Love to the Uttermost | Page 3

was taking that Supper with them before He suffered. He knew that He
would soon depart out of this world unto the Father; His ear was
specially on the alert; His nature keenly alive; His heart thrilling with
unusual tenderness, as the sands slowly ran out from the hour-glass.
It was supreme love.--"Having loved His own that were in the world,
He loved them unto the end." Those last words have been thought to
refer to the end of life, but it surely were superfluous to tell us that the
strong waters of death could not quench the love of the Son of Man.
When once He loves, He loves always. It is needless to tell us that the
Divine heart which has enshrined a soul will not forsake it; that the
name of the beloved is never erased from the palms of the hands, that
the covenant is not forgotten though eternity elapse. Of course Christ
loves to the end, even though that end reaches to endlessness. We do
not need to be assured that the Immortal Lover, who has once taken us
up to union with Himself, can never loose His hold. Therefore it is
better to adopt the alternative suggested by the margin of the Revised
Version, "He loved them to the uttermost." There was nothing to be
desired. Nothing was needed to fill out the ideal of perfect love. Not a
stitch was required for the needle-work of wrought gold; not a touch
demanded for the perfectly achieved picture; not a throb additional to
the strong pulse of affection with which He regarded His own.
It is very wonderful that He should have loved such men like this. As
we pass them under review at this time of their life, they seem a
collection of nobodies, with the exception perhaps of John and Peter.
But they were His own, there was a special relationship between Him
and them. They had belonged to the Father, and He had given them to
the Son as His special perquisite and belonging. "Thine they were, and
Thou gavest them Me." May we dare, in this meaning, to apply to
Christ that sense of proprietorship, which makes a bit of moorland
waste, a few yards of garden-ground, dear to the freeholder?
"Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath
said, This is my own . . .?"

It was because these men were Christ's own, that the full passion of His
heart set in toward them, and He loved them to the utmost bound; that
is, the tides filled the capacity of the ocean-bed of possibility.
It was bathed in the sense of His Divine origin and mission.--The
curtain was waxing very thin. It was a moment of vision. There had
swept across His soul a realization of the full meaning of His
approaching triumph. He looked back, and was hardly conscious of the
manger where the horned oxen fed, the lowly birth, the obscure years,
in the sublime conception that He had come forth from God. He looked
forward, and was hardly conscious of the cross, the nail, the
thorn-crown, and the spear, because of the sublime consciousness that
He was stepping back, to go to Him with whom He realized His
identity. He looked on through the coming weeks, and knew that the
Father had given all things into His hands. What the devil had offered
as the price of obeisance to himself, that the Father was about to give
Him, nay, had already given Him, as the price of His self-emptying.
And if for a moment He stooped, as we shall see He did, to the form of
a servant, it was not because of any failure to recognize His high
dignity and mission, but with the sense of Godhead quick on His soul.
The love which went out toward this little group of men had Deity in it.
It was the love of the Throne, of the glory He had with the Father
before the worlds were, of that which now fills the bosom of His
ascended and glorified nature.
He was aware of the task to which He was abandoning these men.--He
knew that as He was the High Priest over the house of God, they were
its priests. He knew that cleansing was necessary before they could
receive the anointing of the Holy Ghost. He knew that the great work of
carrying forward His Gospel was to be delegated to their hands. He
knew that they were to carry the sacred vessels of the Gospel, which
must not be blurred or fouled by contact with human pride or
uncleanness. He knew that the very mysteries of Gethsemane and
Calvary would be inexplicable, and that none might stand on that holy
hill,