Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3024
“And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come that the Son of Man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone: but fit dies, it brings forth much fruit.” John 12:23-24.
CERTAIN Greeks desired to “see Jesus.” They informed Philip of their desire, Philip consulted with Andrew and the two disciples together informed their Master of what seemed to them to be a very important matter. As wise men from the East once came to see Jesus, so now would these Gentiles from the West do the same! Probably Philip and Andrew expected that Christ would display His miraculous power before the eyes of these enquirers, but our Lord, instead of going on from His triumphal procession and the hosannas of the multitude to something outwardly grander, began at once to speak about a glorification far other than either His disciples or these Greeks desired—a glorification which was to follow upon death and burial!
Is it not very noteworthy how our Lord’s mind was always dominated by the anticipation of that Baptism of His, that immersion in grief and suffering, that decease which He was to accomplish at Jerusalem? This was the main thought of His whole life and nothing could make Him forget it. In His heaviest moments of trial and in His brightest moments of joy, His heart was equally at the Cross—He was longing to complete His atoning Sacrifice for the salvation of His people. O brave, loving heart of Christ, so firmly fixed in love, so resolute to be pierced for the Beloved—we admire and love You in return!
Surely we make too little of our Redeemer’s death. I fear that even we, who preach most concerning it, dwell too little upon it. That we who pray, plead it too little. That we who sing, praise our Lord too little for His wondrous death and that we who live upon His Grace, yet think too little of the channel by which it flows to us! Christ’s death is His Glory and it ought also to be ours. All other topics in Holy Scripture are important and none of them are to be cast into the shade, but the death of the Son of God is the central sun of all these minor luminaries! It is the great Alpha and Omega, the first and the last! It is not only eminent, it is preeminent with us. I could almost wish that we had broken every other string of our soul’s harp but that which resounds the music of His Love. Silence, you other voices, and let the voice of His blood be heard in our souls! If we were bound down to this one subject—chained to it and never allowed to take another, but compelled simply to stand and incessantly cry, “Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world”—it would be an enlargement, rather than a narrowing of our ministry! Here is a theme fit for seraphs! Yes, “Michael the archangel” might find this subject too vast even for his exalted intellect. While we are musing on this text, no other topic shall intrude. Our mottoes shall be, “All for Jesus,” and, “None but Jesus.” May the blessed Comforter, whose work it is to glorify Christ and to take of that which belongs to Him and apply it to us, give us the power of Christ’s death in our hearts!
The verses on which we are to meditate speak of two things—first, Christ’s view of His death and, s econdly, Christ’s view of the necessity and the results of that death.
I. First, we are to consider CHRIST’S VIEW OF HIS DEATH. He says, “The hour is come that the Son of Man should be glorified.”
Now, I freely grant that this passage may refer to Christ’s glorification in His Resurrection, in His Ascension and in all His triumph beyond the skies, but, from its connection with the allusion to the grain of wheat, which is cast into the
ground to die, it is clear that our Lord was mainly thinking of His death and that He spoke of it as being, in a certain sense, the hour of His Glory. Certainly, to spiritual eyes, the Christ of God was never more glorious than when He was nailed to the Cross of Calvary—not even yonder where the lamps of Heaven glow with supernal splendor, where the harps of angels pour forth matchless music and where Christ, Himself, sits upon the Throne of the Highest, “King of kings, and Lord of lords.” A Glory never equaled shone around the Conqueror of death and Hell when He bowed His head and said, “It is finished,” and gave up the ghost!
Mark well that Christ said that, “the Son of Man should be glorified”—not the Son of God—for He was speaking here concerning His human nature. This teaches us that Christ, as Man, was glorified by enduring bravely, patiently and to the end, what no other man has ever borne. Without a murmur, He willingly endured all the agony and ignominy that were heaped upon Him. He marched boldly through the tremendous deeps of physical, mental and spiritual suffering which the Atonement demanded. It may be that in some of His bodily pangs, our Lord’s anguish has been equaled by that endured by some of the martyrs, yet I greatly question whether that has ever been the case. Rather do I believe that His peculiarly sensitive body which had never lost any of its delicacy of tone through indulgence or impurity, and which was originally of the finest mold, seeing that He was “that Holy Thing” which was born of Mary through the overshadowing power of the Highest—for these reasons it appears to me that Christ may have borne physical pains such as, in their intensity, have not been known by any other son of man! But as for His mental and spiritual griefs, they were an unknown abyss—who can measure or conceive what His holy soul endured? Hart’s lines, though very strong in expression, do not go beyond the Truth of God even when he says that Christ, in Gethsemane—