Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: November 29th

THE LOVE OF THE DEPARTING CHRIST

Jesus knowing that His hour was come that He should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end. - John 13:1

The latter half of St. John’s Gospel, which begins with these words, is the Holy of Holies of the New Testament. Nowhere else do the blended lights of our Lord’s superhuman dignity and human tenderness shine with such lambent brightness. Nowhere else is His speech at once so simple and so deep. Nowhere else have we the heart of God so unveiled to us. On no other page, even of the Bible, have so many eyes, glistening with tears, looked and had the tears dried. The immortal words which Christ spoke in that upper chamber are His highest self-revelation in speech, even as the Cross to which they led up is His most perfect self-revelation in act.

Many good commentators prefer to read, "He loved them unto the uttermost,’’ rather than "unto the end" - so taking 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 by 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 words explain for us why it was that in the sanctity of the upper chamber there ensued the marvellous act of the foot-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 shapen and to deepen. "He knew that His hour was come." All His life was passed under the consciousness of a Divine necessity laid upon Him, to which He lovingly and cheerfully yielded Himself. On His lips there are no words more significant, and few more frequent, than that Divine "I must!" "It behooves the Son of man to do" this, that, and the other - yielding to the necessity imposed by the Father’s will, and sealed by His own loving resolve to be the Saviour of the world. And, in like manner, all through His life He declares Himself conscious of the hours which mark the several crises and stages of His mission. They come to Him and He discerns them. No external power can coerce Him to any act till the hour come. No external power can hinder Him from the act when it comes. When the hour strikes. He hears the phantom sound of the bell, and, hearing. He obeys. And thus, at the last and supreme moment, to Him it dawned unquestionable and irrevocable. How did He meet it? Whilst, on the one hand, there was the shrinking of which we have such pathetic testimony in the broken prayer that He Himself amended: " Father! save Me from this hour. . . . Yet for this cause came I unto this hour." There is a strange, triumphant joy that blends with the shrinking that the decisive hour is at last come- not that now the hour had come for suffering or death or bearing the sins of the world - all which aspects of it were, nevertheless, present to Him, as we know, but that now He was soon to leave all the world beneath Him and to return to the Father.