John x. 37, 38.
“If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in Him.”
Last Sunday I compared the method which we commonly suppose to be the most ingenious and successful for the defence of Christ’s Gospel and the confutation of its opponents, with that which was adopted by St. Paul, in his speech at Athens. I showed you that there was not a difference merely between them, but a direct, formal opposition,—one which could not be accounted for by any advantages which the Apostle possessed over us in the mightiness of his gifts, or which we possess over him in the fact of our being inheritors, for eighteen centuries, of the blessings that he proclaimed. If the modern course is right, his divine inspiration was only a means of leading him wrong; if he was right, we are showing that we have little appreciation of the treasures which he affirmed to be ours, by the measures which we take for the purpose of securing them against invaders.
The causes of this wide departure from the precedents which we profess to esteem most, is to be sought, I have maintained, in the entirely different force which he and we give to the word Revelation and the kindred word Manifestation. They are, as I have often observed to you, specially favourite words of St. Paul’s,—words upon which the interpretation not of single passages but of whole Epistles depends. It could not be otherwise, seeing that the revelation of Christ to him was, he declares in the Epistle to the Galatians, that which enabled him to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. The records of his own life therefore—the very meaning of that conversion which we shall be considering this week, and by a necessary consequence the meaning of the message which he delivered to the nations—are inseparably connected with his idea of Revelation. I think the more you pursue the words which express this idea through his letters, the more you will feel that he is rigidly accurate in the use of them; that the sense never changes; that Revelation is always with him the unveiling of a Person—and that Person the ground and Archetype of men, the source of all life and goodness in men not to the eye, but to the very man himself, to the Conscience, Heart, Will, Reason, which God has created to know Him, and be like Him. Or to take his own far better and bolder language,—that which we considered last Sunday,—that of which his Epistles contain the exposition and the rationale,—it is the revelation of Him “in whom we live and move and are,” to creatures who are “feeling after Him, if haply they may find Him.”
Now, if this idea of Revelation has been changed for another that is wholly unlike it,—if by Revelation we understand certain communications made to us by God, and which we cannot dispense with, because the very constitution which He has given us makes us incapable of knowing Him as he is, because by no possibility can there be an unveiling or discovery of His own nature, or character, or purposes to us,—the whole subject must be contemplated by us, and must be presented to others, in an aspect which it never assumes in St. Paul’s writings and discourses, or in any part of the Old and New Testament. So that we are in the strange predicament of men fighting with prodigious zeal and prowess on behalf of the authority of books which, the moment we take them from their shelves and examine their contents, are found to set at nought the hypothesis upon which we have rested our apology for them. In establishing the necessity of a Revelation, we have done what we can to confute the Revelation of which these books testify.
When once such a theory about the nature of Revelation as this has been fully developed (and the unfortunate rage for apologetic literature in the Christian Church has always fostered it, while the faith, the practical life, the sufferings of Christians, have been a continual protest against it),—when, I say, it has been fully developed, it will find, like jealousy, proofs strong as holy writ, proofs even drawn from holy writ, to confirm and justify it. Our Lord’s miracles have been especially made to perform this office. ‘They are,’ it is said, ‘upon the face of them, strange, exceptional acts. What were they for? Why are they recorded? Surely to make the mission of Christ credible. Once admit them, and you cannot doubt that He spoke with an authority which never belonged to any one else. Accept this authority, and whatever you find in the book, however much it seems at variance with your heart and reason, you will be bound to receive as divine.’ I am not now considering the question, how far this mode of argument in our day has been successful in its intended purpose. I am not considering whether it has not kept back numbers from the faith which it recommends; I am not considering how far appeals to the intellect on the particular question of miracles are consistent with the demand for a suppression of the intellect afterwards; I merely desire to meet the question, For what purpose are these works of Christ, if not for the end these apologists have imagined? I will not answer them as they would answer me, in all cases except this, with an assumption of ignorance, ‘How can we penetrate the designs of an infinite Being in any of His doings?’ because I think the Scriptures and the Church have given the answer, and wish us to profit by it. They declare that the miracles were for the manifestation of Christ’s glory. That is the very expression which the beloved Disciple uses respecting the miracle at the marriage-feast; for this reason the Church has chosen that story and the story of other miracles for the Gospels on the Sundays after Epiphany. They are not, according to this teaching, arguments to convince the understanding that it ought to suspend its own proper exercises; they are unveilings or manifestations to the whole man, of the nature, character, mind, of the Son of Man; and therefore, as He shows us in the passage of which my text forms a part, of the nature, character, mind, of the Father who sent Him.
