John 16:7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come to you… I. LET US SUPPOSE THAT THE SON OF MAN HAD CONSENTED TO REMAIN UPON THE EARTH. He could not thus remain except to die daily, or to be for ever triumphant. On which of these two alternatives must we fix? You know too well. 1. Jesus Christ always equally entitled to be loved, will always be equally hated; so that were Jesus Christ to appear successively in different countries, each of them would in its turn be moistened with His blood. If it accords with piety to believe that the Son of God died once, the just for the unjust, it is impious to believe that the blessed seed of the woman was more than once to allow His heel to be bruised by the angel of darkness. 2. Let us hasten then to reject this alternative, and conceive that He has to enjoy an everlasting triumph. He has conquered; He has put infidelity completely to flight. Jesus reigns King of all the earth. He has no more enemies or rivals. Still this kingdom, glorious as it appears, is but a place of exile. The subjects of this King have an advantage over Him. The servant is more than his Master. For Jesus Christ having suffered once, what can those around Him have to suffer? A single look from Him crowns them with glory. There is no longer either difficulty to be surmounted or struggle to be maintained. It is no longer by fire that men are saved, nor by much tribulation that they enter into glory. Religion is no longer a sacrifice; the blessing of the narrow way, and the kingdom of heaven taken by violence, are henceforth only empty sounds. It only remains to ask why earth is not already transformed into heaven? II. LET US NOW LISTEN TO JESUS CHRIST. Let us see in what this expediency consists. 1. "If I go not away, the Comforter will not come," &c. Remain with us, Lord, and we will be comforted. Such would perhaps have been our answer. Who can console better than Jesus? Jesus absent is only one misery more. Jesus might have answered, Are you consoled? does My presence suffice you? No; and yet I am in the midst of you. Thus it appears you still require the Comforter. Two consolations compose the whole new man. (1) Faith. To believe is to repose entirely on the infallibility and faithfulness of God. It is, consequently, to go forward with unflinching eye, and meet coming events as we would meet God Himself; to live in the Spirit; to renounce the domination of the senses; to prefer the invisible, which is eternal, In regard to what specially concerns Jesus Christ, it is to bless God that the Word was made flesh, but not to regard Jesus Christ, although perfect man, as an ordinary individual, whose presence is indissolubly attached to the body. Now, such was the disposition of the disciples, and such is human nature, that had Jesus Christ remained upon the earth, faith would have remained for ever in an infant state. Its case would have been that of a young bird whose parent will not permit it to try its wings. Men would have reposed on the corporeal presence of Christ; not upon His spiritual, which is His real presence. The magnificent developments of the Christian Church would thus be strangled in the birth; or, to speak more properly, there would be no Christian Church; if by the Church we mean the assembly of those who walk by faith, and live in the Spirit. (2) Love in the Spirit. To love spiritually is to love as God loves and wishes to be loved. All in love that is only nature, instinct, taste, self-complacency, disappears or is subordinate. Love, purified and made Divine, rises and attaches itself to what is invisible and immortal. Now almost all the world loves Jesus. How is it possible not to love Him! But no man of the world could have more love for Him than the son of Jonas; and do we not know that Jesus deserved to be loved otherwise? The affection of Peter was not spiritual; that of the world for Jesus is, if possible, still less so. It is a human attachment which Jesus does not count sufficient. But this attachment remained human so long as Jesus Himself remained in a human condition. The visible, corporeal, limited person, behoved to disappear, in order to make room for the idea which it represented, and at the same time concealed. 2. If faith and spiritual affection are the life of the Church, it was for the advantage of the Church that Jesus should go away. This has been well proved by fact. Where was the Church before the departure of Jesus? Nowhere; not even in the bosom of that college of apostles who we have reason to believe knew Jesus far less, and loved Him less completely than a poor Christian peasant now knows and loves Him. Why had His lessons less affect on the apostles than those of the apostles themselves afterwards had on others? The facts cannot be disputed. Before the departure of Jesus there was no Church, but there is one immediately after. 