Verses 1-3
The Patriarch In the Church
John will not have any sin. He was an old man, but he would not set apart any margin for sinning, self-indulgence, worldly-mindedness; he would have the heart absolutely consecrated, fully, wholly, intensely consecrated, to God. How paternally and tenderly he talks, as he had a right to do. When a man is a hundred years old, all other men are looked upon as quite juvenile and inexperienced. Some want to play the rôle of old men and try to look very venerable at seventy; that is a mere trick of old age, juvenile old age. When John came into an assembly of septuagenarians he said, "My little children." It seemed as if he had a right to say so. What a wonderful thing is right, liberty, franchise! Some men can say what they please, and it is all right; it was the very thing to be said, and it was said in the tone that was proper, and everything about the whole atmosphere was exactly what the finest taste and keenest feeling would have it be. Other men say just the same things, and they are all wrong; they are rough, they are rude, they are out of place; they spoil the fitness of things, the inner subtle harmony that ought to hold life in quick responsive balance and union. We must imagine ourselves, therefore, in the presence of a long white-haired, wrinkle-faced, genial patriarch. He was a veritable old man, a right mature saint of God. What will he say? Has old age made him morally blunt? Will he now say, Brethren, on the whole, it is impossible to be just what we ought to be, we must have some little liberty allowed? Has old age blunted his ethical faculty, his idea of soldierly discipline? Will he be lax, will he be blind in his senility? On the contrary, he says, My little children, we must be good up to the very highest point; we must live at highest-water mark; we must not try to compromise with duty, with righteousness, with the finest morality, and its holiest issue, and practical character: we must never sin. He is as hard as James. We have had to remark upon the sternness of James, but when John is stern, there is no sternness like his. We call him the disciple of love, we think of him pillowing his head upon the bosom of his Lord; but when love burns it puts out every other fire it is the wrath of the Lamb. My soul, come not thou into that secret when thou standest in the presence of thy Judge!
But we do sin. What have you to say in reply to that tragical and indisputable fact, O man of the snowy hair and the wrinkled face? What have you to say to that, patriarch of the Church? Hear him! "If any man sin." How wisely he provides for what may be termed contingencies which are yet of the nature of necessities. Who could live in eternal cloudless light with such bodies and such eyes as these? None. We must have atmosphere, we must even have cloud. Who can live an absolutely holy life under conditions of the flesh, the world, and the devil? Why, we sin in prayer; we pollute with our lips the cup of sacrament; we look blasphemies. Is there no provision for this state of things? Hear the old preacher, listen how his voice trembles that trembling is the hiding of true strength; he says, "If any man sin," O Apostle of Christ, we all sin. Saith he, I know it, and I am speaking to that fact, and I may tell you that if any man sin there is a certain circumstance to be distinctly and comfortably remembered: instead of saying to you boldly and bluntly, "Every one of you sins," I prefer to approach the delicate subject in another way, and to say, "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father."
What is an "advocate"? The same word is translated "comforter" in the Gospel; we have a Comforter with the Father, a Paraclete with the Father, the very word that is applied to God the Holy Ghost is applied to God the Son. Why, they are all one! "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord." Putting the rendering into modern English, we might even say, If any man sin we have an attorney with God; a man who holds the whole case in his hands, and can represent it to the Father, and can tell him all about it, how it came to be as black a case as it is. Oh, the winsomeness of his look, the music of his voice, the passion of his advocacy! Trust your case with him. Now I know what to do: I will go to my Saviour with my sins, and say, Lord Jesus, they are here, they hurt me while I hold them; I did them every one, I am sorry in my soul that I ever did them: take my case in hand; other refuge have I none. I will risk eternity in that spirit, I dare not risk eternity in any other spirit. I do not know what eternity is, what eternity means, what eternity implies: I know nothing about it, but that it is the most appalling of all mysteries that relate to duration and experience; and in the face of that mystery I would rather trust this Paraclete than any theory, invention, hypothesis, assumption, I ever heard of. Beyond personal testimony I cannot go; I can only say, This is where I personally stand and wish to stand, and I invite others to be participators of the same rational, profound, and inexhaustible comfort.
