which is very different from the love that is the mark of the true Christian family. Now cast your mind back to John 21, and you will hear one group of people saying, “there is only one man fit to be head of the church, and that is Peter. What did the Lord say? On this rock I will build my church. True, he denied Jesus, but he was forgiven for that.” And another group is saying, “No we must have the disciple whom Jesus loved— there is no higher qualification than that.” But you must listen to Jesus saying to these two, and through them to us all, “What business is it of yours what happens to the other man? Follow thou me.” If only we always listened!
This leads straight on to the third situation. A saying was going around the Church—Jesus told Peter2 that he would live until the Lord returned in glory. Peter is getting on in years now; the Lord will be here any time now and all history will come to an end. No, says John, Jesus did not say that. He was only telling them to mind their own business. “If I will that he live until I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou me.” Mind your own business and your business is not to speculate about the end of time, but to follow.
Now I have borrowed these things from John 21 because what they do is make explicit what is already contained in John 20.31, and worked out in detail in the twenty preceding chapters. Chapter 21 shows how it was applied to particular situations in the Church’s life—all relevant to us because in one form or another they will come up in age after age of the Church’s life, including our own. What does the New Testament set out to do? To preach to us.
JESUS
In the one word, John picks up the whole story that has gone before.3 It is easy to see the meaning in regard to the Gospels, where the story is told. It is no less true of the other great contributor to the New Testament, Paul. It has been well said that the theme of his writing is summed up in one phrase “solus Christus,” Christ alone. There is no other name that matters. If you wish to go in for a simplicity that runs the risk of being so simple as to mislead, you may say (using the words of our text) that the Gospels show us Jesus, the real man who shared our humanity, our living and dying human nature, and Paul supplies the additional theological truth: This man Jesus is truly the Christ, the Son of God. It is misleading and the old Church Fathers who insisted on the inseparability of the two natures, human and divine, were right. I cannot explain it any more than they could, but both properties are here and we need both.
For most of us, it is easiest for us to think of this in terms of crucifixion and resurrection. Christ crucified, yea rather risen, as Paul put it. Or as Charles Wesley put it in lines of which we do not always see the full import—”Those dear tokens of his passion/Still his dazzling body bears/Cause of endless exultation/To his ransomed worshippers.” The risen exalted Jesus bears still the scars of the nails and of the lance. The risen Jesus is the crucified Jesus, and his glory means the whole significance of the cross is ratified by God himself. The love that never lets us go is the power that never fails.
We read (and some of you know far more about this sort of thing than I do) of people who want to embark on a great commercial undertaking. If they can take it on it will be an enormous success. But they can’t get it going unless they can find backers—a bank, say, or an insurance company—that will put up the cash. You cannot do without the backer. You look at the story of Jesus as the New Testament tells it—his love, his dying love for the sinful, the lonely, the outcast and you think, if you think about it at all, who is going to back this enterprise? And the answer is God Almighty.
No wonder that Paul would go out and preach nothing but Christ and him crucified. No wonder that John Lambert the Protestant martyr (1538), his legs already burnt, lifted up for sport by two soldiers who stuck their swords in his body, would cry out “None but Christ, none but Christ.” No wonder Wesley would sing “my heart is full of Christ and longs/ its glorious matter to declare!/ Of him I make my loftier song/ I cannot from his praise forbear.” And go out into the streets, and fields and market places. Perhaps we are going ahead too fast. The New Testament, represented by our text, has another word.
BELIEVING
I’m not entirely happy with “believing” as an English word. It sounds too much as though John has stated a sample of theological formulas—Christ and the Son of God, and is now saying—”sign up on the dotted line and you are in, refuse to sign and you are out.” Let me say at once that I believe that Christ and Son of God are good and true statements about Jesus of Nazareth; but I doubt that this is the way to begin. The word “believing” is not a matter of assenting to a proposition, however true; it is a matter of trusting. It is always edging towards an intellectual emphasis, because we are intellectual beings and we want to use our minds in the way we live.
We know that Jesus somehow means God, that God is known in Jesus, and that Jesus fulfills God’s purposes. All this we sum up by using the old Jewish word for God’s chosen fulfiller of his will—Christ; and we can say Jesus is God without implying he is all the God there is, by speaking of him as God’s Son. But the word most of us I think will find most of use is the word we find in the Appendix—“follow.” There are many things you will never know, never fully understand, but—“follow thou me.”
Following implies trust, you won’t follow someone you don’t trust. And trust implies trustworthiness. Following contains obedience. The leader sets out in a direction you don’t want to go. It is hard, it is dangerous, there is resistance, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Following means going where you are led; it is good if you can understand why, but if you can’t you still follow.
Following is a responsibility for you; it contains also a responsibility on the part of the leader. It is a poor thing if he turns up at the predetermined goal, turns, and sees that his army has disappeared. He has lost them on the way. But not this leader. He will see those who follow through to their goal. “He leadeth me beside the still waters. . . . I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” But that leads to the last point, which again we can dig out of chapter 21—“that believing you may have.”
LIFE
They had got it wrong. The Lord never told Peter that he would live to the end of all things, which would mean the end was very near. They got it wrong but not all Christians have learned their lesson, and may have wasted pointless hours in calculating on a purely imaginary basis when the Son of Man will descend from heaven to bring history to an end. What bliss to be alive at that dawn! But it is all bogus. Here and elsewhere Jesus himself is not telling and himself did not know when the end would come.
Life that would be eternal in heaven is no doubt a very good thing, but it is not the Gospel. The Christian Good News is of life here and now. “A heart in every thought renewed/and full of love divine/perfect and right and pure and good/a copy Lord of thine” (C. Wesley). That is the life the leader leads to, and leads to now. And we may all follow. And that is what the Bible is about.
1. Editor’s Note: The older British practice was to use single quotation marks for a proper quotation of someone else’s words, but also when one is imaginatively speaking in someone else’s voice, such as St. John’s in this case. Accordingly, I have simply left things that way when CKB quotes Shakespeare, Wesley hymns, etc. I have, however, had to modify some of the British spelling of words for the American publisher.
2. Editor’s Note: I take it he means the Beloved Disciple, but the sermon text says Peter. Or perhaps he does mean Peter, but John 21 simply forecasts that Peter will ultimately die much as Jesus did—at the hands of violent men.
