The words of Holy Scripture may be weighed with their context, often best so, but they can sometimes be profitably considered from the point of view of their own intrinsic fullness. Especially is this the case with many of the words of our Lord, peculiarly so, perhaps, with those that are recorded in the Fourth Gospel. It need hardly be said that such isolated contemplation makes no assumption of exhausting the meaning of the Savior's briefest sayings. Rather the contrary. For the more His words are dwelt on, the fuller they seem to grow, and they prove their divinity by a perennial freshness, constantly striking the thoughtful Christian reader with new wonder as he recurs to them, and sometimes almost startling him with some, to him, novel aspect of the truth unrealized before. They are indeed “words of profound illumination” (Dean Wace); always solemn, they arrest now by their strength and majesty, now by their tenderness and sweetness, again by their sternness and severity—such severity as could not be absent from the words of the All-Holy.
An interesting living writer who has said many true, many beautiful things anent the “common salvation,” sadly fails, however, in speaking, in one of his more recent books, of the “essential sweetness of Christ's character.” How one-sided is this, and how forgetful that He who is in question is no mere man! So might one speak of some amiable human character, who would necessarily have what the French happily call les défauts de ses qualités, in other words, that want of balance that marks more or less even the most Christian of mankind. Not so with our Lord. His was the perfect evenness that is symbolized in the meal offering. Nay, singular to say, an unbeliever, the brilliant Frenchman whose “Vie de Jésus” made such a stir a generation or so ago, was far nearer 'the truth, when he summed up the comprehensive character of our Lord's utterances in a striking phrase, saying of them that they were marked by “a flashing brightness, at once sweet and terrible” (une clarté, étincelanie, à la fois douce et terrible). Yes, they must be terrible to such as turn away willfully from them.
Here, however, they are wholly sweet, though pervaded by the inalienable atmosphere of solemnity. The divine dignity of the Speaker impresses the hearer, and also the thought of what the consequences must be of rejecting His words. Clearly they are intolerant of all other claims, being definite, authoritative, and final. And first let us notice the implicit assertion that He who speaks is no less than Jehovah. “I am,” runs the sentence, and the mind at once recalls the sublime words of the Old Testament, “I am hath sent me unto you” (Ex. 3:1414And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. (Exodus 3:14)). “I am that I am” (ibid). It is God's sovereign and eternal Name. It is not fanciful to recognize this, occurring as it does so many times in this Gospel. I am the Bread of Life, the Door, the True Vine, the Good Shepherd.
Next let us mark the perfection of the order that characterizes our verse. It is not haphazard; of that we may be sure. For the way leads to the truth, and the truth leads to life. Doubtless the Christian life is spoken of in the New Testament (see Acts 19:99But when divers were hardened, and believed not, but spake evil of that way before the multitude, he departed from them, and separated the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one Tyrannus. (Acts 19:9) and 23) as a way, but here, of course, with some difference in the application of the metaphor. Yet truly the two uses shade off into one another, for Christ is the way all along, even as He is the beginning and the end— “Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ,” as one has sung. “I am the way.” The desponding Thomas (and here it is desirable to look for a moment at the context) had been deploring that he and his brother disciples knew of no way by which they might rejoin their beloved Master and Lord. So He declares to them that He is Himself the Way, that everything is summed up in Him, the truth and the life as well, that He is “Christus Consummator.” We may also notice, incidentally, that here, as so often, we have a trinity, marking divine completeness—the way, the truth, and the life.
In the presence of such claims how paltry are all reason's solutions of human destiny, as is likewise all sublunary grandeur! Where else is there a way in this dark and distracted world? Naturally we brush aside its ephemeral and turbulent politics, its vain pleasures, its equally vain ambitions. But what about its poets and philosophers? Is there any hope for us here? Surely not, though the poets do sometimes give us partial truths. As the late editor of the Bible Treasury used to say, “the poets are occasionally right, the philosophers always wrong.” Doubtless some may think this a harsh judgment. But how can they fail to go wrong who start from false assumptions, to wit, the competency of the human mind to deal finally with moral and spiritual problems, the right of sick men to discuss the methods of their physician? As an acute modern writer (Dr. Illingworth) has pointed out, “Men assume that their intellect will act as impartially upon spiritual problems as upon mathematics, and this is not, and never can be the case. A sinner criticizing God is like a patient criticizing his physician at a time when his mind is clouded by disease.” And earlier in his remarks, ad hoc, this writer had forcibly said that the successes of the human mind in secular learning and in science had emboldened men to deal with equal confidence with spiritual matters, such as “the being and nature of God, and His relations to man.” “Here,” says he, “we are moving in a region that sin profoundly affects,” and where the unaided mind is bound to err.
So we go back with renewed delight to the gracious words of Him who spoke as never man spake, who alone had, and has, “words of eternal life"; and rejoice to know that that way leads us to the truth, and the truth leads to the life; and that is “life indeed.” R. B.