WHY CHRIST MUST DEPART
"It is expedient for you that I go
away."--JOHN xvi. 7.
A SERMON BEFORE COMMUNION
IT was on a communion night like this that
the words were spoken. They fell upon the disciples like a thunderbolt
startling a summer sky. Three and thirty years He had lived among them. They
had lately learned to love Him. Day after day they had shared together the
sunshine and the storm, and their hearts clung to Him with a strange
tenderness. And just when everything was at its height, when their friendship
was now pledged indissolubly in the first most solemn sacrament, the unexpected
words come, "I must say goodbye; it is expedient for you that I go away." It
was a crushing blow to the little band. They had staked their all upon that
love. They had given up home, business, friends, and promised to follow Him.
And now He says, "I must go!"
Let us see what He means by it. The words may
help us to understand more fully our own relations with Him now that He is
gone.
I. The first thing to strike one is the way Jesus
took to break the news. It was characteristic. His sayings and doings always
came about in the most natural way. Even His profoundest statements of doctrine
were invariably apropos of some often trivial circumstance happening in
the day's round. So now He did not suddenly deliver Himself of the doctrine of
the Ascension. It leaked out as it were in the ordinary course of things.
The supper was over; but the friends had much to
say to one another that night, and they lingered long around the table. They
did not know it was the last supper, never dreamed of it, but there had been an
unusual sweetness in their intercourse and they talked on and on. The hour grew
late, but John still leaned on his Master's breast, and the others, grouped
round in the twilight, drank in the solemn gladness of the communion evening.
Suddenly a shadow falls over this scene. A sinister figure rises stealthily,
takes the bag, and makes for the door unobserved. Jesus calls him: hands him
the sop. The spell is broken. A terrible revulsion of feeling comes over
Him--as if a stab in the dark had struck into His heart. He cannot go on now.
It is useless to try. He cannot keep up the perhaps forced spirits.
"Little children," He says very solemnly, His
voice choking, "yet a little while I am with you." And "Whither I go ye cannot
come."
The hour is late. They think He is getting tired,
He means to retire to rest. But Peter asks straight out, "Lord, whither goest
Thou?" Into the garden? Back to Galilee? It never occurred to one of them that
He meant the Unknown Land.
"Whither I go," He replies a second time, "Ye
cannot follow Me now, but ye shall follow Me afterward." Afterward! The
blow slowly falls. In a dim, bewildering way it begins to dawn upon them. It is
separation.
We can judge of the effect from the next
sentence. "Let not your heart be troubled," He says. He sees their panic and
consternation, and doctrine has to stand aside till experimental religion has
ministered. And then, it is only at intervals that He gets back to it; every
sentence almost is interrupted. Questionings and misgivings are started,
explanations are insisted on, but the terrible truth will not hide. He always
comes back to that--He will not temper its meaning, He still insists that it is
absolute, literal; and finally He states it in its most bare and naked form,
"It is expedient for you that I go away."
II. Notice His reasons for going away. Why did
Jesus go away? We all remember a time when we could not answer that question.
We wished He had stayed, and had been here now. The children's hymn expresses a
real human feeling, and our hearts burn still as we read it:--
"I think, when I
read that sweet story of old,
How Jesus was here among men,
How He called little children as lambs to His fold,
I should like to have been with them then.
I wish that His hands had been placed on my head,
That His arms had been thrown around me,
And that I might have seen His kind look as He said,
`Let the little ones come unto Me.'"
Jesus must have had reasons for
disappointing a human feeling so deep, so universal, and so sacred. We may be
sure, too, that these reasons intimately concern us. He did not go away because
He was tired. It was quite true that He was despised and rejected of men; it
was quite true that the pitiless world hated and spurned and trod on Him. But
that did not drive Him away. It was quite true that He longed for His Father's
house and pined and yearned for His love. But that did not draw Him away. No.
He never thought of Himself. It is expedient for you, He says, not for Me, that
I go.
1. The first reason is one of His own stating. "I
go away to prepare a place for you." And the very naming of this is a
proof of Christ's considerateness. The burning question with every man who
thought about his life in those days was Whither is this life leading? The
present, alas! was dim and inscrutable enough, but the future was a fearful and
unsolved mystery. So Christ put that right before He went away. He gave this
unknown future form and colour. He told us--and it is only because we are so
accustomed to it that we do not wonder more at the magnificence of the
conception--that when our place in this world should know us no more there
would be another place ready for us. We do not know much about that place, but
the best thing we do know, that He prepares it. Eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man what the Lord went away to
prepare for them that love Him. It is better to think of this, to let our
thoughts rest on this, that He prepares it, than to fancy details of our
own.
