[Lincoln's Inn, 5th Sunday in Lent, March 9, 1856.]
St. JohnII. 16.
Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise.
The first three Gospels have been sometimes called theGalilæanGospels; the fourth, theJerusalemGospel. The distinction would be a very false one, if it implied that our Lord's relation to Jerusalem was not present to the minds of the earlier Evangelists, or that St. John overlooked His relation to Galilee. In the ninth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, we are told that Jesus set His face to go to Jerusalem. All the chapters which follow refer to events which took place in that journey, and contain discourses relating to the end of it, and to the city itself. In the thirteenth, we hear of His sending a message to Herod, that a prophet could not perish out of Jerusalem; in the nineteenth, of His looking down upon Jerusalem and weeping over it. The climax of the narrative, not only of St. Luke, but of St. Matthew and of St. Mark, is the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, to be hailed as a king, to die as a malefactor. On the other hand, St. John presents his Master to us in the midst of Galilæan disciples. He carefully omits any allusion to the birth at Bethlehem; he records the first manifestation of His power and nature as given at Cana.
But though these observations show how easily the supposed difference between these narratives may be exaggerated and perverted, they do not prove it not to exist. We have no hint in the first three Evangelists of Christ's presence at any of the Jerusalem feasts, between that in His twelfth year and that which preceded His crucifixion. The scene of the most memorable acts and discourses recorded in St. John, is laid at Passover, Tabernacle, Dedication feasts, to which He had come up from Galilee. The three Evangelists speak of Him continually as teaching in the synagogues; only at the close of His ministry as teaching in the Temple. The second manifestation of our Lord spoken of by St. John is when He drove out of the Temple those who were selling and buying in it.
This narrative is the most signal instance of discrepancy between St. John and the other Evangelists which we shall meet with in our whole course. An act similar, in nearly every particular, to that which our Gospel appears to connect with the period immediately after Christ's baptism—before the Baptist's imprisonment—is said in the others to have been performed when He was about to keep the last passover. 'May not these reports,' it has been asked, 'refer to the same transaction? Need we suppose that St. John troubled himself about chronology? May not his recollections of events at which he was present have been united by some other thread than one of years or days? Oftentimes we may have observed how a word evokes a train of slumbering thoughts. Why may not he who had just been speaking of the firstsignwhich Jesus did, have been led on by that name to the question of the Jews in the eighteenth verse, "What sign shewest Thou that Thou doest these things?"'
Such a method of removing a grave difficulty might be reasonable enough. But is there a grave difficulty—is there any difficulty—to be removed? There is no internal improbability in the supposition that our Lord inaugurated His ministry by one act of purification, and wound it up by another. If we accept the one Evangelist as an authority for the first, the three for the second, we gain, I think, what more than compensates us for an apparent repetition. We acquire a deeper sense of the meaning of the Temple, of the relation in which it stood to the Jews, to mankind, and to Christ. We understand better what the three Evangelists mean when they say that the disciples thought that the destruction of the Temple must be the end of the age, of their world; what St. John means when he speaks of the temple which would be destroyed and raised again.
Some commentators upon the Scriptures, who really wish to understand them, but who feel entangled by the habits and notions of their own time, lament that they cannot reproduce the state of feeling which belonged to the Jew when he gazed upon his temple, or entered within its precincts. 'What help,' they say, 'lies in the descriptions of the most accurate and lively travellers? What should we gain by beholding them with our own eyes? We need to annihilate time as well as space. The mind of the people who gazed eighteen hundred years ago upon these spots will not come back to us merely because we are able to receive a tolerably correct impression of the spots themselves.'
I confess, my brethren, that I am quite unable to sympathise with these complaints. I do not think it requires any effort of imagination to realize the state of mind of an ordinary Jew, as he walked through the city of David, or stood upon the holy hill, in the days of Herod and of Pilate. If we realize the state of mind of an ordinary citizen of London, walking in our streets, or entering the Abbey which contains the sepulchres of our kings and poets, we shall not need any other aid to bridge over the chasm which divides us. Occupation with everything that is before us, with the news of the hour, with the private business which we have most in hand, indifference and torpidity about the past,—these would be our general characteristics. They may be varied by our greater or less interest in architecture—our desire to maintain or confute some architectural theory—by national pride, if we should be making our buildings known to foreigners—by a certain painful sense that we ought to put our minds into a sentimental attitude. Do you suppose the case would have been different with the Jews? Do you suppose there was any charm in the outside of the Temple, which forced a sensual money-getting race into a more elevated or more serene habit of feeling than that which we drop into? Do you suppose that their sacred traditions, their glorious history, their divine calling, must have broken the charm of custom for them, or have lifted the incubus of the world from their hearts? If you do, you adopt a notion which the Scriptures confute in every line. They never tell us that the gravitation of the Jewish soul to earth was less strong than that of other men. They never represent the Jew as wanting one bad and base tendency which belongs to you and me. The evidence which the Bible has produced of its veracity to people of all conditions, in all countries, the most unlike outwardly to those of whom it speaks, is this, that it shows us creatures in allinwardrespects like ourselves, as little capable of being moved by present signs or by records of the past, out of chillness and death, as we are.
