring of eternal life of which all might drink together. The divisions of time had nothing to do with an eternal blessing. The sower and the reaper would rejoice together. Why might not Jacob, who had given the well, and the newest Samaritan convert who drank of it, share in those pleasures which are at the right hand of Him, who is, and was, and is to come?

I have only given you a hint or two which may assist you in tracing out the sense of these great words. The Apostles did not enter into them for many years,--not till they had begun to reap the harvest of which He spoke, not till they had learnt that some of the wages of the reapers were persecution and disappointment. So they understood by degrees how unsatisfactory all promises were but those which He had given them; how miserable a thing it was to hope for any reward but that which had been and is His reward. I suppose we must be trained to understand Christ's doctrine in the same school. Till we have been under His discipline we shall have the temper of hirelings, counting His work a hardship, expecting to be paid hereafter for consenting to do it. Or else we shall look for instant harvests,--for mighty effects to follow at once from the things that we speak,--for those fruits which least manifest the calm, patient, loving will of God, and therefore bring no true and inward satisfaction to the spirit of a man. We must learn to see in the seed that same eternal life which is in the perfect flower and fruit--to believe that God will bring the one out of the other; otherwise we shall have much excitement and much weariness, but no food which can support us, no joy which will connect us with the ages that are past and the ages to come. That will not be given to us till we see, in God's revelation of Himself to one sinner, the token of His love to the world.

The whole doctrine concerning the rewards for obedience, which has been the subject of so many wearisome folios by philosophers and divines, is contained, I think, in these eight verses, and may be drawn out of them for daily use by any who think that the Apostle has a higher wisdom than can be found in his commentators, or in their own speculations. The remainder of the chapter contains, in a form as simple and as available, the solution of another problem which has exercised the wits of schoolmen and the hearts of wayfarers. Who has not been tormented with questions and answers about the nature, conditions, kinds, of belief,--about the force of testimony which produces it,--about the organ which exercises it,--about the security or the insecurity of the person who has it or who wants it? On all these points St. John gives us no dissertations. But he tells us a short story about certain Samaritans, and then another rather longer story about a certain Galilæan, which I think may supply the place of many dissertations.

The first is contained in these verses: '_And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on Him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did. So when the Samaritans were come unto Him, they besought Him that He would tarry with them: and He abode there two days. And many more believed because of His own word, and said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying, for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world._'

Suppose this was translated into school phraseology about implicit and explicit faith,--suppose each of these terms was laboriously explained,--all the different opinions of Fathers, Mediæval Doctors, Reforming Doctors, Modern Doctors respecting each compared, weighed, adjusted,--how much learning we should possess! how much the Apostle's doctrine would expand in our hands,--how much we should expand in our own estimation! But supposing we had actually to find out what belief is in our own case, to trace the history of its progress, how thankful we should be to any one who would translate back the learned language into the language of the Gospel, who would let us hear what these Samaritans--vulgar people of our own flesh and blood--said about their belief and its growth!

The first stage of it we have considered already. What the woman told them had a great effect upon their minds, because she spake of what she knew, and not of what she did not know. If she had said, 'He explained the prophecies to me,'--who would have cared? What judge was she of the prophecies, and what judges would they be? If she had said, 'He wrought a miracle in my sight,'--there had been enchanters enough among them, who had imposed upon much wiser people than she was. Her fellow-citizens, if they were not very curious, would not have deserted their common business for such an announcement as that. But, '_He told me all that ever I did_;' then she spoke from her experience. Whether she were wise or silly, a good woman or a bad, that was worth listening to; there were signs of truth about that.

They came and heard Him themselves. And then He told each of them what _he_ had done, showed him to himself, made him feel that he was in the presence of a Light. The Light entered into the separate hearts, and showed them their dark passages. And yet it was a common Light; it gave them a sense of fellowship they had never had before; it gave them a sense of being men, which they had never had before. And, moreover, it was a Light which scattered confusions, ignorances, falsehoods, that had been dwelling undisturbed within them, or that had only been disturbed by what they felt must have been a ray of this same Light. _And_ therefore, without asking the opinion of any wise man whatsoever, these bold peasants said out frankly and broadly, '_We have heard Him ourselves, and_ know _that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world_.'

