The Gospel of St. John Part 3

I believe, my brethren, that all these pa.s.sages in the story just as much belong to the sign, are quite as essential elements of it, as anything which follows. Nothing can be more simple or brief than the pa.s.sage which comes next. '_There were set there six water-pots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the water-pots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And He saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew:) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, and saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now._' It cannot have escaped you how carefully St. John informs us that not even the ruler of the feast, the taster of the wine himself, knew whence the wine came; he merely makes an idle, merry observation about it. Most of those who sat round him were probably just as ignorant and as little concerned about the matter as he was. The servants may have wondered at what they saw; but their wonder had so little to do with the intention of the act that the Apostle does not stop to notice it. Very little, then, of the notion which we affix--honestly and etymologically affix--to the word _miracle_ has any application here. There was no effort to produce surprise; if surprise was produced, it led to no conviction. Not one of those who tasted the water that was made wine, _simply on that ground_ believed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of G.o.d.

What, then, was signified by this act? What force lay in it? I can only beg St. John to tell us. He says, '_This beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth His glory; and His disciples believed on Him_.' What glory did He manifest? In all fairness and reason, we must again consult the writer of the words about the sense which he puts upon them. He had said, '_And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth_.' I said, when we met with this pa.s.sage in the last chapter, that it was evidently the text of the whole Gospel. The Gospel would either show how the Word made flesh manifested His glory to those among whom He dwelt, and how that glory was as of the only-begotten Son full of grace and truth, or it would fail of its purpose, it would belie its name. Of the Word it has been said before, '_that all things were made by Him: that in Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men_.' The manifestation of His glory, we might surely then expect, would include a manifestation of Him as one who exercised creative power, as one in whom the Life that quickens all things dwells inexhaustibly. One might expect that this Life, if it was exhibited upon _things_, would still be in some very remarkable sense an illumination of _men_. But one would be certain that that illumination _could_ not be outward to the eye. As life is internal, as all its movements and operations are secret, though its effects are so palpable; so the Light which proceeds from this Life--that which is emphatically the Light of _men_, as distinguished from mere animals--must be light penetrating into the inner being, filling the heart, reason, and conscience, scattering darkness in _them_, preparing _them_ hereafter,--since the Light is not put into any one to be hid under a bushel, but to be set upon a candlestick,--to show forth what had so marvellously affected and changed them, to the world.

Now, if we consider the sign in Cana of Galilee with these thoughts in our minds,--which we have not invented for ourselves, but derived straight from the Evangelist,--I cannot doubt that all its different aspects will come out very harmoniously before us.

The first aspect of it is that which is brought before us in our own Marriage Service. Christ is said to have 'adorned and beautified the holy estate of matrimony with His presence and first miracle that He wrought in Cana of Galilee.' This has been the conclusion at which the reason of the most thoughtful men has arrived, and to which the instinctive feeling in all has responded. If Jesus was the Word made flesh, if the order of the world was established by Him, then His acts upon earth would be done for the purpose of vindicating this order. By them He would claim it as His. By them He would say that it did not belong to the evil one. Marriage, as one of the fundamental parts of this order, as one of the earliest inst.i.tutes of humanity, as one that had suffered most from abuse, would be one of the first over which He would a.s.sert His dominion. And because the ordinance is one in which all are interested, we should look for the a.s.sertion to come in some distinct and yet very general way; not, I mean, in a broad proclamation, or in a maxim which is forgotten speedily or frittered away in the application to each individual instance; not again in some case clothed with circ.u.mstances that take it out of the common range of cases, not the wedding of a king or of a saint, but one of which every peasant as well as every king might say, 'This tells me to whom _I_ must look to bless my wedlock, because He is the Author of it.'

Then, again, that part of the story which refers to the mother of Jesus becomes, I think, clearer when we contemplate it in this light.

Romanists are puzzled by it, Protestants exult in it, because it seems to put a kind of slight upon the Virgin. But Protestants and Romanists agree that Jesus had a divine Father and a human mother. If this act was one of the manifestations of Him as the Son of G.o.d, can anything be more natural or consistent than that it should be introduced by words which declare that He could not be in subjection to any earthly authority, while yet the act itself was an act of ministry to even the commonest necessities of the sons of earth? Is not this apparent contradiction the accomplishment of His work, the exhibition of Him in His complete character? He will _not_ be the servant of His creatures, not even of His mother; He obeys the Will, which all are created to obey. He _will_ be the servant of His creatures: He is come into the world for that end. He is doing the will of His Father when He is stooping to the lowest of all.