Accordingly, what spectacle is it which the passage I am considering brings before us? The spectacle of no appalling crime, of none of those hideous and revolting acts which we know from the Jewish historian were perpetrated at the time, and in which the religious sect of the day had its full share. It is a spectacle which had become familiar to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, which every Pharisee had continually before his eyes when he went into the Temple to pray,—most glaringly, it is probable, during the most sacred festivals. Within, the priests offered the regular sacrifices; without, in another part of the house, there was a market for sheep and oxen; there were seats for the money-dealer. The practice was so regular, so sanctioned by prescription, that no one thought anything of it. The pious Jew was no more scandalized by it than the pious Englishman is scandalized by reading an advertisement for the sale of a living. If we have distinctions which satisfy our consciences between the disposing of an actual cure of souls and of the right to endow another with such a cure,—if a line, sometimes invisible to the naked eye, separates the sin of Simony from deeds which laymen may lawfully do, and by which clergymen may lawfully benefit,—the people of Jerusalem had distinctions just as recognised, quite as capable of being defended in argument. Theholyplace might not be approached by any profane feet; that was sacred indeed to the Lord. But the outer court—why might not that be left for ordinary traffic? Perhaps the separation of the priests from the mere throng of worshippers—above all, from the Gentile who might be found among them—was better marked by the concession of this privilege. At all events, it was a privilege guaranteed by usage to the trader. If it was disturbed, would he not probably become disgusted with his country's sanctuary altogether? Might he not betake himself to some Roman temple,—to a worship which was more associated with amusement, if not with business?
I do not know that this calculation was altogether a wrong one. I do not suppose that if the Sanhedrim had chosen or had been permitted by its masters to prohibit these markets, any moral benefit would have been gained for the nation. For what had made the Temple holy and dear to any Jew of that day or of former days? Not its situation, not its having been built by the wise king, not its having been restored after the captivity, not the goodly stones with which Herod had adorned it. No! but the sense of an invisible glory; the belief that God—whom no man had seen at any time—had been pleased to meet His people there. Could any Jewish laws restore this conviction when it had departed? Could regulations to protect a certain enclosure from pollution give rise to anything, except despicable subterfuges, except the vilest hypocrisy, when the only ground and warrant for these regulations was forgotten, when those who would have made them as little confessed the Divine presence as those whom they would have excluded. For this—this was the secret of the Jewish desecration of the Temple. The priests who ministered at the inner shrine did not, for the most part, believe in the Divine presence more than the people who sold sheep and oxen without. A trade was going on in both places. There it was a traffic with God; here it was a traffic among men. The awe of One who dwelt with them, who revealed Himself to them, whose righteousness was their strength, had been exchanged for the fear of One who might call them to account for their treacheries to each other if they withheld their customary and toilsome services from Him.
The preacher in the wilderness had been taught that, when a nation has reached such a condition of rottenness as this, it is not enough to lop off withered branches; the axe must be laid to the root. When the Scribes and Pharisees came to him, he told them to bring forth fruits of repentance, fruits which would show themselves in the Temple as well as the market. But he did not visit either the Temple or the market. Jesus concerned Himself with both. 'He went into the Temple, and found them that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting. And when He had made a scourge of small cords, He drove them all out of the Temple, and the sheep and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables.'
Some who read this story say, that it offends their notion of our Lord's dignity. Could He, with His own hand, chastise these traders? Some say, it offends their notion of His benignity. Could the All-Merciful exhibit such wrath against a tolerated, perhaps an unconscious, profaneness? Before we consider these opinions, it may be well to hear what the disciples felt, when they saw Him with the scourge by whom they had sat at the feast, whom they had hailed as the Giver of the marriage blessing, as the Inspirer of joy. 'They remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.' These words came unbidden into their minds. His look, His voice, expressed all that they had ever heard of the vehement earnestness with which kings and prophets of old had felt the pollutions of God's Temple, and had sought to purge it of them. Josiah and Ezekiel revived in Him. He had forgotten Himself. He was possessed by the spirit that possessed the men of old. There was a fire burning in Him that could not be quenched, till it had consumed all the chaff from the threshing-floor.
Such was their impression at the moment. Looking back upon it after all later events had interpreted it, St. John felt that this was a manifestation of grace and truth, as much as the making the water wine, or the healing the sick. For he had learnt that a gracious Being must be intolerant of that which is ungracious, that a true Being must seek to destroy falsehood—that falsehood most which is nearest the heart of a nation, the altar of God. He felt that this wrath must have reached its highest point in the most gracious, most true Being, in Him from whom all had received their portions of grace and truth. He felt that this wrath must have been least restrained in Him by any thoughts of what would look well in the eyes of men. What were all the notions which he had formed about dignity or comeliness? The Word made flesh was making it manifest that every punishment of every wrong doer was administered by Him; that whatever agents He may employ to purify his Church, to inflict vengeance upon those who have defiled it, the rod is really in His hand,—that it is He who directs and measures every blow.
