S. THE ILLUMINATIONS OF OBEDIENCE.

THE ILLUMINATIONS OF OBEDIENCE.

Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it. — John 2:5.

Through the mists of long and devout tradition which have obscured her character and made her very person almost mythical we are surprised sometimes in reading the Gospels at the clearness and simplicity with which Mary the mother of our Lord stands out before us there. She speaks only on three occasions, but when she speaks her words have such a directness and transparency about them, they come so short and true, they are so perfectly the words that an earnest and unselfish woman would have spoken that they leave us the clearest and most satisfactory idea of what manner of woman she must have been. Those three utterances of hers are like three clear notes of a bell, that show how sound and rich its metal is. Think what they were. In the presence of the messenger who comes to tell her of her great privilege she bows her head and says, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to thy word. "When she finds her son in the temple she cries out to Him," Son, why hast Thou thus dealt with us? Thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing." "When she stands with Him before the puzzled guests at Cana she turns to the servants and says, "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it." The young soul’s consecration! The mother’s overrunning love! The disciple’s perfect loyalty! What can be clearer than the simple, true, brave, loving woman that those words reveal? How all the poor tawdry mythology which has clustered about her, and called her the Queen of Heaven, disappears before the vastly deeper beauty of this true woman of the earth, who wins our confidence and love.

I want to speak to-day of the last of those three words, and some of its suggestions. You remember the circumstances, but let me repeat them once more in the words of the ever-fresh and beautiful old story. "And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. And both Jesus was called and His disciples to the marriage. And when they wanted wine the mother of Jesus saith unto Him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her. Woman what have I to do with thee, my hour is not come. His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it." It is a moment of bewilderment. The impatient guests are asking for what the host has not to give them. The mother of Jesus turns to Him, but He seems to put her suggestion back. There is an air of embarrassment about it all. She and the guests are puzzled, and then she says to them, as if that were the only outlet and escape from their perplexity, "Do what He bids you do." It is as if she said, "I do not understand Him, I do not know what He means or why He speaks as yon have heard Him speak, but the oily way for Him to interpret Himself is to say what He wants done, and you and I in doing it will see exactly what He means. Therefore, whatever He saith unto you, do it. "We ask ourselves at once, where had she learned this of her son? And we remember that since the last glimpse the Gospel gave us of them, they have been quietly living together, mother and son, at Nazareth. There she had studied Him with a love that must have been more and more filled with reverence. There she had realized the mystery of His nature. And one of the things which her experience of Him had taught her must have been just this: that often there were meanings and ideas which He intended to convey which could not be set forth in words, but which must be displayed in action, — in the completely sympathetic action of two beings working together with a common will. Can we not picture many a time in the intercourse of their quiet home in which this must have come to her, — times when some deep mysterious word fell from His lips which awed and fascinated her, perhaps, but of which she could make no clear meaning, and when, as she watched His actions and helped them, doing all that He wanted her to do, there gradually came out from His action the meaning which was in His words, but which they could not perfectly express? I think their life together must have been full of such experiences. There is something like it in the relation that all thoughtful and watchful parents hold to their little children. How often you have watched their actions and quietly helped them out, and learned from them what they were wholly powerless to put in words! There are always some childlike people of whom we feel that the only true expression must be in the working out of their activity. They cannot toll their meaning except in deeds. We feel something of the same kind in our intercourse with Nature. We try to catch her messages, to put ourselves into sympathy with the vague spirit which breathes through all her life; but at the last we learn that it is only by obedience, only by helping her works to their completest by our service and by attentive study of the things she does, that we come really to know this mysterious life of Nature on whose bosom we are living. Whatsoever she saith unto you, do it. Obey Nature and she will reveal herself to your obedience, — is not that the real watchword of our modern science? And like that, only more deep and holy, was the law which the mother of Jesus had learned in the treatment of her Son. That only by doing His will, even when it was darkest, could she truly come to the light which she knew was in Him.

