The Book of Proverbs Illustrated by St. John

“Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness.” —John viii. 12.

The passage: Jesus spoke to them again and said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness.”

We begin this afternoon to read the Book of Proverbs. Part of it is aphorisms about the well-being of individuals and nations, which in modern terms we would call morals and politics. The ground of these lies in the earlier chapters: before we are taught how Wisdom and Folly show themselves in daily dealings, we are told what they are. Shrewd observations from a man with experience of the world and of himself are always worth studying. But if they are not collected merely to display the writer’s sagacity, we may ask him to show how we can use his discoveries in our own emergencies. Solomon accepts the challenge. His claim to wisdom rests on his sympathy with his fellow-men, not on isolation from them. He is wiser than others because he enters more fully into what is human and universal. He is freer from affectation and oddity, he looks more earnestly and bravely into the heart of commonplaces, and he tells his readers what is true of themselves as much as of him. He lets his silly, headstrong son know that there is a light near him in which he may walk, and a darkness in which he may also walk. Rehoboam was no different from Solomon in this. The same law governed both, and the same unseen Wisdom revealed itself to the search and love of both. The same harlot sense tempted both away from Wisdom, to follow their own courses, choose their own delusions, and destroy themselves. Each had in him what made this tempter powerful. Each was addressed by the Divine Teacher, the true Lawgiver and King of Man, and each could heed a voice that was soft and gentle yet had a might to command that no other voice has. Wisdom, Solomon affirms, is no hard, dreary abstraction, no result of experience, no product of our understanding. It is living, actual, personal. We find it; we do not make it. If we search for it, it will disclose itself. The more we confess it, the more conscious we become of its presence, and the more our understandings do it homage rather than trust themselves, the more free, vigorous and manly they are.

I. Such is the doctrine of the Book. It asks to be tried in the greatest and pettiest details of our existence. It sets itself to judge the policy of kings, and it does not disdain the weights and measures of the shop. It needs no happy accidents of time or place to verify it, and it is as willing to be proved by the follies and sins of those who proclaim it as by their heroic deeds. With what in a work of art we would call subtle and bitter irony, the irony of fact, Scripture sets Solomon before us as the signal illustration of his own warnings. The wise king grows elated with his wisdom. He is charmed and intoxicated by the visible things that had been poured at his feet. He is overpowered by the very images he had taught others to beware of, and he becomes a fool. By his folly he establishes his principle for all who ponder the story, not in scorn or despair, but in charity and self-suspicion, trying to learn where their own safety lies.

II. We cannot separate this Book from the life of its author, and we cannot separate it from the history of the people for whom it was written. It is a great mistake to treat it as a singular document, a specimen of Jewish philosophy, and not to see its connection with the narrative of Abraham and the patriarchs, with the fixed law written in tables, and with the visions of the holy seers. The purpose of the Jewish Calling and Covenant, and of Circumcision, if we take the Bible’s language plainly, was to set one race apart to the Living, True and Unseen God. It was to detach them from visible idolatries and so make them a wise and understanding people in the eyes of the sense-bound nations around them.

If this was not the purpose of their family order and legal government, if God was not the author and upholder of both, if their well-being did not rest on trust in Him as a present Protector and King of their children after them, if all their institutions were not meant to redeem them from the idols they made, so that they might serve Him who made them in His image, then the story is a fiction from beginning to end. You cannot rescue it by supposing its actors honest, well-meaning, or at worst self-deceived; we would have to treat them as wilful impostors, blasphemers and liars. But if the quiet pastoral life of Genesis bears this character as legibly as the laws given in the Wilderness, if the voice that said “Get thee out of thy father’s house into a land that I will show thee” and “In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed” carried this meaning, as did the I AM from the bush that burned and was not consumed, then the Psalms translate this historical language into prayer and praise, and Proverbs translates it just as accurately into moral discourse. The devotions and the maxims alike presume a perpetual conflict between Life and Death, Light and Darkness, in which every man and every nation is engaged. Both treat the fight as real, not a sham, because the Light does not come from man but to man. It comes not to his eyes but to his own self, his conscience and heart. And He from whom it comes can be trusted: He wants His creatures delivered from their enemies, and means to deliver them. This faith could be sustained in the nation’s conscience, and could raise and purify the conscience of its members, because holy men kept bearing witness, through the national blessings and judgments they interpreted, that the Divine Wisdom would one day come forth. This Wisdom is the Word who was with God, “as one brought up with Him, and whose delights were with the Sons of Men.” It would come not as a cold abstraction or the letters of a book, but living and personal, the one Solomon declared to be the source of all right thoughts and good counsel, the true King of Men, the object of all loyal homage and dutiful love.