But St. John saw more in the act than this. He had said in his former chapter, not only, 'We beheld Him who was full of grace and truth, Him of whose fulness we hadall received,' but 'We beheld His glory, as the glory of the only-begotten of the Father.' He teaches us to recognise a manifestation ofthisglory, also, in the driving the money-changers out of the Temple. 'Jesus said to them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise.'
The zeal which devoured Jesus was surely a zeal for the house of that God to whom Solomon had prayed, 'Lord, wilt thou in very deed dwell upon earth?' It was for the house of that God whom kings and prophets had worshipped between the cherubim. But which of these had dared to use the language which He used? Which of them had ever said, 'It is the house ofmy Father'? It was anewname,—a wonderful and awful name. And yet the whole force of the testimony which Christ bore for the old building—for the house in which their fathers worshipped—lay in this name. If that house was not to be a house of merchandise—if it was ever to be that again which holy men had believed and found it to be—this new name must remove its debasement, this new revelation must restore its greatness. No other could suffice to undo the hypocrisy of the priests, because that hypocrisy came from their thinking that the house was theirs—from not believing that there was any relation between themselves and Him to whom they offered their worship and their sacrifices. If there was a man who could call it 'my Father's house,' heaven and earth were not at the distance they thought and hoped,—their Judge was very near. On the other hand, no revelation but this could have brought the outer court once more into union with the inner court, could have made both parts of the house of God. For the reason why the people traded in that court, and felt they had no business anywhere else, was that they had no belief that God cared for them, or that there was any fellowship between them and Him, except through those priests who were the barriers to all fellowship. If Jesus of Nazareth, the poor man, one of them, could say, 'It is my Father's house,' the publican might feel then,—even the Gentile might feel afterwards,—that there was a house for him; not a place for selling sheep and oxen, and changing money, but a refuge from the weariness of merchandise, from the haggling and lying of the world, in the presence and heart of a Friend who giveth to all liberally, of One who is altogether righteous and true.
In after days we shall find the Jews felt the boldness of this language, and made it their principal charge against Jesus that He dared to use it. On this occasion it seems to have fallen dead upon their ears. Their question is not, 'What sign shewest thou seeing' thou sayest this, but 'seeing thou doest these things?' They meant nothing more, I suppose, than, 'Why dost thou, a mere Galilæan stranger, take upon thee to drive out these oxen? A prophet might do it—perhaps even a zealot, if he was a Levite, and claimed the honours of his ancestor Phinehas, might do it—but what sign canst thou produce that such an office belongs to thee?' I do not find more intheirdemand than this; but the answer of our Lord refers to His previous words as well as to theirs. He could not give them a sign that He had a right to cleanse the Temple, which would not also be a sign that He had a right, in the strictest sense, to call the Temple 'His Father's house.' You must recollect that this was the claim He had to make good, if you would understand Him when He says, 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.'
The sentence was, of course, enigmatical. The Jews regarded it simply as the language of a fanatic or a madman. 'Forty and six years,' they said, 'was this Temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?' St. John evidently indicates that it was not much more intelligible to him and to his fellow-disciples, when they first heard it, than to their countrymen. But he says a time came when they did understand it. 'He spake of the temple of His body. When therefore He was risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this unto them; and they believed the scripture, and the word that Jesus had said.'
Are we to suppose that thethirdday of the resurrection was the key which unlocked our Lord's meaning? No doubt that was an outward help in the discovery of it; but it would have been a most imperfect help, if they had not attached a meaning to the resurrection which had nothing to do with days or years. By raising Jesus from the dead, God declared Him to be His Son. This was St. Paul's language to the Romans,—this was the very substance of his preaching. By raising Him from the dead, He declared that in Him all the building fitly framed together grew to be an holy temple in the Lord. This was his language to those Ephesians among whom the son of Zebedee was now dwelling. It was the resurrection, then, which taught the disciples that the body of Christ was that real temple of God, of which all stone temples had been the symbols,—that in this only the fulness of God dwelt,—that in this the prayer of Solomon, that God, whom the heaven of heavens could not contain, would dwell with men upon earth, could be actually fulfilled. Some critics say there is an awkwardness in supposing that our Lord pointed to His own body when He spoke of destroying the Temple; and that if He did not, the Evangelist would seem to charge Him with using words in a double sense,—so deceiving His hearers. I do not see why we should imagine Him to have pointed to His body; why His eyes may not have been fixed on the building which He had called His 'Father's house.' He did mean, that, if they destroyedthathouse,—if their money-worship, falsehood, hypocrisy, brought it to utter ruin, and it was at last given up to Roman soldiers,—there was a house not made with hands, which was all that Solomon's, in the very best and noblest conception of it, had tried to be. He meant certainly more than this. He meant that they might and would try to destroy the outward fabric ofthismore glorious temple; but that in three days the dead body would come back from the tomb, and be proclaimed to the world as God's own everlasting habitation. You may call this a double sense of words, if you like; but bysuchdouble senses deceptions are not caused or promoted—they are cleared away. The Jew was labouring under a terrible deception; he was practising a continual equivocation. The Temple of the Lord was a sacred place to him,—he gloried in possessing it; yet he did not in his heart believe that God was meeting His creatures, holding any intercourse with them, caring for them. The building itself, therefore, acquired a reverence in his mind which was apart from reverence to God, nay, fatal to that reverence. God was absorbed in the Temple. The inward thought of the priest was, that if it perished God would perish. Hence arose infinite contradictions in his practice, alternations of scrupulosity and profaneness. Now the money-changer is permitted to sit within it,—now a cry is raised that a Stephen speaks evil words against the holy place, and must be stoned. There was but one way of breaking down this habit of mind: it was to affirm and prove that the Temple was not a fiction,—that the belief of the elder men respecting it was not a fiction,—that God and man were not divided,—that the prophecy of their complete fellowship was not an idle prophecy leading to nothing,—that men might draw nigh to God, as to a father, on the holy hill of Zion; because there was an only-begotten Son, whose body was filled with that Spirit which would raise it out of the grave.