I cannot tell whether this faith of the Samaritans is what one class of modern divines would call _saving_ faith. I should imagine not. For these poor men said they knew Jesus to be the Saviour of the _world_; and it seems to be put forward as the characteristic of saving faith, that men should believe a Saviour for themselves who is not a Saviour for the world. And, certainly, their belief had not that groundwork which another class of divines tells us is the only one upon which the claims of a Christ can rest. He had done no sign or wonder before them; He had only discoursed with them. On this topic, that other story to which I alluded may possibly throw some light.

It is introduced by the words, '_Now after two days He departed thence, and went into Galilee_.' He was going into Galilee before. A strange reason is given for His spending so short a time among the people who had met Him so cordially. '_For Jesus Himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country._' He did not count it good to stay where He had honour. The Galilæans were His kinsfolk and neighbours, bound to Him by human, and therefore by divine, ties. _There_ was the token that He was to labour among them. More respect He might find elsewhere,--that was not what He came into the world to look for. His followers often judge differently about this matter. It may be that here, as elsewhere, we should act more safely if we thought that He had left us an example that we should walk in His footsteps.

'_Then when He was come into Galilee, the Galilæans received Him, having seen all the things that He did at Jerusalem at the feast: for they also went unto the feast._' They had, then, what we are wont to regard as the right foundation of faith; they had the outward evidence, while the Samaritans were only receiving Him on the testimony of their consciences. '_So Jesus came again into Cana of Galilee, where He made the water wine. And there was a certain nobleman_,'--(a person, probably, belonging to the household of Herod Antipas,)--'_whose son was sick at Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus was come out of Judea into Galilee, he went unto Him, and besought Him that He would come down, and heal his son. Then said Jesus unto him, Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe._' Apparently His judgment of these two kinds of belief was different from ours. That which we think weak and groundless, caused Him inward joy. It was meat upon which He could sustain Himself; it showed Him that the Samaritan fields were white already to the harvest. On the contrary, that stable belief, which rested upon signs and wonders, gave Him little pleasure; rather it called forth a rebuke. The nobleman did not answer the rebuke: '_He saith unto Him, Sir, come down ere my child die_.' This was not the response of a man's conscience to one who had discovered his evil. It was not the kind of trust of the Samaritan woman or the Samaritan man; but it was good honest trust, nevertheless. If the nobleman had been hitherto a mere observer of signs, he was now something more. He was a parent seeking help for his boy. He was a man who, in the sight and under the pressure of death, turns to One who can give life. Jesus at once confesses the change which His own discipline has wrought in him. '_He saith unto him, Go thy way; thy son liveth. And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way._'

Two steps we have traced in the history of his mind. A third remains. '_As he was now going down, his servants met him, and told him, saying, Thy son liveth. Then enquired he of them the time when he began to amend. And they said unto him, Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him. So the father knew that it was at the same hour in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth: and himself believed, and his whole house._'

