1 John II. 6—11
He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked. Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old commandment is the Word which ye have heard from the beginning. Again, a new commandment I write unto you, which thing is true in Him and in you: because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth. He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.
Last week St. John was teaching us how very simple people, with no high imaginations and little acquired learning, may know God in the strictest sense of the word know. If they keep His commandments they acquire a knowledge of His character and of His ways, of what He is in Himself and of what He is to them, which can be reached in no other method. There are some expressions which he uses in reference to this subject that are very plain in themselves, just what you would suppose the fisherman apostle, writing for people of all kinds and classes and for those hereafter that might speak all varieties of languages, would use, and yet which, for that very reason, often puzzle scholars greatly. ‘Walk as He walked’—‘abide in Him,’—they say, ‘what can phrases like this signify?’ A specially bad name has been found for them. They have been called mystical. It has been said that the people who resort to them fancy they have some peculiar affinity with the Divine nature.
It is quite right, as I think, to condemn that self-exaltation which leads one man to fancy he has spiritual privileges to which his brother is not entitled; in fact, all boasting and exclusiveness of every sort and however justified. The more sacred the privileges asserted are, the more dangerous this presumption is; to plume ourselves on wealth, titles, fashion,—even office, even on stewardships for which we must give an account,—is not half so bad as pluming ourselves upon being admitted to intercourse with God. For the more nearly we approach to Him, the more should the sense of difference from other men disappear. And unhappily it is true enough that men were tempted in St. John’s days, and are tempted in ours, to this vaunting. It did then, it has since, taken shapes to which this phrase mysticism may be lawfully applied. I spoke of them to you last Sunday. I spoke of men who in the early days of the Church exulted in their knowledge of mysteries, who identified this with the knowledge of God. I remarked that St. John was probably alluding to them, and was dealing them hard blows, when he connected the knowledge of God with keeping the commandments. And it is just when he is doing this, just when he is vindicating this knowledge for humble people, that he talks of abiding in God, and of walking as Christ walked. I believe the adoption of that language was precisely the best witness he could bear for the universality of the blessing he was announcing.
He will frame no fine, elaborate, out-of-the-way forms of speech, such as the men he complained of were continually inventing. The acts of life which are familiar to every peasant shall be the vehicle for conveying the greatest treasures of God to mankind. He is treating men as a race of spirits, of spirits with bodies which connect them with this earth. The relations between their bodies and the earth explain the relation between their spirits and Heaven. ’The power of moving from place to place is one of the most wonderful they have. Without a certain bodily organization, without frames curiously and wonderfully made, they could not do it; but with that bodily organization, with these wonderful frames, they could not do it, if there was not a spirit, a will, which bade the body go in a certain direction, which overcame its natural inertness. This spirit has a motion too. All its thoughts, wishes, impulses, are motions. And all these thoughts, wishes, impulses, may move downwards. The appetites of the body may determine which way they shall go. The things of earth, over which they have such a mighty dominion, may acquire a dominion over them. Or they may move upwards. These thoughts, wishes, impulses, may point to a Being from whom they are derived; they may seek for One in whose image they are made. Either course may be described as a walk; but the second is Christ’s walk. This upward looking, this perpetual spirit, is Christ’s walk. And if we confess Him to be our Lord and Head, we must confess it to be our course; the course for a man as he is distinguished from a mere animal.
We may confess it; but can we take this course merely because we see it is the right one? Here comes in the other phrase. Our bodies rest as well as move; they abide in a place as well as change their place. Even in our railroad days we cannot quite forget that fact; fatigue and sickness fix it upon our minds, if we are ever so fond of roaming. Our bodies demand rest, and our spirits, our wills, say to them, ‘Stop; stay at home.’ Our spirits, then, know what rest means; they require a rest too. But what kind of rest? Are they to stop thinking, desiring, hoping? That would be a miserable privilege to a weary spirit! For in its greatest weariness it dreads losing its powers; it dreads death. ‘No,’ says St. John, ‘the spirit’s rest is to abide in the living Lord… It is weary of itself: it is weary of always seeking the objects which the body and the earth present to it. It wants to find One above itself, and yet like itself. Christ is the object which is offered to it. The spirit of man has a home, a resting-place, while it trusts Him. And doing so, it never can become lazy. It has found its centre, and therefore it can move without irregularity. It has found Him by whom its powers of life are continually renewed; therefore it can move without exhaustion. ’The man that abideth in Him ought himself so to walk even as He walked.’ As if he had said, ‘To confess Christ is not merely to confess what is the right way for me. It is to confess One who is keeping me in that way; who is holding me up that I may not wander from it.’ Well! if that is mystical, God make us all mystics; since this is not a high lore for a certain set of wise people; it is emphatically the lore for feeble tempted human beings, such as we are.
