The Divine Master Workman
“My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” — John v. 17.
JkTTT( A N interval of some months lies between the previous chapter and this, in which many of the incidents in our Lord’s crowded Galilean life took place. Our evangelist does not touch on them — first, perhaps, because they had already been fully described by iA the other three; and secondly, because he wanted to concentrate all his force on the great contest which his Master waged in the very stronghold of Jewish prejudice, and which led, step by step, to the terrible final catastrophe of his death.
This visit to Jerusalem was, without doubt, crowded with incidents, of which a single specimen only is given here, because it introduced one of those startling disclosures of our Lord’s inner being which roused undying opposition among his foes, but constitutes for ever a mine of spiritual wealth to those who love Him.
We must pass over the touching pathos of the incident itself, in order to fix on the salient feature, that our Lord not only healed the sufferer after thirty-eight years’ deferred hope, but did so on the Sabbath, and bade him carry his bed home. This bidding clashed with Jewish custom and Pharisaic ritual; but the man rightly inferred that He who could work so great a miracle was supreme in the spiritual sphere, and could set aside the petty and vexatious exactions of the religious leaders of the time.
It was impossible, however, that the Pharisees and others could silently acquiesce in this assumption of a superior io8 ©IjE gibinc ^Itastcr Workman.
authority to their own; and they seem to have cited Jesus before the authorities on the formal charge of Sabbath-breaking. But his judges were Uttle prepared for the line of his defence, which convulsed the assembly in paroxysms of religious fury, and revealed some of the deepest facts in our Lord’s life and consciousness. His opening words contain the text and pith of all that followed: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”
I. Our Lord’s Consciousness of Deity. — “He said that God was his Father,” or, as the Greek might be rendered, “His own Father” (18). At another time He addressed God as our Father, and the Jews heard Him without scruple. But, when He spoke thus, they felt that He claimed God as Father in a unique sense, and they sought the more to kill Him; not only because He had broken the Sabbath, but because, in saying this, He had made Himself equal with God.
It is most important that we should not read our western notions into our Lord’s references to his Sonship. We must understand them as they were understood by those to whom they were first addressed. In their judgment they conveyed the assertion of equality. And He who uttered them knew that it would be so, and carefully picked these very words because they meant so much. “He thought it not robbery to be equal with God.”
To my mind that is almost the strongest proof of the Deity of our blessed Lord. Not primarily that He wrought marvellous works, or rose from the dead; but that his holy, humble spirit thrilled with the consciousness of his Deity. On these grounds I would be prepared to argue the whole question of our Lord’s Divinity. By friend and foe alike. He is held to have been the holiest that ever trod our earth. But the holiest must be the humblest. He will not strive, nor cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets; He will not assume anything which He is not; He will curtain, so far as He can, the intrinsic splendour of his nature. And yet, for all that, see how this meekest and lowliest of men accentuates his oneness and equality with God. This, indeed, was the charge on which He was condemned to die. Silent in reference to all other charges.
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when He was solemnly challenged as to //ns, He saw no incongruity between his desolate, suffering, rejected condition, and the claim to be, in a unique (and, to the Jewish mind, a blasphemous) sense, the fellow and equal of the Eternal (Matt. xxvi. 63, 64; John xix. 7).
£u the Holiest jnust also be the clearest and most certain in all spiritual insight. Could it be otherwise? Our perception of the truth of things is dimmed and obscured by the grossness of our flesh, the earthwardness of our dispositions, the evil of our hearts. But when these are removed, we no onger see throusli a glass darkly, but face to face. “Blessed are the pure in heari, for they shall see God.” It is a commonplace of moral philosophy that character means vision, insight, knowledge. We cannot but believe therefore, that, even apart from his divine self-consciousness, our Lord could not have been deceived when He announced Himself as his Father’s equal. To his perfect human soul all truth lay revealed as a summer landscape beneath the eye of the sun; and especially this truth, rearing itself prominently from among all the rest.
All other holy beings refuse in horror ascriptions of Divine homage and worship. Apostles and angels join in crying, “See thou do it not.” Consider, then, how great this Man was who, though holiest and humblest of men, forbade none who would prostrate themselves before Him, falling on the ground and praying to Him as God.
Clearly, then, the Son of Man is competent to fulfil all the functions of God. Is untiring energy working ceaselessly through the ages characteristic of the living God 1 So it is of the Son of Man: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work” (17). Is it the prerogative of the Father to raise the dead, and quicken them .? So it is of the Lord Jesus; listen to the majestic words: “The Son quickeneth whom He will” (21). Is it the peculiar right of the Creator to be the Judge of men, because He understands the mechanism of their inner being and weighs their opportunities? This also is the Redeemer’s right: “The Father hath committed all judgment unto the Son,” and his voice shall summon the dead from their graves to his bar (22). Is it the peculiar attribute of God to be the fountain of life, so no Wht gifcrittc iEastcr Morfetnan.
that life, inherent, underived, perennial, is ever rising up in his mighty being, maintaining here an angel and there a humming-bird? This is also an attribute of our blessed Lord. The glorious possession of inherent life is his also; it has been given Him to have life in Himself (26). The entire sum and totality of the attributes of Deity are resident in the nature of the Son of Man.
Obviously, then, men should honour the Son as they honour the Father (23). Nor has this been lacking. When He ascended to his throne, there followed Him from the heart of the Church a tide of adoration, which has only become deeper and wider with the lapse of time. In the first days of the Church, believers were known as those who called on the name of the Lord Jesus. To Him, the ascended and glorified Master, were addressed the prayers of the infant Church about to select an Apostle; of the first martyr, in the moment of his mortal agony — a moment which must ever test the habitual practice of the soul; of Ananias, who talked with a holy familiarity, which gives a glimpse into his prayer-closet: and these are but specimens of myriads. The records of early Church history teem with hymns, and prayers, and dying words, and fervent ejaculations, written on parchment, or scrawled in rude hieroglyphics on the walls of catacombs and prisons, all to the same eflTect.
