Not only was His death before the Lord, but His departure from the world—a notion absolutely new to a Jewish mind in connection with the Messiah. The more such an one believed Him to be the promised One, the less could it be conceived that He should quit the scene which He had come to bless. “We have heard out of the law,” answered the people not long before, that Christ abideth forever; and how sayest thou, the Son of man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of man?” There too He had intimated to the Jews, not only His death, but what death He should die, and His retirement from their midst. A new creation and heavenly glory were beyond their field of vision. But here the Lord prepares His disciples more fully for what was then coming and is now come—facts simple enough for us who have to do with them every day, but wholly unlooked for in Israel, who expected the kingdom immediately to appear, not the things unseen and eternal, with which our faith is called to be conversant.
“Little children, yet a little I am with you. Ye will seek me; and, as I said to the Jews, where I go away ye cannot come, also to you I say now.” (Ver. 33.) None had passed this way heretofore. It must be a new and living way, and only His death could make it possible, consistently with God or with man. But to His own there is a title of endearment; and if He was to be but a little with them, they were to seek Him. Heaven, however, was in no way accessible to man, like the earth, of whose dust his body was made. Christ came from God, and went to God, as He will come by-and-by and receive us to Himself, that where He is, there we may be also. But no more is the Christian able to go there than any other man; Christ alone can bring any therein, as He will surely do with His own at His coming.
But He meanwhile lays a characteristic injunction on them here below. “A new commandment I give to you, that ye love one another; as I loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love among one another.” (Vers. 34, 35.)
The nation disappears. It is no question of loving one's neighbor, but of Christ's disciples, and their mutual love according to His love. New relationships would come out with increasing plainness when He rose from the dead, and sent down the Holy Spirit; and this new duty, loving one another, would flow out of the new relationship: a convincing proof to all men whose they were, for He alone had shown this throughout His life and death, as also alive again—love unfailing. How far were the Jews from such love! The Gentiles had not even the thought of it. And no wonder. Love is of God, not of man, which accounts for the blank till He came, who, though God, manifested love in man and to man, and was thus, through His death and resurrection, to bear much fruit. Their love was to be, if we may so say, of His own material and mold—to abide, if it did not begin, when He went away. It is not here activity of zeal in quest of sinners, however precious, but the unselfish seeking of the good of saints, as such, in lowliness of mind.
An irrepressible disciple, with a curiosity habitual in him, turns from what the Lord was enjoining to the words before: “Simon Peter saith to him, Lord, where goest thou? Jesus answered him, Where I go, thou canst not follow me now, but thou shalt follow me afterward. Peter saith to him, Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? My life for thee I will lay down, Jesus answered him, Thy life for me wilt thou lay down? Verily, verily, I say to thee, in no wise shall a cock crow till thou shalt have denied me thrice.” (Vers. 36-38.) Peter knew and really loved the Lord, but how little he as yet knew himself! It was right to feel the Lord's absence; but he should have heeded better the mild, yet grave, admonition, that where Christ was going away he was not able to follow Him now; he should have valued the comforting assurance that He should follow him later. Alas, how much we lose at once, how much we suffer afterward, through not laying to heart the deep truth of Christ's words! We soon see the bitter consequences in Peter's history; but we know, from the further words of our Lord in the close of this Gospel, how grace would ensure in the end the favor compromised by that self-confidence at the beginning, which he is here warned against.
But we are apt to think most highly of ourselves, of our love, wisdom, power, moral courage, and every other good quality, when we least know and judge ourselves in God's presence, as here we see in Peter, who, impatient of the hint already given, breaks forth into the self-confident question, “Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake.” Peter, therefore, must learn, as we also, by painful experience what he might have understood even better by subjection of heart, in faith, to the Lord's words. Where He warns, it is rash and wrong for us to question; and rashness of spirit is but the precursor of a fall in fact, whereby we must be taught, if we refuse otherwise. He that slighted the warning when Christ spoke it, lied through fear of a servant-maid. True Christian courage is not presumptuous, but well consorts with fear and trembling; for its confidence is not in the resources of self, or the circumstances of others, but in God, with a due sense of the power of Satan and of our own weakness.
When ignorance slips, as it often does, into presumption, the Lord does not spare rebuke. “Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake?” Was this Peter's resolve? Soon would that stout heart quail at the shadow of death. Yet what was death for any saint to compare with Christ's death, when tasting rejection as none ever did, and bearing our sins in His own body on the tree, as it was His alone to suffer for them from God!
But ignorance works often in another way. They will not believe their own utter weakness, spite of Christ's plain warning, and want light to prove His truth and their folly. Nor is this all. They assume that if a believer fail once, he must immediately repent in dust and ashes. How little they know themselves, or have profited by scripture! “Verily, verily,” said the all-patient Master, “in no wise shall a cock crow till thou shalt have denied me thrice.” I recall Peter's repeated denial of his Lord, and with oaths too, under the most solemn circumstances, not to lower him but for the profit of our own souls, and to exalt Him who alone is worthy. How infinite the grace which made the measure of his sin to be the signal and means of his repentance, under the Lord's use of His own word, and in His wonder-working mercy! And what He was to Peter, He is, and nothing less, to us.