But though St. John might not be setting up one class of men in his own day above another, was he not setting up his own day above all previous days? Could men in former generations abide in Christ, seeing that He had not been upon the earth? Could they walk as He had walked, seeing that they did not know what that walk was? The question was one which puzzled many then as it has puzzled many since. It involves a great many questions which are often discussed amongst us, and dismissed rather hastily, before we have sounded the bottom of them. It concerns, for instance, the whole question of progress; in what sense one age is better than its predecessor, in what sense it is worse; in what sense all ages have a common blessing and a common evil. I wish you to see how the Apostle treats it. I do not think we shall find a better way out of the perplexity than that which he points out.
He had been telling them that they were to keep the commandments if they would know God. Now, those people who boasted that they had discovered quite another road to the knowledge of God than this, had an especial dislike to the Old Testament. They were in the habit of setting up the New against the Old, as if they were directly contrary. So they would be sure to turn upon him and say, ‘The commandments? what commandments do you mean? Not those old commandments surely which were given to the Jews! You would not bring us back to the law, would you? Has not St. Paul made it clear that we are delivered from that yoke? has not he shown us that the Gospel has set us free?’ He is not afraid of these questions, startling and plausible as they sound. He faces them boldly. ‘I do mean those old commandments,’ he says; ‘I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. I mean, distinctly, that I look upon those old commandments, if they were faithfully kept, as a way to the knowledge of God.’ But how? St. Paul had said that the commandments, written and engraven in stone, only pronounced man’s condemnation. They had no power to make any man righteous. St. John does not preach any different doctrine. He does not say for a moment, that letters written on stone could lead any man to God. He does not say for a moment, that a person merely regarding the commandments as written on stone could keep them. But he says,—‘The old commandment is the WORD which ye have heard from the beginning.’ Here is the secret of the whole matter. The commandments were not letters on stone. They were a word proceeding from a living God; they were a word addressed to the hearts of human beings. This was the language which the prophets and holy men of the Old Testament had always used. If, for instance, you read the 119th Psalm (I take it merely as a specimen of what you may read all through the Book of Psalms), you will find the word of God, the law of God, the commandment of God, used for each other. Each is said to give light, each is said to quicken, each is said to make the heart rejoice. No dead letters, no stones, no threatenings. The word makes alive; it speaks; it warns indeed of evils into which the man is ready to fall, but it lifts him above the evil; it is good, and it is mightier than evil. The old men knew this to be so; they could not be mistaken about the fact; it was wrought into all their experience. But they longed to know the meaning of the fact; the ground of the fact. They wanted to know why this word had so much to do with them, so much to do with God. They wanted to know why it reproved them, ruled them as a superior, while it was so closely identified with them. More and more they began to be confident that there was a Person from whom this word proceeded; who was with them and with God; who ruled and reproved them in God’s name; who did not the less feel with them and sympathise with them. This was the discovery—the partial discovery—of the great Truth of the universe, of the Word who was in the beginning, who was God, and who was the Light of Men. The full discovery of that Truth was not yet. That could only be when the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among men; when apostles were permitted to see and handle that which was about the Word of Life; when they were sent forth with the message, ‘That which was with the Father, and has been manifested, declare we to you, that you may have fellowship with us.’ But when this discovery was made, did it make them look back with pity or contempt upon their forefathers? No; it enabled them to understand their forefathers as they had never understood them before. It made them see why their forefathers had used such strange expressions about the law and the commandments. They had heard that Word speaking to them from the beginning, who had now dwelt and walked on earth. It was He who had quickened them; He who had given them light. Without Him the commandments on stone would have been curses on their sin and weakness; coming from Him they were blessings unspeakable; a living voice enabling them, in spite of their palsy, to rise up and walk.