No; our Lord did not deceive the Jews when He gave them the fullest, truest sense of their own Scriptures, of their own calling and history. If any words, any acts could have undeceived them, they would have been His. Alas! when money-worship has reached the vitals of a nation, when it has entered into the house of God, the very words and acts of the Son of God may not purge it of its delusions,—they may take their shape and colour from these delusions. May God avert theomenfrom our land, from our Church! May He enable us to believe that every building in which He permits us to worship Him, and to present before Him the finished sacrifice of Christ, is indeed the house of our Father, because of His Father! May every chastisement He sends to us, individually or nationally, be viewed by us as a scourge with which He is cleansing His temple of them that sell and them that buy in it,—of our corrupt traffickings with our own consciences and with Him! May He help us to believe in Christ's incarnation and passion, that we may attain to the full glory of His resurrection, and may find in it the proof that His body was the temple of the Holy Ghost, and that ours are to be temples holy and acceptable unto Him!
[Lincoln's Inn, Palm Sunday, March 16, 1856.]
St. JohnIII. 3.
Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
It is undoubtedly right to connect the beginning of this chapter with the latter verses of the preceding one. 'Now when He was in Jerusalem at the passover, in the feast, many believed in His name, when they saw the miracles which He did. But Jesus did not commit Himself unto them, because He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for He knew what was in man.' I must ask you here, as everywhere else in St. John, to substitute the wordsignsformiracles. Our unfortunate adoption of this last word—which cannot be referred, as some of our careless translations may be, to the following of the Vulgate, for it hassigns—has sadly weakened and perplexed the Evangelist's statements.Here, for instance, he does not tell uswhatthe acts of Christ were which were done at the passover. He does not say whether He healed the sick, or cast out devils. He fixes our attention on this point,—that the acts were received by many of those who were gathered at the feast as signs. 'They believed on Hisname.' The wordname, in every part of Scripture, expresses that which is invisible. It is the contrast to an idol, or that which may be seen. Even idolaters recognised thenameof the god as that which was expressed by the outward image, as that which only the mind could recognise. We cannot, then, give less force to the phrase, 'They believed on His name,' than this,—they confessed a power within Him which put forth these outward manifestations of itself. We should not try to be more definite when we are describing the vague feelings of a people. One moment they might think, 'Somedivine power is at work in Him; He isaProphet.' At another, 'He istheDeliverer, the King we are looking for.' The passover was a time at which such opinions were most likely to be discussed, when parties were most likely to be formed about any new leader. The words which follow, 'But Jesus did not commit Himself to them,' indicate, I think, that such a party was ready to gather itself round Him. He did not covet their support. He did not show the least desire to make use of their services, as one claiming to be the Christ might have done. But the language was capable of another sense. It might denote the caution of a chieftain who was waiting till he had sounded the dispositions of his followers, till he had assurance from some competent witnesses of their fidelity. The notion of such prudence in One who came to give His life for the world, of such need of information in Him whose life was the light of men, was utterly revolting. St. John adds, that the reason of His not committing Himself to this party was, 'that He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify concerning Man: for He knew what was in Man.' They were not to discern and choose Him; He was to discern and choose them. He was not a King that a faction was to set up; He was the original Lord of men—ruling them not as a stranger, not as one who is separate from them, but as one possessing the most intimate knowledge of that which is distinct and peculiar in each man, and oftheman that is in all.
