To apprehend the light or truth of the Lord is needful to our safe conduct through the scene around us; but to discern His Spirit, His tastes, habits of thought, sympathies and aversions, all pure and perfect as they were, so many expressions of the divine mind, gives elevation to our conduct.
Something of His sympathies and aversions may be discovered from His different methods with Nicodemus and the Samaritan in John 3 and 4. There is this common purpose in these scenes. The Lord is putting the soul upon a sinner's ground.
This, however, is done by a different method in each case; and in this different method His Spirit, His tastes, His sympathies or aversions, as we have expressed it, manifest themselves.
Nicodemus was "a master of Israel," a religious "ruler of the Jews." He was of the Pharisees-one, therefore, of a party that had set itself boldly against Jesus. But at this time there was evidently some working of conscience in him. He comes to Christ as a pupil, to learn lessons and mysteries. The Lord transfers him from that ground and puts him under the uplifted serpent; that is, instructs him to come to Him as a bitten Israelite, or as a poor sinner that needed life.
He does this, as we might say, shortly or at once, stopping him at the first utterance of his lips; but withal patiently, and with evident interest in him personally.
The Samaritan woman was one of the thoughtless children of the world. Life and its enjoyments and occupations were all to her. She was shrewd and a woman of good understanding; and, as far as that led her, not ignorant of the religion of the day. But life in the world was her object. She was on the ground where common fallen nature had put her. She had not, therefore, sought the Lord like Nicodemus; but one of the ordinary circumstances of human life had thrown them together. Such a one, I may say, was just the one for the Son of God. He meets her, therefore, in her place, and speaks in her own language to her. But from that place, without rebuke, without abruptness, removes her on the ground of a convicted sinner, and then reveals Himself to her.
She had assumed the place as the ruler had, and Christ allows the whole passage from darkness to light to be made more rapidly. The same occasion witnesses the whole journey, as it does not in the case of Nicodemus. The Lord at first only turns him toward the right road.