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

by Frederick Denison Maurice

In the next verse He assigns the reason: 'And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it.' He had taught them to pray, saying, 'Our Father.' No doubt they had done as He had bidden them. And the thought, 'He taught us so to speak,' must have been a mighty help when the effort was hardest, when it seemed most impossible to conceive that they had a Father. But to pray in His name, what a new world was opened to them, if they might do that! If there was One who did bind them all together, One in whom they were one, what an emphasis was there in that word, 'Our!' If this Son of Man were indeed the Son of God, what life, what reality there was in the word 'Father!' It was not that the prayer wanted its virtue till the name of Christ was openly, formally introduced into it. If that had been so, His own prayer must have been unfit for the Apostles and for us. All prayer that had ever ascended to God had ascended in His name. The Word was with God; the Word was the light of men. All things were created by Him, and in Him. When He had taught His spiritual creatures to feel they had need of a Father of their spirits, He had awakened in them the impulse to pray. The Father of those spirits was seeking such to worship Him, and owned their worship as that of children made in His image, unable to live apart from Him. In the Mediator, He could meet those to whom He had thus given power to become sons of God; He could own them as the spokesmen of humanity. But now it could be declared in what name men had prayed; how it was that the spirits in them answered to each other; in whom God had looked upon them, and been satisfied. No such revelation had yet been made, no such assurance had been given, that every beggar who desired that God's will might be done on earth as it is in heaven, was praying for that which Christ Himself must certainly accomplish. He goes on, 'If ye love me, keep my commandments.' The Apostles thought, as we saw last Sunday, that they could suffer for Christ because they loved Him. They were right in believing that love is the ground of all action and of all suffering, but they were utterly wrong in supposing that their own love could be the ground of either. If this love were in any degree an effort of their own, if it were not God's love working in them, it would prove, as He had warned Peter that it would, the weakest of all things; before the cock crowed, it might be found good for nothing. But if they loved Him, let them keep His commandments; let them submit themselves to the will of One in whom love dwells perfectly, from whom it flows forth freely. 'And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him. But ye know Him; for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.'

This promise, I believe, is the characteristical one of those Paschal conversations; it is that which distinguishes them from our Lord's discourses to the multitude. It is most important, therefore, to observe how the subject is introduced, and how it is connected with the passages we have just been considering. The new commandment, which we find in the previous chapter, had been, 'Love one another, as I have loved you;' which was further expounded by the words, 'As I have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet.' It had been a social commandment. Each obeyed it in so far as he regarded himself as one of a family, under a Master who was his Elder Brother. The loss of fellowship was the loss of allegiance; the loss of allegiance was the loss of fellowship. Since He had given them this commandment, He had been speaking to them of His own union with the Father, of His own obedience to the Father. One truth lay beneath the other; they must be learnt together. Their union would be the way to the apprehension of this union. Their obedience would enable them to enter into this obedience. But, on the other hand, they would find union among themselves impossible till they had a glimpse of the fundamental unity; they would find human obedience impossible till they believed that there was a divine obedience.

But how should they bind these two truths together in their hearts? What would save them from revolving in a hopeless circle, never knowing whether the divine lesson or the human practice must come first?

Before they well knew what they wanted, what deliverer they could have in their infinite perplexity, He, their Head, would pray the Father, and He would give them a Paraclete, one who would be always ready to help when they called for Him, one who should not be with them to-day and gone to-morrow, but with them for ever; not an external Teacher, but a Guide of their spirits; not a Spirit who would obey their fancies or notions, but a Spirit of truth, to whom they must yield, that they might be freed from their confusions and falsehoods. This Spirit, it is added, 'the world could not receive.' That world or order which does not own a Head, which is made up of sections and parties, to which the Word of God comes, and which rejects Him,—such a world is not capable of a uniting, fusing Spirit, not capable even of conceiving how there can be such a Spirit, how He can enter into human beings with all their different tastes and propensities, all their contradictions, to mould them into one, how He can give them one heart and one soul. But the Apostles did know it. They had the germs of unity within them; amidst all their rivalries and discords, they aspired to be one. The Spirit was dwelling with them even then; He should be in them.

