The words must have been very startling to the apostles. They had doubtless come to consider the personal presence of Christ indispensable. He was the principle of cohesion among them, and His departure would be the signal for the dissolution of the brotherhood. He, moreover, gave them what influence they possessed in the nation; for without Him they were but a band of ignorant fishermen.
2. Now if these words were true in the case of the apostles, they are true for all time. The absenteeism of Christ is a help rather than a hindrance to the religious life.
I. It is, of course, true that THE DEATH OF ANY GOOD MAN IS SO FAR A LOSS TO THE WORLD. It is the withdrawal of a beneficent influence. How grand, then, it would have been, to have had Him, the world’s greatest blessing, making one everlasting pilgrimage round the globe. But
1. Such perpetual residence here would have limited His moral influence. No man is understood till he is dead. Absence is the condition of correct insight. Presence either blinds us to greatness, or produces flattery, or that familiarity which begets indifference. It is to be feared that, had Christ remained for ever on the earth, the blindness of the Jews who saw no beauty in Him to make Him desired, would have been repeated by each succeeding generation. We labour under an incapacity for seeing a hero in the man whose hand we can shake. The fault, no doubt, lies in us who live so much in our senses, and look only on the surface of the life. That the valet cannot see a hero in his master is more likely to be due to the valet’s blindness than to the master’s defects. We might have gained in physical happiness from Christ’s perpetual presence, but that would have been but a poor compensation for the loss of reverence, and the inspiring lift our whole nature has received from the ascended and invisible Christ. Why, the physical boon itself would have been but parochial and temporary. And thereon would have arisen dissatisfactions and jealousies.
2. Christ’s perpetual residence here would have been against the growth of the religious life. Instead of living for Christ and God in our hearts, we should have lived for them only in our senses. We should never have hungered for the hour of religious meditation, but rather have complained that He had long delayed to appear in our streets. Newspapers would have been searched to learn His whereabouts; shiploads of the stricken would have travelled the deep, and longed impatiently for the port of their destination; and the rest would have lived on in the restless hope that He would pass their way before they died. Who would have thought of submitting with obedient heart to the afflictions of Providence, of seeking out their Divine purpose when one word from Christ would remove them all at once? Would men ever think of spiritual fellowship with Christ when physical fellowship might be had? Is it not far better that, instead of being the monopoly of a favoured few, He should be ever near to all who call upon Him; that, instead of gazing on Him as a man without, we should feel Him in the background of our hearts?
3. Had Christ dwelt for ever on the earth the good and the bad would have had equal experience and perception of Him. His absence from the earth was indispensable to His manifesting Himself to His people in another way than He could unto the world.
4. Christ’s perpetual residence here would have made impossible the expected distribution of His spirit in the hearts and lives of men, and through all the political, moral, and social organizations of the globe.
II. You will see the expediency of Christ’s departure from the earth, if you consider that HIS CONTINUED RESIDENCE HERE WOULD HAVE SECURED US NO ADDITIONAL BLESSING, except, indeed, relief from physical ills; and, if you admit that these are productive of moral good, and work in us a recompensing glory, it is questionable if their arbitrary removal would have been an unmixed blessing. All the good Christ could do for the world might be summed up under these points
1. In His sacrificing Himself for sin. And here it will be obvious that the satisfactoriness of His death could in but a small measure depend upon any condition of time. As soon as the hour had struck when He would be accepted as our Substitute, it would have availed nothing to have deferred the hour of His triumphal return to God.
2. In impressing on the world’s imagination an ideal of saintliness and nobleness of character that would make for righteousness and protest against evil through all generations. Into the doing of this the condition of time, in a greater measure, did enter; but when He had reached the age at which He spoke of the expediency of His departure, this end had been attained. He has left no more precious legacy behind Him than the memory of what He was. (J. Forfar.)
The departure of Christ
This departure
I. HAS SECURED TO THE CHURCH HIS CONSTANT PRESENCE. While dwelling here as our Saviour He was not ubiquitous. This was sometimes an apparent loss. “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.” How this wail would have extended itself had He remained. Europe would have cried for Him when He was teaching the millions of Asia, &c. No Church now mourns an absent Lord. When faith looks for Him it sees Him. When love yearns for Him it feels Him near. Only when these are feeble do we seem to be forsaken and alone. We have then one friend to whose memory no tablet will ever be erected, and no tear shed; for the strong arm will never cease to hold us securely, and the loving heart will not fail to keep alive our affection with the fire of its abiding love.
II. PREVENTED, TO A GREAT EXTENT, THE GROWTH OF A SPURIOUS AFFECTION FOR HIM. “We have known Christ after the flesh.” Many have an affection for His person without regard to His character and work. It is one thing to weep over Christ’s sufferings, and quite another thing to weep over our sins. Blessed are they who can say, “Whom having not seen we love.” Their affection is not less strong, while probably it is more spiritual than it would have been had He remained on earth.
III. ENABLES US TO UNDERSTAND HIM BETTER THAN WE COULD HAVE DONE HAD HE REMAINED. Why are we more ready to garnish the graves of dead saints than to praise the virtues of living ones? Not always because we are envious. Mainly, perhaps, because just as we may get too near a magnificent pile of architecture, and thus lose sight of the exquisite harmony of the whole. No man was more unknown than Christ. Even His attached friends misunderstood His plainest teachings. It was well that He went away. Things dimly seen before, shone with unclouded radiance after His departure.
IV. SECURED THE OUT-POURING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. It is very probable that this was the chief cause of His departure. Their views of the Holy Spirit were very indistinct. Nevertheless, the language of Christ concerning Him had kindled a strong desire for His presence. Now they learn the price which must be paid for His advent. “If I go not away,” &c. How essential the Spirit was to them, and to the interests of the kingdom, all their subsequent history shows. And there never has been an age in which the Church could afford to dispense with His presence. If this were the only reason for the departure of Christ, we could not murmur. We have not lost our Lord. “He takes of the things of Christ, and shows them unto us.” He strengthens our faith in Him, deepens our love to Him, enlarges our desires after Him, sanctifies our communion with Him. (H. B. Robinson.)