And there was more still in this discovery, which I have hinted at already. As long as the commandments were looked at only as written and graven in stone, they belonged to Israelites. When they were regarded as the word which was heard from the beginning, as words proceeding from the Word which was from the beginning, it was intelligible how God had been speaking to other nations; how that which was known of God had been manifested in them; how those had the knowledge of God who did not like to retain Him in their knowledge; how though they had not the law, they did by nature the things contained in the law; how they showed the work of the law written in their hearts, their consciences meanwhile accusing and excusing each other; how they as well as the Jews could be contentious, obeying not the truth, but obeying unrighteousness; how they, as well as the Jews, might seek by patient continuance in well doing for glory, honour, and immortality. All these assertions are from St. Paul. They are the foundation of his gospel to the nations. And they receive their fullest illustration and explanation from the teaching, which more strictly, though not exclusively, belongs to St. John, respecting the Word, whose light had been shining always and everywhere, and making men aware of their own darkness.
But was there nothing gained by this revelation of the Word in the flesh? by this gospel of His life? Had the world taken no step in advance of its older self? Was it not a good thing to be born under the New Testament instead of the Old? ‘Again,’ says St. John, ‘a new commandment I write unto you; which thing was true in Him and in you, because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth.’ He is a teacher of progress much more truly than those who treated all the past as worthless or evil. He can be thankful for the more advanced wisdom which has been imparted to his generation through the manifestation of the Son of God, partly because that manifestation makes him apprehend more clearly his close relation with the men who lived before it; partly because it lays him under a responsibility which did not attach at all in the same measure to them. The old commandment which they kept, the word which spoke to them from the beginning, is dearer than ever; its worth is more apparent, its influence on them is more clearly divine, because He who was their secret teacher, their invisible king, the hidden light of their hearts, has come forth and been proclaimed as the Teacher of all the Nations; the King of Men, the Light of the World. But by so coming forth, by taking the nature of men, by fulfilling in that nature the very sense of the old commandment, by showing forth the life which that commandment proved to be the only true life, He had brought forth a new commandment, not inconsistent with the old, scarcely an addition to it, rather the very essence of it, which yet it was unable to express. How is that? What is this essence of the law, which the law could not declare even to those who received it most dutifully as the word of the righteous and living Lord? You shall hear: ‘He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now.’
What was there new in this statement? There was nothing new in the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ That was old; that St. Paul declares, that St. John declares, that our Lord declares, is implied in all the commandments. But you will remember what question the lawyer—who fully admitted this doctrine, who even quoted the words out of the book of Deuteronomy which affirmed it—asked of our Lord, ‘Who,’ he said, ‘is my neighbour?’ That was the difficulty. All possibility of self-justification lay hidden in men’s hearts till this question was answered. The story in which our Lord replied to it, is perhaps the passage in the whole Bible with which we are most familiar, and partly perhaps from its very familiarity we often miss the point of it, and do not understand the depth of the principle which it embodies. A poor Jew had been plundered by thieves, on the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho. A priest, one of his own countrymen, the one who was appointed to represent the nation and its members before God, and to bless them in God’s name, did not recognise him as a neighbour; he left him lying where he was. Another of his countrymen, a Levite, the one who should have known the law best of all, whose business it was to expound the law, did not recognise the wounded man as a neighbour, but passed by on the other side. A Samaritan, who was not his countryman, who did not worship in the same temple with him, who was regarded as cut off by the law from fellowship with him, whom he regarded, and who had been taught to regard him, as an enemy, did treat him as a neighbour, did behave to him as one of his own kith and kin, of his own flesh and blood. He poured oil and wine into his wounds, he sat him upon his own beast, he took care of him. Why? Because he looked upon him as a man, because he confessed his fellow-man to be his neighbour. The lawyer acknowledged that the Samaritan heretic had, by some means or other, found the interpretation of the Jewish law, which he had been unable to find. And he was bidden to go and do likewise.
