The Gospel of St. John: A Series of Discourses. / New Edition

by Frederick Denison Maurice

'Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on Him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.'

This expression, 'If ye continue or abide in my word,' denotes very clearly, I think, that they had not merely listened to a saying which went forth from His lips, and been affected by it; that they had confessed the force of a word, which entered into them as light enters into the eye, as heat makes itself felt through the body. And if they traced this word to its source; if they acknowledged the living Word from whom it flowed; if they turned to Him as to one who was near them and with them,—not for a moment, but always; if they trusted in Him, and not in themselves; then they should be—what? saints? divines? doctors? No; but what is much better than any of the three,—what all the three should wish to be raised into,—disciples. They will then be learners, learners sitting continually at the feet of the true Teacher.

And this shall be the result of that daily, hourly learning, of that change from the condition of men who know everything to the condition of men who know nothing. 'They shall know the TRUTH.' The Word shall guide them, counsel them, encourage them, scourge them. He shall prepare them to see that which is. He shall lead them away from fleeting shadows to the eternal Substance, to Him who changes not. Here is a promise, the highest that the highest Being can make to man; for it is the promise of sharing His own nature, of dwelling with Him and in Him. And there is another appended to it, which, though not greater in itself, comes nearer to human experience; commends itself more directly to our sense of oppression and misery. 'The truth shall make you free.' Truth and liberty are inseparable companions; neither can live long apart from the other. The bondage to appearances, the bondage to death, the bondage to the unseen horrors which haunt the conscience,—how shall this be broken? Our Lord says, 'The truth shall make you free.' 'If you abide in my word,—if you adhere to me as the Lord of your spirit, you shall come to know Him who is truth, and He shall break every chain from your neck; He shall give you the freedom of the sons of God.'

However unintelligible His other words may have been to them, surely this magnificent promise will have looked most inviting to the Jews; to those, at least, of them who were not vehemently prepossessed against the speaker, who did not count Him an impostor. The next sentence seems to say that it was not so. 'They answered Him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?' Who were they who said this? We should certainly gather from the previous passage,—'those Jews who had believed on Him.' At any rate, St. John takes no pains to distinguish them from the rest. If they were not the only objectors to our Lord's words, they must have joined in the objection. There is deep instruction in the thought that they did. The voice of Jesus had reached them. It had not merely floated about them, but had penetrated within them. He stood before them who did always the things that pleased His Father. The first sense of having discovered the Divine Man must have been one of delight,—the greatest, keenest delight which they had ever experienced. Then this Divine Man points upwards to a truth in which He Himself is believing and resting. He says He can make them inheritors of that. But at the same moment He looks down into them. He detects a hollowness within them,—a quailing at the thought of this truth,—a secret dislike of it—a preference for that which is hostile to it. They are conscious of a chill. The keen pleasure has been succeeded by a pain as keen. The hope which He holds out to them they cannot grasp. The evil which He has laid bare is near and present. Their pride is awakened; they think of the glory of their descent; they cannot bear to be spoken of as slaves.

We often treat their words as a mere outrageous contradiction of fact. They had been in bondage, we say, to Babylonians and Persians; they were in bondage to the Romans; they complained of the yoke; it was fretting them continually. How monstrous to say, 'We have never been in bondage!' I believe that in speaking so we are not doing them justice, and that we are likely to miss the force of our Lord's answer to them. A modern Roman, in the sight of French or Austrian bayonets, might deny indignantly that he was a slave. He might say, 'I belong to the city which has ruled the world. I am one of those citizens whom it was a shame and wickedness to beat with rods. How dare you speak to me as if I were like an American Negro, liable to be bought and sold, at the mercy of an owner or a driver?' We should not be astonished, I think, at such language. We should understand it, and not feel ourselves justified in replying to it by referring to a foreign tyranny, which may be all the more galling to him because he loathes the name of bondsman. And there was another sense in which a Jew might affirm that he, being a son of Abraham, had never been in bondage. As our Lord had spoken of truth, He might think of his privilege not to be the servant of any false god. Τίνι may serve for this sense as well as for the other. He would exclaim indignantly, 'The truth shall make us free? To what abomination,—to what lying idol have we ever yielded ourselves?'

Our Lord does not complain of them for affixing too strong a meaning to the word bondage. He does not appeal to the places for the receipt of custom, as proofs that the seed of Abraham had lost their independence. But He convicts them of having fallen into a slavery, domestic, personal, abject. He says that this slavery, though it may have caused their subjection to the Romans, would not be removed or abated if that were to cease. And, further, He affirms that slavery to a false god—that which lies beneath all idolatry—might be more justly attributed to the seed of Abraham than to any descendants of Ham.