Christ’s departure and Paul’s abiding
(text, and Php_1:24):--Jesus thought that His disciples would gain by losing Him, and Paul thought that his friends could not do without him. A singular contrast--reverses what might have been expected. How strange it must have seemed to them that they, poor sheep in the midst of wolves, would be better without the Shepherd! And the strangeness is brought more home to us by that word of Paul’s in which we recognize the familiar tone of love that cannot face the thought of leaving a life’s work half done and dear ones unhelped. The contrast rests on the absolute difference between the work of Christ and that of all other teachers, friends, and guides, and so may help us to grasp the unique relation which He and it sustain to the world. It was expedient that Christ should go away, for
I. CHRIST’S DEATH IS HIS WORK. It was needful that Paul should abide, for Paul’s death was the end of his. Paul’s words show us how those speak who know that their departure will do nothing to advance the purposes to which they have given themselves. Christ’s are intelligible only in the light of the great truth that He came to give His life a ransom for the many, and that His death has a substantive value all its own.
II. HIS WORK GOES ON AFTER HIS DEATH, WHILE THAT OF OTHERS CEASES. When Paul dies he can no more help his brethren. True, he may leave a holy memory. The great personalities of the world may, in a certain figurative sense, be said to “rule the nations from their urns.” But that reverberation from the past prolonged into the present is but a poor shadowy thing. Christ’s work to-day is no mere influence flowing from activities long since terminated. It is real and continuous--a present putting forth of present power.
III. CHRIST’S PERSONAL RELATION TO US IS WHOLLY INDEPENDENT OF HIS BODILY PRESENCE. His departure aided in the apprehension of His true character and nature. Like some star, that, as long as it is low on the horizon and shrouded by mist, may be mistaken for some earthborn light, but is known for what it is as it climbs the sky, He was discerned when unseen far better than when here. When He ascended to the Father, that withdrawal from the touch of sense gave Him to the touch of faith, and these desolate disciples were nearer Him when the cloud received Him out of their sight. The true personal bond that knits men to Christ is actually helped by His absence. “Jesus Christ, whom having not seen ye love,” is held in the inmost hearts of millions. That is a phenomenon in the history of human affections altogether unique, and standing in the strongest contrast to the feelings with which the most enthusiastic admirers regard the mightiest among the dead. For love, there must be, or must have been, personal intercourse. With earthly teachers and guides that is only possible whilst they live; so their abiding in the flesh is needful for us. With Jesus Christ, who died--yea, rather, who is risen again--it is possible now for us all; therefore it was our gain that He went away, “departing for a season, that we might receive Him for ever.” (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Christ going away
Our Lord here represents the complex whole of His death and ascension as being His own voluntary act. He goes. He is neither taken away by death nor rapt up to heaven in a whirlwind, but He goes into the region of the grave and thence to the throne. Contrast His ascension with that of Elijah. One needed the chariot of fire and the horses of fire to bear him up into the sphere, all foreign to his mortal and earthly manhood; the other needed no outward power to lift Him, nor any vehicle to carry Him, but slowly, serenely, upborne by His own indwelling energy, and rising as to His native home, He ascended up on high, and went where the very manner of His going proclaimed that He had been before. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
We need not lament Christ’s departure into heaven
Men long for Christ on earth. Christ in heaven is not only faint and dim, but they think a heavenly Being cannot have earthly love. There may be more purity, they think, in heavenly love than in earthly, but less heartiness, and heartiness is what they long for. Now, Christ returned to heaven that He might love more, not less. This was a part of the glory which He had laid aside and was to take again. On earth His soul stood but in the bud. He went to a fairer clime that He might blossom, and now the heavens and the earth are full of the fragrance of His love. Incarnation was limitation. Ascension was expansion. There was not room enough for such a heart while in the body. It came as a seed, and grew, but we saw only the sprouting and the leaves.
Death ripened it back again to the golden fulness of a heavenly state. (H. W.Beecher.)
The departed Christ
The Saviour declared to His disciples that He must leave them. On Him their whole souls had rested. He epitomized to them everything that was sacred; they had forsaken occupation, and had suffered contumely for following this man; and now He was about to be taken from them; and everything in their knowledge, affection, understanding, rebelled against it. They could not comprehend it either in its relations to Him or to themselves. And yet He said, “It is for your own interest that I go away.” That, I think, touches the universal feeling of wonder in men.
I. Is there one of you who has not pondered the question, “WHY DID CHRIST LEAVE THE WORLD? Having once come into it, and brought life and immortality to light, why did He not abide here?”
1. There are multitudes who think that if they could but once have seen Jesus, or laid their hand on His, or heard from Him the history of His life and His instructions, that it would have begotten in them a certainty, an enthusiasm, and a power which would have carried them through a thousand sloughs that otherwise must have engulphed them.
2. Then, again, men think that if once they could pour out their soul’s allegiance to Christ, in His very presence, they could go on all their lives long worshipping and rejoicing in Him. They think it would lay the foundations of piety so strong, that all doubts would flee from them for evermore.
3. Then there is a large number who feel that if Christ were enthroned in Jerusalem, around that sacred Centre would be formed the Church circle in an unbroken unity, and that all the shattered particles of shining truth would be gathered together.
4. Then, again, there is the feeling of certainty which men seek for. This leads men to feel that if they could have a determiner of controversies, it would be a great and desirable thing. They say, “True, we have the Bible; but how can the Bible be a determiner of controversies, when there are a dozen different and warring sects that draw their proofs from it?” There is the vicegerent in Rome; and men say, oftentimes: “We do not believe in a great many things that are claimed in regard to the papacy; but, after all, it is a good thing to have somewhere a centre of faith--one that can determine and put an end to controversies.” I cannot deny that, at the first blush, there is some justification for these fancies; but they will not bear examination. God’s way is always the best.
II. SUPPOSE OUR MASTER HAD REMAINED UPON EARTH, ABIDING IN JERUSALEM
1. How many of the race could have seen Him? The ocean may know ways of circulating its waters; the atmosphere may change and go from place to place without vehicle or expense; but there is no grand current by which the human race may be thus carried hither and thither. So the tribes of the earth would find it difficult to go to a certain place and see the Saviour if He were on earth. Moreover, the mere social and physical disturbances would be enormous. It would break up the household, destroy social intercourse, and subject men to untold perils, and toils, and wastes, and expenses, to say nothing of the destruction of vast multitudes of the human race--witness those fearful pilgrimages in the East, and their fatal results, in famines, slaughters, and the dreaded Asiatic cholera.