III. In the interval between the end of independent Jewish history and the coming of our Lord, it became clear that the sense of a conflict between light and darkness had been working in all the Pagan nations. The cultivated peoples known to us then differ from others precisely in being more conscious of it. They despise the so-called barbarians, however physically strong, as lacking this perception. Yet their clearer utterances interpret the confused dreams of the barbarians and show that these too were engaged in the battle. Every tradition about a heroic man witnesses that he was great because, as the son of some god, he had decided, however imperfectly he kept to it, between the claims of sense and of an invisible guide. The later speculations of philosophers only worked out this material, asking how men could conduct themselves between two such influences, which they should obey, and where each came from. The man who truly believes in the Jewish calling and revelation, far from hiding these facts, will proclaim them loudly. They show that it was a calling for the good of man and a revelation of that Wisdom which speaks to man. They corroborate the truth Solomon illustrated in so many ways. They are testimonies from the innermost conscience and heart of humanity that a Guide was near all, one who could not be found out by searching, though He might be acknowledged in their words and acts. They are a cry from that same heart and conscience that He would declare Himself, and show what He had to do with God and Man, and so what God and Man were to each other.

IV. “Then spake Jesus unto them again, I am the Light of the World.” He had often said this before, for every act of mercy said it to the person who received it. St. John dwells especially on His cure of blindness, taking it as the clearest instance of what all His miracles produced. Each sufferer felt that a power of darkness had seized him and that part of the beauty and joy of the universe was hidden from him. The appearance of a Deliverer who could free him was the appearance of a Light. He was brought out of a cave; the air that breathed on other men now breathed on him, and the common sun shone on him. So it was with the leper who had heard Christ on the Mount and dared to approach Him, though an exile from his kind: “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” That is, bring me back to human society and take away the veil between me and them. So it was with the palsied man, to whom Christ gave the more astonishing message, “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” A palsy lay on his heart more hopeless than the palsy on his limbs. One saw into the depth of his heart and scattered its darkness. He became a freed, illuminated man, and could rise and walk. Christ’s word was light. Entering the soul, it spread through every part of the man and brought health and vigour wherever it met sickness and decay.

Whether the Evangelists tell of the words that scattered diseases or the words that taught the people, they speak the same way, because they could find no language so simple and true. He goes into the land of Zabulon and Naphthali, into Galilee of the Gentiles. It was a half-idolatrous region, and Isaiah had centuries before described it as a region of darkness and the shadow of death. Our Lord’s appearance there is the appearance of a Light, not to a person here and there but to that whole outcast population. There is no real difference between these cases. The light that shines on the sorrowing or tormented man is the Universal Light, and his blessing is to be brought in some measure to share it. That Light is only doing what it is meant to do when whole multitudes feel it at once.

Divines like to distinguish Christ the Teacher of the world at large from Christ the Teacher of each man’s heart and conscience, an outward Christ and an inward Christ. The Evangelists indulge in no such refinements. The Christ who was born of the Virgin and suffered under Pontius Pilate reveals Himself, not to the eyes of those who see and handle Him, but to a spirit within them. He calls forth faith, the proper organ of that spirit. He speaks to the man hidden within the man. And there is always some answer to His voice. It may come as a stupid yawn, from one half-awakened who longs to sleep again. It may come as a growl of defiance: “What have we to do with Thee?” But either way there is a recognition of the Holy One, a sense of Light, however painful and however unwelcome to the eye.

