Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIVMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIV
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. John -- Commentaries
There are two kinds of 'musts' in our lives. There is the unwelcome
necessity which grips us with iron and sharpened fangs; the needs-be
which crushes down hopes and dreams and inclinations, and forces the
slave to his reluctant task. And there is the 'must' which has passed
into the will, into the heart, and has moulded the inmost desire to
conformity with the obligation which no more stands over against us as
a taskmaster with whip and chain, but has passed within us and is there
an inspiration and a joy. He that can say, as Jesus Christ in His
humanity could, and did say: 'My meat'—the refreshment of my nature,
the necessary sustenance of my being—'is to do the will of my Father';
that man, and that man alone, feels no pressure that is pain from the
incumbency of the necessity that blessedly rules His life. When 'I
will' and 'I choose' coincide, like two of Euclid's triangles atop of
one another, line for line and angle for angle, then comes liberty into
the life. He that can say, not with a knitted brow and an unwilling
ducking of his head to the yoke, 'I must do it,' but can say, 'Thy law
is within my heart,' that is the Christlike, the free, the happy man.
Further, our Lord here, in His thoughts of the present and the future,
lets us see what He thought that the work of God in the world was. The
disciples looked at the blind man sitting by the wayside, and what he
suggested to them was a curious, half theological, half metaphysical
question, in which Rabbinical subtlety delighted. 'Who did sin, this
man or his parents?' They only thought of talking over the theological
problem involved in the fact that, before he had done anything in this
world to account for the calamity, he was _born_ blind. Jesus Christ
looked at the man, and He did not think about theological cobwebs. What
was suggested to Him was to fight against the evil and abolish it. It
is sometimes necessary to discuss the origin of an evil thing, of a
sorrow or a sin, in order to understand how to deal with and get rid of
it. But unless that is the case, our first business is not to say, 'How
comes this about?' but our business is to take steps to make it cease
to come about. Cure the man first and then argue to your heart's
content about what made him blind, but cure him first. And so Jesus
Christ taught us that the meaning of the day of life was that we should
set ourselves to abolish the works of the devil, and that the work of
God was that we should fight against sin and sorrow, and in so far as
it was in our power, abolish these, in all the variety of their forms,
in all the vigour of their abundant growth. Sorrow and sin are God's
call to every one of His sons and daughters to set themselves to cast
them out of His fair creation; and 'the day' is the opportunity for
doing that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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