Section VIII

the withdrawal of Jesus into retirement again. retrospect of the evangelist john upon the ministry of the lord

(Luk 21:37-38; Joh 12:37-50)

For two successive days, Christ has sojourned from morning to evening in the temple, and taught. The people had already become accustomed to look for Him daily in the temple again. And thus the crowds set out on the Wednesday once more to seek Him in the temple, and to hear Him. But on this occasion they sought Him and waited for Him in vain; Jesus came no more to the temple.

The Evangelist John expressly declares that Jesus had at this time gone forth from the temple; that He had withdrawn Himself from the people, and gone back into retirement. The reason was, as we have seen, that the leaders of the people had mistaken, tempted, and rejected Him in the temple. In that rejection, He was banished from the national interest as it now subsisted. His prophetic mission to Israel was fulfilled. That the people in the mass were always glad to hear Him, was no longer the consideration; for it was necessary for Him to conceive of the people as it stood to Him legally, and as it was represented to Him by its magistrates. Moreover, it had become quite evident to Him, that at the decisive moment the people would hold and act together with its rulers, according to its external and legal character, in confirming the rejection of His person.

He had now also been separated from the people as Prophet, since He had announced to them the judgment. Had He no longer been linked to the people by another tie than that of His prophetic character, He would probably have returned no more to the city. Hence, therefore, arose a solemn pause, in which Christ had withdrawn Himself from the people. For them it had now become a question whether they should look upon Him again.

The Evangelist John avails himself of this pause to cast a retrospective glance upon the entire ministry of Christ in Israel up to its mournful issue, and upon the causes of that issue.

Although He had done such wonders before their eyes, laments the faithful disciple, yet they did not believe in Him. He points, on the one side, to the entire development of Christ’s life, with the most various manifestations of His glory. On the other side, He indicates the decided unbelief which was generally displayed among the people when Christ discovered to them His glory.

But the profound spirit of the disciple is comforted, in respect of the awful misconduct and disaster of His people—in God. He looks upwards from the guilt of men to the purpose of God, as He adds, ‘That the saying of Esaias the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?’ (Isa 53:1). The prophet Isaiah had already experienced that only a few acknowledged the Word and the Spirit of God in the preaching of the prophets, and surrendered themselves faithfully to the living call of God therein, and that only a few were willing to understand and lay to heart the arm of the Lord—His judgment in the visitations which the prophets announced and interpreted; so few, indeed, that it might almost seem as if there were none at all. It was actually this perception which gave him the feeling of the sufferings of the prophetic character, in which the Spirit of the Lord formed the vision of the great suffering Prophet—the sorrowing Messiah. But the disciple knew that in this complaint the prophet had expressed a theocratic fact of all times, which must needs be fulfilled in the largest measure in the life of Christ; yea, a fact which must directly lead to the suffering of Christ. He proves himself to be a master in the interpretation of Scripture, by quoting in this reference the saying wherewith Isaiah announces the suffering Messiah. He has already, in the second place, intimated wherefore the Jews did not believe,—to wit, because the arm of the Lord was not revealed to them. If man is to believe on God’s word, his soul must first be shaken and possessed by God’s deed. The power of God, in the energy that accompanies His word, must make itself known to him from heaven.

Thus therefore,¹ explains the disciple, they could not believe. The arm of the Lord had not been revealed to them. He explains this fact now in its complete and heavenly importance, as he continues: ‘For again Esaias said, He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.’² Here, however, it might have readily been objected to the Evangelist, as our critics of to-day observe, that the prophet had indeed spoken of a hardening of his people in his times, but that he could not also have spoken it of the time of Christ. The Evangelist does not question the reference to that historical circumstance, but he does not therefore forego in the least the consequence that might be deduced from it. In this sense he observes, ‘These things said Esaias, because he saw His glory, and spake of Him.’