It sounds perhaps at first as if the words of Mary were a mere utterance of despair; as if she said, "I cannot make Him out. He is far away above us. It is not for us to try to make Him out. Such as we are cannot understand such as He is. All we can do is just to take His commandments in the dark, and do them in the dark, and be content. "But if what I have just said is true, the tone of the words is not despair but hope. She does not say, " We cannot know Him; " she only says, " He must take His own way to make us know Him, to make Himself known to us. We cannot understand His words. Let us see what He does. Let us put ourselves into His action by obedience, and we shall understand Him. "Surely she struck there the note of all the best Christian experience that has come since, through all the ages. How familiar has become the grand and simple way in which the soul which has been puzzled with the words of Jesus may stand still and say, — "Lord, reveal Thyself to me in dealing with me. I will not hinder Thee. I will obey Thee. Whatsoever Thou sayest unto me I will do it, and so I shall reach the true knowledge of Thee which my soul craves. "A man has studied Christ in all the books. He has sat still and meditated, and tried to see through His meditation into the very face of Christ whom he has longed to understand; and he has not succeeded. Christ has seemed to elude him. He would not show Himself. He has almost seemed to lay His hand upon the eyes of the inquiring man as if He said, "What have I to do? Mine hour is not yet come. "But then the man looks up and sees a duty, — a very hard one it may be, — or sees a burden which is very heavy. It is evidently coming toward him. He cannot escape it. Suppose that he is lifted up to such a knowledge of it all that he is ready with all his heart to say, "I do not want to escape it. If God sends it, God is in it. God sends nothing, God brings everything. Whatever comes from God has the God whom it comes from in its heart. This, then, is He that is coming to me. What He could not tell me in words about Himself, I shall learn in this touch — what men call this blow — of His hand which I see approaching, " Oh, it is possible so to look forward to a great, an awful experience, with something that is truly triumph filling all the pain and drowning all the dread, so to look to disaster, to sickness, to bereavement, to death, saying, "Now I shall know! In submissive acceptance of God’s will I shall understand that which no study of His words could teach me. " But yet our verse does not allow us to forget that all true waiting for Christ’s self-revelation is of an active and not merely of a passive sort. "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it," says Mary. There is something to be done in order that Jesus may show out completely what He is trying to make manifest. And here, I think, is where a human action mounts to its highest dignity, and puts on its fullest meaning. There are two views of human actions. One looks on them as they are in themselves, seeing only the force and friction which is involved in the specific thing that is done, and in the will of the immediate doer; the other regards them as setting free for expression and effect some higher force and purpose, — the force and purpose of God which are waiting behind. One is the purely human, the other is the divine view of human action. It is as when you turn a screw in some great engine. A child who sees it turned thinks only of the hand which he sees turning it, and sees only the twisting of that bit of brass; but to the man who knows the engine the turning of that screw is the setting free of the imprisoned steam to do its work. And so with human actions. Take any one. You engage to-morrow, it may be, in a new business, take a new partner, and begin to sell new goods in a new store. To one man that may mean the setting forth by your own will in search of fortune, — nothing more than that; to another man it may mean what we can reverently call the opening up to God of chances to show Himself, and work effects which have been seemingly impossible before. New combinations, new contacts, will result out of that act of yours, new needs of divine illumination, of divine guidance are sure to come; and if man’s need is indeed God’s opportunity, then this new enterprise of yours will surely open some new chink through which the everlasting light can shine, or build some wall against which the everlasting and all-loving voice can echo. And so it is with everything you do. You make a friend, you read a book, you take a journey, you buy a house, you write a letter, and so full is the great world of God, so is He waiting everywhere to make Himself known and to give Himself away, that through this act of yours, to men who are looking and listening, there comes some revelation of His nature and some working of His power. Acts become little or great only according to the degree in which God manifests Himself and works through them. To call acts insignificant or important in themselves is as if a child looked into an engine-room and judged of the importance of different parts of the machinery by the size of the handles that moved them. The slightest handle may set free the great power of the steam. To one who listens wisely, the click of a delicate needle may sound as awful as the thunder of the walking-beam. For acts have their true meanings in the points of manifestation and operation which they give to God. It was not because she knew that somehow they would have wine or something better, it was because her Son would surely show Himself through their obedience, if they obeyed Him, that Mary cared what these servants did. It is strange to think what a dignity and interest our own actions might have for us if we constantly recognized this capacity in them which they have not now. We play with bits of glass, finding great pleasure in their pleasant shapes, but never knowing what glorious things they would be if we held them up and let the sun shine through them.

