And when it was day he called unto him his disciples; and out of them he chose twelve, whom also he named Apostles.—St. Luke vi. 13.
We are keeping to-day the festival of him whom we call the last of the Apostles. The passage at which we have arrived in St. Luke concerns the calling of the twelve Apostles. I shall not, therefore, interrupt the order of my discourses that I may speak of St. John. We may discover what he was by considering what the function of an Apostle was. His words and acts may in turn be the greatest helps in explaining that function to us.
(1.) The words, ‘when it was day,’ recall the preceding verse: ‘It came to pass in those days, that he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.’ I have spoken already of the prayers of Christ in connection with His works. When the work most expressed His authority, when the healing act was preceded by an ‘I will,’ He was still renouncing all independence. Every prayer is a renunciation of independence. Every prayer says, ‘We can do nothing without Thee.’ As His prayers were the essentially true prayers, they must have had this meaning perfectly, without any reservation. St. John’s Gospel is here, as elsewhere, the interpreter of that which is implied in the others. It is he who repeats to us those words of Christ, ‘The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.’
How necessary is this recollection, if we would understand the calling and choice of the Apostles, we shall see presently. I would remark here, that when we describe Jesus as the Messiah, we mean that He was the Apostle of God. That title the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews gives Him in a very memorable passage: ‘Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus; who was faithful to him that appointed him, as also Moses was faithful in all his house.’ He goes on: ‘Moses verily was faithful in all his house, as a servant… but Christ, as a son over his own house.’ The faithfulness and obedience of the son is not less than the faithfulness and obedience of the servant—but greater. The filial submission is the perfect submission; the servant’s is only a foretaste of it, an aspiration after it. And if we follow the Creed we shall remember, that the Son of God did not acquire obedience by taking upon Him our nature. Obedience was His divine nature. He endowed ours with it. He shewed forth in human life, under the pressures of human temptations, that loving surrender of His whole being to His Father, wherein consisted His eternal delight.
(2.) That night in which He was not alone, because the Father was with Him, prepared Him to come down amidst the disciples whom He had gathered about Him. He had gathered them; they knew it. Each of them had heard a voice, more or less distinctly, bidding him come. Each had yielded to One who, he felt, had a right to command him. The disciples had not picked out a leader from the number that were then offering themselves to their choice. They had not said, ‘We prefer this Nazarene Teacher to that Pharisee who has come out of Judaea, to that Herodian, to that Sadducee.’ They had not said, ‘We prefer Him to that insurgent chief who is saying that he has a commission to overthrow the Romans and restore the kingdom of David.’ None of these fishermen would have used that language. They had been drawn to this Person. Why He has brought them together, what they are to do, they cannot yet tell. They are following a Master. He will shew them in due time what work He intends for them. And now He takes twelve out of their number. Are these to be the special servants of the King? Are they in time to fight for Him? Are they to have the chief offices in His palace? He does not say. But he calls them Apostles. They are to be sent forth. That is clear, whatever else is hidden. Where they are to go, what they are to speak, what acts are to accompany the speech—on these points He will not surely leave them ignorant. But at first their separation from the rest of those who followed Christ—what it signified, what kind of eminence or dignity it conferred upon them—will have occupied them chiefly.
(3.) Clearly they were distinguished from the other members of the little flock. ‘What had caused the difference? Did He merely like them better than the rest? Had they merited some greater honour at His hands? Had He discovered some peculiar capacity in them? All such questions would occur to these poor fishermen; would occur to them not less because they were poor fishermen. They are human thoughts—thoughts that do not belong to one class of men more than another. With them would of course come such as these: ’We twelve cannot be all alike in His estimation. His choice must be the reward of desert. Some of us must have higher merits than the rest. When all is arranged, when He can finally apportion His dignities, which of us will be the greatest?’ We do not imagine the existence of these jealousies. They are carefully reported to us by the Evangelists. No effort is made to disguise the unsuitableness of the times at which they broke out. St. Luke will tell us that the Last Supper was one of these. And it is St. John who tells us that, at that Last Supper, Jesus took a towel and girded Himself, and stooped down and washed His Apostles’ feet, and said unto them, ‘What I have done ye know not now, but shall know hereafter. As I have washed your feet, so are ye to wash one another’s feet.’ It is St. John who tells us that at that Supper Jesus said, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.’ Here are the opposing explanations of the nature and grounds of the Apostolical calling. Meditate on them carefully. Meditate on them to-day especially. We have been told recently that St. John spent the last years of his stay on earth in putting together accounts of his Master’s doings, for the express purpose of exalting himself above the other Apostles, of proving himself to be the favourite of Jesus, of confounding the earlier Evangelists who had not gratified his vanity sufficiently. I need not tell you, that the man who could do this must have been of all who ever dwelt on this earth the basest and the falsest. Every year of his long pilgrimage this horrible conceit must have been ripening in him; every year it must have been making him capable of profounder dissimulation and treachery. Christendom has been for eighteen centuries drawing lessons from him concerning love and truth. Dying men and women have been sustained by his lessons. Churches have felt them to be stinging reproofs of their untruth and selfishness. And these have all proceeded from a man who surrendered himself to a habit of mind which we should pronounce execrable in any neighbour, or in any fictitious character; whose language must have been most hypocritical when it was most elevated. Those who can believe this may believe it. The supposition makes a more tremendous demand on my credulity than all the miracles which have ever been palmed on the world since it was created. But I do not allude to such a calumny for its own sake. I allude to it because I wish you to see how very natural such an hypothesis is, if we assume the Apostle to have been merely following the bent of his own inclinations. He might have sunk to this deep moral degradation. Any of the Apostles might have sunk into it. Judas actually fell into it. The self-exalting, covetous spirit which was working in all, became master of him. He gave himself up to it. He betrayed his Master—not so foully as St. John would have betrayed Him, if he had acted as these critics say that he acted—but so that all mankind have regarded him with trembling and horror. The other Apostles learnt that the Son of God was manifested that this devil might be cast out of them. They learnt that, as the Father had sent Him forth, so they were sent forth to bear witness by word and deed that love is mightier than selfishness; that Christ revealed His Father as the unselfish Being, as the Author and Example of all sacrifice; that Christ chose them from no partial affection, but as witnesses of His Truth and Love to all mankind. And the one who was nearest to Him, and received most of His love into his heart, was the one whom He called to shew forth most fully the love with which He loved the Universe in giving Himself for it.
(4.) The number which our Lord fixed upon for His Apostles of course reminded them of the tribes into which their nation was divided. They could not suppose that He had adopted that number carelessly, or without reference to their history. In their early work, there was much to confirm this impression. They were not to enter into any village of the Gentiles or of the Samaritans. They were to preach to the lost sheep of the house of Israel of the kingdom which Israelites had been so long expecting. Was it different in after times? St. Peter felt—so St. Luke tells us in his other treatise—that the place of Judas must be supplied before the promise that they should receive power from on high to testify of their Lord’s resurrection could be fulfilled. When the door of the Kingdom of Heaven was opened to the Gentiles, the charm of the number might seem to be dissolved. St. Paul and St. Barnabas were called Apostles. St. Paul in terms asserted the title against those who would have denied it to him. No one vindicated his right to it more practically. No one so distinctly perceived what was involved in the command, ‘Go ye, and preach the gospel to every creature.’ If any formality about the difference between twelve or thirteen or fourteen stood in the way of such an object, it was to be treated with contempt. Wisdom would be justified in breaking through its own rules. The principle of the shewbread would be applicable in another case. What is given for men must not be used against men. If St. Paul had not declared with vehemence that one called by Christ in heaven was as really an Apostle as those whom He called upon earth, the message of the Apostles of the circumcision would have been enfeebled not less than his own. It would not have been the testimony to an actual kingdom, to a living Christ.
Nevertheless, when we read the Epistle of St. James, and observe to whom it is addressed; when we read the Epistle of St. Peter to those who were dispersed through the different provinces of the Roman and Parthian empires; above all, when we read the book from which our second lesson has been taken this morning, and compare it with the few records that remain to us of St. John’s life; we must feel that the twelve tribes of Israel had still a mighty significance for the world, and that the relation of the twelve Apostles to them had been deeply, ineffaceably impressed upon the minds of those Apostles. The twelve tribes represented to St. John the sealed witnesses of God upon earth. It was when he had contemplated these most earnestly that he became aware of the truth that a multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb. And so, in his last chapter but one, we read: ‘And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; and had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel…. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations and in them the names of the TWELVE APOSTLES OF THE LAMB.’
I believe this vision was presented to the mind of the prophet when the old Jerusalem had disappeared or was about to disappear. If it vanished from the earth, only leaving the Roman Empire, its conqueror, to exult in its ruin, an Apostle would have groaned over such a contradiction of all the divine promises. He believed that its overthrow was the fulfilment of the divine promises, that it would be the revelation of that kingdom whereof the twelve tribes had borne witness by their original constitution, by their strange preservation, by their incapacity to maintain their unity, by their passionate eagerness to assert it; that kingdom of which the twelve Apostles had borne witness, declaring its unity to stand not in any fleshly election, but in the union of God with man, of the Father with the Son. Such a kingdom could not be shaken by any earthquake. It could not be limited by any measure of time and space. Death could not divide the members of it from each other. It would exist from generation to generation in its living Head— the conqueror of death. Its nature might be misunderstood, its principles might be set at naught, by those who were adopted into it. But it would go on manifesting itself more and more, till all its enemies were put under Christ’s feet. Yet in its full manifestation, in its most perfect glory, its ancient walls would only look clearer, brighter, firmer. The names of the twelve tribes of Israel, and of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb would be visible in the city which needed no temple, and no sun to lighten it.