Here we have, no doubt, the account of a sign, and of its effect upon the persons toward whom it was exhibited. St. John himself connects it with the sign in Cana of Galilee. He appears to wish that we should regard both as specimens of Galilæan signs in distinction from Jerusalem signs. We may, therefore, apply here the principles which we discovered with reference to the marriage-feast. There it seemed that the lesson which was taught belonged to all marriage-feasts,--to all the outward signs of life and joy,--to those mysterious powers by which, in any country or in any age, physical transformations are effected. In this one instance Jesus was revealed as giving the blessing which seals the marriage-vow, wherever it is made,--as everywhere the Inspirer of gladness,--as ruling all the energies of nature. The circumstances in the Capernaum story are much changed; it touches more nearly on the funeral than on the bridal. But in one, as much as in the other, Christ is revealed as the Word of Life. In one, as much as in the other, human relationships are beautified and hallowed by Christ; the relation of the husband there, of the father here. One, as much as the other, applies to England as well as to Galilee. And what was said there of the faith that followed the sign, is even more strikingly developed here. '_He manifested forth His glory, and His disciples_'--those who had already confessed Him to be the Christ upon another ground--'_believed in Him_.' It was a discovery to them of His inward power. It deepened a conviction that had been imparted to them already. The Capernaum nobleman had already believed in Christ, with the belief of one who wants help, and thinks he has found the person who is able and willing to bestow it. The sign unfolds that faith, and makes it more profound. The man becomes not more a seeker of marvels, but less. He desires no longer, casual, flitting exercises of power; he bows to power as inward, continual, moral. He is always in the presence of Him who spoke the word at the seventh hour. At every moment, he and his son and all his household are receiving fresh life from Him. To know Him, to be in fellowship with Him, to be doing His will--which is the will of Him who sent Him: this he finds to be eternal life.

DISCOURSE XI.

THE POOL OF BETHESDA.

[Lincoln's Inn, 3d Sunday after Easter, April 13, 1856.]

ST. JOHN V. 16-18.

_And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, because He had
done these things on the sabbath-day. But Jesus answered
them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore the
Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He had not only
broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father,
making Himself equal with God._

The scene changes again at the opening of this chapter. '_After these things there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to Jerusalem._' What feast it was, the harmonists may settle; as St. John has not told us, I am content to dwell upon the fact, which he evidently thought of great importance, that Jesus did go up to the feasts, and that His acts had a special reference to the state of mind which He found among the inhabitants of the capital; above all, among its religious teachers.

'_Now there is at Jerusalem, by the sheep-market, a pool which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches._' Jerusalem might or might not have been compassed with Roman armies when St. John wrote. I do not know that its independence or its capture would affect the position of the pool or the sheep-market; they might be still just what they had been when the Apostle knew them. Perhaps the pool was no longer visited as in former days; perhaps the tradition of its virtues still drew to it people from the country round. At all events, the sight which had been before his eyes thirty or forty years before, was not one which he would forget. It is not one which we need much effort of imagination to bring before ourselves.

'_In these_' porches '_lay a multitude of sick folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the waters_.' If we look at the separate figures in the picture, they belong as much to the West as to the East--to the nineteenth century as to the first. Nor can any frequenters of an English or German spa consider the motive which brought together so many of different ages and with different ailments, a strange or an obsolete one. Even the notion that at certain times the water would possess a virtue which at other times it would want, may be justified by modern experience, perhaps may be explained by modern science.

But experience and science, it will be said, are both set at nought by the announcement in the next verse: '_For an angel went down at a certain season, and troubled the water: whosoever, therefore, first after the troubling of the water stepped in, was made whole of whatsoever disease he had_.' Here a reason is given for the virtues of the pool;--not, it will be said, a medical reason; not one which can connect the waters of this pool with those which intelligent people frequent for qualities which are, on fair evidence, known or believed to be in them;--but rather one which connects them with the holy wells which in the villages of England, Wales, and Ireland, are supposed to have received a blessing from some local saint. To find St. John adopting or endorsing such legends, causes no pain to those who assume him and his brother Apostles to be the propagators of superstition; ignorant Jews, who were steeped in all the prejudices of their countrymen, and who added to them some of their own invention. There are some who, with a general respect for him and them, can yet give him credit for following the traditions of his country when they were ever so vulgar and false; excusing him on the plea that he knew nothing of physics, and that his business was not with them. There are men of a better and nobler stamp, who, though they do not claim for him any acquaintance with natural science, yet are sure that he lived to scatter delusions, not to foster them; and that he would not have been permitted by the Spirit of truth to claim for lies the name of Him who came to bear witness of the truth. I do not wonder that some of these honest and earnest men should have been able to persuade themselves that the verse I have just quoted has nothing to do with the general narrative of the cure at Bethesda; but has crept into the text from the gloss of some writer who understood Jewish opinions, not the mind of St. John.