I. Our Lord says, in the words I have taken, “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.” Did you think St. Paul’s words at Athens very inconsistent with some of our current notions? But how much more startling are these! How continually we are told that we are evincing the greatest irreverence, that we are proving ourselves ignorant of the limitations of our own minds, and of the distance between the Divine nature and ours, if we presume to consider whether such and such acts have a divine quality in them, or one that is the reverse of divine. I trust and believe that those who speak this language are utterly inconsistent with themselves. I am satisfied—indeed, I know for certain—that they talk of many of the acts attributed to Siva and Vishnu, and to the gods of the classical mythology, as evil and hateful, and therefore as having no savour of divinity in them. Where did they learn that language? Was it not in the book which told them that God is a righteous Being, just and without iniquity? Have we not learnt it by those reasonings of God with His creatures about the madness and folly of worshipping stocks and stones, about the wickedness of pouring out drink-offerings to false and evil beings? Have we not learnt it from those chapters of Isaiah which we are reading in these Epiphany weeks, those which declare that He is setting forth His true Image, the Image of perfect gentleness and meekness, to confound all the dark images which men have made of Him? And yet, when we come back to the school in which we have received all these lessons, and are assailed by doubters of our own land with the assertion that such and such words or acts or habits of mind should not be attributed to a Divine Being,—instead of asking ourselves, and encouraging them to ask, whether these representations of Him are actually in the Holy Book, or whether the objector has rightly understood them, or whether they really outrage his conscience, as he fancies they do,—we stop him with a preliminary denial of his right to make the inquiry at all. From some high logical or theological tribunal, we pronounce that there is no test in man for ascertaining what is right or wrong in One who claims to be above man; that he may exercise all his faculties in ascertaining whether a certain book has probable claims to be regarded as coming from an infinite and omnipotent Being, none of them in ascertaining what manner of Being He is from whom we say it has come. Has not the disputer a right to turn upon us and say, “All that may be true enough; I dare say it is. It confirms many of my suspicions; it strengthens me in my growing atheism. But how happened it that your logic and your theology fell asleep when you were talking about Vishnu and Siva and Jupiter?”
Now to all this strange and contradictory talk, I oppose not some conclusions of my own reason, but the words of Christ himself, “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.” Here was a distinct appeal to something in man which could recognize whether the works He did were the works of His Father or not. That appeal He was making to men through His whole life upon earth; in those good works—so He calls them—which we have changed into mere exercises of irregular power, into violations of the order which He had himself established.
Take, for example, the work at Cana, which the Church brought before us last Sunday. We are told by St. John, who must have witnessed it, that in it Christ manifested forth His glory to His disciples. Of course he means us to recollect his own words in the previous chapter, “We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,” which was fullness of grace and truth. A Man was sitting in the midst of them, sharing their joy, feeling with them. He manifested Himself to them as the source of that joy. A change wrought calmly, secretly, unobtrusively, unknown to those whom it would have startled most if they had known it, gave them a sense of creative power such as they had never had before. The occasion was common and earthly. The gift was the gift of an ordinary thing, though of one which symbolized life and gladness. It is in little things, in particulars, that the laws of a universe reveal themselves. The unfolding of a flower may teach us more of the birth and growth of all things than we can obtain by reflecting on the whole Cosmos. And in this one act of changing the water into wine at the marriage-feast, the sense of all good things coming down through a Brother, from a Father, may have been more profoundly awakened in the minds of those fishermen, than it had been awakened in all kings and prophets before them. From what material conceptions of Creation may it not have delivered them! How they may have risen to the perception, if not at once, yet through the discipline of after-years acting upon that one event, of a Word who giveth life!
That, I think, was in the truest sense a manifestation. We may confidently apply our Lord’s test to it. If it had not come to the Disciples as a work of the Father, they would not have believed on the Son of Man. They might have believed on a great enchanter,—in one who could play with the powers of nature. They would not have believed in a Lord of their hearts and reins; they would not have believed in a King of nature and of man; they would not have believed in One of whose fullness all had received, and grace for grace.
