Christ's Wish for Man

“Father, will that they also whom Thou hast given me be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory.” — JOHN xvii. 24.

THE truth that men are judged by their desires finds its highest illustration in Jesus. The perfection of His nature is shown in the perfectness of His wishes. When His desires shall be all fulfilled, when He “shall see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied,” then the consummation of all things will have been reached, and there will be nothing more in the universe to be desired.

Let us take this morning one of Christ’s wishes and study it, see what it means, and what would be the effect of its fulfilment. It is a prayer; but a prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward. It was the instinct of Christ’s nature that He looked for the fulfilment of His wishes, not to Himself and not to the things about Him, but to His Father; and so in His prayer we have simply the utterance Godward of what He was desiring in His heart: “Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given me be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory.”

This wish was spoken at Christ’s last supper with His disciples. They were sitting late around their simple table, and soon their separation was to come, the betrayal and the crucifixion. The first interest of the words, then, that which introduces us to and makes ua ready for all the deeper things which they express, is their obvious meaning as an expression of the Saviour’s affection for His disciples, His dread of being separated from them. When friend is going away from friend, how naturally the wish springs up into words: “Oh, if I could only take you with me! The country where I am going may be very bright; the work that waits me there may be all-absorbing. I know that new friendships will be ready for me there; I know that it is better for you to tarry here. But just at this moment all that is overflowed by one desire that springs out of our affectionate companionship. I dread to be separated from you. Oh, that you might be with me where I am.” Now the sublimity and the charm of the earthly life of Jesus consist in large part in the broad and healthy action of the simplest human powers which it exhibits. It is not in anything subtle or complicated. The simplest natures are the grandest natures always. The broad perception of principles, the hearty appreciation of character, the strong feeling and frank utterance of emotion, — these are what always mark the truly greatest men. And so it is a part of the greatness of Jesus that He so simply feels and utters this cordial human affection, and, as He looks round into the familiar faces of the twelve, says, “I dread to leave you behind me. I shall miss you. I wish you could go with me. I will that you should be with me where I am.” We want not merely to admire this in Jesus; not merely to feel its charm. We want to catch it from Him; we want to let it reveal to us what the true dignity of human life is. Elaborate civilization is always making elaborate, artificial standards. To be acute and subtle and skilful in some specialized working of the mind, to be secretive and ingenious, to admire nothing, and never to give way to the affections, — those are the dispositions which a complicated life is always setting up to make its modern man. Christ Jesus lets us see that the true nobility is a broad and sensitive nature, lying wide open to the influences of God, easily feeling and frankly uttering the first true emotions. Let us try to catch the lesson and win something of His unaffected breadth and truth.

But now we go on farther. These primary emotions do exist in Jesus, the proof- in arks of His true humanity, the patterns for all humanity; but they are deeper and richer things in Him than in ordinary men, in proportion to the depth and richness of His human nature and the divinity that was mingled with it. This is what we are used to seeing. The same emotion exists in different men, but it becomes more full and perfect as the man is more and greater. The color deepens with the body and solidity of the material into which it is wrought. Fear is one thing for a coward who shakes at every trem bling leaf, and another for a strong man who looks for ward into the far consequences of things, and trembles at the unrelenting persistency with which a sin dogs the wrong-doer to his punishment. What a totally different thing scorn is in the feeble sneer of the cynic and in the lofty contempt which nobleness has for meanness. How sorrow deepens from the superficial grief of a superficial mourner at a funeral, all tears and crape, to the deep, si lent woe that settles into the very centre of a strong, lov ing character, and makes every day thenceforth, till death comes with its release, different from all the days that went before. Nowhere is all this more true than about companionship. For two beings to be with one another always means the same simple thing, and yet its meaning runs up through all the ascending scale of human character. A herd of brutes are satisfied with a dim, brutish pleasure if they can feed in the same field; and there is a human brutishness, an animal companionship even among men, which makes them like to be with one an other, to sit in the same room, to walk in crowded streets. It is not bad; it is healthy; but it is not high. It is the companionship which is craved by the most superficial men, and by the most superficial part of all of us. Next higher than that, companionship means identity of work and occupation. To be with another man means to engage in the same tasks. This is the companionship of business men, of men of the same profession, when there is nothing more personal behind their professional relation. Next higher still is the companionship of opinion, when men think alike and so are thrown into the advocacy of the same measures and policies. This is the es sence of all partisanship, the association of men about a common thought, however different may be their rea sons and their ways of thinking it. Beyond all these lies the highest companionship, which is companionship of character, a sympathy in the final purposes of life, a resemblance in fundamental qualities, which is so essential that it may even do without the others, and may exist between those who are far apart in place, whose works are wholly different, and who hold very different opinions. These are the grades of human companionship: physical nearness, common employment, similar opinions, sympathy of character. According as the man mounts from the lowest to the highest, to be with any fellow-man comes to signify to him successively one after another of these things.

