Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXIMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. John -- Commentaries
The Passover was purely and simply a rite of remembrance. I venture to
believe that the Lord's Supper is nothing more. I know how people talk
about the bare, bald, Zwinglian ideas of the Communion. They do look
very bald and bare by the side of modern notions and mediaeval notions
resuscitated. Well, I had rather have the bareness than I would have it
overlaid by coverings under which there is room for abundance of vermin
to lurk. Christ puts the Lord's Supper in the place of the Passover.
The Passover was a purely memorial rite. You Christian people will
understand the spirituality of the whole Gospel system, and the nature
of the only bond which unites men to Jesus and brings spiritual
blessings to them--viz. faith--all the better, the more you cling, in
spite of all that is going on round us to-day, to that simple,
intelligible, Scriptural notion that we commemorate the Sacrifice, not
offer the Sacrifice. Jesus Christ said that the Lord's Supper was to be
observed 'in remembrance of Me.' That was His explanation of its
purpose, and I for one am content to take as the expounder of the laws
of the feast, the feast's own Founder.
Now one more word. In the Passover men fed on the Sacrifice. Jesus
Christ presents Himself to each of us as at once the Sacrifice for our
sins and the Food of our souls. If you will keep your minds in touch
with the truth about Him, and with Him whom the truth about Him reveals
to you, if you will keep your hearts in touch with that great and
unspeakable sign of God's love, if you will keep your wills in
submission to His authority, if you will let His blood, 'which is the
life,' or as you may otherwise word it, His Spirit, come into your
lives, and be your spirit, your motive, then you will go out from the
table, not like the disciples to flee, and deny, and forget, nor like
the Israelites to wander in a wilderness, but strengthened for many a
day of joyous service and true communion, and will come at last to what
He has promised us: 'Ye shall sit with Me at My table in My Kingdom,'
whence we shall go 'no more out.'
JOSEPH AND NICODEMUS
'And after this Joseph of Arimathea, being a disciple of Jesus, but
secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away
the body of Jesus; ... And there came also Nicodemus which at the first
came to Jesus by night.'--JOHN xix. 38, 39.
While Christ lived, these two men had been unfaithful to their
convictions; but His death, which terrified and paralysed and scattered
His avowed disciples, seems to have shamed and stung them into courage.
They came now, when they must have known that it was too late, to
lavish honour and tears on the corpse of the Master whom they had been
too cowardly to acknowledge, whilst acknowledgment might yet have
availed. How keen an arrow of self-condemnation must have pierced their
hearts as they moved in their offices of love, which they thought that
He could never know, round His dead corpse!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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