"And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them sleeping, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?"
(Matt. 26:40)
There is always that danger in religion,--the danger of regarding God as a servant, rather than as One utterly to be served. Of course, we do not put it to ourselves in those terms; we speak of a God of love and comfort, and we sing praises to His adequacy to our need, all of which, in its own way, is right. But we must not stop there. There is a stranger and more astonishing thought, which sounds blasphemous perhaps to those who have not been gripped and overwhelmed by it, or who have not fully apprehended that what we see in Jesus that God is, and that is the thought of God's need of us, of God's infinite desire for our companionship. In this word of Jesus,--spoken from out of the midst of the most solemn experience of His life, when more than at any other time He was close to the heart of His Father and God's suffering became His,--I hear an infinite desire for human companionship. "Could ye not watch with me?" We need Jesus, but Jesus quite desperately needs us, and that is what we do not realize when we protest our allegiance to Him.
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Herbert Henry Farmer was born in Highbury, London, the youngest of four sons. Herbert's early academic proclivities at Owen's School in Islington earned him a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read for the moral sciences tripos and graduated first class in 1914. Farmer chose to work at a farm at Histon, near Cambridge, rather than entering the armed services during the First World War. In 1916 he decided to pursue ministry with the Presbyterian Church of England and was chosen as the Burney Student in the Philosophy of Religion at Westminster College, Cambridge. Following the completion of his studies in 1919, he took a pastorate at Stafford and three years later moved to a parish in New Barnet where he remained until 1931.
In 1931 Farmer left parish ministry to pursue an academic career. After a four-year post with the Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut, he returned to Westminster College, Cambridge, where he succeeded his friend John Oman as Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics. In 1936 Farmer was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Glasgow, followed in 1937 by his appointment as the Stanton Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge.
Farmer retired from the college in 1960 and continued to preach and write into his twilight years. He died on 13 January 1981 in Birkenhead.