We have a fine illustration of the desire for this last and highest sort of companionship in the famous words which St. Paul said to the governor, Agrippa, when he was on his trial before him. From the beginning of the interview we can see that Paul was attracted to Agrippa. Something about the manner of the magistrate pleased his prisoner. At last Paul is led on to express his feeling. “I would,” he says, “that thou and all who hear me were altogether such as I am, except these bonds.” Those words seem to be the echo of his Master’s: “I will that they also whom Thou hast given me be with me where I am.” Paul wanted Agrippa. From the dignity of his prisoner’s stand, he yearned over that poor dissolute who was seated upon the throne. “I want you,” he said; “I want you to be with me; with me not in place, not in these bonds, — I do not ask for that. Not in my work. Your work is different. I am a missionary and you are a king. More in opinions, though not principally in those, I want you to be with me. I want your companionship in character, and in the purposes of life.” That was Paul’s wish for his poor, kingly hearer. He himself was delighting in Christ. Truths which had made him another man, hopes that filled all his life with joy, a communion with God, rich, deep, and drowning every sorrow and provocation in its calm and mighty depths, a strength against temptation that filled him with hourly peace, — all these he had. In these he lived, and when he saw Agrippa living outside of all of them, he said, “I wish that you were living here with me.” He added, for fear that they might misunderstand him, holding out his manacled hands, “not in these chains.” But for himself the chains would not have occurred to him. It was not in them that he lived. He lived in the obedience and the communion and the peace of God. There was where he wanted Agrippa to come and be with him.

And this must always be the first joy of any really good life, its first joy and its first anxiety at once, — the desire that others should enter into it. Indeed, here is the test of a man’s life. Can you say, “I wish you were like me “? Can you take your purposes and standards of living, and quietly, deliberately wish for all those who are dearest to you that they should be their purposes and standards too? If you are a true Christian you can. If you are trying to serve Christ, however imperfect be your service, still you can say to your child, your friend, “I wish that you were with me where I am, on this good road of serving Christ, though far beyond me in it.” But I am afraid that there are people here to-day whose lives could not begin to stand that test. I am afraid there are fathers and mothers here whose first and strongest prayer for their chfldren would be that they might be saved from being what their parents are. You shut your characters away. With awkward hands you bring out virtues which you will not practise yourself, and put them before your children and say, “These are good. I advise you to practise these;” but your own frivolity, your scepticism, your lust, the meanness that the years have brought you, the self-indulgence and the ignorance into which your life has fallen, these places where you live your self, you do not want to have your children with you there, and so you never say anything of those places where you are most at home, and steal away to them when you think your children’s pure eyes are not upon you. Oh, what a condemnation of a man’s life is that I It is not good for a man to be living any life which he would not desire to see made perfect and universal through the world. Paul says, “Be what I am;” but Dives cries out of the fire where he lies, “Oh, send and warn my seven brethren lest they come where I am!” The dying Christian tells those beside him of the blessedness of serving Christ. The dying murderer with his last breath warns men from the scaffold not to be what he has been. Oh, test your lives thus! Do not consent to be anything which you would not ask the soul that is dearest to you to be. Be nothing which you would not wish all the world to be!

