John 8:36

CHRIST THE LIBERATOR

‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.’

John 8:36 (R.V).

These kindly words breathe the very spirit of our Master. Christ here declares that His service is perfect freedom. ‘If the Son shall make you free ye shall be free indeed.’ For this assertion He gives two reasons. One is that He bestows a new and emancipating knowledge: ‘If ye abide in My word … ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ The other is that He can permanently reconcile us with our environment: ‘The servant abideth not in the house for ever; but the Son abideth for ever. If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.’

I. Truth emancipates.—To some of us, and perhaps in certain moods to all, the reverse appears to be the fact. Does not every new revelation bring new claims, new duties, burdens, and responsibilities? It is the promulgation of a new law, and how can it profess to offer, of all things, liberty? But when you consider the matter you find that, instead of creating these obligations, a true revelation only makes us aware of realities already existing, facts which vitally concern us. Thus it appears that knowledge, in the act of telling us what restraints are necessary, is our deliverer from a thousand false and tyrannous coercions. Applying this argument to religion, what do we find? Religion, even in its lowest forms, is a theory of life, an answer to great practical questions. What is life—and death? What is sin? What am I? and where are those who have left me? and what is the meaning of my vast unspeakable desires and fears, of my unappeasable loneliness, and of the awful haunting consciousness that I am not alone? These are a part of human nature, as real as the processes of digestion: until I can answer these questions I am in bondage, like a mountain climber caught by mists among the precipices, unable to go back or forward, and freezing while he stands still. Only the light can release him: only the truth can make me free. And to-day there is only one reasonable faith amid the wrecks and ruins of a hundred creeds—amid the debris of our religious theories, almost as many as the scientific theories which have become outworn and cast away, while science lives—Jesus Christ stands alone, immortal, leading still the progress of the race, its keenest thought, its largest aspiration, its wisest benevolence. And thus, because knowledge emancipates, and He is the answer to our deepest problems, they whom He makes free are free indeed.

II. But again, Christ claims to emancipate us, not only by this gift of knowledge, but by reconciling man with his environment.—This, He says, no other power can do, if only because all others pass away and perish: ‘the servant abideth not in the house for ever, but the Son abideth for ever; if therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.’ How may we have peace and liberty amid the stress and pressure of doubtful circumstances? Your business, the more it expands the more is it the sport of events entirely uncontrollable by you: a foreign war, a commercial crisis, the dishonesty of one whom you have never seen. And your reputation, that is a plant sensitive enough to begin to shrivel in the breath of some slander whispered in the dark. And your health, and your family—how many of the contingencies that can wreck them are within your control? What answer has all art and science for the despairing cry, ‘Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?’ Still, as in the first century, it is Christ only Who can respond; and to-day there are millions, as there have been millions in every century since the first, in whose experience He has done it. He introduces into the soul a new influence, all-pervading and all-harmonising; and as gravitation reconciles a thousand cosmic forces otherwise at war, so ‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus sets me free from the law of sin and death.’ God is no longer One from Whom we would fain escape into some far-off land. He is a loving Father, Who awaits us with pardon and the best robe and music and a festival of joy. And man is my brother, one of my family; rude possibly and needing to be restrained, but still one to whose claims I may willingly surrender my own. Christ Himself knew what it was to cry, ‘Let this cup pass from Me’; but because His appeal was not to a deaf and stony Fate, because He could say, ‘O my Father,’ therefore He could add with a true and free assent, ‘nevertheless … Thy will be done.’

Bishop G. A. Chadwick.

Illustration

‘Life is to each of us like the instrument which Hamlet offers to Guildenstern—“but this cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; I have not the skill”—aud nothing can be drawn from it but a shriek. It is by long and hard study, by perfect knowledge and obedience to the laws of harmony, that at last its capabilities are grasped, its music elicited, and the performer attains what every minstrel seeks, what he rightly calls freedom of execution, the freedom which only comes when every touch is regulated, every inflection is an obedience, yet all is easy and swift and true and glad.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

‘FREE INDEED’

There are some of us, and not a few, who do not really ‘stand forth in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.’ We are tied and bound. Perhaps to some besetting sin; perhaps to the world, and, if not, at least to our own little, narrow hearts, with all our doubts, and all our fears. And so we are living on in our poor little worldly circle with little of light and life. We want more holy and lofty confidences: and to this end we want closer communion and freer access to God and His promises.

I. How is this to be done?—How shall we reach out to the greater freedom? In one and only one way. Christ, the risen Christ, Christ the Son—the Son of God and the Son of Man—He is the great and only Liberator. ‘If, if the Son therefore shall make you free.’ All depends upon that word ‘if.’ It is the one condition, it is the positive and absolute prerequisite. He alone can do it. It is His prerogative. No human power can do it. All your efforts will never do it. ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.’ The Son of God became the Son of man, and He might do this very thing; so that the word is doubly true and doubly emphatic, the Son, the Son of God, being the Son of Man. His life and death and resurrection have accomplished this perfect liberation.

II. A new power comes into the man’s mind who has acquired freedom.—The power of the Holy Ghost. His sin remains, but his sin is no longer the ruling power. Now that man has become ‘free,’ he is ‘free’ at the mercy seat, he has ‘free’ access to God, whenever and wherever he likes, by a new and living way; he is ‘free’ to go into the presence-chamber of the King of kings. And that sanctuary is his home. He carries burdens, but he leans so upon Another’s arm that he walks with a firm step and a light heart up the hill. And he sees his way straight before him to an open gate, and within that gate he sees peeps of heaven all along as he goes. And every night he casts his cares, and he washes away the day’s sin, so that every morning he rises ‘free’ and fresh for the day’s duties, or the day’s trials or the day’s mercies. And so that man goes on freer and freer. His heart is free to live or free to die. ‘To live is Christ, and to die is gain.’ But he will never die; he will never die. The Son of Man hath made him ‘free’ of all death. Presently, gently, and with his own willing mind, he will lie down and sleep, and he will awake in Paradise. The grave is no prison-house to him. ‘Free among the dead,’ he rests his appointed time till his Saviour comes.

—Rev. James Vaughan.