2. But let us rise above these considerations of man’s physical circumstances, and go higher. Do you suppose that you would feel any better satisfied if you had seen Christ? When the disciples were with Christ were they more strong and more powerful than afterwards? You know they were not. The inspiration that lifted them above common humanity came by faith, and not by sight. There are realms of knowledge which cannot be reached by vision, and which must be reached by the Spirit. Therefore the Saviour says, “It is expedient,” &c.
3. But, again, would there be any more certainty of unity if Christ could yet be referred to? There are men who say: “If we only had some one in Jerusalem who should be supreme over the Church throughout the world saying: ‘This is the exact way--walk ye in it,’ how much better it would be!” Would it be any better? Why, we do not want mere likeness, sameness, absence of conflict. We have that--in the graveyard; and the race would be but little better than dead men if such unity were to exist, and men did not need to think, to exert themselves, or to make mistakes, which are always incident to investigation and endeavour. Some people are all the time trying to set aside the Divine providence by doing for a man what it was designed that he should do for himself. A Church formed on such principles would be like Babbage’s calculating machine. All that would be necessary would be to turn a crank, the wheels being of just such a diameter, and with just such cogs, but having no volition, no life, individuality, Divinity! I cannot conceive how anybody who has an idea of how the providence of God is unfolding, and has unfolded the world, should stumble on that as the way in which he ought to unfold it. But it is thought that, at any rate, it would determine controversies to have one who could speak authoritatively. Did the disciples believe just what Christ told them? Did the most learned and educated men in the time of the Saviour believe what He taught them? Did not the mind act the same then as it does now? and was it not necessary for men to get at the truth by unfolding themselves, and by educating their inward nature to the thing taught them? And if Christ had lived two thousand years, He would down to this day have taught only those who were competent to understand, by reason of their growth. The earth would have always followed the same law that He pointed out to them then, and we should, have had to learn by stages, and rise accordingly. But we should not even then have come to unity. Even in the consideration of physical truths there is but very little absolute unity. And when you take social and moral truths, still more when you take spiritual truths, they are of such a nature that they report themselves to each individual according to his conformation.
III. CHRIST SAID that it was expedient that He should go away, and THAT IF HE DID NOT GO THE COMFORTER WOULD NOT COME. Blessed word! because if there is anything that we need in this world, it is comforting. There are gods of love, of wine, of war, of government and law, but the world needs a God to comfort it. The Holy Spirit; the One who stands over against those subtle elements in the human soul--which we call the spiritual instinct or sentiment--comes to take the place of Christ, and open the doors of the understanding through the highest intuitions, and give light and direction to our interior nature, and enable us to triumph over death, and crown us sons in the kingdom of God. And this is infinitely better than that Christ should have continued on the earth in His physical form. Now, how blessed it is to feel that the heaven is filled by one who is interpreted to our spirit by historical sympathies as he never could have been interpreted to us in Jerusalem, where He would have had to walk the streets, to eat and drink and sleep as men do. In the spiritland there is not a long day’s journey between us and Him. The distance is not even so great as that which must be gone over to send a letter from the post-office in New York to the post-office in Brooklyn. No thought emerges from your soul that does not go instantly to Him. There are no distances in spirituality. (H. W. Beecher.)
Jesus invisible
I. LET US SUPPOSE THAT THE SON OF MAN HAD CONSENTED TO REMAIN UPON THE EARTH. He could not thus remain except to die daily, or to be for ever triumphant. On which of these two alternatives must we fix? You know too well.
1. Jesus Christ always equally entitled to be loved, will always be equally hated; so that were Jesus Christ to appear successively in different countries, each of them would in its turn be moistened with His blood. If it accords with piety to believe that the Son of God died once, the just for the unjust, it is impious to believe that the blessed seed of the woman was more than once to allow His heel to be bruised by the angel of darkness.
2. Let us hasten then to reject this alternative, and conceive that He has to enjoy an everlasting triumph. He has conquered; He has put infidelity completely to flight. Jesus reigns King of all the earth. He has no more enemies or rivals. Still this kingdom, glorious as it appears, is but a place of exile. The subjects of this King have an advantage over Him. The servant is more than his Master. For Jesus Christ having suffered once, what can those around Him have to suffer? A single look from Him crowns them with glory. There is no longer either difficulty to be surmounted or struggle to be maintained. It is no longer by fire that men are saved, nor by much tribulation that they enter into glory. Religion is no longer a sacrifice; the blessing of the narrow way, and the kingdom of heaven taken by violence, are henceforth only empty sounds. It only remains to ask why earth is not already transformed into heaven?
II. LET US NOW LISTEN TO JESUS CHRIST. Let us see in what this expediency consists.
1. “If I go not away, the Comforter will not come,” &c. Remain with us, Lord, and we will be comforted. Such would perhaps have been our answer. Who can console better than Jesus? Jesus absent is only one misery more. Jesus might have answered, Are you consoled? does My presence suffice you? No; and yet I am in the midst of you. Thus it appears you still require the Comforter. Two consolations compose the whole new man.
(1) Faith. To believe is to repose entirely on the infallibility and faithfulness of God. It is, consequently, to go forward with unflinching eye, and meet coming events as we would meet God Himself; to live in the Spirit; to renounce the domination of the senses; to prefer the invisible, which is eternal, In regard to what specially concerns Jesus Christ, it is to bless God that the Word was made flesh, but not to regard Jesus Christ, although perfect man, as an ordinary individual, whose presence is indissolubly attached to the body. Now, such was the disposition of the disciples, and such is human nature, that had Jesus Christ remained upon the earth, faith would have remained for ever in an infant state. Its case would have been that of a young bird whose parent will not permit it to try its wings. Men would have reposed on the corporeal presence of Christ; not upon His spiritual, which is His real presence. The magnificent developments of the Christian Church would thus be strangled in the birth; or, to speak more properly, there would be no Christian Church; if by the Church we mean the assembly of those who walk by faith, and live in the Spirit.