But that does not exhaust the matter. Consider
the alternative. If Christ had not gone away, what then? We should not either.
The circumstances of our future life depended upon Christ's going away to
prepare them; but the fact of our going away at all depended on His going away.
We could not follow Him hereafter, as He said we should, unless He led first.
He had to be the Resurrection and the Life.
And this was part of the preparing a place for
us--the preparing a way for us. He prepared a place for us by the way He took
to prepare a place. It was a very wonderful way.
In a lonely valley in Switzerland a small band of
patriots once marched against an invading force ten times their strength. They
found themselves one day at the head of a narrow pass, confronted by a solid
wall of spears. They made assault after assault, but that bristling line
remained unbroken. Time after time they were driven back decimated with
hopeless slaughter. The forlorn hope rallied for the last time. As they
charged, their leader suddenly advanced before them with outstretched arms, and
every spear for three or four yards of the line was buried in his body. He fell
dead. But he prepared a place for his followers. Through the open breach, over
his dead body, they rushed to victory and won the freedom of their country.
So the Lord Jesus went before His people, the
Captain of our salvation, sheathing the weapons of death and judgment in
Himself, and preparing a place for us with His dead body. Well for us not only
that He went away, but that He went by way of the Cross.
2. Another reason why He went away was to be very
near. It seems a paradox, but He went away really in order to be near. Suppose,
again, He had not gone away; suppose He were here now. Suppose He were still in
the Holy Land, at Jerusalem. Every ship that started for the East would be
crowded with Christian pilgrims. Every train flying through Europe would be
thronged with people going to see Jesus. Every mail-bag would be full of
letters from those in difficulty and trial, and gifts of homage to manifest
men's gratitude and love. You yourself, let us say, are in one of those ships.
The port, when you arrive after the long voyage, is blocked with vessels of
every flag. With much difficulty you land, and join one of the long trains
starting for Jerusalem. Far as the eye can reach, the caravans move over the
desert in an endless stream. You do not mind the scorching sun, the choking
dust, the elbowing crowds, the burning sands. You are in the Holy Land, and you
will see Jesus! Yonder, at last, in the far distance, are the glittering spires
of the Holy Hill, above all the burnished temple dome beneath which He sits.
But what is that dark seething mass stretching for leagues and leagues between
you and the Holy City? They have come from the north and from the south, and
from the east and from the west, as you have, to look upon their Lord. They
wish
"That His hands
might be placed on their head;
That His arms might be thrown around them."
But it cannot be. You have come to see
Jesus, but you will not see Him. They have been there weeks, months, years, and
have not seen Him. They are a yard or two nearer, and that is all. The thing is
impossible. It is an anti-climax, an absurdity. It would be a social outrage;
it would be a physical impossibility.
Now Christ foresaw all this when He said it was
expedient that He should go away. Observe, He did not say it was necessary--it
was expedient. The objection to the opposite plan was simply that it
would not have worked. So He says to you, "It is very kind and earnest of you
to come so far, but you mistake. Go away back from the walls of the Holy City,
over the sea, and you will find Me in your own home. You will find Me where the
shepherds found Me, doing their ordinary work; where the woman of Samaria found
Me, drawing the water for the forenoon meal; where the disciples found Me
mending nets in their working clothes; where Mary found Me, among the
commonplace household duties of a country village." What would religion be,
indeed, if the soul-sick had to take their turn like the out-patients waiting
at the poor-hour outside the infirmary? How would it be with the old who were
too frail to travel to Him, or the poor who could not afford it? How would it
be with the blind, who could not see Him, or the deaf, who could not hear Him?
It would be physically impossible for millions to obey the Lord's command,
"Come unto Me, and I will give you rest."
For their sakes it was expedient that He should
go away. It was a great blessing for the world that He went. Access to Him is
universally complete from every corner of every home in every part of the
world. For the poor can have Him always with them. The soul-sick cannot be out
of reach of the Physician. The blind can see His beauty now that He has gone
away. The deaf hear His voice when all others are silent, and the dumb can pray
when they cannot speak.