It is necessary for us to recognize that this quality in Jesus which made it impossible that He should perfectly reveal Himself except in His action on and through obedient men, is not something peculiar to Him. It belongs to the very substance of the human nature which He had assumed. The first principle of all influence is, that there is something in every nature which cannot be communicated by mere contact of intelligences. It must pass over, it can only pass over, from man to man through a sympathy of wills; and such a sympathy can exist between an inferior and a superior, between a less and a greater, only where there is loving obedience on one side and loving authority on the other. All the communications of men with one another lie as it were in two strata, — two stories with a floor between them; one story is deeper than the other. In the upper, superficial story men tell each other what they know. All schools, all books, belong in this superficial region of companionship. In the deeper story men give each other what they are. All obedience of will to will, all trust of life in life, belongs in this profounder region. Do you not know the difference? You go to a man’s school, or read his book, and there are great and precious things that pass from him to you. The facts which he has gathered in his industrious study, the ideas that have come forth like stars out of the darkness in his conscientious thought, — these he can give you and he does, and you are richer for them. He has only to teach; you have only to attend and understand. But by and by you come to know the man, to love him, to count his will a better expression of the will of God than your will. You obey him. Then at once is there not a new kind of communication between your life and his? Does he not give you things that he could not give before, — not only facts and ideas, but motives, hopes, fears, loves, dreads, inspirations? You have passed from the upper to the deeper story of companionship, and the passage took place when you passed beyond listening and learning and began to love and to obey. We all have benefactors with whom we live in one chamber or in the other, whom we meet in the upper or the lower regions of communication. Our teachers we meet in the room of instruction; our masters, our saviors, we meet in the deeper room of influence and inspiration. The question of questions, as concerns our Christian faith, is in which room we meet Christ. We certainly meet Him in the upper room where, as we listen. He tells us things we never could have known without Him. Does He meet us also in the deeper chamber where as we obey He reveals to us the very secret of His being and makes us like Himself? There can be no doubt in which room He wants to meet us. The very fact that His coming was an Incarnation is a witness of how thoroughly He wanted to give Himself to us. And nothing is finer in the history of His disciples in the Gospels than to see how He led them down from the surface to the depths, — from the upper region in which they followed Him saying, "Master where dwellest Thou? " and He answered, " Come and see, " to the profound revelation in which the prostrate disciple cried, " Who art Thou Lord? " and the answer came to him from the sky, " Arise and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou shalt do. " The first is enlightenment through attention; the second is regeneration through obedience. In the first, knowledge is given through intelligence; in the second, life is given through the utterly submissive will. This was the essential difference between the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of the scribes which" the simple-hearted people on the mountain felt so truly. This was the great transfer and deepening of the learning life to which the Lord invited His disciples when He said, "If any man will do My will, he shall know of the doctrine." But then perhaps another question comes. "Intelligence comes by obedience you say. I shall hear what Christ has to say to me if I obey Him; but can I obey Him till I first know what He has to say? Have I a right to make myself the servant of any one till I know what it is that he will bid me do? "Or, to take the simple picture of our story, had the mother of Jesus a right to bid any man do whatever her Son should say? Had she the right to bid them obey one whom she did not understand? Must she not wait till she sees what His commandments are before she can call on them for such unquestioning obedience? The answer lies in the essential difference between faith and sight, those two acts of which men have so long talked so much, and of which it has sometimes seemed as if they understood so little. But how simple they are! Faith is the knowledge of a person; sight is the perception of a thing. To believe anything on faith is to believe it because the person who tells it to me I am sure is trustworthy. To believe anything on sight is to believe it because I myself perceive that it is true. I believe the sun is warm because it pours its gracious heat down upon my open hand. I believe that man, the child of God, is not born to die because God Himself, God manifest in Christ, has told me so. They are not different degrees of certainty, they are different kinds of certainty, — different grounds on which certainty may rest. And just as it evidently needs a different kind of a man to trust a personal nature and to examine the structure of a thing, so there will always be a certain broad difference between the men of faith and the men of sight. There is not the slightest antagonism between them, but the ideas are always distinct, always distinguishable. And now with this distinction clear in our minds, see what a perfect right one has — one who knows Christ by any true experience of His character as Mary knew Him — to bid other men obey Him even although they do not know what commandments He will give. You are a Christian, let us say. You have known this Lord of ours for many years. You have learned from many an experience to trust Him absolutely. Well, someday I come to you with a poor handful of confused ideas about Him, with a poor heartful of broken hopes, faded enthusiasms, disappointed expectations. "See, I am all lost, I can make nothing of life!" I cry to you; "What shall I do?" And you just turn to me and point to Christ, and say, "Obey Him, follow Him. Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it. "It is an astonishing answer. I am not ready for it. I turn on you and say, "Follow Him! Why? Where will He lead me? What will He make me do? "And your answer is," I do not know. If I did know I should not need to point you to Him. I need then only point you to your task. I only know He cannot lead you wrong. I do not know His way, but I know Him. "That is faith. And if I still persist, and say I will not promise to obey Him until I know just what He will have me do, so that I can see for myself that it is the best thing to be done, then I am asking not for faith but for sight. How simple it is. I hear men praying everywhere for more faith, but when I listen to them carefully and get at the real heart of their prayers, very often it is not more faith at all that they are wanting, but a change from faith to sight. "What shall I do with this sorrow that God has sent me?" "Take it up and bear it, and get a strength and blessing out of it." "Ah, if I only knew what blessing there was in it, if I saw how it would help me, then I could bear it like a plume!" "What shall I do with this hard, hateful duty which Christ has laid right in my way?" "Do it, and grow by doing it." "Ah, yes; if I could only see that it could make me grow." In both these cases do you not see that what you are begging for is not more faith, although you think it is, but sight. You want to see for yourself the blessing in the sorrow, the strength in the hard and hateful task. Faith says not, "I see that it is good for me, and so God must have sent it, "but" God sent it, and so it must be good for me." Faith walking in the dark with God only prays Him to clasp its hand more closely, does not even ask Him for the lifting of the darkness so that the man may find the way himself. Mary is all faith when she says, "Do what He tells you, and all must come right simply because He is He." Blessed the heart that has learned such a faith and can stand among men in all their doubts and darknesses and just point to Jesus Christ, and say, "Do His will and everything must come right with you. I do not know how, but I know Him. God forbid that I should try to lead you, but I can put your hand in His hand and bid you go where He shall carry you! "