(2) Love in the Spirit. To love spiritually is to love as God loves and wishes to be loved. All in love that is only nature, instinct, taste, self-complacency, disappears or is subordinate. Love, purified and made Divine, rises and attaches itself to what is invisible and immortal. Now almost all the world loves Jesus. How is it possible not to love Him! But no man of the world could have more love for Him than the son of Jonas; and do we not know that Jesus deserved to be loved otherwise? The affection of Peter was not spiritual; that of the world for Jesus is, if possible, still less so. It is a human attachment which Jesus does not count sufficient. But this attachment remained human so long as Jesus Himself remained in a human condition. The visible, corporeal, limited person, behoved to disappear, in order to make room for the idea which it represented, and at the same time concealed.
2. If faith and spiritual affection are the life of the Church, it was for the advantage of the Church that Jesus should go away. This has been well proved by fact. Where was the Church before the departure of Jesus? Nowhere; not even in the bosom of that college of apostles who we have reason to believe knew Jesus far less, and loved Him less completely than a poor Christian peasant now knows and loves Him. Why had His lessons less affect on the apostles than those of the apostles themselves afterwards had on others? The facts cannot be disputed. Before the departure of Jesus there was no Church, but there is one immediately after.
3. Could we venture to maintain that it was good for the disciples that Christ should go away, and yet bad for us? The situation, and wants, are still the same, and we cannot dispense with the painful privation. No Christian, however, consents to it willingly. The resolution to do so depends on the measure of his spirituality. But nothing is more universal or more natural than regret for not having seen Jesus Christ. Many imagine that they could do all with Jesus Christ were He to become visible, that there would then be neither doubt nor fear, that they would thenceforth be all ardour for the service of their great Master. But after reflection how can they continue to use this language?
(1) What is the human body? A living statue. An image of the presence of a moral being, to which through the body are addressed all the feelings which this being can inspire. This organization, however, does not constitute the man. This we all admit when we refuse to estimate a man’s worth by his body, and make it wholly depend on his intellect and will. Moreover, in our attachments we rise superior to the impressions which body can produce upon body. An affection on which neither the external decay of the object loved, nor its absence, nor death, would have any power, would justly be entitled to the highest honour. If any being should be loved purely, it is undoubtedly the Son of God. If the Son of God appeared in the flesh, it was not to make us adore His corporeal presence, but to be man like us, and submit to death. He has given this as a support to our love; but our love should attach itself to that in Him which thinks, invites, and loves.
(2) But let us reply to those who exclaim, “Oh how strong we would be if we could only see Jesus Christ!” Alas! how many saw Him at full leisure, and remained weak! So would it be with you were Jesus Christ to communicate the Holy Spirit, which was given to the first disciples only under the condition of His own absence. The mere aspect of a great personage, the mere report of his presence, has sometimes, on grave emergencies, exercised a decisive influence. But however great the results might be, they were human. But spiritual effects demand a spiritual cause, and the fact of Christ’s corporeal presence, considered in itself, is not so. There is nothing spiritual in it. This absence of a visible Christ is regarded as a privation, a loss. But it is the flesh itself, it is the charm of the present life that makes us deem it so. Jesus Christ, though absent, is not absent. In giving us His Spirit He gives Himself.
4. “Enough of this,” you say, “None of us have the idea of making Christ dwell a second time in the sad darkness of this life.” But if you presume not to claim the visibility of Jesus Christ’s personal presence, you wish visible signs of His invisible presence. If the signs for which you call are only those fruits of the Spirit, which constitute and manifest Christianity, assuredly you are right; and it is these signs of the presence of Jesus Christ you ought in the first instance to ask from yourselves. But there is another desire less pure, “Make us gods to walk before us.” Anything which will give a tangible shape to the spiritual kingdom which Jesus Christ came to establish on the earth.
(1) In the first rank are the institutions and customs which time has consecrated in the bosom of the Christian Church. These circumstances, which are wholly external and are not the Church itself, we so overvalue that we mistake them for the Church; if certain barriers, words, sounds, happen to fail, we think it is the Church herself that fails, and our heart melts within us, and we can scarcely help exclaiming, “They have taken away my Lord,” &c.
(2) Sometimes we consider Jesus Christ to be represented by men who are devoted to His service. Every Christian, in a certain sense, represents Jesus Christ. The error lies in making a mere man the object of feelings which are due only to our Lord, and in regarding any instrument of whatever nature as necessary. And when the righteous hand of God throws down this idol and breaks it to pieces, when this man, supposed necessary, has disappeared, all has disappeared with him.
(3) The successes of Christianity are also a kind of visible Christ to us. We are willing not to believe Him absent so long as we see His religion honoured and multitudes thronging His churches. Our faith takes courage at the sight; but how readily it is shaken, when, in consequence of any great change in the condition of society, enmity grows bold. It seems as if this host of enemies had carried Jesus Christ away.
5. But Jesus Christ, who cannot permit us either to serve Him as an idol, or to put idols in His place, or to seek indubitable evidence of His presence anywhere but in ourselves, as of old, “withdraws to a mountain.” By this new retreat He extinguishes the bright light which He had kindled; He obliges us to seek Him on the mountain, in other words, in our faith, and constrains us to look at Him with other eyes than those of flesh. Let us with all the strength which God has given resist the dangerous temptations of that “lust of the eye,” which, from our carnal nature, we carry even into the purest of religions. (A. Vinet, D. D.)
Christ’s going away our gain
I. BY HIS DEPARTURE HIS LOCAL PRESENCE WAS CHANGED INTO AN UNIVERSAL PRESENCE. As God, He dwells with us through the Holy Ghost, by His essence, presence, and power. As Man He is always with us in all the truth of His Incarnation. His character--His pity, gentleness, patience, long-suffering, love, tenderness, compassion--is shed abroad throughout all His Church. The kingdom of Christ is the kingdom of the Man Christ Jesus; and the reign of His will, human as well as Divine, is His kingdom. And there are even deeper things than these. The mystery of the Incarnation is not a mere isolated fact, terminating in the personality of the Word made flesh, but the beginning and productive cause of a new creation of mankind. By the same omnipotence which wrought the union of the Godhead and the manhood in the womb of the blessed Virgin, the humanity of the Second Adam is the immediate and substantial instrument of our regeneration and renewal. The Church is Christ mystical--the presence of Christ, by the creative power of His Incarnation, produced and prolonged on earth.