But is the Attorney, Advocate, Paraclete, or Mediator, merely a skilled pleader, one who is skilful in the use of words, sharp in the anticipation of objections; is he but a nisi prius lawyer who will take advantage of any precedent or contingency or ambiguity that will help his cause? The answer is found in the character which is assigned to him in the text "the righteous," always the righteous, the right One; right in soul, right in purpose, right in feeling, mighty because he is right. Leave your case with him. Do not peddle with it yourselves; you cannot mend a shattered soul: go plaster the skin you have wounded, the doctor will find you some emollient you may apply: but when it is a question of the soul, To Christ! is the only gospel worth preaching.
But if he be so righteous he will be to us as burning and awful in criticism as God himself. The Apostle John anticipated that difficulty and provided for it; continuing his music thus, "And he is the propitiation for our sins." Righteousness and mercy have embraced, have kissed each other. So long as he is righteous he is fearful, we dare not go to righteousness with our sins; then hear the further strain. "And he is the propitiation for our sins." That propitiation is a theological word, and all theological words are to be jealously regarded and, where possible, to be thoroughly avoided. Yet we could not do without this word "propitiation," in whatever signification it be adopted. Say it means Kopher, cover; so that our sin being there he is the Kopher, the cover, under which they are all hidden. We have comfort even in that signification of the term. Say "the propitiation" means propitiator; a man who seeks to placate, please, reconcile, soften the other side. There is comfort in that signification of the word. It is perfectly possible for God to be love, and yet for God to need reconciling. I am not able to see that there is any sound and all-covering reason in the suggestion that because God is love he can need no reconciling. God is more than love. The term "God" is a symbolical term as well as an eternal term; it represents all that ever can be known or conceived of law, harmony, beauty, righteousness, continuance, and steadfastness of judgment. What a sphere is there for the action of all possible beneficent ministries! I do not therefore shrink from the statement that God needed reconciling: but that does not prevent my seizing with avidity on the counter-statement that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. The action is multifold, and is not to be dismissed with fluent ignorance. By "propitiation" I want to understand that Christ did something for me which I never could have done for myself. Say he bare our sins, and carried our sickness and our sorrow; say that our sins gathered upon him, and that he bare them in his body on the Cross it is a mystery: but, on my soul, it is a mystery of love, and every mystery of love should be carefully considered, lest in despising it or undervaluing it we offer affront to an angel of God.
The Apostle anticipated a misuse of this sublime theological doctrine. He thought the Jews or the Christians would say, How comforting! Christ saved us, Christ has his arms round about us, and come what may we are right. The venerable Apostle says, "He [Christ] is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only" let us have no Pharisaic pride, no pomp and self-trust, no religious vaunting and boasting "not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." When does Christ perform any little miracles? When does Christ half-heal a man? When did Christ merely relieve the burning pain? When did he simply lower the action of the leprosy, and leave it still the torment of the blood? Never. To John there seemed to be quite a round entirety, a noble and majestic integrity, about the expression "the whole world." This world has had a false reputation. It has apparently, I do not know whether really, given itself out as if it were a big place. Civilisation has overtaken it, and put its vaunting, if it ever had any vaunting, to silence, and plainly told us exactly what size it is. Yet the expression "the whole world" is about the largest expression we shall ever know under heaven; because "the whole world" is not a topographical term, it is more, it is a time term, it is a generation word: "the whole world" in the first age, and the second, in the thousandth age, and in the ten thousandth; it is a term that may go backwards as well as forwards. Who can tell what he did, that Son of God, when he died for the whole world? I cannot tell what he did; I know not how that agony affected the graves; I cannot say that there are any limitations to the love of God; I know not how the flood of heaven flowed backward through time's uncounted yesterdays. There we can but be still, thoughtful; there we can but wonder and even hope: but even if the renewed human heart looks back through the dead ages, which in verity are not dead, and yearns over those who long to see Christ in the flesh but did not see him, how know we but that the infinity of the divine love magnifies this yearning into its right proportions, and fills the sphere with overflowing glory and redeeming healthfulness! Leave it: but know that certainly through all the future this propitiation shall be the mightiest agency in the history of man.
