^ See the poor woman in the crowd, who has spent all her living on seeking health, and has spent that living in vain. She comes behind the great Teacher, in the crowd secretly, saying, " If I do but touch his garment I shall be made whole." She had tried every other resource, gone to every other professed healer, had been filled with disappointment, and she was about to give up in despair ; and in that critical hour of her experience, she touched the Saviour and was healed.^
Around Bethesda's healing wave,
Waiting to hear the rustling wing Which spoke the angel nigh, who gave
Its virtues to the holy spring, — With earnest, fixed solicitude, Were seen the .afflicted multitude.
Among them there was one whose eye
Had often seen the waters stirred; Whose heart had often heaved the sigh —
The bitter sigh of hope deferred ; Beholding, while he suffered on, The healing virtue giv'n and gone.
No pow'r had he; no friendly aid To him the timely succour brought;
But while his coming he delayed. Another won the boon he sought;
Until the Saviour's love was shown,
Which healed him by a word alone.^
(2) Christ is also the life, from the fact of His own. resurrec- tion. When Christ says : " I am the life," He does not mean, " I lived the perfect life on earth " ; He means, " I, through the very fact of My death, am the life for evermore, and as a symbol of this, 1 J. Parker. 2 3^ Barton.
124 THE WAY, THE TRUTH, THE LIFE
witness My death and resurrection." Never was one born into the world like Him. Other men are born to live, to act, to do ; He was born to die. But the death which cast its shadow over the Eleven and over Himself should itself be swallowed up in life. Standing there beneath the shadow of His cross, before the open grave over which the stone was to be rolled to hide His burial, Jesus Christ, the frailest life in the world, declared to men, " I am the Ufe."
For three-and-thirty years, a living seed,
A lonely germ, dropt on our waste world's side,
Thy death and rising Thou didst calmly bide :
Sore companied by many a clinging weed
Sprung from the fallow soil of evil and need;
Hither and thither tossed, by friends denied ;
Pitied of goodness dull, and scorned of pride ; -
Until at length was done the awful deed,
And Thou didst lie outworn in stony bower
Three days asleep — oh, slumber godlike-brief
For Man of sorrows and acquaint with grief !
Life-seed Thou diedst, that Death might lose his power,
And Thou, with rooted stem and shadowy leaf,
Eise, of humanity the crimson flower.^
2. Christ is the spiritual life. — He did not only say, " I am the living One," as if He meant to affirm His own immortality. That was indeed true, but it was clearly not His only idea in this place. But Jesus said, " I am the life," the life, that is, of renewed souls, the power which alone can make humanity truly live, the moral and spiritual vital force of the Kingdom of heaven.
(1) Christ is the life now. The eternal life of the spirit is not altogether a future blessing, which we are to get from Christ here- after, but a present blessing too, which we are to look for from Christ now. It is Jesus Christ who brings us into connexion with this source of life eternal — He bears it in His own person. In Him we receive a new spirit ; in Him our motive to live for righteousness is continually renewed ; we are conscious that in Him we touch what is undying and never fails to renew spiritual life in us. Whatever we need to give us true and everlasting life we have in Christ. Whatever we need to enable us to come to the
* George MacDonald, Poetical Works, i. 257.
ST. JOHN XIV. 6 125
Father, whatever we shall need between this present stage of experience and our final stage, we have in Him. The more, then, we use Christ, the more life we have. The more we are with Him and the more we partake of His Spirit, the fuller does our own life become. It is not by imitating successful men that we become influential for good, but by living with Christ. It is not by adopting the habits and methods of saints that we become strong and useful, but by accepting Christ and His Spirit. Nothing can take the place of Christ. Nothing can take His words and say to us, " I am the life." If we wish for life, if we see that we are doing little good and desire energy to overtake the good that needs to be done, it is to Him we must go. If we feel as if all our efforts were vain, and as if we could not bear up any longer against our circumstances or against our wicked nature, we can receive fresh vigour and hopefulness only from Christ.
O ancient streams, 0 far-descended woods Eull of the fluttering of melodious souls ;
0 hills and valleys that adorn yourselves In solemn jubilation; winds and clouds. Ocean and land in stormy nuptials clasp'd, And all exuberant creatures that acclaim The Earth's divine renewal : lo, I too