That there should be many in the crowd at the passover—many of the ignorant expectants of a Christ—who thought that Jesus had given sufficient signs of His right to the name, is not surprising. They might be all the more willing to recognise Him, because He seemed to be of their class. But these signs had affected some to whom the thought of a Galilæan peasant must have been utterly scandalous. 'There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: the same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these signs which thou doest, except God were with him.' The words express more than an individual opinion. Nicodemus must have been conversing with other members of the Sanhedrim. A suspicion that a newTeacher—perhaps a Prophet—with some unusual powers, had appeared, might be diffusing itself through the body.Whencethe powers were derived, whether the prophet was true or false, were still questions to be asked. It was a further question whether the Prophet had any claim to be considered the Christ. The people might easily arrive at that conclusion; a ruler would be disposed to reject it. Yet it might be the true one. Nicodemus would evidently like to know. He could not take the rash step of putting himself under the banner of one who might lead him to rebellion; but he would ascertain the fact privately, if he could.
The reply meets the thought in the heart of the speaker, not the words he had uttered. 'You wish to know whether I am about to set up a kingdom. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."' The phrase 'kingdom of God,' or 'kingdom of heaven,' is one which is continually recurring in the first three Evangelists; it may be said to be nearly their most characteristic phrase. It is not characteristic of St. John; he uses it rarely. But if we want a commentary upon every passage in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in which it is to be found; if we want to know why we hear of it in connexion with the parables,—why the Gospel which the Apostles were to preach is called the Gospel of this kingdom,—I should point you to this verse and to the conversation which follows it. Nicodemus was expecting, in some way or other, toseethe kingdom of God. Signs were to show who the divine King was; He would present Himself in such wise to His people, that they should have no doubt of Him and His authority. All this he thought would be granted by God, if He fulfilled His promises, and raised up the Son of David to sit upon David's throne. Was the hope a wrong one? Could less than a clear demonstration be a warrant for accepting any being clothed in human flesh as the divine Prince and Deliverer? Verily, nothing less. They must see the kingdom of God. It must reveal itself to them with an evidence which they could not gainsay. It must lay hold upon them as its subjects,de factoandde jure, with a compulsion not weaker but mightier than that with which the Roman empire had laid hold of them. The arguments of the Christ must be as decisive in their own kind as the arguments of the Cæsar.
But were they of the same kind? Our Lord says, 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' This language does not occur for the first time in our Gospel. We heard before that the divine Word 'came to His own, and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God; which were born not of flesh, nor of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God.' Here is the announcement of another kind of birth from that which we call the natural birth. And yet it is not a portentous,unnatural birth. If the doctrine which is the foundation of this Gospel is true; if the Word that was with God and was God is Creator of men; if His life is the light of men; those who entertained His light, those who did not refuse to be penetrated by His life, became what they were meant to be: they fulfilled the purpose of Him who called them into existence. The power which He gave them to become sons of God was a power to becomemen, in the true sense of that word—to rise above the condition of animals.
When, therefore, our Lord tells Nicodemus that only those who were born again, or born from above (there is a justification for each rendering—ἄνωθεν, perhaps, unites the force of both), can see the kingdom of God, He tells him that the vision of the true state of man,—of that order which is intended for men,—is only given to those who receive the Light which lighteneth all men. Theirs is the nobler, better birth—the divine birth; and theirs is the power of perceiving that kingdom which surrounds all men, to which all are subject, but which, being the kingdom of God, and not the kingdom of the Cæsar, does not act upon men through material armies, and tax-gatherers at the receipt of custom,—does not manifest its power and majesty to the outward eye. This kingdom is over the man himself, not over his accidents and circumstances; he must be a man, not a creature of these accidents and circumstances, in order to see it; and that capacity of being a man he must derive not from flesh and blood, but from the Father of his spirit.
This conversation by night must have been remembered and recorded by Nicodemus himself. As he repeated it to St. John,—probably long after that day when he came with spices to anoint the body of Jesus in the tomb,—the words which had been spoken to him, and the words which he had spoken, must have come fresh to his memory; the meaning of the one, the deep ignorance of the other, seen by the light that fell upon them from the experiences and the revelations of after years. As he was an honest man, he did not suppress or soften his own answer to the 'Verily, verily,' of Christ. 'How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be born?' In truth, he had no cause to be ashamed of himself for having stated his difficulty in that rough way. To veil it under seemly phrases would have been no evidence of enlightenment.