How was he to go and do likewise? How was he to get the power to go and do likewise? St. John is about to tell us. You see he has introduced us to a new word. He speaks of a man hating his brother. ‘He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness until now.’ We have been hearing of neighbours. Men knew that they ought not to hate their neighbours; that is, men who dwelt near them, who belonged to their own tribe or nation; however often they might do it in spite of their knowledge. The code could not bid them do more than this. We may say it boldly, No mere code can. A code should not attempt to bind men as men together; it must fail if it makes the experiment. But there must be a bond between man and man; there must be a power to make that bond effectual, or the law concerning neighbours will be most imperfectly heeded. As we have seen in the case of the Priest and the Levite, the servants of the law may utterly forget the law. As we have seen in the case of the Samaritan, the man without the law may fulfil its commands to the letter, and far beyond the letter. Why? The revelation of Christ explains the secret. When He came forth, when His light shone upon men, then it was seen that there is a common Brother of Men; of men, I say, not of Israelites merely. Jesus Christ, born of the seed of David, circumcised according to the law, enters into the wants of men, the sorrows of men, the death of men. He is the Universal Brother.
‘Therefore,’ says John, ‘this thing is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is past and the true light now shineth.’ As if he had said, ‘Now we are come into a new and higher state; the state not only of neighbourhood but of brotherhood. When we claim to belong to Christ, we claim this new name. But by claiming it, do we escape out of the region of commandments? Are we no more under an obligation? Nay, verily, we come under a new commandment, under a wider and deeper obligation. Before, it was a sin to hate neighbours; now, it is a sin to hate men; because this brotherhood of men with men is made known. It is a sin; a sin which punishes itself. For to hate a brother is to walk in darkness. It is to hide ourselves from Him who is our great common brother. It is to live as if the Lord had not appeared. It is to say, I will shut myself in my own dark, evil self; though the great blessing and redemption of the world is that I am under the Lord of human beings, that I am permitted to take up my state and glory as a man.’ Therefore St. John scouts all the pretences of men to illumination, on whatever ground they may be founded, which do not involve the practical acknowledgment of this brotherhood, and the conformity of their actions to it. A man may say he is in the light as much as he pleases; but to be in the light implies, that he is able to see his brethren and not to stumble against them.
You see, then, how it is that the New Testament confirms and establishes the Old; and yet that it takes us into a region so much larger, and higher, and purer than the Old. You see how it is that the commandment which was heard from the beginning retains all its force and grandeur: nay, how it is that it acquires a greater force and grandeur, just because there is a new commandment, grounded on that revelation of Christ the Head and Brother of all men. And you see why it is that St. John at once tells us of the greatest sin which it is possible for us, under the New Testament, to commit, and of the greatest blessing which it is possible for us to inherit. For us to hate our brother—to hate any man—is nothing less than to deny the man, the Son of Man; the common light of men. For us to love our brother is nothing less than to walk in the light of Christ’s presence, nothing less than to be free from all occasion and danger of stumbling. ‘He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him.’ He adheres to the language which he has adopted throughout the Epistle. The highest blessing is to walk in the light, and to have fellowship with it; the most terrible curse is to be out of the light, to love darkness rather than light. There is no condemnation, as he says in his Gospel, so great as this; this is the condemnation. ‘To be like Christ, that is blessedness; to be in a state of mind that is contrary to His, that is misery.’
There are various thoughts which crowd upon me as I advance to this great point of Christian ethics. I must dismiss most of them, lest they should confuse us, and lest I should anticipate what will explain itself more fully hereafter. But this I cannot suppress. I who lecture to you on politics, I who have been lecturing lately on the French Revolution, have often to touch upon this subject of Fraternity or Brotherhood. I hope we none of us merely touch upon it; I hope we wish in our hearts to understand it that we may practise it. I hope we are convinced that a college which has not this basis does not deserve the name. We ought never to hear how this thought was awakened in the minds of the poor people of France in 1789; how it clung to them through all the strange, terrible times which followed; how, even when they were trampling all nations down, they still talked of making them brethren; how the belief that Fraternity was possible, started to life again in 1848; how the outward tokens of it were marked on every building, public and private;—we should never read of these facts which belong to our own times, which have fallen under our own eyes, without being persuaded that a special duty is laid upon us to find out what they mean, and how that of which they speak may become a reality for us. I believe that this Epistle of St. John, this book of Christian ethics, tells us what we want to know; tells us how the idea of brotherhood may become a fact; how a phantom which has been often pursued till it led to deeds of darkness, may be changed into a Person who is the Light of the world, and who can enable us to walk in His light, by enabling us to love our brothers as He loves them.