I respect the motives of these interpreters, but I think their conclusion is a rash and a wrong one. I am convinced that the words which they would omit are a vital part of the narrative, and that our Lord's act loses very much of its meaning if we overlook them. I am equally convinced that these words contradict no truth of science; that, if taken by themselves, they do not meddle with it, and are only supposed to meddle with it through a logical confusion, from which, for the sake of science and of our own intellectual clearness, it is well that we should be delivered; that, if taken in conjunction with the whole story, they help to scatter a superstition which was very injurious to the Jewish people, and is equally injurious to people in this day.

What St. John affirms is, that a certain invisible angel or minister--an intelligence, as we are wont to speak--was the instrument of making the water of the Pool of Bethesda beneficial to the persons who went down into it. He accounts, in this way, for its operation being more useful at one time than another. That assertion, you say, interferes with the doctrine that there were certain properties in the water itself which affected the condition of human beings. How does it interfere? You hold that the vaccine matter has in itself the property of counteracting the virus of the small-pox. But you hold also that the intelligence of Jenner had something to do with making this vaccine matter available for the actual cure of patients afflicted by the small-pox; you hold that the intelligence of different medical men has something to do with bringing the preventive power to bear on particular cases. You know this for a fact; but physical science tells you nothing of the way in which the intelligence cooperates with the natural agent. The notion that it does is an excusable fallacy; yet it is a fallacy. _In no instance whatever can the mere study of physics help you to determine anything respecting moral or intellectual forces; though at every turn the study of physics compels you to the acknowledgment of such forces._ It will save us from innumerable confusions, if we take this proposition in the length and breadth of it. Through neglect of it, the physician and the metaphysician are perpetually stumbling against each other, when they might be the greatest helpers to each other.

But, it will be said, that notion of an angel which connects it with the intelligence in a man, is a modern one, not the one which we should naturally derive from the Old Testament. I think, if we study those passages in the Old Testament which refer to angels, we shall find that it is exactly _this_ notion which is the result of them, and that any other is a modern one, either derived directly from heathen sources, or from a mixture of heathen feelings with the lore of the New Testament. In the patriarchal times, we hear of angels appearing to Abraham to tell him of blessings which were coming upon his descendants; of angels seen by Jacob in a vision, of one who wrestled with him till the break of day. The stories leave upon us the impression that there are beings who minister to the unseen Lord of the whole earth; who are interested in the well-doing of men; who are different from men, but not so different as to be incapable of converse with them--not so different that they may not present themselves even to the human senses. The effect of those visions and revelations was to take away from the old shepherds the feeling that they were merely surrounded by natural forms or by animal existences which were beneath them; that there was a world near them, though not visible to them, which might have fellowship with them, and which elevated them above their flocks and herds. In the next age,--the age of legal and national life,--there are intimations of an angel going with the people through the wilderness; angels admonish warriors that they should be courageous in fighting the battles of the Lord; angels remind the people of their departures from the law of God; angels arouse humble men to deliver their people from idolatry and from slavery. Here the lessons respecting the nature and work of angels are not changed, but expanded. These messengers communicate more with the spirit of men, present themselves more rarely to the eye. They are witnesses of a permanent divine order, belonging not to the individuals to whom they come, but to their race; of an order from which they have departed, and into which it is the Divine will that they should be brought back. In the regal period, the war or the pestilence,--the direction of natural agencies to the punishment of human crime,--is referred to angels. The effect of _this_ teaching upon the thoughtful Jew was, that he could never suppose himself the mere sport of outward influences of earth, or of air, or of fire. All these had a purpose; all were directed by the wisdom of Him who had entered into covenant with the nation. In the Book of Psalms, which illustrates this period, He is said to '_make His angels spirits, His ministers a flame of fire_.' All natural powers are felt to be angels of God, because they are under the direction of an intelligent and righteous Ruler. In the Books of the Prophets, before the captivity, the angel is not lost sight of; but the Word of God who comes to the Prophet, more and more gathers up all powers and ministries into Himself, while the human teacher to whom he speaks is himself treated as a messenger of the Most High,--as no less His angel than any creature who has not the weeds of mortality. In the Prophets, after the captivity, new functions are assigned to angels. They watch over different lands; provinces of the earth are committed to them by the Lord of all;--it is hinted that some of them may have failed in their trust, as human sovereigns fail in theirs. These lessons seem especially appropriate to the time when the Jew was to feel his connexion with other nations, and to find that each of them supposed itself to be governed by some divine king or demigod.