II. HIS DEPARTURE CHANGED THEIR IMPERFECT KNOWLEDGE INTO THE FULL ILLUMINATION OF FAITH. While He was with them, and taught them by word of mouth, their hearts were slow of understanding. Their minds were earthly, and interpreted all things by the rules of earth and sense. But when the Comforter came all things were brought back to their remembrance. Old truths and perplexing memories received their true solution. Words they had mused upon in doubt were interpreted; sayings they had thought already clear were seen to have profounder meanings; a fountain of light sprung up within them, an illumination cast from an unseen teacher unfolded to their consciousness the deep things of God and of His Christ. Their very faculties were enlarged; they were no longer pent up by narrow senses and by the succession of time, but were lifted into a light where all things are boundless and eternal. A new power of insight was implanted in their spiritual being, and a new world rose up before it; for the Spirit of truth dwelt in them, and the world unseen was revealed.
III. HIS DEPARTURE CHANGED THE PARTIAL DISPENSATIONS OF GRACE INTO THE FULNESS OF THE REGENERATION. Our nature, which He had made sinless, deathless, and divine, from the time of His ascension into heaven was glorified. The Second Adam began to give of His own spiritual nature, to multiply the lineage of His elect, and to gather His mystical family into one universal body. The agent In this Divine work is the Holy Ghost dwelling in us. The Incarnation raised man to a higher life, and laid a higher law upon us: the coming of the Holy Ghost endowed man with power to walk in that higher and more perfect path. (Archdeacon Manning.)
Christ’s ascension the Church’s gain
I. THERE IS A NATURAL SENSE IN WHICH LOSSES OFTEN PROVE TO BE GAIN IN THE END. We gain wisdom and knowledge and experience by losses; and we unquestionably gain a very much clearer mental and spiritual vision. And so, perhaps, in this natural and human sense it would be in one way expedient for the disciples to lose their Lord--inasmuch as the loss of Him would tend to open their eyes to a juster and truer estimate of His Person and character. On this very night Philip gave sad evidence of how little he and the others even yet understood of Him. “Have I been so long time with you and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip?” was the Saviour’s reply to Philip’s request that He would show to them the Father. To the very end of His life it was still true of the disciples that “they understood not what things they were that He sake unto them,” and what He did they knew not either as yet--but should only know hereafter. Was this, then, what our Saviour meant in the text when He said “It is expedient for you that I go away:”--“You will be able, after I am gone, to balance and weigh the things that I have said and done better than you can at present, and so, by the exercise of your calmer judgment, arrive at a juster estimate of Me?” This would certainly be a consequence of His departure--but it was not this He meant by the words He used.
II. IF FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY ARE THE THREE GRACES WHICH MAKE UP THE SUM OF A CHRISTIAN CHARACTER, HOW VERY MUCH THAT CHARACTER MUST BE STRENGTHENED BY THE GREATER EXERCISE OF THESE SEVERAL GRACES. When the Lord they loved was taken away from them, then their faith would be called into action as it had never been before, for faith begins where sight ends; when they ceased to see the Lord with the natural eye then the spiritual vision--which is only another name for faith--would have to be entirely depended upon. And so, too, with their hope. No longer would they be looking for a temporal and earthly fulfilment of God’s promises. The hope they had been hitherto entertaining of earthly honour for their Lord, and the restoration of an earthly kingdom to His chosen people, would henceforth give place to a wider and better and further-reaching hope. Their treasure henceforth would be in heaven, and they would surely experience in their own case the truth that they had long since heard and learnt by rote--that where a man’s treasure is there will his heart be also.
III. IF I GO NOT AWAY THE COMFORTER WILL NOT COME UNTO YOU--but if I depart I will send Him unto you. Do we understand this? Is it that the Holy Spirit is kinder, more loving, more powerful than He who sends Him? Ah no, we know that the Three Persons are at the same time One God--One in power, and in holiness, and in love. The meaning has already been partly stated. It is better for the Church--it is better for each one of us its members--to walk by faith than to walk by sight. It is better, and it is the work of God the Holy Ghost to lead us on to this higher life. So long as Jesus was present upon earth there could not fail to be something earthly and carnal in the attachment of His disciples to Him; but when He was departed the Holy Ghost would teach men a more spiritual attachment. (John Crofts.)
Expediency
I. THINGS ARE NOT OF NECESSITY AS THEY APPEAR AT FIRST SIGHT. We are very short-sighted, and we judge just by what is within range of our vision. How should human sight perceive that it ever could be expedient for the well-loved Jesus to depart? Surely nothing could compensate for that; and yet He says it is for their advantage. Let this be a lesson to us, not to be too hasty in taking things” at first sight. Let us not say, when, perhaps, we are on the very road to blessing, “all these things are against me.” It is necessary that we keep our minds in a state of readiness to admit possibilities.
II. THE VALUE OF UNDERLYING AND DEFERRED BLESSINGS IS OFTEN FAR GREATER THAN THAT, OF WHAT WE HAVE LOST, OR ARE ABOUT TO LOSE. The full ear of corn is of much more value than the single grain from which it sprang, from whose death it took its life; but who would have believed as a theory, that it was only under this condition it could come. “What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.” God is continually sowing for us seed which we would never sow for ourselves, because we could not bear to see it die.
III. THINK OF GOD’S ACTION ON THE WHOLE MATTER. We can never deal with the whole of a matter. All human affairs are like spheres, they can be illumined only on one portion of their surface at a time. Some of them revolve so slowly, that it requires more than a lifetime for a man to see their whole surface. Events are happening to us now, which are the legitimate consequences of certain actions of our youth; or even of our parents; or of their parents; and God is engaged in the whole matter. Is it not an immense relief that we can leave God to deal with things as a whole--that we need not strain ourselves, in endeavouring to compass things beyond our grasp.
IV. CONNECT GOD DIRECTLY WITH EXPEDIENCY. Expediency implies suitability of action to circumstances, of means to accomplish an end--that end being what “seemed meet unto Him.” Man recognizes the meaning of the word, and thinks he acts upon it; but being evil, he often forgets moral principles; moreover, he is so ignorant, he often chooses wrong means; he thinks it is not expedient to do such and such a thing, whereas it is the very thing he should have done; and he does the very thing, which, as it turns out, he should not have done. But with God there are no mistakes; and so, there is no miscarrying; there is absolute righteousness in Him; and so, in His dealings towards us, and others, there can be no wrong. He does the right thing, with the right motive, in the right way, at the right time. There are two considerations, which will help us very much to fall in with God’s arrangements with faith and comfort.
