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 A SIGHT OF CHRIST. 
 
 ^ Sermon 
 
 Preached at St. Margaret's Churcli, on Sunday Evening", 
 March 5th, 1899, by the 
 
 EEV. CANON J. ARMITAGE ROBINSON, D.D., 
 
 Rector. 
 
 " Sir, we would see Jesus." — St. John xii., 22. 
 
 THE occasion was unique. " There were certain Greeks, of 
 them which came up to worship at the Feast. These 
 came then to Philip which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked 
 him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus." 
 
 Note fii'st that the initiative was with them. They desired 
 to see Him : He had not sought them. For His mission during 
 His earthly life was not to them. We do not always sufficiently 
 bear in mind how limited was the scope of our Lord's earthly 
 ministry. He confined Himself, with a few exceptions, strictly 
 to the Jews. He hardly ever stepped outside the narrow 
 boundaries of the Holy Land, whose area is no larger than the 
 county of Yorkshire or the principality of Wales. It was not 
 meet, He said once to a woman that was a Greek, "^ to take the 
 children's bread and cast it to the dogs." He was " not sent but 
 unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." 
 
 And yet He was ''the Son of Man" — the Man for all men. 
 His ultimate purpose, as we saw this morning, was to weld all 
 men into the unity of one. 
 
 He had not sought them : but now they had sought Him. 
 
 In what spirit they had come, we are not told. But it was 
 
 likely that they were serious men. Attracted probably by the 
 
 beauty of the Old Testament scriptures, which had been trans- 
 
 11
 
 SERMON, 
 
 lated into their tongue, tliey had learuccl to reverence the 
 Supreme God of tlie Jewish people, and they had come up to 
 ■worship Him in His great Temple at Jerusalem. And thei-e they 
 ]iad heard of Jesus, the young Prophet from Galilee ; of His 
 Avonderful deeds, of His no less wonderful words. They must 
 by all means see Him and hear Him for themselves. Had he 
 perchance a message which might reach even to theai ? 
 
 He does not refuse them an interview. He recognises the 
 significance of their request ; He feels the uniqueness of the 
 moment. It is one of " the days of the Son of Man,^-* It is a 
 pledge and a prophecy of the future. 
 
 They shall see Him — and that not merely with their bodily 
 eyes. He will open up to them more than a superficial view 
 of Himself. He will let them look into His heart and His life. 
 
 He is near to the end. *' The Feast " which had brought them 
 to Jerusalem was, as it proved, the occasion of His Crucifixion. 
 His Death was, in some sense at least, full in His view. He was 
 facing, hour by hour, that which would seem, when it came, to 
 his nearest disciples the very overthrow and failure of His whole 
 mission. Not a shred of human support would be left to it. All 
 the fabric that He had seemed to be building would come 
 crashing down in a gigantic ruin. He Himself would be shamed, 
 tortured, done to death. 
 
 He knew that He should go through it, and come out on the 
 other side. But others could not grasp this, though He told them 
 of it. 
 
 Out of the depth of what was in His own consciousness He 
 speaks. He shews them Himself: He allows them to see Him. 
 
 His first words, as they met, were indeed such as must have 
 been unintelligible to them. They were scarcely addressed to 
 them, though they were spoken in their hearing. " The hour is 
 come," He said, *' that the Son of Man should be glorified.^' We 
 can see, as we look back, something of what He must have 
 meant. 
 
 12
 
 A SIGHT OF CHRIST. 
 
 Then He directly addresses them, in words which were per- 
 fectly simple, and which in after days must have echoed again 
 ani ag-jiin in their souls. " Verily, verily, I say unto yoic, except 
 a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone : 
 but, if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." It was a parable; but 
 the meaning was not far to seek. The isolated life. He declared, 
 was a wasted life : the only fruitful life is the life that dies. 
 
 A single grain of wheat, shut up in a box, is wholly and utterly 
 useless. You cannot make a loaf of it. It serves no purpose at 
 all. It has grown and swelled and ripened into its present 
 perfection, and the end of it all is that it is perfectly worthless 
 by itself. Nature has wasted her forces : she has produced a 
 valueless product : " it abideth alone." 
 