At his call to the prophetic office, Isaiah had a wondrous vision. He saw the glory of the Lord. It was the glory of the Self-revealing! of Him who lowered Himself with His throne to the temple of God, surrounded with the symbols of His revelation,—thus a vision of God as He represented Himself to the seer, conceived in the way of His incarnation; and therefore a vision of Christ. Isaiah thus beheld the glory of Christ in the spirit; he beheld the King. In the light of this glory, moreover, and in contrast with it, was revealed to him the sinfulness of his own nature,³ his inability to convert the people, and thus also the deep immorality of his people, and the assurance that they would only still more harden themselves against his preaching.

Since, then, Isaiah obtained this glimpse into the hardening of his people, by seeing them in the light of Christ’s glory—in the light of the thrice holy One,—it is plain that he expressed his judgment upon the people—in substance, upon the Jewish people-as it would continue to harden itself against the word of God, till the time of Christ, rather than upon the people of his time alone. Thus, as on one side, in the spirit of vision, he saw Christ in His glory, so, on the other side, he saw the people as they appeared in this light, and blinding themselves against it. His words are thus always capable of being referred, first of all, to his own contemporaries; but they are (in accordance with their prophetic nature) words which, in the highest sense, have the life of Christ in view, and have been fulfilled in Him.

Thus Isaiah had already experienced, that his people were not only blinded and hardened against his prophesying, but that it was actually the effect of this prophesying to complete that blinding and hardening. And nevertheless, he knew that he had been commissioned by the omniscient God. And thus it was also certain in his mind, that it was God’s counsel and decree that this blindness should come upon this people; and at the same time it was manifest to him also that this decree was a judgment.

First of all, it is the guilt of man which results in this incapacity to recognize the divine. But then it is a divine decree that this incapacity must increase, even to the blindest rejection and denial of salvation. Then it is an acknowledged general historical law of God, that sin at once and always results in blindness, helplessness, and servile fear—that it must thus beget the principles of threefold deeper sinfulness. Moreover, it is further a special law of God in history, that salvation is presented to the hardened sinner, and that thereby the process of his destructive career is hastened.

This rolling wheel of advancing induration can only be brought to a stand-still in an abyss of guilt and misery: this wheel, in which judgment is ever anew entangled with sin, and sin ever anew entangled with judgment—in which all salvation is changed into doom; so that at length, even out of judgment, salvation may proceed.

The judgment of God, which the prophet Isaiah recognized, in the hardening of his people, illustrates to him the dark decree of God in this hardening, and makes it appear to him as a pure revelation of righteousness. In this righteousness appeared to him thus the terrible flame of God, which, as light, illuminated God’s dark decrees upon Israel, and, as fire, consumed the dark guilt of the people.

As this consolation was fitted for the day of Isaiah, so, according to the meaning of his word, it is still more fitted for the day of Christ. And as the eagle spirit of an Isaiah could find a melancholy consolation for the hardening of his people, in this holy and heavenly depth of the righteous counsel of God; so still more, in the light of the new covenant, can John, kindred as he is in spirit to Isaiah, the eagle of the evangelic history.

The Evangelist expressed a general judgment upon the people, as represented by its rulers. This sentence might now be misunderstood, in the feeling that generally the rulers in Israel had received no impression at all, no warning of the glory of Christ. But to such a misunderstanding he opposes himself, with an observation which is to define his sentence more closely: ‘Nevertheless among the chief rulers also many believed on Him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue (excommunicated): for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.’ This is scarcely said of Nicodemus and of Joseph of Arimathea; although their lengthened restraint by the power of that motive testifies what a number of men, less noble and less endowed with grace among their fellows in dignity, fell thereby into a ruinous snare. John had looked more deeply into the dispositions which actuated the circle of the Sanhedrim than the other disciples. He had been known in the family of the high priest. He knew what a favourable impression the personality and ministry of Christ had made in the circle of the leaders of the Jewish people. But he knew also how strongly the Pharisaic institution ruled in them, and how much the judgment of orthodoxy and heresy, of honour and shame, was decided in accordance with its dull and slavish spirit. That spirit had long ago established the law, that whoever should acknowledge Christ, should be liable to excommunication; and the minds of the Jews, even the most eminent of them, were more afraid of the disgrace attached to excommunication, than of its civil disabilities. Thus, even many of those rulers who had received an impression of the glory of Christ, tremblingly held back from a surrender of themselves to His communion, because this would have drawn upon them their excommunication on the part of the Pharisaic interest. They shuddered thus at the ignominy of apparent heterodoxy to which they must have been subjected, if they had been willing to live for the true spiritually living orthodoxy, for the faith in Christ: they chose the honour (the δόξα) of men, thus also the orthodoxy of men; and therefore gave up the honour which is with God, in surrendering the truth, which, even according to their knowledge, was orthodoxy before God. Thus also, it was the fear of the Pharisaic institutions which completed the judgment in Israel, and brought the Lord to the cross.

