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be hungry or thirsty, to be in the dark, to be outside, to be forlorn, wandered, dead, may know Jesus. This is the one thing of which the evangelist is sure, that there is no human need, not even the profoundest, which He cannot meet of His fulness all may receive, and grace upon grace. In this adequacy to all the spiritual needs of the human race Jesus stands as completely alone as He does in His unique relation to the Father. The Saviour of the World (317, 42, 1247) can no more be conceived to have a rival or a partner than the onlybegotten Son of God.

In examining the first epistle we saw that in the faith of the writer the eternal life which came through Christ was dependent upon His being a propitiation for sins. When he thinks of Jesus as Saviour, it is inevitably in this character that he conceives Him. The view taken in the gospel, it is sometimes alleged, is quite different. Here, it is said, there is no allusion to propitiation; the category which rules the author's thoughts is that of revelation, not that of atonement. Christ brings eternal life by making known the Father, and that is all. But such an interpretation of the gospel is misleading and superficial. There is of course a difference between a gospel and an epistle in every case; the emphasis in them will necessarily fall upon different points. But the fourth gospel, as we have already seen, has more of the character of an epistle than the other three; it is not such an immediate reflection of historical fact; the historical fact is interpreted and illumined in it by the faith and experience of the writer, and as he himself tells us, by the teaching of the Spirit; and unless we could say beforehand

that he was a different man from the author of the epistle ―a proposition which has all evidence and probability against it-the presumption must be that on a question so vital the two books will be at one. This is in point of fact the conclusion to which we are led by an impartial examination of the gospel itself. It is a book of testimony to Jesus, and what is the first testimony it presents? It is that of the Baptist in 129' Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.' If any one believes that the Baptist here is only the vehicle for the faith of the evangelist, the argument is unaffected: a lamb by which sin is taken away is nothing but a sacrificial lamb, and the expression covers precisely the same spiritual debt to Christ and dependence upon Him as is covered by iλaoμós, or propitiation, in the epistle (22, 410). Again, at the close of the gospel, in the Johannine parallel to the apostolic commission in Matthew and Luke, we read: 'He breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit; whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose' soever sins ye retain, they are retained' (2023). Clearly for the evangelist the forgiveness of sins lies at the heart of the gospel with which the disciples were entrusted as representatives of Jesus, and like everything else in the gospel it must be due to Him.

But not only is this the case, it may be further shown that the particular way in which forgiveness is conceived as due to Jesus is the same in the gospel as in the epistle. Sometimes this comes out quite incidentally, and apart from any intention of the author. It is enough to recall, in illustration, his comment on the

counsel of Caiaphas: 'You do not consider that it is for your interest that one man should die for the nation, and not the whole nation perish' (1150). This, the evangelist adds, he said not of himself, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, and not for the nation only but also that He might gather together in one the dispersed children of God. Such a reflection on the brutal or cynical policy of the high priest could never have occurred to any one unless it had been divinely true for him that the death of Jesus was the life of the world. Nay, unless this had been an element of the truth in which as a religious man he lived and moved and had his being, so that it was always present to him without deliberate reflection, it is impossible to see how his comment on Caiaphas should have originated. But this is only another way of saying that the death of Jesus has in the gospel the same place in the writer's faith as it has in the epistle.

As illustrations of the significance which he assigns. it in a more conscious fashion we may refer to the great sacramental discourses in the third and sixth chapters, and to the emphatic words about the water and the blood in 1934. It cannot be doubted that the last are to be interpreted in the same sense as the corresponding words, which have a similar and at the first glance a puzzling emphasis, in the epistle (5o: see above, p. 84). There is a reference in both places to the Christian sacraments of Baptism and the Supper which are in the writer's thoughts all through chapter 3 and chapter 6. If we look at chapter 3 connectedly, we see that the death of

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Christ comes into it precisely as it does into the epistleindeed, precisely as it does into the epistle to the Romans. Nicodemus is being taught that we must be born again. The necessity of the new birth is the earthly thing which every one might be presumed to understand out of his own experience: who has not sighed to be another creature than he is? The heavenly thing which it is so hard to understand that the speaker may well despair of finding faith for it, is the possibility and the method of the new birth. No one can explain this heavenly thing but Jesus, and he does it in two sentences. One is that in which he describes it as a being born of water and of the spirit, where there is a reference, which it is not possible for the present writer to question, to Christian baptism and to the reception of the spirit which was its normal accompaniment in the apostolic age. The other is that in which he says, 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth may in Him have eternal life.' Apart from the suggestion of the figure, we know what the evangelist meant by the lifting up of the Son of Man: Jesus used this word, he tells us plainly elsewhere (12), to signify by what death He should die. Unless we are prepared to accuse the author of a rambling incoherence, and of tumbling out sentences which have no connexion with each other and could never find an intelligible context in the mind of his readers, we shall remember that the baptism alluded to in ver. 5 is baptism in the name of Jesus, and specifically, as ver. 14 reminds us, in the name of Jesus who died for us upon the Cross. It is baptism, as

Paul expresses it, looking to His death (Rom. 63). The new birth is mysterious, but not magical. As the evangelist understood it, in its specifically Christian character, it is normally coincident with baptism; it is an experience which comes to men when in penitent faith they cast themselves upon the Son of God uplifted on the Cross-in other words, when they commit themselves to the love which in the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world by becoming a propitiation for it. Apart from such a combination of ideas, the discourse with Nicodemus is chaotic and unintelligible, and the mere fact that it is thus made lucid and coherent is sufficient to vindicate this construction. It secures for regeneration a genuinely Christian character by making it depend upon the death of Jesus, and it only gives to that death in this passage the significance claimed for it from 1 29 to 19 34.

Mutatis mutandis, all that has been said of the third chapter in John may be said of the sixth. The Supper is in the author's mind in the one as Baptism is in the other. The subject is Jesus as the bread of life, and the burden of the discourse is put with the utmost generality in ver. 56: As the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so he that eateth me, he shall live because of me.' But the evangelist passes, voluntarily or involuntarily, into the liturgical terminology of the sacrament when he speaks of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man; and once this is recognised, there can be no question as to the reference of such words. Their reference was fixed in the Christian community before this gospel was written, and

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