Therefore He goes on: 'This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth. But I have called you friends; for all things which I have heard from my Father, I have made known unto you.'
You see how earnestly He repeats those words which to many of us have such a paradoxical sound. 'I command you to love.' 'Just the thing,' we say in our hearts, 'which cannot be commanded, which must come from choice.' 'Just that,' He answers, 'which cannot come from choice, which must come from submission.' If a loving Being were not the Lord of our wills, were not the Lord of the universe, we might make mighty efforts to love, supposing we had been taught by some visitant from another region what love was; and every such effort would be a rebellious struggle against our Master and our destiny. If there is a perfect Love creating and sustaining all things, if men have a Father, then such efforts cannot be rebellious, must be in conformity to this law: 'Love as I have loved you.' I have said this before, while dwelling on another part of this discourse; but I must say it again and again, for it is the principle which underlies the whole of it, and upon which the distinction that is made here between servants and friends entirely depends. Christ manifests the greatest love which, He says, can be manifested. The love which He manifests is His Father's. He lays down His life in submission to that. They become His friends by yielding to that love, by confessing it, by allowing it to have dominion over them. He calls them no longer servants, but friends, because servants only know what they are to do, without knowing why they are to do it; whereas He has told them the very secret of His Father's mind, the ground on which His acts and His precepts rest. It is not that the friend is less under authority than the servant. It is not that the one does what He is bidden, and the other may do what he likes. It is that the friend enters into the very nature of the command,—that it is a command which is addressed to his will, and which moulds his will to its own likeness.
In strict consistency with this language, He goes on: 'Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and have ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, He may give it you.' All sectarianism, all self-seeking and self-willed religion, is based upon the idea, 'We have chosen Him. By an act of faith, or an act of love, we have entered into a relation with Him, which but for that act would not be.' And the whole Gospel turns upon the opposite maxim to this: 'I have chosen you.' 'You are merely obeying a call. You are merely confessing a relation, with the making of which you had nothing to do.' Even when this doctrine of election has taken a narrow form,—even when it has been recognised chiefly as exclusive,—it has had a mighty power over the hearts of men. They have given themselves up, as they never could do when they thought they had selected their own Master, or were going upon errands of their own. But when it takes the form which it has here; when Christ, who has loved them to the death, commands them to love others as He has loved; when He tells them that He has placed them in their different circumstances that they may go and bring forth fruit,—that fruit being the men whom they shall persuade that they too belong to a race for which Christ has died, and which the Father loves;—there cannot be any principle which is at once so humbling and so elevating, which so takes away all notion from the disciple that there is any worth in his own deeds or words, which gives him so confident an assurance that God's word, spoken through him or through any man, will not return to Him void. And that, if I am not mistaken, is the reason why the promise, that whatever is asked of the Father in Christ's name shall be granted, is again introduced here with the variation, 'He may give it,' instead of 'I will do it.' A man who feels that he is called to a work, does not therefore feel power to accomplish it. He may feel—as Moses did, and as Jeremiah did—an increased feebleness, an utter childishness; but he understands that he may ask the Father, whose will he is called to do, that that will may be done; so he wins a strength which is and is not his own.
We wonder to find the command which we have heard so often, delivered once more in the 17th verse. But we presently discover that it is as an introduction to a new subject, and that in relation to that subject the old words have a new force. 'These things I command you, that ye love one another. If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love its own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. Remember the word which I spake to you, The servant is not greater than his Master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also.' Here the love which He commands them to have for one another—the love which is His own, and which He inspires—is contrasted with the hatred of the world. The one difference which we have already discovered between the world and those whom He chooses out of it, is that they confess a Centre, and that the world confesses none; that they desire to move, each in his own orbit, about this Centre, and that the world acknowledges only a revolution of each man about himself. The world, indeed, cannot realize its own principles. It must have companies, parties, sects,—bodies acknowledging some principle of cohesion, aspiring after a kind of unity. Still, as a world, this is the description of it; and therefore, as a world, it must hate all who say, 'We are a society bound together, not by any law of our own, not by an election of our own, but by God's law and election. And His law is a law of sacrifice. He gives up His Son; His Son gives up Himself. We are to give up ourselves in obedience to His Spirit, that we may do His work.'
As He had so lately called them friends, not servants, we may be surprised that here He gave them the old name again. But the title, servant, is not now a dishonourable title for those whom He has called friends. Since the Master became a servant, His friends must be content to be servants, otherwise they do not know what their Lord doeth; they cannot enter into His mind. With this service, too, they must take the hatred and persecution of the world as part of their endowment, as one of the treasures which their Lord shares with them. If it does not hate them, they must always fear that they are not loving each other, or loving it as God loves it.
'But all these things will they do to you for my name's sake, because they know not Him that sent me. If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin. He that hateth me, hateth my Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father. But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled which is written in their law, They hated me without a cause.' These are, perhaps, the most terrible words in the Old or New Testament. No descriptions of divine punishment which are written anywhere, can come the least into comparison with them for awfulness and horror. This gratuitous hatred—this hatred of Christ by men because they hate God, this hatred of God because He has manifested and proved Himself to be love—is something which passes all our conceptions, and yet which would not mean anything to us if our consciences did not bear witness that the possibility of it lies in ourselves. And do not let us put away that thought, brethren, or the other which is closely akin to it, that such hatred is only possible in a nation which, like the Jewish, is full of religious knowledge and of religious profession. There, our Lord tells us Himself, was a hatred of Him and of His Father which could be found nowhere else,—there, among scribes, and Pharisees, and chief priests. Let us ask God, that none of us may say of his brother, 'This crime may be committed by thee;' but each of himself: 'God be merciful to me a sinner. Keep me by Thy love, abiding in Thy love. Help me to keep Christ's commandment of loving my brother as well as Thee; else, if I am left to myself, I may sink into such a hell of hatred, as would be worse than all other hells that men have ever feared to think of.'
Let us pray this prayer, and then our Lord's last words in this chapter will come to us as the most wonderful relief, as the very answer which we long for. 'But when the Comforter shall come, whom I will send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of me: and ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.' To have the Comforter, the Paraclete, with us, this is the security that the spirit of hatred shall not overcome us. To have the Spirit of truth with us, this is the security that we shall not be brought to believe a lie, or to disbelieve in the God of truth. To have Him testifying of Christ, the Son of Man and the Son of God, is the security that we shall abide in Him who has given the greatest proof of love that can be given, by laying down His life for His friends. To be able to testify of Him because we have been with Him, even when He was hidden from us, and we did not know how near He was; to testify of Him by our words and our deeds; this is the security that He is using us for His own gracious purpose, and that He will be glorified in the fruits which He will cause us to bring forth.