3. Could we venture to maintain that it was good for the disciples that Christ should go away, and yet bad for us? The situation, and wants, are still the same, and we cannot dispense with the painful privation. No Christian, however, consents to it willingly. The resolution to do so depends on the measure of his spirituality. But nothing is more universal or more natural than regret for not having seen Jesus Christ. Many imagine that they could do all with Jesus Christ were He to become visible, that there would then be neither doubt nor fear, that they would thenceforth be all ardour for the service of their great Master. But after reflection how can they continue to use this language? (1) What is the human body? A living statue. An image of the presence of a moral being, to which through the body are addressed all the feelings which this being can inspire. This organization, however, does not constitute the man. This we all admit when we refuse to estimate a man's worth by his body, and make it wholly depend on his intellect and will. Moreover, in our attachments we rise superior to the impressions which body can produce upon body. An affection on which neither the external decay of the object loved, nor its absence, nor death, would have any power, would justly be entitled to the highest honour. If any being should be loved purely, it is undoubtedly the Son of God. If the Son of God appeared in the flesh, it was not to make us adore His corporeal presence, but to be man like us, and submit to death. He has given this as a support to our love; but our love should attach itself to that in Him which thinks, invites, and loves. (2) But let us reply to those who exclaim, "Oh how strong we would be if we could only see Jesus Christ!" Alas! how many saw Him at full leisure, and remained weak! So would it be with you were Jesus Christ to communicate the Holy Spirit, which was given to the first disciples only under the condition of His own absence. The mere aspect of a great personage, the mere report of his presence, has sometimes, on grave emergencies, exercised a decisive influence. But however great the results might be, they were human. But spiritual effects demand a spiritual cause, and the fact of Christ's corporeal presence, considered in itself, is not so. There is nothing spiritual in it. This absence of a visible Christ is regarded as a privation, a loss. But it is the flesh itself, it is the charm of the present life that makes us deem it so. Jesus Christ, though absent, is not absent. In giving us His Spirit He gives Himself. 4. "Enough of this," you say, "None of us have the idea of making Christ dwell a second time in the sad darkness of this life." But if you presume not to claim the visibility of Jesus Christ's personal presence, you wish visible signs of His invisible presence. If the signs for which you call are only those fruits of the Spirit, which constitute and manifest Christianity, assuredly you are right; and it is these signs of the presence of Jesus Christ you ought in the first instance to ask from yourselves. But there is another desire less pure, "Make us gods to walk before us." Anything which will give a tangible shape to the spiritual kingdom which Jesus Christ came to establish on the earth. (1) In the first rank are the institutions and customs which time has consecrated in the bosom of the Christian Church. These circumstances, which are wholly external and are not the Church itself, we so overvalue that we mistake them for the Church; if certain barriers, words, sounds, happen to fail, we think it is the Church herself that fails, and our heart melts within us, and we can scarcely help exclaiming, "They have taken away my Lord," &c. (2) Sometimes we consider Jesus Christ to be represented by men who are devoted to His service. Every Christian, in a certain sense, represents Jesus Christ. The error lies in making a mere man the object of feelings which are due only to our Lord, and in regarding any instrument of whatever nature as necessary. And when the righteous hand of God throws down this idol and breaks it to pieces, when this man, supposed necessary, has disappeared, all has disappeared with him. (3) The successes of Christianity are also a kind of visible Christ to us. We are willing not to believe Him absent so long as we see His religion honoured and multitudes thronging His churches. Our faith takes courage at the sight; but how readily it is shaken, when, in consequence of any great change in the condition of society, enmity grows bold. It seems as if this host of enemies had carried Jesus Christ away. 5. But Jesus Christ, who cannot permit us either to serve Him as an idol, or to put idols in His place, or to seek indubitable evidence of His presence anywhere but in ourselves, as of old, "withdraws to a mountain." By this new retreat He extinguishes the bright light which He had kindled; He obliges us to seek Him on the mountain, in other words, in our faith, and constrains us to look at Him with other eyes than those of flesh. Let us with all the strength which God has given resist the dangerous temptations of that "lust of the eye," which, from our carnal nature, we carry even into the purest of religions. (A. Vinet, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. |
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