The Jewish doctors, it is said, not uncommonly described the Gentile as one who became a little child, who began his life anew, when he was received by baptism into the privileges of their outer court. If so, Nicodemus must have been familiar with the expression; but it must have been to him, and to most who availed themselves of it, a mere figure of rhetoric—one of those counters which pass among religious people, which have a certain value at first, but which become at length so depreciated that they serve no purpose but to impose on those who take and those who give them. However little Nicodemus might know of Jesus, he did know that He was not resorting to figures of rhetoric—that if He spoke of a birth, He meant a birth; and he must have perceived that what He said did not apply to sinners of the Gentiles, but to him, the religious ruler of the Jews. It was, therefore, a good and healthy sign, a proof of the power of the new Teacher, that he forgot the conventionalisms of the Sanhedrim, and spoke out coarsely and naturally, as a peasant might have done. Our Lord, surely, passed this judgment upon him; for, instead of rebuking him for his question, He meets it in the most direct manner possible: 'Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.' The object of Nicodemus in coming to ask Him about His kingdom, is still kept prominently forward; but there is a noticeable change in our Lord's words. He had spoken ofseeingthe kingdom of God; He now speaks ofenteringinto it. Each expression may, unquestionably does, involve the other; still they are distinct. Toseea kingdom, is to have an apprehension of its reality and of its nature; toenterinto a kingdom, is to become a subject of it. And then the thought forces itself upon us, 'How can any one choose to become a subject of God's kingdom?Ishe not a subject of it necessarily? If God is the King of kings and Lord of lords, can he escape out of His kingdom? Is he not bound by the laws of it, whether he likes them or no?' We cannot state this difficulty to ourselves too frequently; we cannot meditate upon it too earnestly. Our consciences tell us that wearethe subjects of God's kingdom; that its laws do bind us; that they avenge themselves upon us when we break them. But our consciences tell us, also, that there is rebellion in us against that which holds us so fast, which executes its decrees so certainly. This is the contradiction, it exists—it is a fact,thefact, of our lives. No theories can get rid of it. But who shall tell ushowto get rid of it? Before we can understand what could remove it, before we can even ask with any seriousness to have it removed, we must know and feel how deep the contradiction is. Suppose the government of God should be a government over our wills, rebellion in those very wills must be the most fearful we can conceive of. And the entering into the kingdom of God must import the return of the spirit of man to its allegiance,—the claim of a voluntary spiritual being to be under the will with which it is its misery to be at strife. John had come preaching, 'the kingdom of God is at hand,' calling men to repentance, baptizing with water, proclaiming One who would baptize with the Holy Ghost. When Jesus says to Nicodemus, 'Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,' He takes up the teaching of his forerunner, He expounds his act, He announces the fulfilment of his promise. The being baptized with water, He declares to be the act of submission to the Father of spirits,—the sign which a man gives that he accepts His government, that he surrenders himself to it. It is a surrender,—that is the only word we can find,—a confession by the human will of its impotency. It must be guided, governed, inspired, or it can do nothing, it can only struggle against its blessedness. The acceptance, therefore, of this water-sign, by a creature conscious of his own irregular strivings, of his separation from God, is the expression of a desire that God would act upon his will, would raise it to its proper condition, would quicken it to the acts and impulses which belong to it,—in other words, would baptize it with the Spirit.
We see, then, how water and the Spirit are connected with the entrance into the kingdom of God,—the kingdom over the spirit of man. Our Lord goes on to explain that He had used the wordbirthin its relation to both, not carelessly, but strictly. 'That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.' One is as true and actual a birth as the other. The coming forth of the fleshly creature into light, its beginning to breathe, the voice which accompanies that breathing, are not more undoubted facts—very mysterious factstheymust appear to all who reflect upon them—than the coming forth of a spirit out of its darkness, than the sense of light which startles it, than its breathings, than its cry.
I have introduced this thought concerning breath and the voice of the new-born child, because it seems to me to connect itself with the words which follow, and to remove a confusion which our translation of them has introduced into our minds: 'Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.' The philological objections to this rendering of the words are very numerous. In the first place, ἄνεμος, not πνεῦμα, is the proper word forwind. But suppose, by reducing the wind to a faint low breathing, we escape from that objection, there is the second, that πνεῦμα is used twice in the same sentence in different senses. Yet this is a slight fault compared with the next. We actually attributewillto the wind; it blows where it listeth, ὅπου θέλει. After this flagrant departure from all scriptural and spiritual analogy, it is scarcely necessary to mention another, which is, nevertheless, not unimportant, and is of the same kind. Φωνὴ is the articulate voice of a living being; it is here changed into a natural sound. Now, wherever violence is done to the truth of language, I believe more or less of violence is done to some higher truth. What need have we to introduce the sighing and soughing of the wind, in order to make our Lord's explanation more clear and forcible, if we understand Him to say,—'All the breathings of God's Spirit are free, not fixed and fettered by material or mechanical conditions. You hear His voice continually; but whence the Spirit comes, whither it is going, you know not. And so it is with him that is born of the Spirit. The process of birth cannot be perceived by you; you hear the voice which indicates birth, you see the signs and tokens of life; but how the spiritual being came to be what he is, you know not.' If we take this to be what our Lord told Nicodemus, and what He is telling us, are we not to learn that, at every moment of the day, the Spirit of the eternal God is moving around us, speaking to us, acting upon us; but that His mightiest operation, that which alone fulfils His purpose towards us, is when He enables us to become the willing servants and children of our Father in heaven?