It is the peculiar nature of Pharisaism, as it continues immortally to appear in a hundred forms throughout history, that in the alliance of spiritual indolence with the life of the people, it stamps as scholastic decrees the impure notions of the people, which are always deposited upon the pure doctrines of revelation and the doctrinal determinations of the Church, and gradually forms them into institutions and traditions which it vindicates as the highest expressions of orthodoxy; while precisely those notions which are generally established in the mind of every people, whether Gentile or Jew, are therefore charged with superstition and with utter heresy. These institutions, moreover, it strives to establish as an inviolable law for all spirits; and for that purpose it draws into its interest the same slavish popular spirit which has produced them; summons it to the highest chair of judgment to decide upon doctrines, in order with its help to condemn all purer apprehensions and representations of revelation which oppose its institutions. But the fearful authority which it wields in this direction terrifies most spirits into a totally slavish attitude; and even many who have the beginnings of a better knowledge, allow themselves to be startled by its ban to such a degree, that they forego the truth, and the honour which is with God, in order to vindicate the honour which is among men, in feigned surrender to these institutions.

But those ambitious ones were all the less capable of becoming associates of Christ, that He, in His whole Spirit and ministry, set forth the direct contrast to their ambition—that He, in perfect sincerity, sought not the honour that is from men, but the honour that is from God; yea, the honour of God. Thus John now represents Him, in opposition to His ambitious despisers. Jesus cried, and said, ‘He that believeth on Me, believeth not on Me, but on Him that sent Me. And he that seeth Me, seeth Him that sent Me.’ This He declared often and solemnly; this He again and again affirmed. Thus faith in Him, He declared, must necessarily lead to the purest faith in God; and if any one looks on Him, and fully acknowledges Him in the Spirit, he shall know that He with perfect transparency and likeness reveals the Father: it must happen to him that contemplates Him, that the human nature in its temporal form will pass away from his sight, and he shall behold through Him only the Father in heaven. Thus, moreover, there is no difference between faith in Him, and the simplest faith in God, or rather, faith in Him is the medium of pure faith in God; and thus also His manifestation, His honour, forms not the slightest shadow which might darken the honour of God; rather is it His honour to reveal the honour of God. Thus He was opposed in perfect nature and glory to those who polluted faith in God by faith in their institutions; who disturbed and depraved it; who made, with their honour and their respectability among men, a dark cloud, which could not but obscure the pure bright form of the honour of God.

The Evangelist prosecutes this fundamental thought of the manifestation of Christ, that it led everything back to the Father still more closely, by connecting therewith His words in significant expression, according to His own lively remembrance of them.

‘I am come a light into the world,’ said He, ‘that whosoever believeth on Me should not abide in darkness.’ Even as the visible light of heaven does not make itself visible, but enlightens that which is visible; so Christ, as the pure divine light of heaven, glorifies the Father and enlightens the world, in order to lead back mankind out of the darkness of unspeakable spiritual entanglement of self and the world, to the pure recognition of God and all things in Him.

Thus would He become to the faithful the fuller light of the world, not a world shadow, as every selfish personality forms it. Nay, He explains further. Even the unbelieving, who hear His word and will not receive it, He will not judge of Himself, and in His historical manifestation. He will erect no special worldly court against them; for he is not come to judge the world, but to save the world. Rather shall that man that rejected Him be judged by His word which he has heard from Him, and has not received. This word shall judge Him at the last day. Thus, in His judicial ministry, He will do nothing beyond the efficiency which resides in His word in the eternal truth, as He has announced it. The word of Christ alone—which the unbeliever has once heard, and has regarded as an empty sound, as a voice gone forth and soon forgotten—shall, in the imperishable heavenly power of its truth, pursue him, whisper, echo, and resound after him, until in the last day it breaks over him in the thunder of a doom of condemnation, bearing just the same testimony, as the sentence of the truth coming into manifestation, which separates the believing and the unbelieving.