Thus, then, we understand Christ’s longing for the companionship of His disciples. He wanted them to be with Him. That wish of His must have run through all the scale of companionship which we have traced; but it must have completed itself in the desire that they should be like Him, that they should have His character, that in the obedience and communion of God, where He abode, they should abide with Him. I do not think that we can tell how much it signifies, this wish of Jesus, in its lower meaning of physical companionship. I am sure it does mean something. I am sure that in the Bible some thing is promised, some close, perpetual association of the souls of Christ’s redeemed to Him, which, over and above the likeness which is to come between their souls and His, shall correspond in some celestial way to that dose, visible- tangible propinquity with which they sat by one another at the table in the upper chamber. The “seeing His face,” the “walking with Him in white,” in heaven, are not wholly figures. What they mean those know to-day who through the lapsing years have gone from us, one by one, to be with Christ. But yet God’s guidance I doubt not it is which more and more in these days has drawn the minds of Christians to think of heaven less as a place than as a character. Certainly one of the strongest characteristics of our time has been a sensible diminishing of the attempt to realize the blessedness of the occupations and the beauty of the landscapes of the other life, and an increase of the con viction that the essence of its happiness must be in holiness, and that the soul consecrated to holiness might well forget even to ask where it was to dwell and what it was to do forever. What “place” may mean in that other life we cannot even conjecture till we know something of the nature of the spiritual body in which we are to live; and, paint the place as definitely and as brilliantly as we will, still it would make it earth, not heaven, if it should be conceived of apart from spiritual fitnesses, as gratifying or satisfying the soul of its inhabitant. “Ccelum patria, Christus via,” says the old motto: “Heaven the coun try, Christ the way.” But it is true that He who is the way is also the life into which the way leads; and Christ must be country as well as path. Much of the corruption of religion, the foul, bad lives into which men have fallen, while all the time they thought that they were living most religiously, have come just here. Men have thought that they could be with Christ without being in Christ; that they could have His blessings and not share His character. Christ himself pictured the arrival of the deludeJ company at the gates of their misimagined heaven. “Master,” they said, “we have eaten and drunk in Thy presence, and Thou hast taught in our streets.” And then He answered them, “I never knew you. Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity.” Oh, my dear friends, let us beware of such delusion. Let us watch and guard against it. When is our Master’s prayer fulfilled for us? When are we with Jesus where He is? Not when we say His name most loudly. Not when we crowd into the very centre of His church. Not when we come, if such a thing be possible, to some supernal region where with new sort of visibility He walks among a people who see Him in the new as men once saw Him in the old Jerusalem. Never, never are we with Christ till we are like Him. Not till He is formed in us do we enter truly into Him.