'How can these things be?' asked the doctor of the Sanhedrim, in a bewilderment which many of us can well understand. It was, indeed, a strange new world into which he was transported; it seemed to him a world of dreams, because he had been himself so much amidst dreams, because he had known so little of realities. 'Art thou a master of Israel,' was the rejoinder, 'and knowest not these things?' 'What hast thou been learning all thy life? what hast thou been teaching thy countrymen? Hast thou not been reading of an unseen God, who holds converse with men,—of a God of the spirits of all flesh? Hast thou not believed that this God is a living God, as He was when He appeared to Moses in the bush? when He touched the lips of Isaiah with fire in the Temple? Hast thou not understood that He is thy God, as much as He was the God of any Israelite to whom the commandments were spoken on the Mount? Hast thou not bidden the people of Israel of this day to believe that He istheirGod?' 'Verily, I say unto you, That which we have known, we speak; that which we have seen, we testify.' 'This is the characteristic of every true teacher, of every called prophet. This has been the characteristic of John; this is mine. We do not speak things that we have learnt by report—things that have been transmitted to us; we speak the truths with which we have been brought face to face.' 'And ye receive not our testimony.' 'These things we tell you of, because they are about you, because you are created to know them, and have fellowship with them. And you turn away from them in search of things that are at a distance from you—of formalities and trifles which you call by lofty names, which give rise to endless disputings, but which do not concern you as human beings in the least.' 'And if I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of the heavenly things?' 'If these things which have to do with your daily lives, which bear upon your ordinary business, which you can test by the experience of your failures and your sins,—iftheseseem to you incredible, how will it be if I speak to you of God Himself, of His purposes, of His nature?'
His words imply that He has a right to speak of these things also, that He isableto speak of them. On what ground could a power so amazing rest? He goes on to declare the ground of it: 'For no man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven.' Of all paradoxes, this appears to be the greatest. And yet if the heart of this ruler—if the heart of any man—has been delivered from the oppressive fears and superstitions that connect themselves with the thoughts of a distant heaven inspace, which looks coldly and drearily down upon earth—of a distant heaven intime, which stands aloof from all human sympathies; if ever the belief in heaven has been regarded as a spring of hope and energy to the sons of men; if ever they have learnt not to think of earth as a place in which they were to cozen and lie for threescore years and ten, and heaven as a place to which some might escape, if they made compensations to the Ruler of it for the evils which they had done in the other region of His government; that deliverance, those better and nobler thoughts have come from the paradox which is uttered in this verse. Poor people—utterly bewildered by all they have heard from divines and masters in Israel about heaven, and the way in which they are to obtain heaven—have taken this sentence home to their hearts,—that the Son of Man, He who suffered for them and with them on earth, is He who has ascended into heaven, and who is always in heaven. They have entered into the kingdom of heaven with those spirits which were born of the divine Spirit, as they entered into the kingdom of earth when they were born of the flesh; they have seen the kingdom with the spiritual eye which God has opened, as clearly as they have seen the trees and flowers of earth with the fleshly eye which He has opened.
How He opens that eye, and what He reveals to it when it is opened, the next words will tell us. 'And as Moses liftedup the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved.'
How can I introduce such a passage as this at the close of a sermon? Because I would not allow my sense of the immense worth and importance of every clause, of every word, of which it consists, to hinder you from tracing the method of our Lord's discourse. The question about the kingdom of God lay at the threshold of the dialogue. Here He declares how He is to claim His kingdom, to what throne He is to be raised, that all men might confess Him as their King. Jesus might have spoken of the exaltation of David or of Solomon as the pattern of His own. He goes back to an older and sublimer event in Jewish history. The brazen serpent to which the eyes of those were turned who had been bitten by the serpents in the wilderness, the common life-giving, life-restoring object,—this was the sign which He chose of that dominion which should stretch from sea to sea, which should reach to the lowest depths, and work the mightiest deliverance. 'You would know if I am a King. You will see me lifted upon a cross: there you may learn what I am. Whoso sees the Son of Man, his Lord and King there,—whoso believes and trusts Him there,—will rise up indeed a new man, will be saved from the plague which is destroying him, will awaken to health and freedom. He will not perish in his wretched, selfish isolation; he will have that life which is the common life of all.'
And why? He will see there the love of God to him and to the world. The only-begotten Son upon that cross will declare Him as He has always declared Him; but the revelation will be immeasurably fuller and clearer than it has ever been. He from whom men have turned as their enemy, as plottingtheirdestruction, as pledged to destroy the world, will be manifested as their Saviour and its Saviour. That which has been the curse and misery and death of man, his separation from God, his hatred of God, will cease for those who believe that in this Son of Man He is making known what He wills, what He is. They will have that eternal life of trust and love which is His own life.
And therefore He goes on: 'He that believeth on Him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest that they are wrought in God.' The belief that Jesus does by His cross manifest the tender love of God to mankind, that in Him God's whole will and mind and purpose are revealed to men,—this takes away the condemnation from their consciences; this restores them to trust and liberty and hope. And therefore, conversely,notto believe this, is to have a sense of alienation and distance from God, to feel that there is an abyss between us and Him which has never been closed—an abyss into which we are casting our sacrifices and works of devotion, in the dream that it may at last be filled up; while all our efforts, being efforts of discontent and distrust, efforts to conciliate a foe, widen and deepen it. Our Lord pronounces this unbelief to be its own all-sufficing punishment. 'The light is there; you do not love it; you fly from it. What worse state can there be than that? You hug the evil deeds from which you might be delivered. You choose the evil which is contrary to the being and nature of the blessed God in whose image you are made. What torment can there be so great as that?'