Moreover, Christ declares this imperishable and judicial power of His word, just for the reason that His word is just as free from individual arbitrariness, and from the false legal character, as His appearance and His entire nature. ‘For I have not spoken of Myself; but the Father which sent Me, He gave Me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak.’ With this declaration we receive a considerable disclosure of the purity and subtlety, of the infinite certainty, of the divine consciousness in Jesus. It was thus engaged in every word that He spoke, as a clear internal law of life received from the Father. He spoke every word according to its meaning, and according to its expression, with the consciousness that so it had been committed to Him of the Father. He knew, in expressing Himself thus upon this unutterably subtle mystery of His inmost life, that He had thus hitherto spoken every word by the commission of the Father; and that, for the time to come, He would continue to speak every word in similar purity, by the Spirit and law of the Father. This is the most perfect union, and the most perfect freedom—an infinitely pure and appointed life of the Son in the Father. In this divine faithfulness, moreover, He has the consciousness that this divine law of life is the assurance of His life-giving nature. ‘I know,’ says He, ‘that His commandment is everlasting life.’ In this everlasting life, which is one with the eternal certainties of the life of God, He is involved; from it, He speaks every word of His, diffusing eternal life. When, then, this eternal life in His word comes to judgment upon a man, it comes to this judgment on His behalf, although, by its light, it reveals eternal death, which he has himself chosen for himself.

The Evangelist closes all these sayings of Christ comprehensively with the words: ‘Whatsoever I spake, therefore, even as the Father said unto Me, so I speak.’

Thus John conceived and recognised the Lord; thus he understood His assertions about His own nature. In His whole nature he found no trace of arbitrariness, egotism, worldly pretension, or dogmatism, but the pure image of God—the evident pure light of God glorifying God and the world in its simplicity. And thus he found in His word no falsely positive particle, and no false sound, but the simple call of God—the perfect echo of the pure creation—the pure word of everlasting truth—the everlasting life of all God’s law—the divine law of all everlasting life—everlasting life itself; thus, therefore, the word of enlightenment and enfranchisement for every human heart which seeks its honour in the honour of God, and not its glorification in the false glorification of men. But because he thus recognised the Lord, and understood His word in the pure ideality of a great mission of God, of the perfect revelation of the Father, therefore he also comprehended every expression of Christ concerning His vocation, and His relation to the world, according to its innermost significance, and was able to give to it this concentrated expression.

Moreover, he can thus console himself with this remembrance during a pause wherein Jesus, despised and rejected by His enemies, left the temple and went back into retirement. He knows that Jesus can go back pure to His Father, since He has purely fulfilled the mission of the Father, and that of His entire ministry nothing is lost, because it is wholly discharged in God. He knows also that the despisers of Jesus have not to do with the personality of Jesus as it appeared in the form of a servant, passing through the world and time; but with the eternal word of God which He has spoken, with the great eternal reality, yea, with God Himself, whose judgments surround and enclose all their guilt, just as formerly the fire of God blazed around and through the burning bush. But the most consolatory fact which supports him in this mournful consideration, is the certainty that Christ has redeemed and led back himself and his kindred out of darkness to a walk in light.

He saw a judgment in the separation of Christ from the temple institution of His people; but he acknowledged this judgment, in its pure spirituality, altogether as a judgment of God. Therefore the entire work, the entire mission of Christ, stands to him in the purest ideality or sanctity; and it is just this view that he set forth in his retrospect of the prophetic ministry of Christ.