Is not the doctrine of this chapter entirely consistent with the lessons which St. John had learnt from his fathers? Those lessons, I have urged, can neither be confuted nor confirmed by physical science. But the analogy which we derive from our ordinary experience is all in favour of them. It is a shock to the conscience and reason of man to feel that he is indebted to moral agents,--to spiritual agents,--in a very great degree, for the health and comfort which he enjoys here; but that the whole world which lies beyond his ken is only peopled with physical forces which act upon him blindly and care nothing for him. Men never have been able to persuade themselves of this. The _people_ have always held the opposite faith. Surely it is time to ask ourselves whether that faith must be merely set at nought,--whether its manifest falsehoods and mistakes do not conceal precious truths,--whether those truths can be at variance with any others,--whether we are not bound to bring them into light, as the only means of dislodging the errors to which they have given countenance, and also of overthrowing some of those idols of the cave which the student worships no less ignominiously than the multitude worships the idols of the market-place? I believe St. John tells us how his Master did this work at the Pool of Bethesda: '_A certain man was there which had had an infirmity thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, He saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole? The impotent man answered Him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me. Jesus saith to him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed and walked._'

This was a sign indeed,--a sign addressed to a man who had been waiting day after day, perhaps year after year, for some outward accident to make him well,--that health and disease are dependent upon no accidents; that the power of life is an inward power; that there is One in whom it dwells; that He in whom it dwells is near to the weakest, the most helpless, even the most sinful. It would seem, from the words which our Lord spoke to this man afterwards, '_Go, and sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee_,' as if He had selected a man in whom all these conditions met, who was the oldest and most powerless of all the sufferers there, and had brought the sufferings upon himself by his misdoings. The demonstration, therefore, was complete. Men--the very lowest men--are not the dependants upon outward things, no, nor upon the visitations of angels. Such visitations may be appointed; but there is One who has a right to call Himself a Son--One in whom the mind and purpose of the Lord of angels is expressed--One who fulfils, not occasionally but continually, His purposes of health and restoration to men--One who is the Son of Man--who has sympathy with men, and can take away their infirmities, because He knows them, enters into them, suffers them.

Thus this cure is bringing us to the point to which St. John has been bringing us in all the previous passages of his Gospel. This sign at the Pool of Bethesda, like all the other signs we have been considering, reveals to us the Word who is the Source of life and health to all creatures. We are led from the messenger, visible or invisible, to Him who was with God and was God. We are led from the mere friends or helpers of man to that Word made flesh, the Son of Man. We are led finally to a Son who has come to reveal a Father.