I spoke of the new birth, or the birth from above, by which men are made capable of seeing the kingdom of God, as one of which those may become conscious who are conscious of a rebellious will, and who would fain submit to their rightful Ruler. This latter part of the dialogue confirms and enlarges that statement. He who is bitten with serpents may turn to the brazen serpent; he who has been alienated from God may become at peace with Him. But our Lord's words also discover to us another truth, different from this, nowise inconsistent with it. They show us that our consciousness is not in any sense the foundation of God's kingdom, that His love is the foundation of it. They make us understand that the revelation of that Love is in very deed the reconciliation and regeneration of the world; that we may claim all as included in that reconciliation and regeneration; that our baptism of water and the Spirit, while it gives all warrant for conscious repentance and faith, must comprehend the unconscious, must declare upon what their consciousness is to stand. Theyaresons of God. God's Spirit is given them, that they may grow into the knowledge of their sonship, that they may be able to live in conformity with it.
The conclusion of this memorable discourse also takes off all the edge which has been given to those words, in the earlier part of it, in which it is said, 'the Spirit breathes where He wills.' I have treated that language as expressing the entire freedom of His operations, His independence on material agents as well as on the will of the creature. But if any one concludes that the Spirit does not will that all men should believe and come to the knowledge of the truth, he must deny that He is the Spirit of that God who sent not His Son to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
[Lincoln's Inn, Easter Sunday, March 23, 1856.]
St. John III.30.
He must increase; I must decrease.
We have seen, in the first chapter of this Gospel, how much the work and office of John the Baptist are connected with all the deepest thoughts and announcements of the Apostle. The more we study him, the more probable, I think, the old tradition of the Church, that he was a disciple of the Baptist, must appear to us,—the more we shall understand the cause of his anxiety to point out the exact relation between his two teachers.
I have endeavoured to show you that it is not thesuperiorityof the Christ to the forerunner which he chiefly dwells upon. That difference had been sufficiently brought out by the earlier evangelists. He insists that the superiority of the Christ rested on Hispriority; that the later in order of manifestation was the first in order of being; that of His fulness John and all previous prophets had received; that of Him, as the Word of God, as the Light of men, they had all borne witness. Whether Jesus was or was not the Word made flesh,—whether He did or did not prove that in Him was the Life of all things, and that He was the Light of men,—are questions which the Evangelist undertakes to resolve for us in the course of his narrative. Upon that point the Baptist may at times have had a strong conviction; at times he might be doubtful. But that there was such a Word of God, such a Light of men, and that He would make Himself manifest, this was the groundwork of his prophecy; by this proclamation he proved himself to be of the same class with Isaiah and Ezekiel; by this he showed that a kingdom of heaven must be at hand, in which the least might be greater than he.
How our Lord spoke to a ruler of the Jews concerning that kingdom, and the qualifications for entering into it and seeing it—how he connected it with a birth by water and by the Spirit—we have heard in the first part of this chapter. The narrative which occupies the remainder of it carries us back to John. Not long after the passover at which the conversation with Nicodemus took place, Jesus, we are told, went with His disciples into the country part of Judæa—the land of Judæa being here set in contrast, not with Galilee, but with the city of Jerusalem, at which He had been during the feast. 'There He tarried with them and baptized.' This expression is used loosely; it is qualified in the next chapter. 'Jesus,' it is said, 'Himself baptized not, but His disciples.' Still it was regarded, to all intents and purposes, as His baptism. It was naturally compared with that of John; for he was still at large, and was 'baptizing in Ænon, near to Salim, where there was much water.' Perhaps the numbers that went out to him had diminished; but it is obvious from the context that he was still an object of attraction to many; 'they came to him, and were baptized.'
'Then there arose a question between some of John's disciples and a Jew' (the plural is evidently quite out of place) 'about purification.' We need not inquire into the nature of this dispute, seeing that the Apostle tells us no more of it. Before that time, and ever since, the subject of purification has given rise to thousands of questions, all bearing more or less directly upon the relation between outward acts and the inner man,—what the former can or cannot do to make the other better. Such questions were certain to be awakened by a baptism with water, and a preaching of repentance such as John's; any of them may have suggested to his disciples the thought whether there was some greater virtue in that of Jesus, or whether He were merely a rival and imitator of the elder teacher. With surprise and perplexity, and something of the indignation which was natural in men jealous for the honour of a beloved teacher, 'they came unto John, and said unto him, Rabbi, He that was with thee beyond Jordan, and to whom thou barest witness, behold the same baptizeth, and all men come unto Him.'
There was probably a pause before John gave his answer. The news which he heard may have stirred up strange thoughts and doubts within him, not in a moment to be quelled. Was his work over? Was he to have no more power over men? Was he no longer a witness for God? The magician says, when the fabric of his vision is dissolved—