Page images
PDF
EPUB

The Prodigal Son, are but by-products of certain chance combinations of phosphates and nitrates in the brain; all that incomparably holy, loving, sublime and pathetic life of him whom we have thought the Holy One of God, the ideal of humanity, is but a fine and etherealized emanation of chemical elements. The very statement is a refutation. The being of God and the existence of mind, soul, spirit, are vindicated in the very existence of Jesus. They are, for he is. To the seeker for the truth of God, he replies, I am the truth.

(4) Finally, what says "The Truth," as to the faith in the future life? "If a man die, shall he live again?" By his answer to that importunate question Jesus proves his claim. On no other subject is he more positive. First to last, he never hesitates, never doubts. While we halt, and falter, and tremble before the mystery of death, he, standing in the light, is calm and clear. "In my Father's house are many mansions." In the light of "The Truth" this is too inevitable to need telling. "If it were not so, I would have told you." "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." After all our reasonings, hopes, imaginings, the truth about the life to come for us is Christ and his testimony. We have more than his words, more than the positiveness and serene assurance of the teaching of Jesus. He is him.self the truth of immortality, for he is himself the life immortal: that spirit-life demonstrating itself immortal in historic fact. Life in him did not end with the grave. He rose from the dead, he came back from the shadows, the firstborn of many brethren.

Charles L. Noyes.

THE COMFORTER PROMISED

JOHN 14: 15-27

"If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter."

The Christian imagination has always loved to linger on the scene in the large upper room where Jesus and his picked men ate and talked together on the night before he died. We are indebted to Da Vinci and Del Sarto for delineations that have become immortal. Their skilful hands have portrayed the little group and the few accessories of the simple meal. We see the eager, questioning look on the faces of the disciples, the tense muscles, the expectant attitude, and in his rightful place in their midst the man who had become their spiritual center. The literary art, also, has helped to preserve these memorable, pregnant hours, and all the biographers of Jesus exert their best powers when they seek to describe the scene.

But despite the aid which artist and writer bring to our attempt to reconstruct the momentous occasion, we are conscious of a serious lack, in the inability of any imagination to compass the length and breadth of its spiritual significance. Oh, to penetrate what went on in the minds and hearts of the disciples and the Master! The gospel narrative far surpasses any paraphrase in what it discloses of the currents and counter-currents of thought, and of the play and interplay of emotion. But the movement of the narrative is so swift and the style so condensed that we get only glimpses of the mental condition of the disciples, and

even the prolonged discourse of their Lord does not seem to proceed in an altogether orderly and systematic

course.

One thing surely was uppermost both in the mind of Jesus and of the others-the imminence of his departure. It was this that excited their questioning and their fears. It was this that kept sounding through Jesus' words. He had tried previously, it is true, to prepare them for it, but the time had come when he must speak more plainly. To the disciples its bearing upon them was the one consideration: Why they could not go with him; how they could go when the right time came; how he would be able to show himself to them after he had gone. To Jesus, on the other hand, his going away was looked at, first of all, not in its bearing upon himself, but upon them. He did not pause to reflect upon the glad consciousness that the end of the long fight was near, or upon the thrilling thought of speedy reunion with the Father. But as a dying father yearns over the children from whom he is being taken, so Christ's sole concern was for his followers. How would they get along without him? What would they be able to do and be without him? One great object, then, of this Paschal discourse was to make them understand that his absence would be made good to them. He knew well how essential he had become to Peter and John and the rest. What a new world he had opened to them, even though its glories were yet but half perceived, even though they were still raw recruits! Yet he was sure that their three years with him had wrought wonders, had made them different from any other set of men in all Judæa and in all the wide world. Yet, could he leave them now? Would they not slide nearly back to the moral and spiritual plane where they were when he found them by the Lake of Galilee? Undoubtedly, unless he could make some provision that would guarantee the permanence of their love and de

votion and would equip them with power to be his faithful representatives in the world.

Jesus knew that he could thus safeguard their spiritual interests. The consciousness that he still had a gift to bestow upon them richer than any that had yet fallen from his bountiful hand runs through all these last words. It is this sense of still being able to serve them that makes the beautiful sayings something more than empty platitudes. Otherwise of what use would it have been to talk about going to the Father, when the man whom they were coming to look upon as the embodiment of the Father was, in a few short hours, to be snatched forever from their sight? Or why should he urge upon them the duty and the joy of loving each other when the face that had always looked so pityingly upon their petty wranglings and had always glowed with approval when they were kind and unselfish would no more be seen at the head of the table where they broke their daily bread? As they contemplated the breaking of such precious ties could they help feeling that it would have been better, far, for them never to have left their fishing and their tax-gathering if this great, mysterious stranger was to tarry with them only three years and then leave them orphans? Christ understood not only human nature in the abstract but the half-Christianized nature of the coterie about him, and so he came boldly out and declared that a power would still be with them which would do for them and for the world just what he had been doing. This power would teach, illuminate, console, convert and convince all men who would open their hearts to its incoming.

It is not clear that at this time the disciples discriminated between the coming of the Holy Spirit and the return of Jesus. Perhaps he did not expect them to make any such fine distinctions. Theology sets for itself a difficult task when it undertakes to differentiate the two in terms that

shall possess any meaning for the average Christian experience. But the great, comprehensive truth to be grasped is this, that by the gift of the Spirit, God makes good to every disciple the absence of Christ in the flesh. It is this basal doctrine of our faith which prevents this touching scene in the upper chamber from becoming simply a beautiful picture in the life of a religious enthusiast, bound for martyrdom, and of the men whom he had gathered about him. It is this doctrine that makes Christian history intelligible. To it we trace our Bible, our churches, our institutions, all that has been precious in the experience of Christians through the centuries, all that has been heroic in their achievements in the world. Like the other fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion this has been grasped slowly, imperfectly, and perhaps at times erroneously. The Book of the Acts shows that even the men to whom the promise was originally made were led on step by step in their realization of it and of all its implications with respect to the Gentile world. The condition of the modern Church is another proof that a full realization of the meaning of the promise has yet to be reached, even in circles where Christianity as an institution and as an influence is most firmly established. But the Church has always lived under the inspiration of this promise and this hope, and we, as well as the early followers of Jesus, may take this promise to our hearts and live by the comfort and the inspiration which it holds.

For Christian experience, with perhaps the single exception of the Apostle Paul, has followed a uniform rule. Men first become acquainted with the historic Jesus, the human Jesus. The spell of his rich, rare personality exerts its charm upon them. Or, as Professor Drummond used to put it when talking to college boys, "The Christian life is simply falling in love with Jesus." His strength and power of character, the gentleness and graciousness of his

« PreviousContinue »