1. The persuasion, that when He deems such and such a mode of action expedient, He sees the end from the beginning. We do not know in what a beginning will end, He does.
2. The belief that He sees the real suitability of operative causes--how certain things are calculated to bring about certain ends. We often think we see this. But all life is full of the history of sad mistakes in this respect. Unforeseen and disturbing influences have come in. The means we put in motion did not go far enough, or they went too far, or, perhaps, were beside the mark altogether. But when God is in action, all this is put far away; and if the causes which He sets in motion are in anyway trying to us, we maybe certain that they will produce the end He desires. And so, though we cannot see it at the time, our heaviest trials are for the best. They are only means to an end. They are expedient. (P. B. Power, M. A.)
Christ more useful within the veil
The high priest was more useful to them within the veil than outside of it; He was doing for them out of sight what He could not accomplish in their view. I delight to think that my Lord is with the Father. Sometimes I cannot get to God, my access seems blocked by my infirmity; but He is always with God to plead for me. Let us joy and rejoice that our covenant Head is now in the bosom of the Father, at the fountain-head of love and grace, and that He is there on our behalf.
Expedient absence
It is better for us that Christ should be in heaven than with us upon earth. A woman had rather have her husband live with her than go to the Indies; but she yieldeth to his absence when she considereth the profit of his traffic. (T. Manton.)
The expediency of Christ’s absence
All departures are painful and trying, e.g., the boy to business; the girl to marriage; the friend to sea; the relation over the river of death. Glad that this is true of Christ; that He felt the going away, and needed comforting. But, in His case, that was true which is so often true still--the one who went was the Comforter. His was no ordinary going. He was more to the disciples than they realised.
I. IT WOULD PROVE TO BE A PRESENT SPIRITUAL POWER. Our Lord comforted by giving a two-fold assurance:
1. He would really be always with them.
2. He would give His Spirit to be always with them. But this is confusing, until our hearts learn to hold both these forms of truth in harmony. Our Lord, while here, was always trying to glorify His spiritual relations; and so preparing for the time when His relations should be all spiritual. Is it not infinitely comforting to be assured that temporal relations shall, by and by, give place to those which are spiritual? The comparative value of the temporal and the spiritual we learn in the progress of life. The child-Christian wants a Christ of the flesh. The matured Christian wants a Christ of the spirit. And just that Christ “gone away” has become. He was outside us; He is in us now. We hear of the scene on Olivet, and we say, “He is gone.” We hear of the scene at Pentecost, and we say, “He has come again to abide with us for ever.”
II. IT LOCALISES OUR CONCEPTION OF HEAVEN. The human Christ went to a place, and prepares a place. “This is enough, Jesus is there; and Jesus knows.”
III. IT GIVES US GROUND FOR CHERISHING A HIGH HOPE. Resting upon the promise He has left. Our sorrow is the seeming separation; our everlasting joy shall yet be conscious union, under conditions that involve no separation. One day we “shall be ever with the Lord.” We may reverently fit the influence of Christ’s departed saints into Christ’s own words (as in text). Few of us but have dear friends, “not lost, but gone before.” And they seem to whisper in our souls, and say, “It is expedient for you that I go away.” We cannot see it. We are like the women at the sepulchre. And yet those who are “gone away”--1. Do become a present spiritual power to us. By “going” their characters get glorified, so as to be to us
(1) Holy example;
(2) call; and
(3) impulse.
They live ever in our souls. Among the very highest of the spiritual forces moving us in the godly life, we put the influence of the white-robed host, the sainted dead.
2. They localize heaven for us.
3. They keep alive in our souls a great hope. “I shall go to Him, but He shall not return to me.” The hope of reunion, where they “go no more out for ever.” (Weekly Pulpit.)
Expediency of the Ascension
The Ascension was expedient because
I. IT SECURED AN ADEQUATE SENSE OF THE TRUE PLACE AND DIGNITY OF MAN AMONG THE CREATURES OF GOD. There are great studies, which, as they are sometimes handled, tend to create a degraded idea of man.
1. Look, says the astronomer, at the North Star, the light which falls on your eye left that star some thirty years or more ago; and yet this light travels at a rate of 200,000 miles a second. Or, look at the Milky Way, a collection of worlds more numerous than the sands on the sea-shore, separated often from each other by distances which our figures cannot express, and among these are stars whose light must have taken even thousands of centuries in order to reach us on this earth. Or, look at that Dog Star, Sirius. When it was first known that our own sun was moving round some other centre, just as our earth moves round him, it was a shock to the thought; but this giant sun, Sirius, compared with which our own sun is but a pigmy, is himself in motion around some other central orb, the size and place and distance of which exhaust the capacities of imagination. And then our friend turns our thoughts upon this little home of ours. Astronomy has told man many things, and among others, his insignificance.
2. Comparative physiology takes us into its museums, and we see ranged before us the skeletons of apes. Look at the lower types (so it is said) of the human family; at the Aztecs and the Papuans; and then say how you can trace a sharp line of demarcation between this animal and that animal.
3. Or again, we picture to ourselves a scene which takes place inevitably after a great battle; and as our thought lingers over the ghastly ruin, chemistry passes by, and it suggests that after all all is well, and that these buried and disfigured forms will presently be resolved into their constituent elements; and that the value of man may be appreciated when we have discovered what remains after a human body has been submitted to the verdict of a chemical student. Certainly most of us do not readily acquiesce in these theories of human life. Our reason tells the astronomer that there is a moral as well as a material world, and that bulk and distance are not the main tests of greatness; and it tells the comparative anatomist that no similarity of his skeletons can possibly obliterate the vast interval which parts a being with self-reflecting consciousness, and free will from a being which is governed only by instinct; and as for the chemist, whether he is in the cemetery or in the laboratory, reason protests to him that his analysis begs the tremendous question, whether the most important and vital part of man has ever been before him to be analysed at all. But the Christian falls back upon a distinct fact, which enables him to listen with interest and with sympathy to all that the astronomer, &c., may have to tell him, and withal to preserve the robust faith in the dignity of man. He believes in the ascension of our Lord into heaven. Somewhere in space he knows there is at this moment, associated with the glories of the self-existing Diety, a human body and a human soul. Ay, it is on the throne of the universe. No other creature of God shares that incomparable dignity.