I have chosen my text from the latter part of the chapter, because it brings _this_ subject so directly before us, and because I believe that in doing so it gives us the real moral and explanation of the narrative of which I have just been speaking. Two cures are recorded by St. John as done by our Lord in the city of Jerusalem: one is that at the Pool of Bethesda; the other, that of the blind man at the Pool of Siloam. They are very different in their incidents and their object: the latter we shall have to consider attentively hereafter. But they have this in common,--both were wrought on the Sabbath-day. In both cases, St. John fixes our thoughts upon this point; in both, this circumstance is the cause of the bitterest indignation against Jesus; here it is said to be the motive of a conspiracy against him. '_Immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked: and on the same day was the sabbath. The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, It is the sabbath-day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed. He answered them, He that made me whole, the same said unto me, Take up thy bed, and walk. Then asked they him, What man is that which said unto thee, Take up thy bed, and walk? And he that was healed wist not who it was: for Jesus had conveyed Himself away, a multitude being in that place. Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. The man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus which had made him whole. And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay Him, because He had done these things on the sabbath-day. But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him because He not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God._'

Two points present themselves to us here, and demand some earnest consideration. The first is, Why should the Sabbath-day have been especially chosen by our Lord for these acts of healing? The second is, What connexion was there in the Jewish mind, or in our Lord's own words, between the charge of breaking the Sabbath and the charge of calling God His Father?

The belief in angels had a good effect upon the people of the Jews, in so far as it led them to believe that the Most High cared for them individually as well as nationally,--that He Himself, and not some outward thing, was the Author of their blessings, the Restorer of their health. It was perverted to a bad use by the people, in so far as it led them to depend upon accidental interferences, not upon a continual living Helper. How Christ's sign brought out the good, counteracted the evil, of this faith, I have endeavoured to show you. But the belief of angels and spirits, which distinguished the Pharisees from the opposing sect, had most of the mischief, little of the truth, which clung to it among the crowd whom they despised. The tenet, that angels had interfered and might interfere, did not make them think that God was concerned for His creatures,--that He loved them. It only suggested the thought that there were certain persons and certain places that might receive favours which were withheld from others. It did not bring them to believe that any union between God and man existed or was possible. Rather angels were the dispensers of those laws, and the executors of those punishments, which marked the separation between God and His creatures, and the wrath of God against them. God was the Author of statutes which had been written in tables of stone, and could not be changed. God was the Judge and Condemner of those who broke these statutes. God might dispense with the punctual fulfilment of them, or accept sacrifices as a compensation for the breach of them, in the case of His favourites. But one claim to be such favourites would be the rigorous enforcement of them, as His commandments, against the nation generally, and the ignorant, miserable, sinful portion of it particularly.

Was not this zeal for the laws and ordinances of the Most High a good zeal? Did not Christ come to fulfil the law?--did He wish to set it aside? Consider, my brethren, what the law was. I do not speak of any spiritual interpretation of it; I refer merely to the letter of the Ten Commandments. They begin with these words, '_I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the house of bondage_.' The zeal of the Pharisees for the law of God forgot this foundation of the law altogether. They did not tell the Israelite that the Lord was _his_ God; they did not proclaim the Lord as a Deliverer from bondage, but as the Author of bondage. Therefore, _every_ commandment was denied in its very essence. The first said, '_Thou shalt worship the Lord_,'--that is, the Lord the Deliverer, the Lord _thy_ God,--'_and Him only shalt thou serve_.' But the Pharisee worshipped any god rather than this only God; worshipped a god who was directly the reverse of this only God. Everything in heaven or earth or under the earth--money, the meanest thing of all--was more an object of worship to him than this only God. He could not help taking His name in vain. Every time he pronounced it he took it in vain; he substituted another name for that of the only God; he cherished another name in his heart.

But then came the command to keep the Sabbath-day. Here, at all events, he could be strict to the letter; that he could keep as God had wished it to be kept. What! when that commandment says, 'Man shall rest because God rests; man shall work because God works?' What! when the commandment announced the Sabbath-day as a blessing to the man-servant, and the maid-servant, and the cattle? A Pharisee construe this commandment literally? A Pharisee keep this commandment strictly? Impossible. There was none which he must distort more, in which he must suppress more vital words, which he must more habitually disobey. The denial of the sentence which introduces the commandments--the determination to regard the Lord as a forger of chains, when He declares Himself to be the breaker of them--necessarily led to a greater and grosser violation of this statute and ordinance of the Lord than of all the rest.

