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Faith m Christ.
"Believe also in me."
Christ makes for Himself the most majestic claim. " Believe in Me," He says, " as you believe in God, and so you will believe in God in a richer and fuller form." " Ye believe in Ood — as all your Jewish ancestors believed in Him — add to that faith all the things I have shown you and taught you. Believe in God, as He has spoken to you with My lips, and dwelt with you in My fellow- ship with you, and loved you with My heart. You know I have dwelt with you and loved you. Do you know why ? It is that you may know that God is love. It is that you may come to know that beyond the darkness of the hour and the loneliness of the years — alike in the starlight and in the storm — there is but one thing : the breath, the light, the end of being ; and that thing is the love wherewith God loves you."
There is a clear claim put forward by Christ that His disciples shall repose in Him the same absolute, unquestioning, unlimited faith that they repose in God. It is not merely that Jesus claims absolute infalhbility for His teaching concerning God and man, though this is necessarily included; and, if there were no clear assertion beyond this, we should still be driven to seek a deeper explanation of it. Even if we had nothing to direct us beyond our Saviour's repeated assertions that the words He spoke were without any exception or qualification the words of God, that not the slightest taint of imperfection marked His presentation of eternal truth, that His union with God was so perfect that He could say: The Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all
^ H. Hensloy Henson, T/ie Valtie of tlie Bihle, 143.
ST. JOHN XIV. I 47
things that Himself doeth; — even if there were nothing more than this we should find it utterly impossible to explain Jesus Christ by any principles of human development, or by any conceivable communication of the Divine Spirit to one who was a son of Adam and nothing more. Nowhere except out of the very bosom of the Father could He come who was the effulgence of the Father's glory, and the express image of His person.
^ Is not Christendom built on the " also " of Christ's supper table ? Luther has remarked that in this fourteenth chapter " we have the great articles of Christian doctrine in most impressive exhibition, and fundamentally established as in hardly another place of Scripture." This is true. Sometimes we turn with a sigh from the elaborate confessions of later ages to the confession summed up in the short saying of the Lord. Less than this there may not be, more than this there need not be, in the faith of a Christian. The "also" must stand out in bold relief, rightly apprehended and firmly grasped ; but when it is so grasped the mind holds the essential Christian verity. It is the plus in respect of which the faith of the Christian Church is apart from and more than every mere theistic religion — a plus that is not an addition only, but a new faith. For the trust in God, which is " also " with trust in Christ, is not the same as the trust which is without.^
1. Christ is the Revealer of God. — Jesus Christ is the Divine Eevealer of God. Without Christ there is no real knowledge of God in the depth of His love, the tenderness of His nature or the lustrousness of His holiness ; there is no certitude ; the God that we see outside of Jesus Christ is sometimes doubt, sometimes hope, sometimes fear, always far-off and vague, an abstraction rather than a person, " a stream of tendency " without us, that which is unnameable, and the like. Jesus Christ has showed us a Father, has brought a God to our hearts whom we can love, whom we can know really though not fully, of whom we can be sure with a certitude which is as deep as the certitude of our own personal being ; He has brought to us a God before whom we do not need to crouch far off. He has brought to us a God whom we can trust. Very significant is it that Christianity alone puts the very heart of religion in the act of trust. Other religions put it in dread, worship, service, and the like. Jesus Christ alone says that the
1 J. M. Laing.
48 SECRET OF THE UNTROUBLED HEART
bond between men and God is that blessed one of trust. And He says so because He alone brings us a God whom it is not ridiculous to tell men to trust.
To those who can receive this heavenly vision all human life is altered. We have dimly seen the heart of God, and we are no longer scared by the strangeness of His vesture or by the rough voice with which He sometimes seems to speak to us in the course of the world. We believe that His very nature and property is to forgive and pity, that the central core of His ethical being is love, that He withdraws Himself from us at times, only in order to increase our hunger and thirst for His presence, that though for a small moment He may forsake us, yet with everlasting kindness will He have mercy upon us. And thus by His sublime anthropomorphism Jesus assuages for His followers all the worst terrors and sorrows that Nature brings upon us. Through Him we have learnt that love, and even self-sacrificing love, is no local and transient product, but something at the very root of the universe, as it were, " the lamb slain from the foundation of the world," a partial manifestation of that which was in the beginning with God, of the very soul of God. The God disclosed to us by Christ is not one who regards the terrible drama of human suffering from afar, but one who Himself shares our strife and bears our woes. Christ gave us the conception of a God who actually leads struggling souls on personally, and is not content with merely pointing out the road to them.