Take again those acts of healing which have been brought before us in the Gospel today. The first was wrought on behalf of a leper, who met our Lord as He came down from the Mount. The people who heard His discourse on that Mount said, “He speaketh as one having authority, and not as the Scribes. He speaks like a King, like one who knows the Law and the Lawgiver, not like one who has to spell the meaning of it out of books.” The leper confessed the same fact. “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. Thou hast authority; I see that. Thou art the King over men, over me. And Thou hast spoken of a Father who cares for His children, who cares for the unthankful and evil. That has been the burden of thy discourse. Wilt thou not then have regard even to an outcast from the society of men, to one who proclaims himself unclean? Others may cut him off, but wilt thou?” The answer, “I will; be thou clean,” is assuredly an assertion of the authority which the leper had ascribed to Him. He assumes a kingly right over the body of this man—a right to restore its health. But so far is He from trying to separate that act of healing from the order of God’s government and kingdom, that He sends the man to the priest, the ordinary and appointed judge in cases of leprosy. He is to prove, by the recognized outward sign, that the inward cure has taken effect. He is to offer the gift which the law has prescribed. Here is then not a King now for the first time installed in that office, now for the first time exercising its noblest functions. Here is the manifestation of Him whose goings-forth have been from everlasting; a revelation of Him from whom all powers and methods of healing have been derived. Most strictly then is He fulfilling His own words, “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. If my works are less regular, orderly, inward, than those of Him who governs all things, who renews the life of all things and all men day by day, believe me not. If my works are not works of grace and truth, works which bear witness of a Father who is full of grace and truth, of a Father who is not the destroyer but the restorer of men, who is pursuing them into all the secret places of their sorrow and misery to make them right, believe me not.”
This manifestation is the proper preparation for the next, of which I have spoken to you more than once. I will not dwell upon it in reference to the Centurion’s training in the Roman camp, to the lessons he had learnt there of obedience and government, and the power of words to subdue physical strength and hold multitudes in subjection. I would speak of it as the typical instance of those works of healing which demanded faith, and evoked a faith in the persons who were benefited by them. The notion we have formed of miracles and their object leads us to suppose that this faith was in a Person presented to the eye, and able to do marvels that had never been done before. Our Lord selects, as His instance of lively faith, a man who cared nothing for the sight or touch, who confessed an invisible might, who believed that if Christ spoke the word, his servant would be healed. May we not affirm then, without hesitation, that the highest blessing which our Lord conferred on palsied, leprous, blind, deaf, dead men, was that He awakened in them a trust which raised them above what they saw—above themselves? Was not the difference between the nine who went their way, and the one who returned to give glory to God, precisely this, that they received a bodily cure no less perfect than he did, but that he was saved out of his selfishness and ignorance of God, because he perceived that Jesus was doing His Father’s works? This, I think, has been the interpretation of earnest readers; it may almost be called the traditional interpretation of Christendom. If we would but hold it consistently,—if, in the case of this miracle or of any other, we would but accept the lessons which it has carried home to suffering and lonely people in all parts of the world,—if we would but consider those lessons worth all the apologies that ever have been written, or ever shall be written, we should be less afraid of taking the words of the Son of God as they stand,—we should not think it dangerous to apply His own test to His own works.
