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 the third day 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 destroyed that house,—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 of this more 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 by such double 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 the omen from 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!
DISCOURSE VII.
THE NEW BIRTH.
[Lincoln's Inn, Palm Sunday, March 16, 1856.]
St. John III. 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 word signs for miracles. 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 has signs—has sadly weakened and perplexed the Evangelist's statements. Here, for instance, he does not tell us what the 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 His name.' The word name, 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 the name of 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, 'Some divine power is at work in Him; He is a Prophet.' At another, 'He is the Deliverer, 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 of the man that is in all.