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Notes

1. Among the interpreters of John in later days, the view has more and more prevailed, that John is recapitulating the previous ministry of Christ in the section here considered. The last objections of Strauss and De Wette to this view have been set aside by Schweizer (p. 12) and Tholuck. Compare the latter on the passage (p. 301). As to the Aorist forms which occur in this section, Tholuck observes: ‘There is not the smallest objection to taking the Aorist as the pluperfect, especially in recapitulating; yet the Aorists may be considered, without hesitation, as narrative. It is, indeed, confessed that the Greeks, according to Kühner (ii. p. 76), use the Aorist when they speak of an appearance often perceived in the past.’ The fact here is, perhaps, that John represents briefly, as a historian, the ministry of Christ in its outlines; and, indeed, as pure ideality, in opposition to the false positive institutions of the Jews who put Him to death.

2. In the above citation and confirmation of the difficult passages in John, there has been often sought a confirmation of the harsher doctrine of predestination,-often, indeed, under the false supposition that John intended to represent the hardening of the Jews as having been caused by Isaiah’s prophecy. Lücke remarks (ii. p. 536): ‘Strict monotheistic Hebraism, which makes no distinction between the mediate and the immediate,—the divine causation and permission,—absolute decrees and God’s ordinance as related to human freedom,—refers evil and wickedness also to the divine causality. But Scripture contains everything to exclude the misunderstanding that God is the effective origin of evil.’ It may be asked here, first of all, in this respect, which is right; whether the Old and New Testament view of the relation referred to, or the modern estimate of it, which would place permission in the place of causation? But before all things, the meaning of the passages of Scripture referred to should itself be accurately settled. Scripture scarcely refers evil immediately, and as such, to the divine causality. Between suffering and evil there is an indissoluble relation: evil in itself is the perverted nothingness which the will consummates in sinful self-determination. Suffering, however, is the manifest working out of evil in substantial life; and thus is itself substantial. But for that very reason it is, moreover, no pure, simple, true working out of evil. It is not only its result, but rather the reaction against it. Suffering, as the substantial phenomenon of evil, is not only God’s permission, but also God’s ordinance, because it comes into the sphere of the substantial as a reaction against evil in its pure spiritual form. But none the less, we have no hesitation in characterizing evil, although modified a thousandfold when apparent, and therefore also existing in the substantiality of suffering, unconditionally as evil,—for instance, a murder, a war, and the like; and we are justified in so doing, so far as we regard in these manifestations of evil, the evil acts of will which produced them. But just as, in this case, we have no hesitation in losing sight of the suffering as caused by God in human sin, so the Holy Scripture has just as little hesitation in losing sight of the sin in the suffering—and, indeed, with equal justice. But inasmuch as it characterizes such sufferings as are from God constantly as judgments, it refers definitely enough to sin as not being from God. From the depth and energy of its divine consciousness results its expression in the manner referred to: it knows that God rules throughout the whole region of the substantial, not merely as permitting, but as effecting; whereas this is denied if suffering is always ready to be called evil. But the manifest sin which is neutralized by its result, is never regarded under the aspect of suffering as judgment upon the vanity of the heart which originated the sin. But how often must the sense of God’s rule in the world suffer, if, in all the events in the world’s history which have resulted from evil, the control of God is only acknowledged as permissive, not as effective.⁴

1) The διὰ τοῦτο is perhaps not to be referred to the following ῦτε,, but to what precedes. Moreover, not to the ἵνα, but to the τίνι ᾳπεκαλύφθη. The second place specifies the ground of the first, and the second citation from Isaiah is intended to explain this place.

2) Isa. vi. 10, freely quoted, and strictly agreeing neither with the Hebrew nor with the Septuagint. In respect of the difference between the Hebrew and the LXX., compare Lücke, in loco

3) Isa. vi. 5.

4) [Augustin s remarks on the passage are a fine sample of his exposition (Tract, in Joan. 53, 4). In reply to the objection mentioned above, he says, ‘Quibus respondemus, Dominum proescium futurorum per Prophetam prædixisse infidelitatem Judseorum; prsedixisse tamen, non fecisse. Non enim propterea quemquain Deus ad peccandum cogit, quia futura hominum peccata jam uovit. Ipsorum enim prsescivit peccata, non sua.’—ED.]