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

by Frederick Denison Maurice

Yet under each of these heads points are brought out by St. John to which there is nothing corresponding in the earlier Evangelists, and which one feels instinctively would have been out of place in them. The first is this in the story of the apprehension: 'Jesus therefore, knowing all things that should come upon Him, went forth, and said unto them, Whom seek ye? They answered Him, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus saith unto them, I am He. And Judas also, which betrayed Him, stood with them. As soon then as He had said unto them, I am He, they went backward, and fell to the ground. Then asked He them again, Whom seek ye? And they said, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus answered, I have told you that I am He: if therefore ye seek me, let these go their way: that the saying might be fulfilled, which He spake, Of them which thou gavest me have I lost none.'

The last quotation is taken from the prayer which St. John alone has given us. But I think the words, 'I am' which made the officers stagger as they drew near with their torches in the dark night to the Nazarene prophet, have also their interpretation in previous words which belong exclusively to this Gospel. We are told in the 8th chapter that the Jews in the Temple took up stones to cast at Jesus, because He appeared to them to be claiming the words spoken in the bush as if they were spoken of Him. Was there not a recollection of those words as He stood before them now? Did not the clear light of righteousness and truth in His face carry them home to the conscience of the officers, and make them feel for a moment that One was using them who had a right to use them, One to whom they owed homage?

The struggle was soon over; they had been sent to do a work, and they went through it. Then came that other sentence, 'Let these go their way,' which fulfilled, St. John says, the words, 'Of them which thou gavest me have I lost none.' What! we say to ourselves, Were not those words spoken for all time? Did not they refer to a deliverance from ultimate perdition? Could they be accomplished in the deliverance of the eleven Apostles from the immediate peril of being apprehended with their Lord? I answer, the more we become acquainted with the letter and with the spirit of St. John's narrative, the more we understand that he regards every act done by our Lord, to effect ever so temporary a redemption, for ever so small a body, or so insignificant an individual, as a sign of what He is, of the work in which He is always engaged, of the blessing which He has wrought out and designs for the universe. If we do not like to take this as a sign that the words of that prayer were uttered on earth and accomplished in heaven, we may form what sublime notions we will about Christ's redemption, but they will be notions only; they will not belong to reality; at best they will point to some good which we expect for ourselves; they will not glorify Him from whom all good comes.

The incident of Peter smiting the high-priest's servant follows immediately upon this sentence. The sequence is, I think, significant. The Apostle begins to defend his Master; he does not know that his Master is defending him. Of His disciples He loses none; but 'the cup which His Father has given Him, He must drink.' Then the vigorous champion is chilled. He must warm himself at the fire, for it is cold, while his Master is in the hall before the high-priest; the faces of maid-servants terrify him; he forgets that he was in the garden with Christ; he forgets his own violence; and the cock crows. The story is told with peculiar vividness by St. John, but it is the same in substance with that which the Hebrew Matthew told of the Apostle of the Hebrews; which Mark told of his own kinsman and master, writing perhaps from his dictation.

But the answer of Jesus to the high-priest is found only in St. John. 'I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort, and in secret have I said nothing. Why askest thou me? Ask them which heard me, what I have said unto them: behold, they know what I said.' I do not quote these words only or chiefly because they show that He who when He was reviled reviled not again, could answer in a way which the bystanders thought offensive to the dignity of the high-priest; so justifying words that have been pronounced unseemly in many of his followers, when they have been brought before priests and rulers; nor because they show how easily affected reverence for an administrator of the law may be joined with an outrage upon the law itself. I quote them much more because they occur in that Evangelist, who has been suspected of revealing a secret lore which Christ had kept back from those who heard Him in the synagogue and in the Temple. That inference has been grounded upon those Paschal discourses which I have been considering lately; discourses especially designed to prepare the disciples for delivering a message to the world; discourses of which the main characteristic is, that they contain the promise of a Comforter who should deliver them from their narrowness, and who should convince the world. But here is a testimony, coming after those discourses, from the lips of Christ himself, that He had no esoteric lore, that His doctrine may be learnt from that which He spoke openly, and that His disciples are teaching another doctrine than His, if theirs is not one which can be proclaimed as good news to the universe.