II.
IT MAKES ROOM FOR FAITH IS CHRIST.
It is, of course, conceivable that our Lord might have willed to prolong His life upon the earth through the centuries of Christian history.
Had He done so, there would have been no questions as to the seal and centre of authority in the Christian Church, or as to the true area and contents of the Christian creed; there would have been ever before the eyes of men a living example of what the Christian character was meant to be; and perhaps the conversion of the world would have been completed long ere this.
But one thing is certain, that if Christ had continued to be visibly present, there would have been no room for true faith in Him.
Trust in Christ there might have been; we trust our friends, our elders; but faith “is the evidence of things not seen.
” Think what this would have meant for Christendom.
Why is it that so great a place is assigned to faith in the New Testament? Because faith is the apprehension of an object with ever-increasing clearness on the part of the whole soul, of its thought, of its heart, of its determination.
And such an apprehension of a perfect object means vast moral leverage. We become, more or less, like that on which we continually fix our attention. If we look persistently downwards then we become earthly; if we look upwards then the light of heaven is reflected in o’er souls. For this there would have been no room if our Lord had not ascended; the world would only have “known Christ after the flesh,” would have concerned itself with His outward and human form, rather than with His true and essential divinity, and it therefore was expedient that He should go away, as promoting the moral effect and power of faith.
III. IN THE INTERESTS OF WORSHIP. What is the idea of God which we gain from nature Courage, energy, and intelligence--nature certainly suggests these; but benevolence is in the back-ground of its suggestion respecting its author and its master. It is cold, thin, superficial; like the clear sunlight on a frosty day in January, there is no warmth, no colour, no character about it; it may provoke intellectual interest, admiration, wonder, but not passion of any kind, not devotion, not worship. But we Christians approach God not only through external, non-human nature, but through man. Man, unlike nature, has moral character. When the Old Testament would teach us the awful attributes of the self-existent, it draws upon the ordinary language of human passion and human experience, it describes a being with human feelings of anger, of pity, of jealousy, of love. The revelation through man is a higher revelation; it is one of moral character. “The Lord is long-suffering,” &c. But here, of course, human nature, as we know it, if taken on the average as a guide to the true character of God, may easily mislead us. It is expedient that perfect humanity should thus be associated on the throne of heaven with the infinite and the eternal. And thus, in the worship of the Church, inspired on the one hand, by an awful sense of the inaccessible majesty of God, and, on the other, by a trustful, tender passion, which has its roots in the consciousness of a human fellowship, with its awful object, we find that which we find nowhere else on earth, and we understand the words, “It is expedient for you that I go away.” And a last reason for the expediency
IV. IN CONNECTION WITH HIS WORK OF INTERCESSION. A question which Christians ought to ask themselves more often than they do is this--“What is our Lord doing now?” At His ascension “He sat down at the right hand of God.” It is the posture not merely of the enthroned Monarch of Heaven; it is the posture of the omnipotent Priest. He does not stand to plead; still less does He prostrate Himself, side by side with those highest beings who are ranged around the throne. He sits in His wounded but glorified humanity as the one permanent sacrifice which will for ever avail before the eyes of the All Holy. “Therefore, if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father,” &c. This uninterrupted action of our glorified Redeemer should surely be more in our minds. What was He doing when we were born? Interceding. What will He be doing at the moment when we shall be leaving it? Interceding. How was He engaged during the long hours of last night, or when we arose from sleep this morning? What will He be doing when we again lie down to rest? What is He doing now, while I am speaking for Him, and while you are listening? The answer is ever the same. Now, this intercession is the very strength of our Christian life. We claim its power in every prayer when we say, “Through Jesus Christ our Lord.” We associate our poor feeble prayers with His majestic pleading. It is the knowledge that this great work proceeds uninterruptedly, that makes hope and perseverance possible when hearts are failing, when temptation is strong, when the sky is dark and lurid. Surely it is expedient for you and me that He should go away. (Canon Liddon.)
Our Lord’s ascension the Church’s gain
1. Selfishness is never less attractive than when it would leave its imprint on theology. Yet we are not unfrequently confronted by systems in which the satisfaction of the believer is made the centre of a theological panorama, while the revealed nature or economies of God are banished to its circumference. In this way the self-sustaining, infinite, Supreme Being comes to be regarded as chiefly interesting on account of the satisfaction which He yields to the subjective yearnings of a finite and created soul But the manifested glory, the vindicated honour of Jesus Christ must take rank before all other considerations in regard to the Ascension: at length that life of humiliation is over, and the Bridegroom of the Church “girds His sword upon His thigh, as becomes the Most Mighty, and according to His worship and renown.”
2. This, then, is our first tribute of love and duty to the mystery of to-day, and we may now turn to that other and very different point of view which is sanctioned by our Lord in the text. No words that ever fell from the lips of Christ can have at first seemed to those faithful souls who heard them to verge more closely than these on the confines of paradox. Could it be expedient for men who are still pilgrims upon earth that their Guide should be taken from them? For pupils who are still ignorant that their great Teacher should desert them? For spiritual children, still so deficient in the Christian character, that they should be deprived of Him who taught by example even more persuasively than He taught by precept? He might have said “expedient for the spirits of the just made perfect, to whom, after overcoming the sharpness of death, He was about to open the kingdom of heaven; for the angels who had for thirty-three years been” ascending and descending upon the Son of Man,” and who had now higher ministries in store for them: for Myself, who, after finishing the work that was given Me to do, am to be glorified by the Father with that glory which I had with Him before the world was. But He does say, “for you.” My brokenhearted, despairing disciples, it is “expedient for yon,” that I, your Teacher, Friend, Guide, Strength, should leave you. Wherein then, it may be asked, did this expediency lie?