But let us look a little at the next clause of this verse of ours. It will carry out and make more forcible, I think, the thoughts on which we have been dwelling. Jesus says, “Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given me be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory.” That is what He wants them to be with Him for: “that they may behold my glory.” Perhaps it sounds to us a little strange at first. The words almost suggest the vulgar craving for display and admiration which is familiar enough to us among our ordinary fellow-men. The school-boy wants his school-fellow to come home with him that he may see the state in which his father lives. The American says to the foreigner, “Come, see our land, its vastness, its resources, its progress.” The Christian says, “Come to* my church. You shall see how elaborately and tastefully we pray; you shall hear our music; you shall admire our piety.” And then comes the prayer of Jesus, <l Father, I want them to be with me, that they may see my glory.” Before the words can be cut entirely free from low associations and soar into the high, pure meaning which belongs to them, we must remember what Christ’s glory is which He wants us to see. Its essence, the heart and soul of it, must be His goodness. Again, what outward splendor may clothe Christ eternally we cannot know, in our deep ignorance of the very conditions of life in the spiritual world where He abides. But this we are sure of, that in at its very centre and heart the glory of God must issue from and consist in the goodness of God, not in His power. It is the very purpose of religion, it is the battle that Christianity has been fighting with the standards of the world for all these centuries, to make men know that power without goodness is not really glorious. And we must not apply to God a standard from which we are always trying to disenchant ourselves as concerns our fellow-men. In Him, too, nothing but goodness can be really glorious in the eyes of moral creatures. His power is the emphasis set upon His goodness; the brilliant light thrown through the perfect window, showing the window’s glory, not its own. Other creations which are not moral, the brutes and the inanimate universe, n.ay praise the glory of mere power. It is the prerogative of our morality that only in a moral character can it discover the glory that shall call out its fullest adoration. It is Christ’s goodness, then, that He would have His people see. Think for a moment of what prospects that wish of our Lord opens. That we may see His goodness perfectly! Nowadays men are telling one another how tired they are of seeing sin on every side of them, — unrighteousness, impurity, corruption. “You cannot open your eyes,” they say, “but one or the other of these things is staring you horribly in the face.” We cheat ourselves if we think that it is peculiar to our times, for it has always been so. We cheat ourselves if we think that it is universal, for there is goodness, bright and glorious goodness, around us, mixed with the sin on every side. But yet there is unrighteousness enough to make our hearts sad and weary. I pity from my heart the man who, in the midst of the corruption all about him, has it not in his power to turn, and, for refreshment and relief, look at the goodness of Jesus Christ. There stands what we have searched for in vain It rests and renews our failing courage, it makes us men again, with hope for humanity, when we turn and see His goodness. But how imperfectly we see it! How much goodness there must be in Him which we do not see! For here this truth comes in, that in these moral things only the like can see its like; only the good can really discern, appreciate, and understand goodness. That needs no proof. We see it every

day. Men live alongside of the best saints the world possesses, do business with them, pass their whole lives with them, and never know that they are good. If we have ever made any advance in purity and unselfishness, has not the best of all its satisfaction been in this, that it has let us see some thing new of the self-sacrifice and purity in other men which had been hidden from us. The higher we climb, the more the peaks open around us. Now apply all this to the Saviour’s prayer that we may see His glory. His glory is His goodness. Only by growth in goodness can

His goodness open itself to us. What is He praying for then? Is it not that which we traced before in the first part of His prayer, the same exactly, that we might be like Him? So only can we see Him. It is His glory that He wants us to see, but, back of that, He wants us to be such men and women that we can see His glory.

I think of Jesus as He walked through Jerusalem. Men passed Him by; some never looked at Him; others just looked at Him, and sneered, and went their way. Do you think that did not give Him pain? Surely it did. It stung Him deep with sorrow, that men would not understand Him. They could not see His glory. But was His pain for Himself? Was it that His glory needed their recognition? Was it not for them? Was it not that He saw them incapable of apprehending Him? Was it not over their low perceptions, their earthliness, their love of what was bad, their hate of what was good, that He lamented? Was not this what He was really mourning for when He sat on the Mount of Olives, and looked down upon Jerusalem? Not for Himself, but for the city which had rejected Him. Not, “Woe is me! woe is me!” but, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”

Sometimes, my friends, in very far off way, it is given to a man to echo this experience of Jesus. Sometimes a man is pure, honest, just, living for the good of other people, and other people will not see it. He knows him self; he is sure that no base motive mingles with the acts he does. But men fail to understand him, and he is left to sit upon the mountain and look down in sor row upon the city which he longs to save. At such a time a man wants, and often enough he fails to get, the spirit of Christ’s prayer. He wants men to “see His glory,” and they will not. Is it for himself or for them that he is disappointed? Is it his dishonor or their blindness that stings him? The man whom you helped yesterday and who ungratefully slanders you to-day, are you indignant about yourself or pitiful over him? The man who is going up and down the town telling slanders about you, what is the feeling with which you upbraid his misrepresentation? It is hard to keep out pride and jealousy, but if we ever find ourselves where anything like Christ’s experience comes home to us, let us remember how He wanted men to see Him because it was so wretched for them, not for Him, that they should be blind to Him; in simple, manly honesty, let us try to make men see what we are doing, not because we are provoked at being misunderstood, but because it is not good for them not to be capable of seeing.

