To understand the fulfilments of Scripture of which the Apostle speaks, by merely fitting the words which he quotes to some fact, I believe to be impossible. There is a fact always answering to the words; but its import, its connexion with the life of our Lord and the life of man, must be ascertained by meditating on the context: that context being found, not always in the letters of a book, but quite as often in a portion of history, or in an institution and the purposes for which it existed. Here is a type instance. The words, 'A bone shall not be broken,' are brought to the Apostle's mind by seeing that the usual custom of breaking the legs of crucified malefactors was not followed in the case of our Lord. But those words recalled to him and to his countrymen the feast of the Passover, and all that is declared respecting it in the 12th chapter of Exodus. The fulfilment, then, of these words was the fulfilment of the whole Passover service; the translation of the national deliverance which it spoke of into a complete and universal deliverance; the substitution of the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, for the lamb whose blood was sprinkled upon the door-posts of the houses that the angel of death might not touch them.
The other quotation is even more remarkable; it is taken from the 12th chapter of Zechariah. 'And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for Him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for Him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born.'
One fulfilment of Scripture at the Cross was in the rending of the vesture by the soldiers, and in the mockery of the priests. The last, representing the inward hatred of the Jewish nation, is more fearful than the mere recklessness of the heathen officials. How utterly overwhelming it would have been to the Apostle, if he could have supposed that either the recklessness or the hatred was mightier than the divine love which was manifested there! But the pierced side recalled the words of the old prophet. There was a witness in them that even hatred would prove weak at last; that even upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the house of David a power would come from that Cross that nothing should resist. It said, 'The will of eternal Love may be contended with long. It must prevail at last and for ever.'
With the assurance that Scripture shall yet receive this grand and complete fulfilment the history of the crucifixion closes. St. John, like the other Evangelists, records the burial in Joseph's tomb. He introduces one particular into their narratives which, for the students of his Gospel, is full of interest. 'And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night; and brought a mixture of myrrh, and aloes, about an hundred pound weight.'
On the night of which St. John speaks, Nicodemus had heard the words, 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God so loved the world, that He sent His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' As the eyes of the ruler turned to the Cross, may there not have come to him a sense of divine, unutterable love, stronger than death, which will have made these dark words intelligible? May there not have come to himself, in that hour, the pangs of the second birth of which all his Jewish lore had taught him nothing? May he not have hoped that for the body he was anointing, there would also be a second birth, a resurrection morn?
DISCOURSE XXVIII.
THE RESURRECTION.
[Lincoln's Inn, 11th Sunday after Trinity (Afternoon), August 3, 1856.]
St. John XX. 30, 31.