I wish you to observe how every word and every symbolical act of Christ has pointed to the disciples as a body, as a family; how all commandments and all promises have reference to them in this character; how the difference between them and the world was not that they were individually better than the persons of whom it consisted, not that they had blessings which the world was not intended to be a partaker of, but simply that the Son of Man had chosen them, and had constituted them His witnesses to the world. And to those who owned Him as the Head of their body, whether they saw Him or not, He would come. 'I will not leave you orphans,' He says; 'I will come to you.' If they were left without Him who alone had told them of a Father, who was their only bond to a Father, they would be in the strictest sense orphans. These last words took off the rough edge of that sentence which, with all its apparent fulness and richness, must have sounded sorrowful in the ears of the disciples, as if there could be a substitute for Him, another Paraclete. In some wonderful manner He would Himself be among them; in some wonderful manner His Father would be among them. Else why did He speak of orphans? And the next words made His meaning more definite, if not at once more clear, to them: 'Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me. Because I live, ye shall live also.' 'The world, which judges only by sense, which believes nothing, will have no organ by which to apprehend me. I shall seem to it to be far away. It will proclaim that it has got rid of me. But you will apprehend me through the spirit's organ. Your inner life will rest upon my life. In your own selves you will be in contact with me.'

'At that day,' He goes on, 'ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.' 'In that day, when you shall begin truly to see me, when you shall know me more fully than you have ever known me yet, in that day the great mystery of my union with the Father will come out fully before you. It will come forth to explain another mystery, which without it would be incredible, that as I am in Him, so you are in me; that as He is in me, so am I in you.'

We shall find how this mystery, in connexion with the other, becomes the subject of the subsequent discourse, till it finds its fullest expansion and expression in the prayer of the 17th chapter. But it was necessary that He should set before them once again the nature of the mystery, and the way to the knowledge of it, lest they should lose themselves in abortive efforts to embrace it. 'He that hath my commandments,' He says, 'and keepeth them, He it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father; and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.' The love of the Father for the Son, and of the Son for the Father, was the ground of their union. He who would remember Christ's commandments that they should love one another, and would watch over them and cherish them in his heart, he would show his love to Christ; and to him the love of the Father would be manifested, to him the Son would manifest Himself.

This idea of a secret manifestation which the world could not share in, may have seemed merely astonishing to some of the disciples,—may have awakened certain feelings of vanity, as if they would be His exclusive favourites, in others of them. Either feeling might have been in Jude, or both might have been mixed, when he said, 'Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?' The answer is one which, if it were taken in, would destroy all exclusiveness, but would not diminish wonder: 'Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. He that loveth me not keepeth not my words: and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father's which sent me.' If a man loved Christ, he would hold fast those words of His in which He said that God 'loved the world, and gave His only-begotten Son for it;' that God 'sent not His Son to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.' And then, because these words were dear to him, and he wished to live in the spirit of them, the Father who loved the world would come and make His abode with him, would impart to him His own likeness, and enable him in a measure to enter into His love. But one who cared nothing for Christ, would not care for these words of His, would not keep them in his heart, would not really believe them, would not desire to have his own mind fashioned in accordance with them. And seeing that Christ's word is not His, but the Father's who sent Him, that Father would remain to such a person always hidden and unknown.

'These things,' He adds, 'have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance.' It may be hypercritical to complain of our translators for rendering μένων by 'being yet present;' but I cannot help thinking that 'remaining,' or 'while I remain with you,' would have diminished the likelihood of a misapprehension which must make much of what He says here and afterwards unintelligible. That He was going away He had told them; only one day longer He would remain among them as their visible Teacher. But, assuredly, He declares solemnly that He shall not cease to be present with them; it is the express object of His conversation to give them that assurance. Nowhere does it come forth more strongly than in this sentence. What He said to them while they could look into His face, while they could see His lips moving, was but poorly apprehended by them; only a small portion of its meaning passed into them. Their real learning would come hereafter,—the vital recollection and understanding of the very words they were listening to then. Did they not feel that they wanted some one to fix the sense in their hearts, before the sounds mingled with the common air? Did they not want an interpreter, who should not translate one set of phrases by another, but should translate phrases into realities, and should open the spirit to entertain them? Were they not conscious of a hebetude and dulness, which the divinest wisdom could not penetrate as long as it remained on the outside of them? Did not the dulness hinder their intercourse with each other? Did any know exactly what the other meant? Did they not talk of trifles, because they despaired of breaking through the ice which enclosed their neighbour's heart, and had not even learnt the secret of thawing their own?

Yes; in this way they were taught that they must have a Spirit such as He spoke of, to be with them, not occasionally, but continually; to be with them, not as separate creatures, but as fellow-men; to be the Inspirer of their memories, their understandings, their affections; to be their Deliverer from shallowness; to be their Guide to that well of living water at the bottom of which truth lies. It was thus that they learnt, however imperfectly, that this Spirit must be a Divine Person,—could not be a mere vague and floating influence. It was thus that they sprung to the conviction, however hard it might be, which our Lord had expressed, and which He repeated in another form of words here, that the Spirit must bring Him near to them, must come in His name, must bind them together in His name. It was thus they learnt that a Spirit, which did not proceed from a Father and testify of a Father, could not be the Spirit of truth or the Spirit of peace.