But if this be our judgment of two parts of the sign, it must, I think, greatly modify, if not alter altogether, the apprehensions which we have formed of the third part, that which concerns the turning of the water into wine. We cannot regard the main characteristic of the marriage and the marriage-feast as being their commonness, their similarity to what is going on in every part of the world--to what is going on among ourselves; and then make the essence of that which our Lord did at the feast consist in its uncommonness, in its unlikeness to everything that is done elsewhere--to everything that is done among ourselves. We must abandon one habit of feeling or the other. Which we shall abandon depends, it seems to me, upon the strength or the weakness of our faith in St. John's a.s.sertion, that in Him who sat at that feast was life and that all things were made by Him. If we take those words literally, if we suppose the Evangelist to mean what he says, then we must a.s.sume that what happened then was but an instance of the working of a universal law. We shall conclude that all living processes--be they slow or rapid, be they carried on in the womb of nature or through the intervention of human art--have their first power and principle in Him, that without Him nothing could become that does become. Such a belief undoubtedly carries us into great depths and heights. It increases the wonder with which we regard every dynamical discovery. But it does not interfere with any discovery. It gives solemnity and awfulness to the investigations of science. It forbids trifling in them. It stimulates courage and hope in them. It makes all superst.i.tious dread of them sinful. The Word, who is the Light of men, will Himself teach those who seek humbly and diligently to enter into those operations of life of which He is the first Mover.

But there are other thoughts connected with this word _Life_, which it is impossible to sever from it in any case, and which suggest themselves more directly than any others when the subject is a wedding-feast and the turning of water into wine. Life has a relation to joy, which is as close as the relation of death to sadness. Our minds become confused upon this point. We talk of the burden of life.

We talk of death as delivering us from this burden. But these are careless expressions, against which the conscience of man rebels. The Scripture is in harmony with the conscience. It speaks of our carrying about with us a burden of _death_ from which we need to be delivered.

If it ever speaks of the moment of departure from the world as a moment of deliverance, it is because, as the poet says, 'Death itself there dies.' In creating the wine, then, which is said in the old Scriptures to make glad the heart of man, which had been a symbol of joy as well as of life to the heathen--the symbol of high inspirations even when it was actually acknowledged to be the cause of the lowest animal degradation--the Son of Man was claiming to be the Giver of all joy, to be the Redeemer of all joy, even in its humblest earthliest forms, from that which had made it base and inhuman. In what sense the Source of Joy was also the Man of Sorrows, St. John will tell us in due time. There is something which binds this very story of the feast at Cana to His deepest sorrow. Mary has not appeared before in this Gospel; she never appears again till we meet her beside the cross. She knew that a sword was to pierce through her soul, at the very time when she was asking her Son to prove Himself the Lord of nature and the Giver of delights to man. One work did not interfere with the other. He could not be really the Word made flesh unless He fulfilled both.

And now, then, we may understand why we are told so expressly in the text that '_He manifested forth His glory, and that His disciples believed on Him_.' Who were these disciples? One of them must have been that Andrew who told his own brother Simon, '_We have found the Christ_.' One would have been that Philip who said to Nathanael, '_We have found Him of whom Moses in the law, and the Prophets, did write_.' One would have been that Nathanael who said, '_Rabbi, thou art the Son of G.o.d; thou art the King of Israel_.' Not one of these had received a sign or a miracle to impart to them these convictions.

The witness of John concerning the Light, met by the witness in their own hearts, the manifestation to those hearts that Jesus was the Light of whom they had heard,--this was their preparation for the marriage-feast and for what pa.s.sed there. Because they _had_ acknowledged Jesus and _had_ become His disciples, with a feeble, imperfect, confused knowledge of course, but with a desire of the knowledge which they should receive from continual converse with Him; _therefore_ the sign of the water being made into wine had a meaning for them which it had not for others; _therefore_ it was to them a manifestation of His glory; _therefore_ it gave them a belief in Him, as answering to John's testimony, which they had not had before. An outward exercise of power strengthened their belief in a power which lay entirely beyond the region of their senses. They were sure that a sign had been given them that He who blesses marriage, He through whom all things live, He from whom all men derive their light and joy, was actually dwelling among them.

