These majestic and strange words are the proper close of our Lord’s discourse, what follows being rather a reply to the disciples’ exclamation.
I. THE DWELLING WITH THE FATHER. The most probable reading is more forcible. “I came forth out of the Father” implies a far deeper and closer relation than even that of juxtaposition, companionship, or outward presence. In these words there is involved that, during His earthly life, our Lord bore about with Him the remembrance and consciousness of an individual existence prior to His life on earth. “Before Abraham was, I am.” But beyond that, they are the assertion of a previous, deep, mysterious, ineffable union with the Father. If this fourth Gospel be a genuine record of the teaching of Jesus Christ (and, if it is not, what genius was he who wrote it?), then nothing is more plain than that. Over and over again He reiterated this tremendous claim to have dwelt in the bosom of the Father long before He lay on the breast of Mary. Note that the meekest, most sane and wise of religious teachers made this claim, which is either true, and lifts Him into the region of the Deity, or else is fatal to His pretensions to be a teacher that it is worth our while to listen to.
II. THE VOLUNTARY COMING INTO THE WORLD. We all talk in a loose way about men coming into the world when they are born; but the weight of the words and the solemnity of the occasion, and the purpose, forbid us to see such a mere platitude as that in the words here. “I am come rote the world There has been a Man who chose to be born. Now this voluntary entrance of Jesus Christ into our human life
1. Underlies the whole value of that life. It underlies, e.g., the personal sinlessness of Jesus, and hence His power to bring a new beginning of pure and perfect life into the midst of humanity. All the rest of mankind, knit together by, that mysterious bond of natural descent which only now for the first time is beginning to receive its due attention on the part of men of science, by heredity have the taint upon them. And unless Christ came in another fashion from all the rest of us, He came with the same sin as all the rest of us, and is no deliverer. The stream is fouled from its source, and flows on, every successive drop participant of the primeval pollution. But down from the white snows of the eternal hills of God there comes into it an affluent which has no stain on its pure waters, and so can purge that into which it enters. Jesus Christ willed to be born, and to plant a new beginning of holy life in the very heart of humanity which henceforth should work as leaven.
2. Unless we preserve this clear in our minds and hearts, the power to sway our affections is struck away from Christ. Unless He voluntarily took upon Himself the nature which He meant to redeem, why should I be thankful to Him for what He did? We talk about kings leaving their palaces and putting on the rags of the beggar, and learning “love in huts where poor man lie,” and making experience of the conditions of their lowliest subjects. But here is a fact infinitely beyond all these legends. And we may learn there what it is that gives Him His supreme right to our devotion and our surrender--viz., that, being in the form of God, He thought not equality with God a thing to be covetously retained, “but made Himself of no reputation,” &c.
III. THE VOLUNTARY LEAVING THE WORLD.
1. The stages of that departure are not distinguished. They are threefold in fact.
(1) There was a voluntary death. We have our Lord’s own words about His having power to lay down His life. We have in the story of the Passion hints that His relation to death was altogether different from that of ours. “Into Thy hands I commit My Spirit”; and He gave up the Spirit. We have hints of a similar nature in the very swiftness of His death and unexpected brevity of His suffering, to be accounted for by no natural result of the physical process of crucifixion. The fact is, that Jesus Christ is the Lord of death, and was so even when He seemed to be its servant, and that He never showed Himself more completely the Prince of Life and the Conqueror of Death than when He gave up His life and died, not because He must, but because He would.
(2) There was a voluntary resurrection, for although Scripture represents His rising sometimes as being the Father’s attestation of the Son’s finished work, it also represents it as being in accordance with His own claim of “power to lay down My life, and to take it again;” the Son’s triumphant egress from the prison into which, for the moment, He willed to pass.
(3) And there was a voluntary ascension. There was no need for Elijah’s chariot, nor any external agency. The cords of duty which bound Him to earth being cut, He rose to His own native sphere; and the natural forces of His supernatural life bore Him, by inverted gravitation, upward to the place which was His own.
2. And thus, by a voluntary death, He became the Sacrifice for our sins; by the might of His self-effected resurrection proclaimed Himself the Lord of death, and the Resurrection for all that trust Him; and by that ascending up on high draws our heart’s desires after Him, so that we, too, as we see Him lost from our sight, behind the bright Shekinah cloud, may return to our lowly work with great joy, and set our affections on things above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God.
IV. THE DWELLING AGAIN WITH THE FATHER. But that final dwelling with God is not wholly identical with the initial one. The earthly life was no mere parenthesis. He carried with Him the manhood which He had assumed into the glory in which the Word had dwelt from the beginning. And this is the true consolation which Christ offered to these His servants, and which He still offers to us His waiting children. And if that be so, it is no mere abstract dogma of theology, but it touches our daily life at all points, and is essential to the fulness of our satisfaction and our rest in Christ.
1. Our brother is elevated to the throne, and He makes the fortunes of the family, and none of them will be poor as long as He is so rich. He sends us from the far-off land where He is gone precious gifts of its produce, and He will send for us to share His throne one day.
2. This elevation fills heaven for our faith, our imagination, and our hearts. Without an ascended Christ we recoil from the cold splendours of an unknown heaven, as a savage might from the unintelligible magnificence of a palace. But if we believe that He is at the right hand of God, then the far off becomes near, and the vague becomes definite, and the unsubstantial becomes solid, and what was a fear becomes a joy, and we can trust ourselves and the dear dead in His hands, knowing that where He is they are, and that in Him they and we have all we need. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
From the Father to the Father
I. CHRIST HAS BEEN HERE AND GONE.
1. This is one of the best attested facts in the world’s history. It is attested by contemporaries and by the accumulating moral and social influences of eighteen centuries.
2. It is the most glorious fact in the world’s history. Nothing has so blessed the world. It was the creation of a sun in man’s moral heaven, the opening of a fountain in man’s moral desert. All that is wholesome in the governments, pure in the morals, benevolent in the institutions, holy in the spirit and manners of the world owes its existence to this fact. Insignificant as this planet is compared with other orbs, the fact that Christ has trod its soil has given it a lustre that pales the brightness of them all.
II. CHRIST HAS BEEN HERE AND GONE BY HIS OWN CHOICE. Who else could have said this! All others have been sent, Christ came. He fixed His own time, birthplace, country, parentage, circumstances. In the same way He departed--“I leave”--when I please; now or in the future; how I please; by a natural or violent death--“I have power to lay down My life,” &c. We are sent away, often by means most revolting, and at a time most dreaded.
III. CHRIST IN VISITING THIS EARTH AND DEPARTING FROM IT WAS THE CONSCIOUS MESSENGER OF THE FATHER. The language suggests
1. The life of true souls. Coming from the Father with our motives, inspirations, and directions from His service, and returning with the results of our labours. As rivers have their existence by rolling from ocean to ocean, so the true life of souls is unconsciously moving from God to God--the cause and end of all activities.
2. The interference of the world with this life. Christ speaks as if, when in the world, He was away from the Father. At times the Father’s face seemed eclipsed, “Why hast Thou forsaken Me?” So with us the power of the senses, physical suffering, secular enjoyments, and social trials often interrupt Divine communion. But when we leave the world we shall be for ever with Him.
Conclusion:
1. With what holy gratitude should we celebrate Christ’s advent and departure!
2. Alas! how many who come into this world depart not to the