I think then that we have reached the meaning of this prayer of Jesus; and we are struck immediately by seeing how it really is identical with all His prayers for men. In various words, under various figures, Christ is the intercessor, always offering prayers for men, but all His prayers resolve themselves into the same wish, all are asking for the one same thing. It is always that men might be saved from sin, that His goodness might come to us and we might be good. There is something veiy impressive, I think, about this, as it becomes more and more plain to us. I hear God at work everywhere on the lives of men. Wherever I go I hear men answering to some touch of His. They may not know that it is His touch which they are answering; but. one who believes in Him knows that these things about us are not all doing themselves, but He does them. I pass one man’s door and laughter comes ringing out. God is sending joy into that house. I pass another, and I hear the sound of smothered sobs. God has sent pain, perhaps has sent death, there. One man is struggling with doubts which God has sent him. Another man is walking in the brightness of unclouded faith. Has God a hundred purposes for all these men? Our truth to-day is that He has but one purpose for them all. He is trying to make these men true and holy. He is doing this for all of them, and He is doing nothing else save as a means to this for any of them. Men stumble so before they get hold of that truth. They complain that God does not do this and that and the other thing for them, which He never undertook to do. They say, “He does not make me rich. He does not fill my life with friendships.” So they flutter about with their complainings as a bird will sweep this way and that, doubtful and wandering and tempted on every side. But as at last the bird catches sight of the home where it belongs, though very far away, and all its flntterings cease, and setting itself straight towards that, it steadies itself and seeks it without a single turn aside; so by and by one of these wanderers among many hopes discovers far away the hope, the one only hope, for which God made him, and forgetting every thing else thenceforth gives himself to that, to serve God and by serving Him to grow into His goodness.

This was the prayer of Jesus, His only prayer, remember! He asked His Father simply for this, that those whom He loved might come to Him in spiritual likeness. We use still, in our religious talk, the words which ex press what Christ desired, but too often they have acquired some small meaning and degenerated into cant, and lost the largeness and purity of meaning with which Jesus used them. We talk about a worldly man being “far from Christ.” Men mean by that too often some thing technical, something narrow; the not having undertaken certain ceremonies, or passed through certain experiences. But how much the words really mean. What a terrible thing it is to be really “far from Christ.” To be far from purity is to be impure. To be far from spirituality is to be sensual. To go away from the light is to go into the outer darkness. Not to be “with Him where He is,” is to be away from Him where He is not, where sin is and the misery that belongs with sin. And then that other phrase, which we use so often: “Coming nearer and nearer to Christ,” we say; that does not mean creeping into a refuge where we can be safe. It means becoming better and better men; repeating His character more and more in ours. The only true danger is sin, and so the only true safety is holiness. What a sublime ambition! How it takes our vague, half-felt wishes and fills them with reality and strength, when the moral growth, which makes a man complete, is put before us, not abstractly, but in this picture of the dearest and noblest being that our souls can dream of, standing be fore us and saying to us, “Come unto me;” standing over us and praying for us, “Father, bring them where I am.”

That was Christ’s prayer. He prayed it at the Pass over table. The next day He prayed it in all the silent appeal of His suffering upon the Cross. “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” The cross was Christ’s supreme utterance of His longing that all men might be rescued out of sin and brought to holiness. As we stand and see Him suffer, one thought, one cry alone arises in our hearts. Oh, how He must have wanted to save us! How terrible sin must have seemed to Him! How glorious holiness must have seemed, that such a prayer ag this sacrifice of Himself should thus have gone up to God for our salvation!

Here let me close. It certainly would make it harder for us to do wrong this coming week, easier to do what is right, harder to be selfish, easier to be Christ-like, if this week we could constantly hear Christ praying for us that we might be with Him where He is. That prayer would draw us to Him, into His life, into His character, and make this week a foretaste of that eternity whose promised glory is that there we are to be “forever with the Lord.”