 But what ''^if it die " ? if it surrender its perfectness to the 
 disintegrating soil ? if it be content to be buried and broken up 
 and decomposed, trusting only to the germ of life which it con- 
 tains ? If it give its life away — " if it die " — then there is a 
 glorious harvest of abundant reproduction. " If it die, it bringeth 
 forth much fruit." 
 
 The lesson was not a difficult one to understand. It was 
 taught, indeed, out of an inner consciousness which they could 
 not penetrate. They could not know as yet how much of His 
 own life He was shewing them. But His words were very 
 simple, and part at least of His meaning was within their grasp. 
 And lest by any chance they should miss it. He went on to make 
 it absolutely clear. '' He that loveth his life loseth it ; and he 
 that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal," 
 
 He has said no more. Ho has merely said over again what 
 He had said before in a figure. The life loved is the life lost : 
 the life rejected, so far as material and transitory interests go, is 
 the life that is saved for the highest ends. 
 
 And He adds to this words which involve the most unhesita- 
 ting claim. He assumes that they desire not merely to see Him, 
 but to serve Him. And they are right in their desfire : for to 
 13
 
 SERMON. 
 
 serve Him is the highest at which they can aim. " If any man 
 serve Me, let him follow Me ; and where I am^ there shall My 
 servant be.'^ They cannot know precisely whither He is going-; 
 hut they must follow Him, and accept the consequences, what- 
 ever they may be. He has told them enough to let them see 
 what sort of path He is likely to tiead. He is going to put His 
 own principle into practice. He is going to die, that in a thou- 
 sand forms He may live. He that wonld serve Him, must follow 
 Him : " it is enough that the servant be as his Master " : 
 " where I am, there shall My servant be.'" But the words are a 
 promise in disguise : and He interprets them as such, when He 
 adds: ''If any man serve ]\[e, him will My Father honour.'^ 
 
 "We need not pursue the conversation further. It becomes 
 more jjurely personal to Himself, and then He turns from Himself 
 to speak to His Father. 
 
 ^Vq hear no more of " the Greeks " who desired to " see 
 Jesus.'' They pass from our view as completely as the Wise Men 
 from the East who came to the Nativity. But like them they 
 were representative of the great outside world which is destined 
 to come to the feet of the Christ. More especially, they repre- 
 sented the Western M'orld : and so they represented ourselves. 
 And the revelation of Himself, which He gave to them, in the re- 
 velation which we need to-day. His words to them are His 
 message to ourselves. 
 
 As they pass from us, we can follow them a little way in our 
 thoughts. They had seen Jesus. They had not been dissap- 
 pointed in their quest : nay, they had seen Him in a fuller sense 
 than they had anticipated. He had told them the law of the 
 highest life; He had made them feel that it was the law of His 
 own life. 
 
 It was certainly very i-emarkable — we can almost hear them 
 
 say, as they ponder His words one with another — it was certainly 
 
 very remarkable. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground 
 
 and die, it abideth alone." That must mean that a life that is 
 
 14
 
 A SIGHT OF CHRIST. 
 
 lived by and for itself^ however perfect and complete and har- 
 monious it may seem, is a life that is barren and unprofitable. 
 "Except it die, it abideth alone: but, if it die — if it die, it 
 bringeth forth much fruit." A paradox truly : but the perpetual 
 paradox of Nature. We see it in the natural world. He declares 
 that it holds also in the spiritual world. " He that loveth His 
 life, loseth it : but he that hateth his life in this world shall keep 
 it unto life eternal." That is the same thing- in other words. 
 But what a philosophy of life ! Surrender is the gate of success : 
 death is the portal of life. 
 
 ''Never man spake like this man ! " And then He seemed to 
 assume that we came because we wanted to be His servants. He 
 laid His strong hand so gently on our shoulders, and claimed us 
 as His own. " If any man serve Me, let Him follow Me : and 
 where I am there shall My servant be." And what a universal- 
 ity in His claims ! Who need be excluded from His service, and 
 from the reward that follows it ? " If avy man serve Me, him 
 will the Father honour." The All-Father is our Father too : and 
 this is the path by which we may find Him. Truly this is " the 
 Way and the Truth and the Life." 
 
