(Second Sunday after Trinity, 1831.)
TEXT: JOHN xiv. 27. “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give unto you.”
THE word which the Saviour here makes use of in speaking to His disciples has with us a twofold meaning. It suggests to our minds a condition of human society which, when it has been interrupted, we all long to recall; a state in which alone we look for universal contentment, and all things going on prosperously. But it has also another meaning; for we all know by our own experience the inward strife that goes on in the heart of man, and as its opposite,—a peace often interrupted, it is true, and seldom perfect—but still, the peace of the Lord. The Saviour could not promise peace of the first kind to His disciples. Referring to that, He said, I came not to send peace on earth, but a sword. He had told them before, and could tell them nothing different, that they would be hated and persecuted as He was, that like Him they would have to fight with spiritual weapons in the cause of His kingdom. But now that His work in the souls of His disciples was so far accomplished, He could promise them that which He had lovingly announced from the beginning, the rest that He invited troubled souls to come and find in Him; He could assure them of that inward peace even now, when He was just about to leave them. This word of the Saviour directs our thoughts, then, to the inmost depths of each individual soul, and shows us what is and ought to be wrought there by the Saviour, who claims this as His own work in our souls. Let us, therefore, in connection with these words, take this thought as the subject of our consideration—how each individual soul who is a partaker in Christ’s redemption discerns, in the peace which He leaves to His people, in His peace, a fulness of divine wisdom such as no imagination can surpass. Let us first inquire what the Saviour’s peace really is; and then reflect, and ask whether there does not lie in that, and in that alone, the whole fulness of the divine wisdom that can be revealed to a human being.
I. First, then, what is the Saviour’s peace, which He left to His people? Is it the peace which He Himself had, or is it a feeble image, a dim shadow of it, a slight approach to it? What was the peace of the Saviour? His peace was grounded on this—that He was eternally, and in all respects, one with His Father; that whatever His eye rested on around Him, His spirit considered as a work of God; that He suffered His will to be determined by no emotion of His own mind, without having first recognised the will of God in what was required of Him; and that thus the one effect constantly kept pace with the other. He studied the works of His Father, and the Father showed Him greater and yet greater works; He did the will of the Father, and was ever more vehemently impelled to the fulfilling of that will, until He could say that all was finished. And as the divine will is nothing but almighty love, this oneness of will with God, by which the Father’s will, and no other, was always His, could be in Him also nothing but an eternal fulness of love welling up from His heart. It was a love that was ever offering to men, sunk in the misery of sin, the greatest gift it could bestow, the gift of fellowship with His own life, so that they should be able to draw from His fulness, peace and truth and oneness with God; but it was also an indulgent and compassionate love, which did not refuse to men even the meaner things they craved, but with tender hand provided help for their bodily need. And this love, with the greatest gift always in store, but ready, at the same time, to bestow the lesser blessings—this love, making itself felt on all sides—this was the peace the Saviour had. And nothing whatever could disturb this peace, just because He had no plans, and took no step in His life that could have been out of harmony with the will of His and our Father,—just because He knew nothing whatever of an inward strife, but all within Him was, and remained, agreed in harmony, as it had been from the beginning. But certainly He would not have been able to carry in His heart this fulness of a love so moving, ever reaching forth to others, and offering itself to them; indeed, He would not even have seen the works of God which His Father showed Him, and no purpose of God would have ripened in His soul into a definite act; unless, sinless as He was, He had had the keenest and most thorough sympathy with the misery of sin. He saw men who were capable of being like Himself, for that was what they were meant to become—men whom, for that very reason, He did not scorn to call His brethren—sunk in that state of bondage from which the law had not been able to save them, for the law only brought them the knowledge of sin; and in this sympathy with sinful men the sinless One passed His life on earth; yet this had never power to disturb His peace, but rather was a living and essential element of it. How strongly floes this compassion for the misery of sin come out in all His discourses, in which he sought to awaken a true conviction of sin in men who carried it in their hearts, and yet had so little sense of it! How deeply did this very sympathy enable Him to see into the human heart, even with regard to that which could have no place in His own pure heart! And the further He proceeded in His great work, the war of the divine Word against the sin of the world, so much the greater became this compassionate sympathy. If He could have thought it a possible thing that the power of sin, and His power to overcome sin, could exist together without sin being utterly vanquished by Him, He might have used, as the utterance of His own feeling, the words which could only be the expression of this sympathy with the sin of the world, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” But even then there was in His soul the same peace in which, a few moments later, He commended His spirit into the hands of His Father.