I have been the more careful in considering this subject, my brethren, because St. John records it as the _beginning_ of the signs which Jesus did. It is not recorded in the other Evangelists. It is told here as if the whole scene had come back to the mind of the old Apostle; as if he had been at that feast, and felt himself transported there again from his chamber at Ephesus. I think there must have been a reason why that day was brought again to his remembrance, why he was enabled to describe it so briefly yet with such distinctness. People in that age, as we know from St. Paul's Epistles, as we might have guessed if we had not this decisive information, were p.r.o.ne to set great store by the powers which had been bestowed upon the Church to manifest the presence of the Holy Spirit within it. From magnifying the powers, they had pa.s.sed, by a natural process, to magnify the outward effects of these powers; then, to exult in them because they were strange and peculiar. St. Paul had urged the Corinthians to remember that all gifts were bestowed for use, and not for show; that it was better to speak five words which could be understood and might be profitable, than to speak a thousand words in an unknown tongue, unless it were interpreted. In spite of these exhortations, the _sign_ was no doubt gradually losing itself in the _miracle_. The unseen Presence, which could not be recollected without a sense of awful responsibility, was far less thought of than the display which could be made in the eyes of the ignorant. Whenever such a temper begins to prevail, we may be sure that tricks, impostures, lies in the name of Christ and of G.o.d, will spread rapidly; the spirit of falsehood will creep into the heart which has confessed its allegiance to the Spirit of truth. Ephesus, we know from the Acts of the Apostles, had been a favourite home of the magician and the enchanter. In the first fervour of their belief in Him who is the way and the truth and the life, the Christians had burnt their books and abjured their lying trade. But St. Paul, as he told the elders of the city, dreaded that after his departure grievous wolves might come in among them. There was no sheep's clothing these wolves were more likely to wear than this.

Reverence for Christ's miracles might be made an excuse for practising all old heathen arts and enchantments in His name. How suitable a work for the aged disciple of Christ to lay his axe to the root of this deception! How fitting a thing was it for him to say, 'You talk of the miracles of the Christ. I remember the first of them all. I remember what it taught me then, what it teaches me still. It was not an enchantment; it was not a wonderment. It was a sign of His presence in whom is all grace and truth, who was manifested that He might put down all falsehoods whatsoever, and who will put them down at the last.'

It was the beginning of signs. I do not say that our examination of it will save us from the trouble of examining each new sign as it comes before us. By rigorously adhering to that name, as St. John does, we a.s.sume that each has a signification of its own. We shall find them all very different from this in their circ.u.mstances, in some of their internal characteristics. But I believe that if we follow out the line of thought into which I have endeavoured to lead you this afternoon, and if we make St. John's first chapter the expounder of his object in every subsequent narrative, we shall be delivered from innumerable difficulties by which the study of miracles generally, and of each particular miracle is beset. To those who tell us that a Church which can work miracles is a true Church--to those who speak of miracles done with a serious purpose in former days, or of miracles done for the amus.e.m.e.nt of men that crave for some new thing in our days--we may make the same answer. The Scriptures teach us to care for no miracles except so far as they are signs. Of what are your miracles signs? Do they signify that the Word who was made flesh is not continually acting in the affairs of men now? If so, they contradict those signs which we confess to be true signs, those which have signified to us and to our forefathers that all life is in Him, that all light is from Him. Or _do_ they say this? Then they say what every marriage is saying just as clearly; what our ordinary food and wine, what the growth of trees and flowers, what the plough of the husbandman and the laboratory of the chemist are such pledges of as your miracles can never be. G.o.d may perform wonders to break the chains of sense, to make us aware that He is always at work. We are sure that He will not enact wonders to rivet the chains of sense upon us, to turn away our thoughts from Him to some low earthly agent. Only a wicked and adulterous generation seeks for such wonders, for such signs. The signs which will be given to it, if it does not repent, are signs of fire and of blood, the slaughter of the first-born, the cry in the Temple, 'Let us depart.' But if we receive the beginning of signs which Christ gave us in Cana of Galilee, all common things will become sacraments of His presence. The husband and the wife will confess that He has united them. We shall receive the water and the wine both as His gifts. He will drink the new wine with those who come at His bidding to give thanks for the blood which He poured out for the redemption of the world.

DISCOURSE VI.

THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE.

[Lincoln's Inn, 5th Sunday in Lent, March 9, 1856.]

ST. JOHN II. 16.

_Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise._

The first three Gospels have been sometimes called the _Galilaean_ Gospels; the fourth, the _Jerusalem_ Gospel. The distinction would be a very false one, if it implied that our Lord's relation to Jerusalem was not present to the minds of the earlier Evangelists, or that St.

John overlooked His relation to Galilee. In the ninth chapter of St.

Luke's Gospel, we are told that Jesus set His face to go to Jerusalem.

All the chapters which follow refer to events which took place in that journey, and contain discourses relating to the end of it, and to the city itself. In the thirteenth, we hear of His sending a message to Herod, that a prophet could not perish out of Jerusalem; in the nineteenth, of His looking down upon Jerusalem and weeping over it.

The climax of the narrative, not only of St. Luke, but of St. Matthew and of St. Mark, is the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, to be hailed as a king, to die as a malefactor. On the other hand, St. John presents his Master to us in the midst of Galilaean disciples. He carefully omits any allusion to the birth at Bethlehem; he records the first manifestation of His power and nature as given at Cana.

But though these observations show how easily the supposed difference between these narratives may be exaggerated and perverted, they do not prove it not to exist. We have no hint in the first three Evangelists of Christ's presence at any of the Jerusalem feasts, between that in His twelfth year and that which preceded His crucifixion. The scene of the most memorable acts and discourses recorded in St. John, is laid at Pa.s.sover, Tabernacle, Dedication feasts, to which He had come up from Galilee. The three Evangelists speak of Him continually as teaching in the synagogues; only at the close of His ministry as teaching in the Temple. The second manifestation of our Lord spoken of by St. John is when He drove out of the Temple those who were selling and buying in it.

This narrative is the most signal instance of discrepancy between St.

John and the other Evangelists which we shall meet with in our whole course. An act similar, in nearly every particular, to that which our Gospel appears to connect with the period immediately after Christ's baptism--before the Baptist's imprisonment--is said in the others to have been performed when He was about to keep the last pa.s.sover. 'May not these reports,' it has been asked, 'refer to the same transaction?

Need we suppose that St. John troubled himself about chronology? May not his recollections of events at which he was present have been united by some other thread than one of years or days? Oftentimes we may have observed how a word evokes a train of slumbering thoughts.

Why may not he who had just been speaking of the first _sign_ which Jesus did, have been led on by that name to the question of the Jews in the eighteenth verse, "_What sign shewest Thou that Thou doest these things?_"'

Such a method of removing a grave difficulty might be reasonable enough. But is there a grave difficulty--is there any difficulty--to be removed? There is no internal improbability in the supposition that our Lord inaugurated His ministry by one act of purification, and wound it up by another. If we accept the one Evangelist as an authority for the first, the three for the second, we gain, I think, what more than compensates us for an apparent repet.i.tion. We acquire a deeper sense of the meaning of the Temple, of the relation in which it stood to the Jews, to mankind, and to Christ. We understand better what the three Evangelists mean when they say that the disciples thought that the destruction of the Temple must be the end of the age, of their world; what St. John means when he speaks of the temple which would be destroyed and raised again.

Some commentators upon the Scriptures, who really wish to understand them, but who feel entangled by the habits and notions of their own time, lament that they cannot reproduce the state of feeling which belonged to the Jew when he gazed upon his temple, or entered within its precincts. 'What help,' they say, 'lies in the descriptions of the most accurate and lively travellers? What should we gain by beholding them with our own eyes? We need to annihilate time as well as s.p.a.ce.

The mind of the people who gazed eighteen hundred years ago upon these spots will not come back to us merely because we are able to receive a tolerably correct impression of the spots themselves.'

I confess, my brethren, that I am quite unable to sympathise with these complaints. I do not think it requires any effort of imagination to realize the state of mind of an ordinary Jew, as he walked through the city of David, or stood upon the holy hill, in the days of Herod and of Pilate. If we realize the state of mind of an ordinary citizen of London, walking in our streets, or entering the Abbey which contains the sepulchres of our kings and poets, we shall not need any other aid to bridge over the chasm which divides us.