The instincts of the Christian heart are not then hopelessly at fault when they prompt prayer to our ascended Lord. He does not scruple to ask for such honour as men give to God. He insists that they who do not honour Him withhold honour from the Father. He claims that every knee should bow to Him, and every tongue acknowledge that He is Lord. He does not chide the threefold circle of adoration, by which his throne is ceaselessly surrounded, as elders, saints, and angels fall down and worship the Lamb with the same devotion with which they adore the Supreme.
II. The Fellowship between the Son and the Father DURING OUR Lord’s human Life. — And as we study it, let us” remember that golden key to the unlocking of the treasures (©ncttEsa toitir (iott. m
of this precious Gospel, that we are to be to the Lord Jesus all that He was to his Father, and that He is willing to be to us all that his Father was to Him. And as we con these wondrous statements of that inner fellowship between Father and Son, we shall see that the after parable of the vine was founded on a union which already subsisted; and shall learn how close, and intimate, and all-embracing our Lord would fain have our union with Himself to become.
‘■’•He did notlmtg of Himself” i.e., He originated nothing, did nothing at the prompting of his own will; but always leant on his Father for direction and inspiration (19). No vine ever clung to its trellis-work, and no child to its mother, as He to his Father. Though all his Divine attributes were within his reach, and might at any moment have been called into operation. He forebore to use them, that He might learn the life of dependence and faith, the life which was to be ours towards Himself. This is why the sacred writers speak of the faith of our Lord Jesus (Gal. ii. 20; Heb. xii. 2).
He was ever conscious of his Father s love and presence. — He lived in the present tense of his Father’s love, which was so real as to rob his life of all sense of loneliness (20; viii. 29). He knew that his Father heard Him always, as his spirit rose in perpetual fellowship and communion, unhindered by the densest clouds of human unbelief (xi. 42). Yea, there was something deeper still in his habitual realization that the Father dwelt in Him; so that his words, and works, and influence, and plan of life were the perpetual working out of what his Father was working in (17; xiv. 10). And why should not we live in a fellowship equally hallowed and close? It was his one desire that his relationship with his Father should be the model of our relationship with Himself (xvii. 21, 23). And thus it shall be by the grace of the Holy Spirit who, Himself God, is (if I may use the term) the all-pervasive medium between the Father and the Son, and who links all whom He fills into that same sacred oneness.
He was perpetually engaged in reading the open book of his Father’s will. — He had no will of his own to seek, no object of his own to serve (30). He had come, in his Father’s name, to do his Father’s will, and to glorify his Father’s name (30, 43; xvii. 4). It was the passion of his being to do God’s work on God’s plan. And his eye was thus ever kept on the movement of the cloud of his Father’s unfolding purpose. The Father showed the Son what He was doing. And the Son, having seen it, translated it into the language of daily human life (20). But what a model for ourselves! If He whom we worship as Lord took on Himself so absolutely the form of a servant, how fair would our life be if we more deeply received of his spirit; and, through obedience here, prepared ourselves to sit by his side in the glory, and reign with Him!
These are glimpses of what our life may become. There will be pain to suffer, a conflict to maintain, a work to do, in face of opposition which may grow ever more violent; but, amidst it all, there may be unbroken fellowship with the ascended Lord by the grace of the Holy Spirit, through whom alone it can be originated and maintained. Ah, that clear heaven of azure blue, unflecked by cloud — what a reflection it casts on the face of the quiet, upturned heart! This is the spiritual equivalent of the land that drinketh water of the rain of Heaven!
III. The Plan of our Master’s Work. — Our Lord was as careful of the promptings of his Father as a jeweller of gold leaf. If the Father wrought within Him up to any given moment of time, He never hesitated to give free play to the holy impulse, though it should bring Him into collision with the religion of his time. “See,” said He, “Sabbath or no Sabbath, my Father moved Me to this miracle. I could do no other than yield. Ye must reckon with Him” (17).
He waited for the Father to show Him what next He would have Him do. The pattern of his life was gradually outspread before Him, as that of the tabernacle was unfolded before the great lawgiver, shut up with God. He seemed ever a learner in his Father’s workshop, making all things on the pattern shown Him from hour to hour. This made Him so still, so calm, unmoved by difficulty, unperturbed amid a hail of murderous stones (viii. 59; ix. 4). And it would bring rest, and unity, and power, into our own lives, if it were the one purpose of our being
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to discover and do only the good works which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. Better do less that we may do more. Better stand still than run without being sent. Better withdraw oftener from the valley to the brow of the Transfiguration mount, than, by fussy activity, miss the radiant vision, and the bitter need which waits for us at the mountain foot.
And thus our Lord’s life-work was ever on an ascending scale. From making water wine, to making blood the ransom price of souls; from raising the daughter of Jairus, to the calling of Lazarus from a three days’ death-sleep; from cleansing the temple, to works of redemption, resurrection, and judgment. God was ever showing Him yet greater things. The plan of his life was ever becoming fuller; its stream deeper, its current swifter. Nor will it be otherwise with ourselves. Be true to the power you have, and it will increase. The limb becomes defter by use. And he who yields his ‘prentice hand to be nerved and used by the great Master Workman, shall find, as the years pass by, that he will be able to accomphsh results, the mere dreams of which had never visited him in the most ecstatic moments of his youth.
O glorious Servant of God, and worker for men, breathe into us thine own spirit; that following in thy steps we may at last participate in thy rest and reward!