V. So there is no need of the artificial rules and distinctions that doctors invent to their own confusion. The Light makes the distinction. It is not the distinction between Pharisee and Publican, or between religious and irreligious men. It goes deeper: between that in every man which welcomes the light and claims kinship with it, and that in every man which shuns the light and would gladly extinguish it forever. It is expressed in these words: “He that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness.”

When the Son of Man said to Matthew the Publican, sitting at the receipt of custom, “Follow Me,” no more force was used on him than on any Scribe or Ruler who cried, “This man blasphemeth; he casteth out devils through the Prince of the Devils.” It was wholly an inward attraction. Matthew needed a guide out of the covetousness and money-worship to which he felt his circumstances, and something stronger than circumstances, made him prone. His guide had come, had spoken, and had given the command He had the right and power to give. So Matthew became a disciple. He did not know what paths he would be led through, or what work he would do besides collecting taxes. The Master would show him in time; his business was to follow. As he followed the Light, it showed him more of the confusion he had been walking in, more of his own ignorance and folly. The path of life often seemed thornier and more tangled than before, because the thorns that had pierced him unseen were now visible, and because he had a goal in sight instead of wandering wherever chance led. Strangest of all, he found that to follow the King of Men was to follow a Sufferer, whose path was one of humiliation, contempt and death, with a Cross at the end of it. What an end! This, said our Lord, was the hour of the powers of darkness. They had apparently triumphed. The Deliverer was crushed. The Light of the World was put out.

And yet it was then that Matthew found what he had to do besides collecting taxes. It was to testify: “The Light of the World is not put out. It never shone so brightly as now. That Cross is the fullest and most perfect exhibition of it, to men, to Angels, to you and to me. Now is that Being manifested in whom is Light and no darkness at all, Good with no taint of evil. Now He is seen in a dying Man. Now His reconciliation with our race is complete. Now Death and the Grave have become great testimonies for Life and Immortality. Now each man who has the sentence of Adam upon him may know he is a kinsman of the Son of God. Now he may follow Him, and when the darkness is thickest around and within him, not walk in it, but see the Light of Life.”

And so the doctrine of Proverbs, to which the heroes of the old world clung though it reached them through no written book, has become the message of the Gospel. The conscience of mankind has cried for the Light in various tongues, or in mere inarticulate groans, and the Light has come forth to it. The Light of the World says now to every one of us, “Follow me, and thou shalt not walk in darkness.” Yes, brethren, to every one of us in his commonest work: at the receipt of custom, in the hall of justice, in daily dealings with each other as citizens, fathers, brothers, husbands. In whatever work a man is engaged, he is tempted into a road that looks promising and may lead, and sometimes does lead, to wealth and fame. But it is certain to end in darkness, and is dark all along. A little tampering with conscience, words spoken and things done that will not bear the light, that we cannot quite dare to look at ourselves: where do these lead? To the loss of all moral discernment, the incapacity to know right from wrong or truth from falsehood. They lead to that habit and state of falsehood which is Hell.

And yet to avoid these, to keep the heart and reason open, free and pure, able to hold the truth they have and ready to receive what they lack, how hard it is! Which of us does not bitterly know how hard? And the effort would be desperate if our own understandings and consciences had to find the light they need, or had to depend on the opinion of society and the traditions of men to supply it. But it is not so. Jesus the Son of Man speaks now as ever: “I am the Light of the World, shining on all, not far from any. In all perplexities, bewilderments and temptations, trust in Me. I will guide you, and following Me you shall not walk in darkness.”

And for us too, as for our Leader, “Via Crucis, Via Lucis.” He will use crosses on earth to purge our eyes and prepare them for the Light that will burst upon the whole world when He appears.