There is a reason then; Mary had a right to say what she said to the servants. We may have good right to say the same thing to ourselves and to each other. There is one complete act by which a man is justified in taking his whole life and giving it over into the keeping and authority of a Being whom he has thoroughly tried and perfectly trusts. That is the act of faith; an act, as I trust you see, not irrational but full of the profoundest spiritual reason. There is a conviction of our Friend’s trustworthiness so large and deep that we know He must be universal. He is not ours alone. He is all men’s if they will trust Him too, and so it is possible for us to turn to every man we meet and, out of the perfect certainty of our own heart, say to him, "Do this great act. Make this my Lord your Lord. Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it. " That is the preaching of faith, — the consummate work that any man can do as it regards his fellow-man, surpassing utterly all the most wise and watchful care and suggestion about the details and special actions of the life, this claiming of the life as one great whole for its true Lord.

Think what there must come — I rejoice to know that to many of you I may say. Remember what has come — with such a complete acceptance of the overlying and surrounding authority of Christ. The two things that men’s lives want most as they grow older are, I think, simplicity and independence. We become broken and scattered among a thousand interests until life has no unity, and we become fettered by a hundred gradually accumulated obligations, till, without ever having deliberately given ourselves away, we grow aware, with a dull and heavy consciousness, that we are no longer our own, and cannot act ourselves. The only restoration of both — of simplicity and independence — must come, not by the cutting off of our relationships and the rebellion against authorities, — that would be ruining the life in the vain attempt to save it, — but by enveloping all the relationships in one great relationship, and by subordinating all the authorities to one great authority. The child’s life is simple and independent. He can think of it as a unit, and he can walk across false masteries which try to govern him almost without seeing them. And why? Because his life is held, firmly and warmly, in another life. It may be that you have lost this privilege and power of the child. If you are like most men, you certainly have lost it. How shall you get it back? There is only one way, — you must be a child again. You must be converted and become like a child. Not by cutting your life down and making it meagre will you make it simple, not by making it restive and rebellious will you make it independent; but if ever, to-day or any other golden day, — though to-day is the best day in which to do it that you will ever see, — if ever you can take your life and, won by His love and justified by the abundant assurance of His faithfulness that He has given you, you can give your life away to Christ, saying as the comprehensive law of all your action, " Whatsoever Thou sayest unto me, Lord, I will do it," then simplicity and independence will open around you like the peace around the disciples when their Lord was in their storm-tossed boat. Then you may make your relations with your fellow-men as rich and full as possible. You may accumulate the dependences which make the sweetness and value of a life on every side, but, held in the grasp of that great loyalty, the multiplicity of life shall make and not destroy simplicity; and you shall be men’s servant without being their slave, just as Jesus was, when you are as truly His servant as He was the servant of His Father.

