John 20:15-23

John 20:15

Next to the absence of all notice of our Lord's mother, few things are more remarkable in the narrative of the period after the resurrection, than the silence respecting John.

I. John was born a lover of repose, of retirement. Left to himself he would never have been an adventurous or ambitious man. But let us not confound John's yielding gentleness, with that spirit of easy compliance which shuns all contest, because it does not feel that there is anything worth contending for. Beneath John's calm and soft exterior there lay a hidden strength. In the mean, vulgar strife of petty, earthly passions, John might have yielded where Peter would have stood firm. But in more exciting scenes, under more formidable tests, John would have stood firm where Peter might have yielded. And there was latent heat as well as latent strength in John. As lightning lurks amid the warm, soft drops of the summer shower, so the force of a love-kindled zeal lurked in his gentle spirit.

II. Nor let us confound John's simplicity with shallowness. If it be the pure in heart who see God, John's was the eye to see farther into the highest of all regions than that of any of his fellows. If it be he that loveth who knoweth God, John's knowledge of God must have stood unrivalled. There were besides under that calm surface which the spirit of the beloved disciple displayed to the common eye of observation profound and glorious depths. The writer of the Gospel and the Epistle is the writer also of the Apocalypse; and if the Holy Spirit chose the human vehicle best fitted for receiving and transmitting the Divine communications, then to St. John we must assign not the pure, deep love alone of a gentle heart, but the vision and the faculty divine the high imaginative power. It was the all-conquering grace of God that brought Peter and John into a union so near, and to both so beneficial John's gentleness leaning upon Peter's strength; Peter's fervid zeal chastened by John's pure, calm love. In the glorious company of the Apostles they shone together as a double star, in whose complemental light, love and zeal, labour and rest, action and contemplation, the working servant and the waiting virgin, are brought into beauteous harmony.

W. Hanna, The Forty Days,p. 126.

References: John 20:16. Preacher's Monthly,vol. i., p. 305; vol. vii., pp. 56, 235; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 389; Christian World Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 350; R. H. Newton, Ibid.,vol. xxviii., p. 378.