And yet there were obvious reasons why the Pharisee should take his stand on the fourth commandment rather than on any other. As our Lord tells him elsewhere, he made it part of his religion to set aside the honour of fathers and mothers. To bear false witness against a neighbour, if he was not a religious man, not one of their sect, was a merit rather than a crime. Covetousness is spoken of in the Gospels as the very principle of their acts towards men and towards God. And--without inquiring how far they were guilty of secret treasons against life, against marriage, against property--since the enforcing of punishments on open crimes, which disturbed the peace of society, was taken out of their hands, there was no way left them of signalizing their care for what they called God's law and God's honour, but by a pitiless rigour in enforcing the customs and traditions which had connected themselves with the Sabbath-day, the reason and the purpose of the day having been forgotten.

Here was the ground which the Jewish teachers had chosen for the exhibition of their morality and religion; it was on this ground that Jesus encountered them. To the first question, then, I answer, that He selected the Sabbath-day above other days for healing the sick, because He came to vindicate the law and make it honourable; because it had been made dishonourable, and the whole sense of it destroyed, by the notion of the Pharisees that it proceeded from an arbitrary Being, who had made it to coerce His creatures, and not from a loving Being who had formed them in His image, and desired that they should be sharers of His blessedness; because, unless the day of the rest could be reclaimed from their perversions, and restored to its right place and dignity in God's gracious economy, the law never could be a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ the Son of Man, but must always be a hard taskmaster to keep them from Him. It was not a single point of truth which was involved in this controversy--least of all the question, whether a commandment might be relaxed in one particular. The whole truth of the old covenant was involved in it; the whole life and work of the Son of Man was involved in it; the purpose for which the Son of God had taken flesh was involved in it.

The other Evangelists make these assertions sufficiently clear. They tell us how Christ claimed to be the Lord of the Sabbath, because '_the sabbath was made for man_;' and, because He was the '_Son of Man_;' how He was more angered at the hardness of heart which displayed itself in the apparent zeal of the Pharisees for the Sabbath, than at all their other exhibitions of the same hardness; how the Jewish rulers met His divine anger with theirs, and decided that the only adequate answer to the demand, '_Is it right to do good on the sabbath-day, or to do evil?_' must be a conspiracy to put Him to death. St. John could not say more on these points. But there was a subject which it was his especial office to handle. He shows us how Jesus made the defence of the fourth commandment, in its letter and its spirit, a means of asserting His own relation to God. '_My Father worketh hitherto, and I work._' Man was bidden to work because God worked. Had GOD ceased to work, then, on the day of rest? Was He not nourishing the earth, and causing it to bring forth and bud on that day? Was He suspending His labours for His creatures on that day? The argument, like those about the ox and the ass falling into the pit, was broad, simple, direct; one of those which men who have lost their life, their humanity, their godliness, in their books, are tormented by hearing; one which opens the deepest abysses of thought and consolation to those who are seeking for a living God, for a Father of their spirits. But such seekers cannot be content with a command to work because God works, to rest because God rests,--they must know how the command can be obeyed. They must know on what foundation the command stands. If there is a Son of Man who can say, 'I work because He works; I do as my Father does;' He may give the sons of men power to work and power to rest. His union to them and to God is the foundation of both.

I have replied, then, to our second question as well as to the first. I have showed you how the act by which Christ, in the judgment of the Jews, broke the Sabbath-day, naturally led to what was in their judgment an act of blasphemy. It was not that He dispensed with a law of God because He was the Son of God. It was not that He put a new sense into the law of God because He was the Son of God. It was that He could interpret the law of God fully. It was that He could accomplish the law fully. It was that He could unfold the Gospel which was hidden in the law. It was that He could show in what God's rest consists, by showing in what His own rest consisted; what God's work was, by the works which He did Himself in the might of God's Spirit. And thus, by one sign, He declared that men are not the servants of angels, and that they are the children of a Father.