Occupation with everything that is before us, with the news of the hour, with the private business which we have most in hand, indifference and torpidity about the past,--these would be our general characteristics. They may be varied by our greater or less interest in architecture--our desire to maintain or confute some architectural theory--by national pride, if we should be making our buildings known to foreigners--by a certain painful sense that we ought to put our minds into a sentimental att.i.tude. Do you suppose the case would have been different with the Jews? Do you suppose there was any charm in the outside of the Temple, which forced a sensual money-getting race into a more elevated or more serene habit of feeling than that which we drop into? Do you suppose that their sacred traditions, their glorious history, their divine calling, must have broken the charm of custom for them, or have lifted the incubus of the world from their hearts? If you do, you adopt a notion which the Scriptures confute in every line. They never tell us that the gravitation of the Jewish soul to earth was less strong than that of other men. They never represent the Jew as wanting one bad and base tendency which belongs to you and me. The evidence which the Bible has produced of its veracity to people of all conditions, in all countries, the most unlike outwardly to those of whom it speaks, is this, that it shows us creatures in all _inward_ respects like ourselves, as little capable of being moved by present signs or by records of the past, out of chillness and death, as we are.

Accordingly, what spectacle is it which the pa.s.sage I am considering brings before us? The spectacle of no appalling crime, of none of those hideous and revolting acts which we know from the Jewish historian were perpetrated at the time, and in which the religious sect of the day had its full share. It is a spectacle which had become familiar to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, which every Pharisee had continually before his eyes when he went into the Temple to pray,--most glaringly, it is probable, during the most sacred festivals. Within, the priests offered the regular sacrifices; without, in another part of the house, there was a market for sheep and oxen; there were seats for the money-dealer. The practice was so regular, so sanctioned by prescription, that no one thought anything of it. The pious Jew was no more scandalized by it than the pious Englishman is scandalized by reading an advertis.e.m.e.nt for the sale of a living. If we have distinctions which satisfy our consciences between the disposing of an actual cure of souls and of the right to endow another with such a cure,--if a line, sometimes invisible to the naked eye, separates the sin of Simony from deeds which laymen may lawfully do, and by which clergymen may lawfully benefit,--the people of Jerusalem had distinctions just as recognised, quite as capable of being defended in argument. The _holy_ place might not be approached by any profane feet; that was sacred indeed to the Lord. But the outer court--why might not that be left for ordinary traffic? Perhaps the separation of the priests from the mere throng of worshippers--above all, from the Gentile who might be found among them--was better marked by the concession of this privilege. At all events, it was a privilege guaranteed by usage to the trader. If it was disturbed, would he not probably become disgusted with his country's sanctuary altogether?

Might he not betake himself to some Roman temple,--to a worship which was more a.s.sociated with amus.e.m.e.nt, if not with business?

I do not know that this calculation was altogether a wrong one. I do not suppose that if the Sanhedrim had chosen or had been permitted by its masters to prohibit these markets, any moral benefit would have been gained for the nation. For what had made the Temple holy and dear to any Jew of that day or of former days? Not its situation, not its having been built by the wise king, not its having been restored after the captivity, not the goodly stones with which Herod had adorned it.

No! but the sense of an invisible glory; the belief that G.o.d--whom no man had seen at any time--had been pleased to meet His people there.

Could any Jewish laws restore this conviction when it had departed?

Could regulations to protect a certain enclosure from pollution give rise to anything, except despicable subterfuges, except the vilest hypocrisy, when the only ground and warrant for these regulations was forgotten, when those who would have made them as little confessed the Divine presence as those whom they would have excluded. For this--this was the secret of the Jewish desecration of the Temple. The priests who ministered at the inner shrine did not, for the most part, believe in the Divine presence more than the people who sold sheep and oxen without. A trade was going on in both places. There it was a traffic with G.o.d; here it was a traffic among men. The awe of One who dwelt with them, who revealed Himself to them, whose righteousness was their strength, had been exchanged for the fear of One who might call them to account for their treacheries to each other if they withheld their customary and toilsome services from Him.

The preacher in the wilderness had been taught that, when a nation has reached such a condition of rottenness as this, it is not enough to lop off withered branches; the axe must be laid to the root. When the Scribes and Pharisees came to him, he told them to bring forth fruits of repentance, fruits which would show themselves in the Temple as well as the market. But he did not visit either the Temple or the market. Jesus concerned Himself with both. '_He went into the Temple, and found them that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting. And when He had made a scourge of small cords, He drove them all out of the Temple, and the sheep and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables._'

Some who read this story say, that it offends their notion of our Lord's dignity. Could He, with His own hand, chastise these traders?

