Always has the Spirit been proceeding, and always will the Spirit be proceeding, from the Word and from the Father of the Word, giving their light and their life to men.
St. John’s message will last for ever; and therefore he tells it slowly and deliberately, knowing that no time can change what he has to say; for it is the good news of the Word, Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, because he is God of very God, eternally in the bosom of the Father.
Now St. John, who writes thus simply and quietly, was no weak or soft person. He was one of the two whom the Lord surnamed Boanerges, the Son of Thunder—the man of the loud and awful voice. Painters have liked to draw St. John as young, soft, and feminine, because he was the Apostle of Love. I beg you to put that sentimental notion out of your minds, and to remember that the only hint which Holy Scripture gives us about St. John’s person is, that he was ‘a Son of Thunder;’ that his very voice, when he chose, was awful; that he, and his brother James, before they were converted, were not of a soft, but of a terrible temper; that it was James and John, the Sons of Thunder, who wanted to call down thunder and lightning from heaven on all the villages who would not receive the Lord.
A Son of Thunder. Think over that name, and think over it carefully, remembering that it was our Lord himself who gave St. John the name; and that it therefore has, surely, some deep meaning.
Do not fancy that it means merely a loud and noisy person. I have known too many, carelessly looking only at the outsides and shows of things, and not at their inside and reality, fancy that that was what it meant. I have known them fancy that they themselves were sons of thunder when they raved and shouted, and used violent language, in preaching, or in public speaking. And I have heard foolish people honour such men the more, and think them the more in earnest, the more noise they made, and say of him; ‘He is a true Boanerges—a Son of Thunder, like St. John.’
Like St. John? The only sermon of St. John’s which we have on record is that which they say he used to preach over and over again when he was carried as an old man into his church at Ephesus. And that was no more than these few words over and over again, Sunday after Sunday, ‘Little children, love one another.’
That was the way in which St. John, the Son of Thunder, spoke when age and long obedience to the Spirit of God had taught him how to use his strength wisely and well.
Like St. John? Is there anywhere, in St. John’s Gospel or Epistles, one violent expression? One sentence of great swelling words? Are not the words of the Son of Thunder, as I have been telling you, peculiarly calm, slow, simple, gentle? Can those whose mouths are full of noisy and violent talk, be true Sons of Thunder, if St. John was one?
No. And if you will think for yourselves, you will see that there is a deeper meaning in our Lord’s name for St. John than merely that he was a loud and violent man.
You hear the roar of the thunder, but you know surely that it is not the thunder itself; that it is only its echo rolling on from cloud to cloud and hill from hill.