O brethren, may those to whom God has given a better and a nobler Sabbath, which commemorates God's rest in the risen Son of Man and Son of God, never forget the truth which He taught the Jewish people respecting their Sabbath, or repeat the Jewish sin by making it a mere legal day instead of His day!

DISCOURSE XII.

THE SON DOING THE FATHER'S WORK.

[Lincoln's Inn, 4th Sunday after Easter, April 20, 1856.]

ST. JOHN V. 43.

_I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive._

I spoke to you last week upon these words,--'_Therefore the Jews sought to kill Jesus, because He not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God_.' I tried to ascertain what connexion there was in their minds between these two offences; I tried also to show you how their feelings respecting the Sabbath-day were involved in their general feelings respecting the Law and respecting the dominion of angels. If there was a Son who was higher than angels, who could express the very mind of God--if that Son was actually in the nature of man--all their thoughts of God and of man must be changed; they must regard Him whom they worshipped as something else than a mere lawgiver, removed to an immeasurable distance from His creatures, only holding occasional intercourse with them through beings of a different order from their own. They must look upon human beings,--that is to say, not only upon themselves, but upon publicans and heathens, upon those whom they regarded as utterly cut off from God,--as standing in a very near and close relation with Him. This, therefore, was the most horrible of all conceptions to them, one which struck at the root of their pride, of that which they called their faith. They might suspect Jesus before, they might despise Him; but the moment He called God His Father, suspicion and contempt gave way to hatred. It was clear enough why He was setting institutions at nought; it was clear enough why He claimed to heal sick men, whom the ministrations of angels could not heal. By His words and His acts He was bringing God and man into the most dangerous proximity. He, '_being a man, was making Himself equal with God_.'

This last charge I did not dwell upon; I reserved it for our consideration to-day. The discourse of our Lord which follows in this chapter has reference to it. No words throw more light upon it than those which I have taken as my text from one of the latest verses. The answer to the charge begins in the nineteenth verse. '_Then answered Jesus, and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise._' You will feel at once that this sentence is the expansion of that plea which Jesus put forth for the cure which He had wrought on the day of rest,--'_My Father worketh hitherto, and I work_.' But, I think, you will feel also how wonderfully it meets the other more awful accusation, that He was raising Himself to a level with God. If it had been true, it would not have been a new charge. '_Ye shall be as gods_,' was the first temptation presented to human beings,--the temptation to which they yielded. The ambition had never ceased in any age or in any man. Jesus would have been but the Person who exhibited it in its highest power, who expressed it with the greatest boldness. But if the doctrine which St. John asserts at the beginning of his Gospel, which he has been working out in every passage of it since, is a sound one; if there is a Word who was with God and was God; if that Word was made flesh, and the glory of the Only-begotten of the Father shone forth in Him; then Jesus was the one Person in the world to whom this charge did not apply; the one Person in whom there was no ambition of making Himself equal with God. And this is what He declares here: 'You think I am exalting myself; on the contrary, this proclamation which I am making of a Father, this claim which I am putting forth to be His Son, is the abdication of all independent greatness, the denial that I am anything in myself. I can do _nothing of myself but what I see the Father do_.'

Here is the new revelation, the discovery of the real ground upon which all things stand,--the will of a Father commanding, the will of a Son submitting. Here is that idea of Godhead which men had been seeking for,--if haply they might feel after it and find it,--in which they had been living and moving and having their being, yet which they had always been rebelling against and contradicting, and which every thought and act of self-will and pride had been putting at a distance from them. The lowliest of all, He who was called the '_carpenter's son_,' was able to speak it out, to translate it into language, as His whole life translated it into act. And this union of wills, this inward substantial Unity, He declares to have its basis in love, the underground of Deity,--'_For the Father_ LOVETH _the Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth_.'