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

by Frederick Denison Maurice

They were clean as a body, as a family. Each had need to be purified from his own individual selfishness which kept him apart from the family, which kept him from claiming the common righteousness of his Lord. But they were not all clean. There was one who had wrapt himself up in his individual nature,—one solitary, selfish being, who would have nothing to do with the family,—who would have nothing to do with the common Lord, the Son of Man; one who had sold his heart to the divider, to the spirit of selfishness and evil. I do not know anything which illustrates more clearly the sense in which the Apostles, as a body, were clean than this terrible exception; or anything which explains more clearly what need they would have for that daily cleansing of the feet of which He had given them a pledge.

'So after He had washed their feet, and had taken His garments, and was set down again, He said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his Lord; neither He that is sent greater than He that sent Him. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.'

In the last century, preachers were wont to speak continually of our Lord as an example. In our time there has been a kind of revolt against that phrase as a hard and even as an unpractical one. 'It is very well,' we say, 'to have an example; but can we follow it? Christ is divine, and we are human. No doubt He was human, too, in a sense; but then surely His divinity helped His humanity, so as to put all His acts at an immeasurable distance from ours.' I believe there is a genuine feeling at the bottom of this complaint. I believe it is a very wearisome and a very useless thing to talk to men about examples, unless you can show how that he who exhibits the example has some connexion with them, and some power over them. But, on the other hand, we are bound to inquire what has been the effect of example upon the world, how the men whom we meet with that are better than ourselves operate upon us, how it is that we can be impressed by the records of men who have departed. Christ's divinity is not a hindrance to our understanding the might of His example; it rather explains to us the whole doctrine and law of example. Are not that doctrine and law to be found in this passage? If He were not the Master and Lord, if the disciples did not say well in calling Him so, then His act would have been a solitary one, belonging to Himself, one which they could not imitate; but if He were their Lord in the highest sense of the word, in that sense which John has been setting forth to us throughout his Gospel,—if He were the Word in whom they had been created, the Word who was their life and their light, the Word from whom every energy of their spirits was derived,—then everything which dwelt in Him could descend upon them; whatever shone forth in Him could be reflected in them. And this would take place, not by their raising themselves to contemplate a lofty ideal, but by their submitting to a gracious and loving Will. The Highest of all showed Himself to them in washing their feet. All they had to do was not to think themselves greater than He, not to think that unworthy of the disciple which was not unworthy of the Lord.

The difficulty to the formal divine is no doubt this:—'If cleansing the feet symbolizes the removing of defilements from the inner man, is not that Christ's work alone? Can the disciple follow His example in doing that work?' Our consciences tell us that he can. We do know that we may receive purification from one another, that the tenderness, and love, and patience of one man act in a marvellous way upon another, when those qualities seem the furthest from him, when he most confesses that they do not belong to him. We do not set ourselves deliberately to follow examples. The examples get the mastery over us; there is a life in the men who exhibit them which awakens life in us. These are facts not to be gainsaid for the sake of any system. Upon them have been built theories about the righteousness of the saints, and the transference of one man's righteousness to another, which are, no doubt, very immoral and ungodly. But St. Paul's words, which are the plea for these theories, 'I fill up in my body the sufferings of Christ,' are both moral and godly. For they are grounded upon the idea which St. John is setting forth here: that Christ, the Divine Sufferer, is the source of all purification and of all life; and that all men, in their proper spheres, may share His sufferings, and transmit and communicate the purification and life that flow from them to their fellows. All difficulties about example are capable of that solution. If we are members of one body, if He is the Head, why should not there be a continual circulation of life from each member of the body to every other? How can the departure of men out of this world hinder that circulation, or cause us who are here to feel it less? May not their power have become greater as the mortal fetters have been taken from them? May not we feel it more?

That is a strange announcement,—'The disciple is not above His master,'—to be introduced by a 'Verily;' and yet the longer the Apostles lived, the more they understood what need they had to be told this truth, and told it with such solemnity. What follows reminds us that a commonplace in words may become a paradox in action, and that we never experience either the difficulty of a divine sentence, or the power of it, till we put it in practice. All the crimes of Churchmen from that hour to this, all their cowardice, their arrogance, their baseness, their violence, have had this one root: the servants of Christ have believed themselves greater than Christ; they have counted it a shame and disgrace to do what He did, to endure what He endured. Here has been the cause of their powerlessness; the very secret of His power has been wanting in them. They have put forth the mock power which His real power has come into the world to crush and subdue. Does not the Christian power—the Church's power—begin when it has been brought to work with this power of Him who humbled Himself, and not against it? Do we want another ground for believing that those who have completely washed their robes and made them white from every stain of selfishness in the blood of the Lamb, must be mightier than they were here? Do we want another explanation of the fact, that those words of theirs which spoke out the true mind of Christ in them, live and are fruitful for generations after their names, and all the efforts they made to magnify their own names, have been forgotten?