Yes the visible Incarnation must of necessity be
brief. Only a small circle could enjoy His actual presence, but a kingdom like
Christianity needed a risen Lord. It was expedient for the whole body of its
subjects that He went away. He would be nearer man by being apparently further.
The limitations of sense subjected Him while He stayed. He was subject to
geography, locality, space, and time. But by going away He was in a spaceless
land, in a timeless eternity, able to be with all men always even unto the end
of the world.
3. Another reason why He went away--although this
is also a paradox--was that we might see Him better. When a friend is
with us we do not really see him so well as when he is away. We only see
points, details. It is like looking at a great mountain: you see it best a
little way off. Clamber up the flanks of Mont Blanc, you see very little--a few
rocks, a pine or two, a blinding waste of snow; but come down into the Valley
of Chamounix and there the monarch dawns upon you in all his majesty.
Christ is the most gigantic figure of history. To
take in His full proportions one must be both near and away. The same is true
of all greatness. Of all great poets, philosophers, politicians, men of
science, it is said that their generation never knew them. They dawn upon us as
time rolls past. Then their life comes out in its true perspective, and the
symmetry of their work is revealed. We never know our friends, likewise, till
we lose them We often never know the beauty of a life which is lived very near
our own till the hand of death has taken it away. It was expedient for us,
therefore, that He should go--that we might see the colossal greatness of His
stature, appreciate the loftiness and massiveness of His whole character, and
feel the perfect beauty and oneness of His life and work.
4. Still another reason. He went away that we
might walk by faith. After all, if He had stayed, with all its
inconveniences, we should have been walking by sight. And this is the very
thing religion is continually trying to undo. The strongest temptation to every
man is to guide himself by what he can see, and feel, and handle. This is the
core of Ritualism, the foundation of Roman Catholicism, the essence of
idolatry. Men want to see God, therefore they make images of Him. We do not
laugh at Ritualism; it is intensely human. It is not so much a sin of
presumption; it is a sin of mistake. It is a trying to undo the going away of
Christ. It is a trying to make believe that He is still here. And the fatal
fallacy of it is that it defeats its own end. He who seeks God in tangible form
misses the very thing he is seeking, for God is a Spirit. The desire burns
within him to see God; the desire is given him to make him spiritual, by giving
him a spiritual exercise to do; and he cheats himself by exercising the flesh
instead of the spirit. Hunger and thirst after God are an endowment to raise us
out of the seen and temporal. But instead of letting the spiritual appetite
elevate us into the spirit, we are apt to degrade the very instrument of our
spiritualisation and make it minister to the flesh.
It was expedient in order that the disciples
should be spiritualized that Jesus should become a Spirit. Life in the body to
all men is short. The mortal dies and puts on immortality. So Christ's great
aim is to strengthen the after-life. Therefore He gave exercises in faith to be
the education for immortality. Therefore Jesus went away to strengthen the
spirit for eternity.
It is not because there is any deep mysterious
value in faith itself that it plays so great a part in religion. It is not
because God arbitrarily chooses that we should walk by faith rather than by
sight. It is because it is essential to our future; it is because this is the
faculty which of all others is absolutely necessary to life in the spirit
For our true life will be lived in the spirit. In
the hereafter there will be nothing carnal. Christ is therefore solicitous to
educate our faith, for sight will be useless. There will be no eye, no pupil,
no retina, no optic nerve in the hereafter, so faith is the spiritual
substitute for them which Christ would develop in us by going away.
5. But the great reason has yet to be mentioned.
He went away that the Comforter might come.
We have seen how His going away was a
provision for the future life. The absent Lord prepares a place there; the
absent Object of faith educates the souls of the faithful to possess and enjoy
it. But He provides for the life that now is. And His going away has to do with
the present as much as with the life to come. One day when Jesus was in Peroea,
a message came to Him that a very dear friend was sick. He lived in a distant
village with his two sisters. They were greatly concerned about their brother's
illness, and had sent in haste for Jesus. Now Jesus loved Mary and Martha and
Lazarus their brother; but He was so situated at the time that He could not go.
Perhaps He was too busy, perhaps He had other similar cases on hand; at all
events He could not go. When He went ultimately, it was too late. Hour after
hour the sisters waited for Him. They could not believe He would not come; but
the slow hours dragged themselves along by the dying man's couch, and he was
dead and laid in the grave before Jesus arrived. You can imagine one of His
thoughts, at least, as He stands and weeps by that grave with the inconsolable
sisters,--"It is expedient that I go away. I should have been present at his
death-bed scene if I had been away. I will depart and send the Comforter. There
will be no summons of sorrow which He will not be able to answer. He will abide
with men for ever. Everywhere He will come and go. He will be like the
noiseless invisible wind, blowing all over the world wheresoever He
listeth."
