ST. JOHN XIII. I II
III.
Love to the End.
" Unto the end " — this is the measure of the Saviour's love, and the word does not mean merely so long as He lived, but also in the highest degree, to the very uttermost. It is not merely a measure of time, but a measure of the quality and passion of love. Not merely to the end of His life did He love, but to the end of love, to the limits of a limitless love. There are no conditions, no barriers, no limits. Place the end where you will or how you will, draw the circumference as wide as you may. He fills the whole circle with His love. He loves unto the end, that is its quality. To the end of His life, the end of our life, the end of the world, the end of time — more than that, it is to the end of an endless thing, to the extreme Hmit of the limit- less, the very end of love itself. It does not mean merely that He loved till He died, not merely that He loved in the highest degree ; it includes all that and more. It means that He loved through all that love brought Him, the humiliation, the suffering, the sorrowful way, the Cross. Love to the end expresses the height and depth and breadth and strength of love; and that was how He loved and loves. Shakespeare, in the cxvi. Sonnet, gives this enduring quality as characteristic of the highest and best love :
Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds. Or bends with the remover to remove: . . . Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
^ Many good commentators prefer to read the last words of the text, " He loved them unto the uttermost" rather than " unto the end " — so taldng them to express the depth and degree rather than the permanence and perpetuity of our Lord's love. And that seems to me to be far the worthier and the nobler meaning, as well as the one which is borne out by the usual signification of the expression in other Greek authors. It is much to know that the emotions of these last moments did not interrupt Christ's love. It is even more to know that in some sense they perfected it, giving even a greater vitality to its tenderness, and a more precious sweetness to its manifestations. So understood, the
12 THE LOVE OF JESUS FOR HIS OWN
words explain for us why it was that in the sanctity of the Upper Eoom there ensued the marvellous act of the feet-washing, the marvellous discourses which follow, and the climax of all, that High-priestly prayer. They give utterance to a love which Christ's consciousness at that solemn hour tended to sharpen and to deepen.^
1. He has loved His own all the way. — Let us interpret all our experience by this great fact, and the whole path is illumined and the meaning of much that was dark is made clear. We will not judge God by every little unexplained corner of the road, but by the whole long stretch of His providence. While we were in the dark patches we did not understand and sometimes doubted, but on looking back over all the way we see it to be ruled and governed and directed by love. The disciples might sometimes think they had reason to doubt the Master's perfect love. At this very time they might ask, why if He loved them they should be bereaved, why they were to be left as sheep among the wolves ? His dealing with them was indeed marked by love, but was it all love and only love and love unto the very end ? St. John saw afterwards that it was so, from first to last — indeed there was no last.
^ We sometimes do not understand the way of His love. Some passages and events puzzle us and alarm our faith. We cannot explain them on the hypothesis that they are the result of absolute love. Why should certain things happen that we dreaded, and other things be denied us that we desired ? As George Bowen says in his beautiful book. Love Revealed: "He takes extraordinary liberties with us. Believing in His love and having our own particular conception of what love is, we settle in our minds that a certain contingency can never by any possibility be allowed to come to pass. Against everything else we prepare — not against that. We feel that it would be an un- pardonable outrage to His most holy nature to suppose for a moment that He should suffer that contingency to come to pass. And yet that is the very thing that He brings to pass. We had boasted of the love of Jesus among our neighbours and told them that He would not sufler our brother Lazarus to die, but would assuredly come and restore him to health ; and lo ! Lazarus dies and is buried, and it is much if our sense of the love of Jesus be not buried with him. He takes what seem to us friglitful liberties with our sensibilities and with our trust." Well, St.