It is St. John who tells us that the Jews did not 'go into the judgment-hall lest they should be defiled, that they might eat the passover.' This most characteristic trait of a religious and godless nation ever put upon record, should be thought of by each of us in silence and awe, since every age has brought some terrible repetitions of it. What cautions have not inquisitors taken lest they should be defiled! what care have they not used to prepare themselves for feasts, at which their hands were to be dipped deep in blood for the honour of their god! They never fancied that they were copying the Pharisees of Jerusalem. We wrap ourselves in our Protestantism, and think we are quite secure that we shall not follow them. Alas! there is our peril! to dream that there is one evil tendency in Jews or in Romanists which is not in us, that there is one crime of theirs which we may not commit!

It is from St. John that we learn that Pilate would have wished the people to take Jesus, and judge Him according to their own law; and that they, acting in the spirit of the advice of Caiaphas, waived the privilege which perhaps they might have asserted, that He might die the Roman death of the cross, and perish as a traitor against the Cæsar. And it is St. John who gives us that dialogue in Pilate's hall, of which we are only beginning, after eighteen hundred years, to spell out the sense, though during all those eighteen hundred years the sense has been declaring itself in wonderful ways. 'Then Pilate entered into the judgment-hall again, and called Jesus, and said unto Him, Art thou the King of the Jews? Jesus answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me? Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done? Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. Pilate therefore said unto Him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.'

The other Evangelists have spoken to us of a kingdom of heaven, a kingdom the nature of which might be explained by parables of nature, the powers of which were manifested in acts of healing and blessing to men. It was a kingdom in the strictest sense, a kingdom set up on earth to rule over the earth. But it was not of this world. Its capacity of blessing men arose from its not being created by them, or dependent upon them. It was God's kingdom, therefore it was as unlike as possible to the tyrannies by which the world had tormented itself. St. John had gone in his Gospel to the root of this doctrine. He had spoken of a Word by whom the world is created, who is the Source of its life, though it knows Him not. He had spoken of this Word as the Light of men. He had shown how the Word, being made flesh, proved Himself by all His acts and discourses to be the same who had taught the hearts and consciences of men in all ages. He had spoken of this Word as setting forth the Father from whom He came. He had said that in manifesting Him, he manifested the truth which would make men free.

In this dialogue all these lessons are gathered up. Jesus will not tell Pilate that He is not a king, for that would be to contradict all His preaching and all His acts; He will not tell him that He is a king, for how could a poor official and slave of Roman absolutism understand Him? But He says: 'For this cause was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I might bear witness (to Jews, to Romans, to thee) of the truth. And I know that those who seek truth and love truth will hear my voice.' This was that 'good confession' which he witnessed before Pontius Pilate, the ground and pattern of all confessions that were to be borne afterwards in the world; all these deriving their virtue from this, all being witnesses of a kingdom which is not of the world, but overcomes the world; all being true because He is the truth.

I have said already that Jesus is represented in all the Gospels as wearing the purple robe and the crown of thorns. But the words of Pilate, when he brought Him forth with these signs of royalty, 'Behold the Man!' occur only in St. John. The answer of the chief priests and of the officers was, 'Crucify Him, crucify Him.' Pilate said, 'Take ye Him, and crucify Him: for I find no fault in Him. The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God.' These words, like so many of which he speaks in his Gospel, may have fallen lightly upon St. John's ears at first; but after that 'Jesus was risen from the dead, then would he have remembered what things were spoken of Him, and what things were done unto Him.' Then will the sentence, 'Behold the Man,' have seemed to him the most wonderful inspiration which an evil ruler, who spoke not of himself, was ever visited with. Then the cry, 'Crucify Him,' will indeed have meant, 'Crucify the Man, the Son of Man, the Representative of Humanity.' Then the attempt of the chief priests to sustain their charge of treason against Rome when that was failing, with the charge which Pilate could not understand, and which therefore made him the more afraid, of treason against God, will have appeared to him a startling testimony that they could not crucify the Son of Man without crucifying the Son of God.