Some say, it offends their notion of His benignity. Could the All-Merciful exhibit such wrath against a tolerated, perhaps an unconscious, profaneness? Before we consider these opinions, it may be well to hear what the disciples felt, when they saw Him with the scourge by whom they had sat at the feast, whom they had hailed as the Giver of the marriage blessing, as the Inspirer of joy. '_They remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up._' These words came unbidden into their minds. His look, His voice, expressed all that they had ever heard of the vehement earnestness with which kings and prophets of old had felt the pollutions of G.o.d's Temple, and had sought to purge it of them. Josiah and Ezekiel revived in Him. He had forgotten Himself. He was possessed by the spirit that possessed the men of old. There was a fire burning in Him that could not be quenched, till it had consumed all the chaff from the threshing-floor.

Such was their impression at the moment. Looking back upon it after all later events had interpreted it, St. John felt that this was a manifestation of grace and truth, as much as the making the water wine, or the healing the sick. For he had learnt that a gracious Being must be intolerant of that which is ungracious, that a true Being must seek to destroy falsehood--that falsehood most which is nearest the heart of a nation, the altar of G.o.d. He felt that this wrath must have reached its highest point in the most gracious, most true Being, in Him from whom all had received their portions of grace and truth. He felt that this wrath must have been least restrained in Him by any thoughts of what would look well in the eyes of men. What were all the notions which he had formed about dignity or comeliness? The Word made flesh was making it manifest that every punishment of every wrong doer was administered by Him; that whatever agents He may employ to purify his Church, to inflict vengeance upon those who have defiled it, the rod is really in His hand,--that it is He who directs and measures every blow.

But St. John saw more in the act than this. He had said in his former chapter, not only, '_We beheld Him who was full of grace and truth, Him of whose fulness we had all received_,' but '_We beheld His glory, as the glory of the only-begotten of the Father_.' He teaches us to recognise a manifestation of _this_ glory, also, in the driving the money-changers out of the Temple. '_Jesus said to them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise._'

The zeal which devoured Jesus was surely a zeal for the house of that G.o.d to whom Solomon had prayed, '_Lord, wilt thou in very deed dwell upon earth?_' It was for the house of that G.o.d whom kings and prophets had worshipped between the cherubim. But which of these had dared to use the language which He used? Which of them had ever said, 'It is the house of _my Father_'? It was a _new_ name,--a wonderful and awful name. And yet the whole force of the testimony which Christ bore for the old building--for the house in which their fathers worshipped--lay in this name. If that house was not to be a house of merchandise--if it was ever to be that again which holy men had believed and found it to be--this new name must remove its debas.e.m.e.nt, this new revelation must restore its greatness. No other could suffice to undo the hypocrisy of the priests, because that hypocrisy came from their thinking that the house was theirs--from not believing that there was any relation between themselves and Him to whom they offered their worship and their sacrifices. If there was a man who could call it 'my Father's house,' heaven and earth were not at the distance they thought and hoped,--their Judge was very near. On the other hand, no revelation but this could have brought the outer court once more into union with the inner court, could have made both parts of the house of G.o.d. For the reason why the people traded in that court, and felt they had no business anywhere else, was that they had no belief that G.o.d cared for them, or that there was any fellowship between them and Him, except through those priests who were the barriers to all fellowship.

If Jesus of Nazareth, the poor man, one of them, could say, 'It is my Father's house,' the publican might feel then,--even the Gentile might feel afterwards,--that there was a house for him; not a place for selling sheep and oxen, and changing money, but a refuge from the weariness of merchandise, from the haggling and lying of the world, in the presence and heart of a Friend who giveth to all liberally, of One who is altogether righteous and true.

In after days we shall find the Jews felt the boldness of this language, and made it their princ.i.p.al charge against Jesus that He dared to use it. On this occasion it seems to have fallen dead upon their ears. Their question is not, '_What sign shewest thou seeing_'

thou sayest this, but '_seeing thou doest these things_?' They meant nothing more, I suppose, than, 'Why dost thou, a mere Galilaean stranger, take upon thee to drive out these oxen? A prophet might do it--perhaps even a zealot, if he was a Levite, and claimed the honours of his ancestor Phinehas, might do it--but what sign canst thou produce that such an office belongs to thee?' I do not find more in _their_ demand than this; but the answer of our Lord refers to His previous words as well as to theirs. He could not give them a sign that He had a right to cleanse the Temple, which would not also be a sign that He had a right, in the strictest sense, to call the Temple 'His Father's house.' You must recollect that this was the claim He had to make good, if you would understand Him when He says, '_Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up_.'