The doctrine of the Holy Ghost is very simple.
Men stumble over it because they imagine it to be something very mysterious and
unintelligible. But the whole matter lies here. Our text is the key to it. The
Holy Spirit is just what Christ would have been had He been here. He ministers
comfort just as Christ would have done--only without the inconveniences of
circumstance, without the restriction of space, without the limitations of
time. More: we need a personal Christ, but we cannot get Him, at least we
cannot each get Him. So the only alternative is a spiritual Christ,--a Holy
Spirit, and then we can all get Him. He reproves the world of sin, of
righteousness, and of judgment. Christ had to go away to make room for a Person
of the Trinity who could deal with the world. He Himself could only reprove the
individual of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. But work on a larger
scale is done now that He is gone. This is what He refers to when He said,
"Greater works than these shall ye do."
And yet Christ did not go away that the Spirit
might take His place. Christ is with us Himself. He is with us and yet He is
not with us, that is, He is with us by His Spirit. The Spirit does not reveal
the Spirit. He speaks not of Himself, He reveals Christ. He is the nexus, the
connection between the absent Christ and the world--a spiritual presence which
can penetrate where the present Christ could not go. It was expedient for the
present Christ to go away that the universal Christ might come to all.
Finally, if all this was expedient for us,
this strange relation of Jesus to His people ought to have a startling
influence upon our life. Expediency is a practical thing. It was a terrible
risk going away. Has the expedient which Christ adopted been worth while to you
and me? These three great practical effects at least are obvious.
(1) Christ ought to be as near to us as if He
were still here. Nothing so simplifies the whole religious life as this
thought. A present, personal Christ solves every difficulty, and meets every
requirement of Christian experience. There is a historical Christ, a national
Christ, a theological Christ--we each want Christ. So we have Him. For purposes
of expediency, for a little while, He has become invisible. It is our part to
have Him
"More present to
Faith's vision keen;
Than any other vision seen;
More near, more intimately nigh
Than any other earthly tie."
(2) Then
consider what an incentive to honest faithfulness this is. The kingdom of
Heaven is like a man travelling into a far country. And before he went he
called his servants and gave to every man his work.
Are we doing it faithfully? Are we doing it at
all? The visible eye of the Master is off us. No one inspects our work. Wood,
hay, stubble, no man knows. It is the test of the absent Christ. He is training
us to a kind of faithfulness whose high quality is unattained by any other
earthly means. It was after the Lord was gone that the disciples worked. They
grew fast after this--in vigour, in usefulness, in reliance, in strength of
character. Hitherto they had rested in His love. Did you ever think what a risk
it was for Him to go away? It was a terrible risk--to leave us here all by
ourselves. And yet this was one of His ways of elevating us. There is nothing
exalts a man like confidence put in him. So He went away and let us try
ourselves.
We cannot always sit at the communion table. We
partake of the feast not so much as a luxury, though it is that, but to give us
strength to work. We think our Sabbath services, our prayers, our Bible reading
are our religion. It is not so. We do these things to help us to be religious
in other things. These are the mere meals, and a workman gets no wages for his
meals. It is for the work he does. The value of this communion is not estimated
yet. It will take the coming week to put the value upon it. In itself it counts
little; we shall see what it is, by what we shall be.
Every communicant is left by Christ with a solemn
responsibility. Christ's confidence in us is unspeakably touching. Christ was
sure of us: He felt the world was safe in our hands. He was away, but we would
be Christs to it; the Light of the World was gone, but He would light a
thousand lights, and leave each of us as one to illuminate one corner of its
gloom.
(3) Lastly, He has only gone for a little while.
"Behold, I come quickly." The probation will soon be past. "Be good children
till I come back," He has said, like a mother leaving her little ones, "and I
will come again, and receive you unto Myself, that where I am, ye may be also."
So we wait till He come again--we wait till it is expedient for Him to come
back.
"So I am watching
quietly
Every day.
Whenever the sun shines brightly,
I rise and say;
`Surely it is the shining of His face!'
And when a shadow falls across the window
Of my room
Where I am working my appointed task,
I lift my head to watch the door, and ask
If He is come."