What a curious expression there is in the third verse! Read it: "And hereby we do know that we know him." There is about as little agnosticism in that verse as any verse I ever read. This amounts to a double affirmative "hereby we do know that we know him." What if, after all this pother of words in angry criticism, God be the only Thing, Quantity, Force, or Personality, that we do really know? That would be just like human education and the secret of human progress, to be ignoring the very thing that we do most truly know; that we know so well, in the sense of intensity of feeling and powerfulness of inspiration, that we actually fail to realise the fact that is so potent and so powerful. If you make the matter one of intellectualism, I think that agnosticism is about the cleverest thing that ever was invented to snub the pride of intellect; it balances that pride admirably; but if you leave the pure intellectualism of the case and take in all the other elements that constitute true and vital and influential knowledge, then I will repeat the bold assumption, that it may be that God is the only Quantity, Force, or Personality that we really do know. We know by feeling, we know by experience, we know by that large comprehension which is called consciousness; sometimes we know without words: there are songs without words, why should there not be theologies without words great, reverent, marvelling apprehensions and outgoings after God, that can have no fit expression in human words? When your soul is at its highest and its best, when it has prayed itself half into heaven, then say what you really believe. You can never say your soul's creed in cold blood. It is not a form, it is an inspiration, a passion, a storm, yet a calm of the soul.
But how are we to know that we know Christ, and know God? The Apostle says, "If we keep his commandments." We cannot get rid of this moral element in Christianity. Christianity will never allow us a vacancy in which we can serve the devil. It is always: Pray without ceasing, Watch without slumbering, Beware, for in the space required for the closing of an eye the enemy may smite you, and your soul may be slain. Never rise from your knees: you fight best when you kneel most. So Christianity is not a fine sentiment, but a daily personal discipline. And if any man be hugging his own soul and saying that, be saved or lost who may, he is right, and need take no further care about the matter, be it known to him that this is the law Johannine, the law divine; that, if we would prove our knowledge of God, we must keep God's commandments, we must be moral, we must attend to the discipline of the soul, we must watch ourselves. Blessed is that servant, whom the Lord when he cometh shall find watching.
Prayer
Almighty God, thou canst not show us how large thy love is, because we could not bear the infinite vision: thy love it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive. The great God loveth all; there is nothing that thou hast made that is excluded from thine affection, thou didst only make what thou didst love: thy love is the creating force, and thy love inspires and directs all things created. Thou hast set thyself a difficult task in making man: in that thou didst make him like thyself thou didst make the task more than any miracle we have yet known of; for being like thyself he could wound thee, disobey thee, leave thee: none can hurt the parent's heart so much as the child can. Yet thou shalt not be judged by to-day or tomorrow, or by any little speck which we call time; the Lord shall be judged in the sanctuary of his own eternity, the Lord shall vindicate himself in his own infinity. We need patience; we are impetuous, we want to seize conclusions, we are vexed by processes which wear the mind and irritate the whole nature: to work this patience within us is the miracle of the Holy Ghost. Take away from us all that is impetuous, fiery, urgent, and that is determined to throw off all restraint; enable us to accept the yoke lovingly, meekly, and often to do everything by doing nothing: teach us how to perform the miracle of praising God in silence, and doing God's will by having no will of our own. Surely this also cometh through the Cross; man cannot be taught this elsewhere than at a place called Calvary: there we see thy Son, our Saviour, our Priest, our Infinite Redeemer; he has said, Not my will but thine be done: and having so said the bitterness of death was passed, and the Cross could hurt him no more. Enable us to follow Christ in this great act; we cannot do it without him, we can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth us: may we be crucified with Christ, not on one side of him, but with him, on his Cross, that knowing the fellowship of his sufferings we may afterward know the power of his resurrection. Thou dost enable thy loved one to say: I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. Amen.
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