(5.) St. John’s day has tempted me to connect these passages from the Apocalypse with that simple narrative which we read in the chapter from St. Luke. But I do not think I could have illustrated that narrative better from any other source. For the more we remember that the Apostles were Jews, that they were sent forth as Jews to bless all the families of the earth, the better we shall understand their institution, in its growth, in its completion; the less we shall wonder when we hear of a final Apostle—of one who tarried till the Lord came. To a very respectable and very earnest body of men in our day it has been a great offence that the Apostolic order should have ceased in the Church. They are sure that it must have been removed as the punishment of some great sin; they are sure that, however long we have been without it, there must be a restoration of it. If it had the especial fitness which I have supposed to the Jewish economy—if the whole formation of it denoted it as a Jewish order—if it existed to tell Jews of a Kingdom of Heaven, for which their national institutions had been preparing, and which would be revealed as they expired; one can understand why there should be an Apostle to announce this consummation, and why there should be no other to take his place. He saw the night torches go out; he saw the Sun rising. He needed no successor to bear his name. He left the world with the assurance that the kingdoms of the world were the kingdoms of God and His Christ, and that they would be shewn to be so. The old forms would be changed; there would be new bottles prepared for the new wine; but the law and the prophets would not perish; the Old Testament and the New would live on; the walls of the city would still have the names of the twelve tribes; the deeper foundations of the city would still have the names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb.
(6.) But while I cannot see why we should wish the order of God’s universe altered, or any return to one which has done its work and passed away, I do feel that we have a heavier sin to confess than the sin of being no longer directed by a body of twelve Apostles. It is the sin of pretending to believe the message of the twelve Apostles, and not really believing it; the sin of supposing that they were divine and inspired men, and yet that they prevaricated when they said that a Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and that it would actually be revealed in their day; the sin of keeping Christmas Day, and of not owning that God has indeed given His only begotten Son to take our nature upon Him, that we, being regenerated and made His children by adoption and grace, might daily be renewed by His Holy Spirit. If we believed that this union and reconciliation of heaven and earth had taken place—if we held that our baptism into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost was not a delusion—we should also believe that the sacred writer was sincere in saying, ‘Ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest…. But ye are come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all… and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, which speaketh better things than that of Abel.’
The tidings of this city of God were those which the Apostles carried first to their own nation, then to the different tribes of the earth. A Christendom rose to the sound; a modern world appeared out of the ruins of the ancient world. We have ceased to believe in such a city. There were Apostles, inspired men, 1800 years ago. We spell out with difficulty some of their words, and call them divine. We fancy that there has been a feeble transmission of their authority from generation to generation among ourselves. And people in other lands tell us that except we own an Apostle who was crucified on a Roman hill as the head of the Universal Church, we can never know who our Father in heaven is; we can never really be one family in His Son; we can never really be baptised by His Spirit.
To all these doctrines I would oppose the doctrine of that Apostle whom we remember to-day. If we have not yet learnt to regard him as a self-seeking, self-glorifying deceiver, let us accept the other—I believe the only other—alternative. Let us recognise him as the teacher through whom those bright beams of light were shed upon the Church, which illumined it in the hour when the old world was passing away with a great noise, which shall be shed upon it again when its divisions, and hatreds, and falsehoods are bringing back the darkness and chaos out of which it arose.’
‘Many other signs,’ he says in his Gospel, truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name.’ Thus he defines the office and work of an Evangelist, the end of all Scripture; not to fix our thoughts upon the letters of a book, but to direct us to that Son who died, and rose, and liveth for evermore.
‘That which was from the beginning,’ so he writes in his Epistle, that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you:… and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ…. This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth: but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sins. There is the theology, there is the morality of an Apostle; a theology and a morality, as I think, fresh and young for all times, striking at the root of our denials and our self-deceptions, shewing us why we cannot believe in ourselves, or our notions, and theories; shewing us in whom we may believe, who is able to deliver us from all our darkness and enmities, who is able to bring us into His perfect light and love.
And if we pass from the Gospel and the Epistle to that book which is rightly called the Revelation, or unveiling of Jesus Christ, we find the old Apostle, the last of the Apostles, telling of Him which is, and which was, and which is to come; of the seven spirits before His throne; of Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the first begotten from the dead, the Prince of all the kings of the earth. He is telling us of the kingdom under which we are living, of the Name with which we are sealed. He looks back to the past, claiming his own kinsmen after the flesh, his own beloved nation of Israel, as heirs of promises which must be fulfilled. He looks onward to the future, claiming all nations as intended to walk in the divine light, to bring their treasures into the divine city. In that city may be found the names not of one but of all the Apostles. For all testified of the truth which St. Peter declared in express words, ‘Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner-stone, elect, and precious: and he that believeth on Him shall not be confounded.’