'I spake not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the Scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me. Now I tell you before it come, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am He. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that receiveth whomsoever I send receiveth me; and he that receiveth me receiveth Him that sent me. When Jesus had thus said, He was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.'

How are these verses connected with those that went before them? how are they connected with each other? Sometimes the thought comes to us,—'Can we trace the processes of that Mind in that hour? Must not His words spring out of depths into which our eyes can never look? Must they not follow each other in an order which is altogether unlike that of other men?' So far as such a doubt leads to reverence,—so far as it makes us distrust our own perceptions, eager to learn from others, certain that we can but see the smallest portion of that which is in Him, I would cherish it. So far as it puts Christ at a distance from us, as it tempts us to think that He was not the Son of Man feeling perfectly as a man,—that He did not mean that the things He said to us should be apprehended by us, and that He will not help us to apprehend them,—so far I would eschew it, and cast it off; because it is fatal to all sincere reverence and sincere humility.

I think He says plainly,—'I am not speaking to you all when I bid you wash each other's feet. There is a sympathy with my mind implied in that act. There is a submission to me, as one who has chosen you, implied in it. That sympathy, that submission, one of you has shaken off. He sits at my feast; He has disclaimed me. But I tell you to do as I have done, that you may know hereafter what the secret of the power you exert over men is. If they receive you, they will be receiving me; if they receive me, they will be receiving my Father.' Does it seem to you that such an assurance was likely to counteract the humbling lesson which He had just given? I do not wonder that any should entertain that opinion, because it is undoubtedly true that men may give themselves intolerable airs on the strength of their being messengers of the Most High; may curse and excommunicate all who do not receive their decrees and confess their dignity, under pretence that they are setting Christ at nought. It is true also, and the records of the world establish the truth, that none have been so free from pretension, that none have borne such insults, and been so ready to die that men might not be cursed and excommunicated, as those who have given themselves up to speak a word which they were sure was not theirs, who have felt that they had no goodness or love of their own to show forth, but that the Son of God was showing forth His love to sinners through them, even as the Father showed His love to men through the Son. There needed a 'Verily' to confirm this sentence as well as the other. They are, in fact, parts of the same sentence. The disciple will think himself above his Master as long as he thinks himself separate from his Master; when that thought ceases, he must accept our Lord's language in the length and breadth of it: 'He that receiveth you receiveth me.' Dare he be an insolent, usurping, persecuting priest, unless he inwardly denies that the meek, suffering Jesus, who washed His disciples' feet, is in him?

And is it wonderful that the 'trouble of spirit' which St. John speaks of, should have mixed itself with this thought, and that the image of the betrayer, which had been appearing from time to time during this discourse in the background, should now rise fully and terribly before Him? 'There is one who chooses to be separate from me! one who will stand in his own name! one who will cast me his Lord, and friend, and reprover, away! He is one of you,—one of those whom I have sent forth as a messenger in my Father's name and mine.' Jesus has spoken of the Scripture being fulfilled in the act of Judas. It was a Scripture which David felt had been fulfilled in his own case. A friend who had eaten of his bread had lifted up his heel. It had been fulfilled in a thousand cases before David, and since. But this was the fulfilment; this contained the essence of all treacheries that had been and that were to be; this explained the principle and author of them. If there is a Son of Man, one in whom all human feelings, sympathies, affections, reach their highest point, one from whom they have been derived, one in whom they reflect perfectly that God of whom He is the image, then the betrayer of that Son of Man exhibits the revolt against these feelings, affections, and sympathies, the strife against this love, in which every false friend may read the ground and the possible consummation of his own baseness. Men, generally, have confessed this remark to be true, and have embodied it even in their careless forms of speech; therefore they ought to confess, also, that whatever pain and inward anguish any have experienced from the insincerity of those who have eaten their bread and lifted up the heel against them, must have been undergone by Jesus with an intensity proportioned to the intensity of His love. Surely this reflection, if we follow it out, may help us more to such an apprehension of His sufferings, as it is permitted and possible for us to have, than any phrases of pompous rhetoric which put Him at a distance from us, and make us suppose that He did not bear our griefs and carry our sins.

'Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of His disciples, whom Jesus loved. Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom He spake. He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto Him, Lord, who is it? Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when He had dipped the sop, He gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.'