« W. J. Knox Little, Sunlight and Shadow, 28.
ST. JOHN XIV. 6 121
And so the Word had breath, and wrought With human hands the creed of creeds In loveHness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought.^
(2) Christ is t]3£josvelation_of_G.od- — He was God manifest in the flesET It is common to say that Christ was the great Kevealer of God, who, by His inestimable instructions, has made us acquainted with the Divine character and will. Now this is true, but it is not the whole truth, nor yet indeed the chiefest and most blessed portion of the truth. He was not only the Eevealer of God, but He was Himself the revelation of God, Not merely did He say things about God which are written in a Book, not merely did He inspire His servants to write in that Book still other things which they came to understand only after He had left them, by the illuminating influence of His Holy Spirit, but He was the Book Himself.
He is the Truth in reference to the Divine nature. That Truth, then, is not a mere matter of words. It is not only His speech that teaches us, but Himself that shows us God. His whole life and character, His personality, is the true representa- tion within human conditions of the Invisible God ; and when He says, " I am the way, and the truth," He is saying substantially the same thing as the great prologue of this Gospel says when it calls Him the Word, and the Light of men, and as St. Paul says when he names Him " the image of the invisible God."
^ This is the function of the Son of Man, to give men their Heavenly Father, the Father whom He knew, the God with whom He lived in communion, in the personal relations of Spirit with spirit. To preach theologies would have been no new thing ; to preach theologies in the belief that through them we are making acquaintance with realities is an occupation and an illusion of which the world never wearies; but to have the living God mirrored in a human soul, as face answers to face in a glass, this was not the old work of announcing abstract truths about God, it was to reveal God Himself. We have no means of knowing God except by knowing His image in our own nature. / ,. The knowledge of God was lost to the world, because the image " 'of God had been lost out of the soul. Christ, through obedience to the inward promptings, kept the mirror pure, without flaw or
^ "In Memoriam."
122 THE WAY, THE TRUTH, THE LIFE
soil, and so manifested the Father in the Son. There is no other mirror, to which we have access, in which He can spiritually be seen as He is. Other mirrors, as those of outward Nature, are dead mirrors, which have to convey their symbols to a living soul there to be interpreted. How could we know God if we saw Him only in the reflection of a soul that is itself unclean, clouded, distorted ? If there had been no unsoiled mirror, we could have known God under no adequate living type. " If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also." " We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." ^
IV.
Christ the Life.
" I am the life."
The phrase, " I am the life," points to all Christ's work upon us as a life-giving Spirit, a Quickener and an Inspirer. Dead men cannot walk a road. It is no use making a path if it starts from a cemetery. Christ taught that men apart from Him are dead, and that the only life that they can have by which they can be knit to God is the Divine life which was in Himself, and of which He is the source and the principle for the whole world.
Thou art the Life! All ways without Thee paths that end in death;
All life without Thee with death harvest rife; All truths dry bones, disjoined, and void of breath:
Thou art our Life!^
1. Christ is the life of the lody. — We may take Christ's words first of' all in their most literal meaning.
(1) " I am the life." — It is a tremendous claim for any man at any time to make, and He who makes it here is about to die. But as the Apostles listen, startling deeds of His come back to their recollection — His healing of the sick. His restoring of the dying, and His raising of the dead.
It is a plain fact of history, — true as the decrees of truth are
* J. II. Thorn, Laws of Life after the Mind of Chrint, 13. » E. K. Charles.
ST. JOHN XIV. 6 123
true, — that everything which ever came into the presence and contact__of Qhristj „when^ JBe^ was upon, the earth, lived. No -cOl^se was ever under the influence of that high touch, but it took again its vital power. When He met the dead body upon the road, when He was in the same room with the dead child, when He stood at the mouth of the grave of a dead man — and those are the only recorded occasions of His intercourse with death — death retired and life came back.