57 - John 16:20

’Verily, verily I say unto you, That ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice; and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.’ -John 16:20. The hour was now at hand when Jesus was about to enter into that great agony which had been distinctly before him ever since he had entered upon his ministry, and to which he had made from time to time ominous reference; the hour of the power of darkness; the baptism of anguish wherewith he was to be baptized; the tribulation through which he was to pass to the crowning tribulation and humiliation of the cross; the great and terrible eclipse which his glory was to undergo; the obscuration of the Sun of Righteousness; the spoliation of the King of glory. The hopes and machinations of his enemies among the Scribes and Pharisees, the Herodians and Sadducees, the lawyers and elders, the priests and princes, were to be crowned with a victory that they had scarcely dared, in their most sanguine moments, to anticipate. They were actually to get the upper hand of Jesus of Nazareth; not by force but by surrender; he with all his Divine powers was to pass into their absolute power, and all his influence over the people was to be crumpled up like a piece of worthless paper, so that men should stand still and see them accomplish all they wished without a thought of interposition. The accumulated treasures of their malevolence, baffled and thwarted during all these years by the irresistible ascendency of his character, his words and his works, were to be poured fully out on his unprotected head. He was to be a defenceless lamb in their hands, a speechless, passive lamb. They were to be allowed to show him to men as a deceiver, an impostor, a blasphemer, a felon; to mock him, spit upon him, smite him, scourge him, strip him, and crucify him in the company of notorious malefactors. The prince of the power of the air was to obtain his desire, and have entire control (more complete even than his control over the ancient servant of God, righteous Job) over the Son of God, who had presumed to lift up a banner against the empire of the god of this world. All this anguish and agony, and wrath and humiliation, and darkness and laceration, and defeat and extinction, all this complicated horror was before Jesus, and yet he occupies himself in this parting scene with his disciples, with the suffering which they were to experience!

Herein is love. Having loved his own in the world, he loved them unto the end; up to the very moment when he passes into the hands of his enemies, he concerns himself solely about his disciples! Look through all the loving words of these divine chapters, and see how he occupies himself solely with them and their needs and their difficulties. When he thinks of his own tremendous overthrow, his solicitude is for the way in which they will be affected by it. "Ye shall weep and lament, ye shall be sorrowful;" this is the picture which fixes his gaze, and this is the catastrophe under which he wishes to sustain them so far as may be. There is indeed a brighter picture beyond, and he wishes much that they could have faith to look to it in the hour of their dismay and grief. If they could only carry with them to the scene of their great defeat and their enemies’ triumph the assurance that the defeat was only temporary, only apparent, and that in fact it was simply a means of purchasing such a world-wide and glorious victory as eye had not seen or heart conceived, then indeed they would have been mightily sustained under the burden of sorrow. But the present has a power which the future cannot touch. The mother knows, when the pangs of parturition come upon her, that a child is to be born into the world; but the joy of that future belongs to the future, the pangs of the present have the mastery; the sufferer may be so mastered by the suffering that no anticipation of joy can for the time find any place. Thus would it be with the disciples when they should see their Divine Master pass along his Via Dolorosa to Golgotha, the place of skulls. What could their poor faith do in the hour when Jesus, with a great cry, should give up the ghost and leave them but his dead crucified body? One fact would take possession of all the faculties of their souls, and darken the face of universal things; the fact that Jesus in whom they had so implicitly trusted was dead and gone.

They had followed him confidently, believing that he would guide to the ivory palaces of Messianic glory, and just when their feet should be on the threshold of the heaven-descended mansion of the King of saints, the ground caves in, and they sink into a horrible pit, and see their jeering enemies gazing at them from the brink. With them indeed, in that horrible pit, are many precious words of the Saviour, assuring them that the hour of darkness, the night of misery shall pass, and something better than all their hopes dawn upon them. But unbelief has the field to itself; and those very words that should be precious are simply agonising by the awful contrast which present realities offer. But Christ’s "verily" of the suffering and of the night is not more invincible than his "verily" of the joy and of the dawn. If their sorrow forbids them to remember the promises, their joy shall forbid them to remember the sorrow. It shall be joy that no man can take from them. Men have taken their Christ from them, and they seem to have lost him utterly; but their Christ shall arise again, and no man shall evermore have power to come in between them and him; he shall be theirs for ever, and joy shall be theirs for ever. Delivered from that horrible pit, what trial shall their faith need fear henceforward? They are prepared to face the Neros of the world, and all the power of the adversary.