The first of these allegations is contained in the words which contain also the justification of His assurance that He can break their fetters, and give them a higher liberty than they had ever attained or dreamed of. 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.' It is common to quote the first of these verses without the second. Preachers tell their hearers that they have committed sin, and are therefore the servants of sin. They say nothing of the Son who abideth in the house into which sin has intruded itself. I believe, brethren, that by making this separation, we put the sense of Scripture, as well as the honesty of our minds, in the utmost peril. I might use stronger language,—I might say we all but destroy both. We try to conceive of evil apart from good, of disobedience apart from obedience. We cannot do it. God's eternal law will not let us do it. If you want me to understand the corruption and depravity of my nature, you must tell me from what it is drawing me aside. You do me an infinite injury, if you tell me that sin is close to me, unless you tell me also that the great Enemy of Sin is close to me, and that I am violently tearing myself from Him when I give myself over to it. It is possible, no doubt, to find, in the height or the depth, another sense for these words than this, as it is possible to find another sense for any words, if the one which is nearest and most obvious should for some reason be disagreeable to us. And I am certain, brethren, that we shall all seek for some new, ingenious, and elaborate interpretation, or shall embrace it when it is presented to us—I am certain that we shall call the literal interpretation mystical, and shall persuade ourselves that the one we have put in the place of it is literal—unless we perceive that it corresponds both with the context of the New Testament and with our own necessities. I call upon you to see whether what I am saying is not true of each one of us. Let each man ask himself, 'Is not the sin of which Christ speaks, with me? Is not the Son of whom He speaks, with me? Has not the usurper of the house separated me from the Lord of the house? Is not the Lord of the house ready to put down the usurper, and to make me free indeed?'

The next words have led some to suppose that our Lord cannot have been speaking to those Jews who believed on Him:—'I know that ye are Abraham's seed; yet ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you.' These, it will be said, were not the men who were seeking to kill Him; they had confessed His authority; His word, it is admitted, had made its power felt by them. I will not evade the objection by saying, that so far as these men took their stand upon their position as Abraham's children, so far it might fairly be said to them: 'You see what Abraham's children do; their parentage does not save them from this crime.' I believe that is not the meaning of the charge, or at any rate that it is only one very small part of the meaning. I think our Lord was speaking to the consciences of those whom He addressed of a sin of which they had been guilty. I think that if those consciences had been aroused to confess His power—in some measure to own His goodness—they will have been more ready than any other to own the charge; and if they did not own it, to be stung by it. They had not participated, it is probable, in the plots of the Scribes and Pharisees to put Jesus to death. They might not then, they might not afterwards, take up a stone to cast at Him. But why were those plots conceived? why were those stones raised? To get rid of a Judge and a Reprover; to put out a light which was shining into the heart, and making its darkness visible; to destroy the Son of Man, the King of man; that each man might be his own king—might live undisturbed by any obligations to his fellow-men; to destroy the Son of God,—the witness of God's truth and God's love; that men might claim the inheritance as theirs,—that they might take credit to themselves for all goodness and truth, and give themselves no credit for their wickedness and lies. Now, did not each one of those to whom Jesus spoke, know inwardly that he had sought to put out the light that was shining into him,—to kill his Judge and Reprover? The living Word was there,—the Son was claiming to be the Lord of the house. But He was not allowed His place there. A certain sense there was of His presence. Certain acts of homage were rendered to Him. But He was not permitted to reign. They would find a divided allegiance more and more impossible. The good Lord or the evil must be absolute. The one who was rejected must be slain.

At each turn, this conversation becomes more profound and awful. The next verse leads us into a depth into which we may well tremble to look, and yet from which it is most unsafe to turn away:—'I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father.' Jesus had spoken of His Father as the root of all His loving acts,—of the wisdom, and truth, and love which were expressed in His words and in Himself. If there is a root to which all good that appears in a human life can be referred, must there not be a source to which all evil is referred? Can it be the same? If healing, restoration, life, are from the Father of Jesus, from what father come murderous thoughts,—the wish to destroy the Son of Man?

To fly from any thought which presses closely upon the conscience to some external truism,—even if it is one which has been proved to be inapplicable,—is the ordinary desire of us all. 'They answered and said unto Him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham.' The question is about the paternity of certain purposes in their minds. These purposes were near to them, to their very selves. They determined their acts and their habits. Did they take these by descent from the father of the faithful? Were these his progeny? Of course, they would have answered, as many of us would have answered, 'That is using words in a double sense. You mean one kind of fatherhood, we mean another.' No! it was they who were guilty of this duplicity. They were calling Abraham their father, in the notion that they were deriving some spiritual privileges from him. If they only intended that they could trace up their pedigree, according to the flesh, to him, let them say that frankly to themselves. It was just what our Lord was urging them, in this part of His conversation, to do. But if he was their parent in any other sense, then let them remember what he was, what he did. The living and true God spake to him, and called him. He heard the voice; he yielded to it. That same voice was speaking to them. He was 'telling them the truth;' and therefore 'they sought to kill Him.'