I. THERE WAS A KIND OF NATURAL EXPEDIENCY IN THE ASCENSION, grounded on that law of the human mind which makes the appreciation of present blessings so very difficult. Most men look back with affection on the years of their childhood; and nations have always surrounded their early annals with an atmosphere of poetry. So limited are our powers, that generally speaking, observation must have ceased before reflection can begin to do its work. Had Christ continued to live visibly upon earth, the spiritual force of the Church might have been expended in an indefinitely prolonged observation. The strength even of saintly souls might have been fatally overtaxed. If Jesus is to be seen by His creatures in His relative and awful greatness, He must be withdrawn. Even on the night before the Passion, St. Philip asks a question, which proves that he does not yet know who Jesus really is. “What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter,” was an announcement of the self-same principle. He was to be comprehended when He was gone. The life of Christ on earth had first to be brought to a close, ere it could be dropped as a seed that would spring up and bear fruit into the heart of redeemed humanity. And each teacher that has unfolded and enforced the meaning of that life, has, in adding to the illuminated thought of Christendom, attested the truth of our Master’s words--“It is expedient,” &c.
II. THE LIFE OF THE SOULS OF THE APOSTLES JUST HAVE BEEN QUICKENED BY THE DEPARTURE OF THEIR LORD. Faith, hope, and charity are the threefold cord that links the living spirit with its God. These graces were dwarfed in the apostles. Their belief did not materially differ from the creed of the devout Jew. Their hopes were centred on an earthly throne. Their charity was discoloured by the presence of a subtle element of sense, which dimmed its spiritual lustre. Christ left them, and behold, they find springing up within themselves a new and vigorous life. By leaving them our Lord has made room for the full play and power of faith. (1Pe_1:8).
Hope, too, rivals in its growth the growth of faith. It reaches forth into an eternal future. And when Christ was seated at the right hand of God, love, as a matter of course, would seek simply and constantly those things that are above, and not the things upon the earth.
III. But if the apostles had been altogether left to their own resources, could they have formed so true an estimate of His life, as by their writings to rule the thought and kindle the enthusiasm of all ages? Were faith, hope, love, thrown out, as plants of native growth, from the rich soil of their natural hearts? Are the Epistles of St. Paul, or is the character of St. John to be explained by their natural gifts, educational antecedents, contact with the Redeemer, the circumstances and directions of their lives? Surely not. Even though the Pentecostal miracle had not been recorded, some supernatural interference must have been assumed, in order to account for the apostolic character, and the apostolic writings. Of itself the departure of our risen Lord would neither have permanently illuminated the reflections of the Church, nor yet have quickened the graces of its separate members. WE MUST WAIT UNTIL PENTECOST IF WE WOULD ENTER INTO THE FULL EXPEDIENCY OF THE ASCENSION. Pass the eye over that last great discourse, and mark how it bears with repeated effort and significance upon the statement of the text (chap. 14:3, 12, 16, 26; 15:26, 27; 16:7, 10, 13). While Christ tarried here, His apostles who saw and conversed with Him were further, immeasurably further, from Him than we may be, if we will. To them He was still an external example--voice, force. Christ in us is the hope of glory. Our ascended Lord has sent down upon us that promised and gracious Friend, whose office it is to unite us to Himself. Therefore, united to Christ, man is no longer an isolated unit; he is a member of that spiritual organization which is Christ’s Body. If we feel the expediency of the Ascension, we are men of prayer. “In heart and mind” we “ascend thither” where prayer is not an effort but an atmosphere. It is the instinctive breathing of an informing spirit, the voice of children, who, without doubt or questioning, throw themselves into their Father’s arms. Can we realize, each one for himself, what is involved in this expediency of our Lord’s ascension? Not if we forget the sharp distinction which exists, and which will exist for ever, between the very highest, noblest, purest, truest efforts of nature, and the heavenly action of the Spirit of grace. We shall never understand the expediency of the Ascension, if we forget that we are the subjects of a spiritual dispensation, in which forces more extraordinary are at work, and results more wonderful are produced than any which fall under the cognizance of sense (1Co_2:7-9). The Ascension reminds us of a life which is higher than this world. So much higher, so much more blessed and glorious is the life of grace, that One who loved us men with the truest and purest affection, yet withdrew Himself, as on this day, from our sight in order to enable us, if we will, to live it. (Cannon Liddon.)
Gain in the Saviour’s loss
1. The parting of friends is always a sad thing; for many things may come to prevent a meeting again. But partings sometimes are among the very saddest things: parting of those who are very dear: of the playmates of childhood: of those who hitherto have kept close together in the race and the warfare of life, but who are now to be severed by long years. And why is it then, that emigrants, e.g., are yet content to part? Because they feel it is better so; that they are leaving a country which will not yield bread, for another where there is work and bread for all. And the friends who remained behind knew all that too.
2. The thing to which people most naturally have recourse to blunt the pang of parting is some such thought as is suggested in the text. The dying wife tries to persuade the husband that it is far better as it is. The reckless and graceless young man, reclaimed by a kindness and a wisdom that were half angelic, as he feels life ebbing away, says: “Perhaps it is as well I should go home pretty soon.” And just with that simple and natural thought did the blessed Redeemer seek to console His disciples.
3. Now we often say and hear such words as these, when they express rather what is wished than what is felt and believed; when we could give no sufficient reason, save that one sheet-anchor of the weary and disappointed heart, the wise and kind decree of God. But it is not merely in this general view, and merely by way of saying a kind word that might cheer up somewhat in a trying hour, that Jesus said this. His departure was the condition of another’s coming, who would more than make up for His loss. Precious indeed, then, must that other be!
4. Now we must all feel that although it is our privilege to love each of the three Persons in the Trinity; still the Saviour we cannot choose but single out for special love. And we should hardly be able to persuade ourselves that even the coming of the Comforter could make up for His absence. But all that He declared was, that for believers so situated as the disciples He was addressing, it was advantageous that the Comforter should be present with them, even at the price of His own departure.
5. But the thought naturally suggests itself, Why might the Church not have had both? Now, we must just take Christ’s word for it, that this cannot be. For some good reason we cannot have both together. Note two or three considerations
I. THE CHOICE LAY BETWEEN CHRIST AS HE THEN WAS, A PERSON DWELLING IN A HUMAN BODY, AND A DIVINE SPIRIT CAPABLE OF BEING UNIVERSALLY PRESENT AT THE SAME TIME. Christ, dwelling in flesh, could be only in one place at a time; while the Comforter, unbound by fleshly trammels, could be in a thousand places, working on a million hearts all at once. And for the grand end of carrying on the government of a Church that is to overspread the world, it was better to have one Divine Being, equally present, working with equal energy everywhere, than even to have Christ Himself dwelling in visible form in s