 This morning I endeavoured in my first words to you to trace 
 the broad purpose of the life of Christ, as it is indicated in the 
 Gospels. He came to draw all men to Himself: He came " that 
 they all might be one." He Himself was revealed as the new 
 foundation upon which the Unity of Mankind was to be built up. 
 He gathered a few souls together, to be one with Him even as 
 He was one with the Father, and to carry on His work of uniting 
 men by the formation of a visible society, which should expand 
 and expand till it included the whole human race. 
 
 The conception is a large and a mysterious one; and to some 
 of you it might seem to be remote from our common Hfe, to be 
 in curious contradiction with the most obvious facts, and to be 
 little helpful to those who have after all to live in a very imper- 
 fect world. I do not believe that it need be so. Indeed I think 
 15
 
 SERMON. 
 
 that our daily life often suffers from the littleness and poverty of 
 our ideals. Practical people as we are, we are content to aim at 
 that which is less than the highest : and, as we generally find 
 that we hit a good deal lower than our aim in any case, the con- 
 sequence is that we fall very far short of what we might reach 
 if we had courage to aim higher. These large thoughts do us 
 good : they open our hearts, they lift us nearer to God. They 
 supply us with a noble motive; they encourage us with a 
 splendid hope. 
 
 But, lest we should even seem to lose ourselves in vagueness 
 and mystery, I have chosen to-night a very personal subject — 
 the relation of the individual life to the great Purpose of God. I 
 have asked you to be present, as it were, at an interview between 
 Jesus Christ and certain earnest souls who wanted to see Him. 
 We have heard how He talked with them ; how He opened up 
 His own lifers secret in their presence ; how He shewed them the 
 method — the very practical method — by which He sought to 
 make His great ideal an actual reality. We have heard Him 
 saying that a life must die, if it is to rise to all that it is meant 
 to be : that, as in the natural world, so in the spiritual world, a 
 life can reproduce itself it over and over again, if only it is con- 
 tent to die. We have heard Him go on so simply to assume 
 that those who have once seen Him will want to serve Him : 
 that those who have once grasped His method, will wish to 
 follow it out in their own lives. We have almost felt His 
 invisible Hand laid upon our own shoulders, claiming us from 
 this night and for ever to be His servants. 
 
 We cannot see Him with our own outward eyes, as those 
 Greeks saw Him. We cannot follow in His actual footsteps. 
 We sometimes fancy perhaps that, if we shut our eyes tightly, 
 we might call up a vision of Him standing before us, and 
 beckoning to us to come after Him ; and we think that that would 
 indeed be a crisis in our lives, and that then we should be His 
 for evermore. 
 16
 
 A STGnT OF CHRIST. 
 
 Perhaps it may be so for some of us who have emotional 
 natures : but for many of us nothing of the sort will come ; we 
 should even mistrust ourselves if it did. 
 
 Nay, we cannot thus know " Christ after the flesh." But we 
 can follow Him none the less. We can follow Him with our 
 mind : we can understand His method, we can recognise His 
 aim. And we can follow Him with our will : we can determine 
 to choose His aim as our aim, and we can determine to try to 
 put His method into practice. 
 
 With our mind and our will we can love Him, and the rest 
 — the emotional love — may wait. That will come as the crown 
 of all in God's own time and way. He v/as very clear and 
 practical Himself about this matter. 
 
 Listen to Him once again : '' He that hath My commandments 
 and keepeth them, lie it is that loveth Me." Let us thank Him 
 for saying that : it sweeps away so many difficulties. " And he 
 that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, 
 and will manifest Myself to him." That will awaken, be sure of 
 it, the response of love even in your cold heart. 
 
 And once again : " If a man love Me, he will keep My words, 
 and My Father will love hiui ; and we will come unto Him, and 
 make our abode with Him." 
 
 ''Even so, come. Lord Jesus.^' Even so, ''abide with us.'^ 
 
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