I have talked freely this morning about obeying Christ, about doing whatever Christ says to us. I know that there are some souls among you in which such words have started anew the question and the doubt which has often haunted them; before. I must try to show where the answer to that question lies, before I let you go. You say, "I would indeed obey if Christ should speak to me, but can He speak? Can I hear Him and be sure it is His voice? Oh, if I only could have been there where He lived in the flesh! Then I should have known that it was He. Now, is it not all a vague figure of speech when you talk to me about obeying Jesus, a Jesus whom I never saw, whose voice I never heard? "The question is one that easily becomes confused in theory, but practically I believe that it is much clearer than we think." Obeying Christ," we say; and what is Christ? I think over all that I know of Him, and this is what He is: First, He is the utterance of the eternal righteousness, the setting forth before men of that supreme nature in which there is the source and pattern of all goodness, — God; second. He is a man of clear, sharp, definite character, who lived a life in Palestine which still shines with a distinctness that no other human life can rival; third, by His spirit He is a perpetual presence, a constant standard and inspiration in the heart of every man who loves and trusts Him. All those things come up to me when I say "Christ." And now can such a Christ speak to me? Can He say to me, "Do this?"* If as I think about some act which it is possible for me to do, there rise up about that act these three convictions: First, that it is right, that it is in harmony with that great, constant goodness which fills the world and comes from God; second, that that man in Palestine would have done it if it had offered itself to Him there as it offers itself to me here; and third, that if I do it now, my own soul will be fed and strengthened. If these three convictions come and gather round that act, and take it up and lay it before my conscience and my heart, then I know Christ is bidding me do it. Is that clear? There is some act that you are questioning, about to-morrow or to-day. If Jesus were at hand, you would go out and ask Him, — "Is it Thy will that I should do it, oh, my Lord?" Can you not ask Him now? Is the act right? Would He do it? Will it help your soul? It is not often that a man really is in doubt who seriously wants to know the answer to any of these questions. And if the answer to them all is "yes!" then it is just as truly His command that you should do that act as if His gracious figure stood before your sight and His finger visibly pointed to the task. You say, perhaps, " I might know that an act was right and that would be enough, without bringing in Christ at all. Why need I think of it as His command? "Only because He is just that, — the reassertion, the enforcement of essential duty. He does not make righteousness, He reveals it; and when the soul that loves Him does an act at His command it is conscious that it is doing that which in the very nature of things, in the very nature of God, it was bound to do. But let us not grow confused with many words. I turn to your own consciences, dear friends. Is there nothing that Christ as your friend, your Lord, your Saviour, wants you to do that you are leaving undone today? Do you doubt one instant that with His high and deep love for your soul. He wants you to pray? — And do you pray? Do you doubt one instant that it is His will that you should honor and help and bless all these men about you who are His brethren? — And are you doing anything like that? Do you doubt one instant that His will is that you should make life serious and lofty? And are you making it frivolous and low? Do you doubt one instant that He wants you to be pure in deed and word and thought? — And are you pure? Do you doubt one instant that His command is for you openly to own Him and declare that you are His servant before all the world? — And have you done it? These are the questions which make the whole matter clear. No, not in quiet lanes, nor in bright temple-courts as once He spoke, and not from blazing heavens as men seem sometimes to expect, — not so does Christ speak to us. And yet He speaks! I know what He, there in His glory, He here in my heart, wants me to do to-day, and I know that I am not mistaken in my knowledge. It is no guess of mine. It is His voice that tells me.

How full of mystery and light our life becomes as we go on into it, not knowing what there will be there for us to do, but knowing that through it all He will be with us and in us giving us His commandments, and resolved only on this, that whatsoever He shall say to us, we will do it always. What will He say? What wondrous new commandments has He in reserve which, as we lovingly obey them, are to make the interest and growth and glory of these coming years? And let us remember that here, in what we have been thinking of this morning, lies the real bond of union between this life and what we choose to call " the other life," — the life that lies beyond the grave. There as here obedience to Christ and everlasting revelation of Christ to the obedient soul is to be the essence and delight of life. Oh, my dear friends, let us do whatsoever He saith unto us now, that then we may be ready for the higher duties and the completer revelations which He will have to give us through eternity.