I reserve the consideration of one of these works, that of restoring the man possessed with the devils, for next week, because it strikes directly at one of the leading and most effective reasons for inventing another test than our Lord’s, and for discarding that. The Church has connected with that narrative the one respecting the passage over the Lake of Galilee, when Jesus said to the storm, “Peace, be still.” There is a great beauty, which all readers have felt, in the association of the tumults in nature with the tumults of the human spirit. There is more than beauty: there is the deepest practical benefit in considering wherein they are alike, wherein they differ, why the same monarch must have dominion over both. I should gladly use the Gospel of next Sunday to suggest this comparison, but as I wish to fix your minds upon the cure of the demoniac for its own sake, I will refer for one moment to the first story now, as an additional illustration of the doctrine, “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.” The remark can scarcely have failed to strike any one, that our Lord’s acts of power do, in a very wonderful manner, gather up the different functions which those who were seeking God, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him, had attributed to separate divinities. Little as the Jews knew of the names of Dionysus, Demeter, Aesculapius, Phoebus, they, like all other people, felt as if some distinct benefactor must be concerned in the gift of the wine that made glad the heart, of the common bread, of bodily health, of the light in the eye or understanding. And so, as the disciples were to preach a Gospel to all nations, acts which testified of this union of powers were the most perfect preparation they could receive—initiating them into the faiths of different races, making them in the fullest sense assertors of the unity whereof their own was the appointed witness. To realize, by one special instance, in whose hand was the trident of the seas, was surely a part of this practical discipline which they would appreciate hereafter. But they would only appreciate it hereafter, because the impression He made on them at the moment was not the impression of a wonder-worker, who was exhibiting his power in producing startling effects and a sudden excitement, but of a calm Ruler, the upholder and restorer of peace and order. It was a work which revealed Him who had fixed the bounds of earth and sea. It was a work which, beneath the Creator of the world, revealed the Father of men.
II. The first part of my text is negative,—“If this is not so, believe me not.” The second is positive; it is full of instruction, I think also of encouragement. “But if I do, though you believe not me, believe the works.” In general, perhaps, the order was reversed. Jesus was recognized first by the Galilean fishermen as the Teacher they had craved for; to whom the prophets and John, the chief of the prophets, had pointed them; then the works became fuller manifestations of His nature and His dominion. The Centurion had learnt his need of One who could command men by a word, as he commanded the soldiers that were under him; the power which sent away his servant’s palsy appeared to be the proper endowment of such a Ruler. But our Lord speaks of cases in which a belief in the works may precede a belief in Him, and may lead to it. The works, He says, may lead men to know—actually to know—that the Father is in Him, and that He is in the Father. What! to know this? Is not this the deepest mystery of the Christian faith? Must it not be received as a dogma transmitted from other ages, very galling to the reason, but against which it cannot remonstrate, because it has no capacity for dealing with the Infinite? I can only repeat our Lord’s words. He says that men who believe the works as works of His Father, even before they have learnt to believe Him, may come to know this truth. And suppose it were a truth—suppose this mystery did underlie the universe, as we in our creeds profess that it does,—and suppose that the Church is right in treating these works as divine manifestations,—must it not be so? Could they be divine manifestations, and not manifestations of this divine relation? Could men feel them as divine, because the expression of the highest grace and truth,—feel them as human, because coming with all human grace and truth,—and not confess a Father and Son, with an inward reality and certainty such as no mere dogma or tradition ever earned for itself, ever pretends to earn for itself?
And yet, brethren, we fear to let our Lord’s miracles be exposed to a trial which He claimed for them and to which such a promise as this is attached! We think it safer to stifle all examination into their moral character, lest we should put in hazard the authority of the documents which contain them! Oh, poor and heartless policy, which must produce the results of all policy that is not based on truth! No doubt, if you invite men to say whether the miracles of Christ have not in them the tokens of all grace and truth,—are not such signs of His power as a Father would give to His children,—you permit them to state their doubts, their difficulties, their suspicions. Do you not wish that they should? Do you not know that there is danger, incalculable danger, in their quelling these doubts, difficulties, suspicions,—in their not bringing them forth to the light of day? If some are merely idle doubts, doubts suggested by the spirit of scorn, are there not some which God has awakened, that He may satisfy them? Dare you crush those? Can you distinguish the tares from the wheat? Cannot you trust God to do it? The truth must be spoken—our modern way of meeting objections nourishes and justifies all the pride and contempt which prompts the worst of them; only hinders those from coming forth which really demand a solution, which, if there is any moral standard for man, any moral sense in man, will find one.
And while we consider the effect we may produce on others, let us not forget the reaction upon ourselves. History, not speculation, supplies us with an awful warning. We know, on the testimony of Evangelists and Apostles, that there were men—religious men eager to crush all doubt respecting the authority of the Scriptures; quite ready to confess miracles that were merely miracles of power. These men refused our Lord’s test. They would not ask whether His works were good, whether they came from the Father. They did not believe they had any faculties for entering on that inquiry. And so they denied both the Father and the Son; so they came to believe that Christ healed the sick, stilled the winds and waves, preached glad tidings to the poor, under the inspiration of Beelzebub, the prince of the devils.