The sentence was, of course, enigmatical. The Jews regarded it simply as the language of a fanatic or a madman. '_Forty and six years_,'

they said, '_was this Temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?_' St. John evidently indicates that it was not much more intelligible to him and to his fellow-disciples, when they first heard it, than to their countrymen. But he says a time came when they did understand it. '_He spake of the temple of His body. When therefore He was risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this unto them; and they believed the scripture, and the word that Jesus had said._'

Are we to suppose that the _third_ day of the resurrection was the key which unlocked our Lord's meaning? No doubt that was an outward help in the discovery of it; but it would have been a most imperfect help, if they had not attached a meaning to the resurrection which had nothing to do with days or years. By raising Jesus from the dead, G.o.d declared Him to be His Son. This was St. Paul's language to the Romans,--this was the very substance of his preaching. By raising Him from the dead, He declared that in Him all the building fitly framed together grew to be an holy temple in the Lord. This was his language to those Ephesians among whom the son of Zebedee was now dwelling. It was the resurrection, then, which taught the disciples that the body of Christ was that real temple of G.o.d, of which all stone temples had been the symbols,--that in this only the fulness of G.o.d dwelt,--that in this the prayer of Solomon, that G.o.d, whom the heaven of heavens could not contain, would dwell with men upon earth, could be actually fulfilled. Some critics say there is an awkwardness in supposing that our Lord pointed to His own body when He spoke of destroying the Temple; and that if He did not, the Evangelist would seem to charge Him with using words in a double sense,--so deceiving His hearers. I do not see why we should imagine Him to have pointed to His body; why His eyes may not have been fixed on the building which He had called His 'Father's house.' He did mean, that, if they destroyed _that_ house,--if their money-worship, falsehood, hypocrisy, brought it to utter ruin, and it was at last given up to Roman soldiers,--there was a house not made with hands, which was all that Solomon's, in the very best and n.o.blest conception of it, had tried to be. He meant certainly more than this. He meant that they might and would try to destroy the outward fabric of _this_ more glorious temple; but that in three days the dead body would come back from the tomb, and be proclaimed to the world as G.o.d's own everlasting habitation. You may call this a double sense of words, if you like; but by _such_ double senses deceptions are not caused or promoted--they are cleared away. The Jew was labouring under a terrible deception; he was practising a continual equivocation. The Temple of the Lord was a sacred place to him,--he gloried in possessing it; yet he did not in his heart believe that G.o.d was meeting His creatures, holding any intercourse with them, caring for them. The building itself, therefore, acquired a reverence in his mind which was apart from reverence to G.o.d, nay, fatal to that reverence. G.o.d was absorbed in the Temple. The inward thought of the priest was, that if it perished G.o.d would perish. Hence arose infinite contradictions in his practice, alternations of scrupulosity and profaneness. Now the money-changer is permitted to sit within it,--now a cry is raised that a Stephen speaks evil words against the holy place, and must be stoned. There was but one way of breaking down this habit of mind: it was to affirm and prove that the Temple was not a fiction,--that the belief of the elder men respecting it was not a fiction,--that G.o.d and man were not divided,--that the prophecy of their complete fellowship was not an idle prophecy leading to nothing,--that men might draw nigh to G.o.d, as to a father, on the holy hill of Zion; because there was an only-begotten Son, whose body was filled with that Spirit which would raise it out of the grave.

No; our Lord did not deceive the Jews when He gave them the fullest, truest sense of their own Scriptures, of their own calling and history. If any words, any acts could have undeceived them, they would have been His. Alas! when money-worship has reached the vitals of a nation, when it has entered into the house of G.o.d, the very words and acts of the Son of G.o.d may not purge it of its delusions,--they may take their shape and colour from these delusions. May G.o.d avert the _omen_ from our land, from our Church! May He enable us to believe that every building in which He permits us to worship Him, and to present before Him the finished sacrifice of Christ, is indeed the house of our Father, because of His Father! May every chastis.e.m.e.nt He sends to us, individually or nationally, be viewed by us as a scourge with which He is cleansing His temple of them that sell and them that buy in it,--of our corrupt traffickings with our own consciences and with Him! May He help us to believe in Christ's incarnation and pa.s.sion, that we may attain to the full glory of His resurrection, and may find in it the proof that His body was the temple of the Holy Ghost, and that ours are to be temples holy and acceptable unto Him!

DISCOURSE VII.

THE NEW BIRTH.

[Lincoln's Inn, Palm Sunday, March 16, 1856.]