Our Lord's Resumption of Life
Canon Liddon. John 10:11-15 I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd gives his life for the sheep.… I. WAS HIS OWN ACT. Nowhere is the majesty of our Lord's Divine Person more manifest than here. 1. He had power to lay His life down. Could we use His words? There is much in life we can control, but not our way of leaving it. (1) So far from laying it down, we yield it up. It is wrung from us by disease, violence, or accident. No men of this century have wielded more power than the two Napoleons; they little meant to die — the first at St. Helena, the third at Chislehurst. Bishop Wilberforce never entered a railway carriage without reflecting that he might never leave it alive. He was a fearless horseman, but he met his death when riding at a walking pace. (2) But cannot a man lay down his life at pleasure? And did not the Stoics commend it? As a matter of physical possibility, we can; but what about its morality? It is at once cowardice and murder. (3) A good man may find it his duty to accept death at the hands of others. Patriots and martyrs have had moral power to lay down their lives; but they could not control the circumstances which made death a duty. (4) Our Lord's act differs from that of the suicide in its moral elevation (ver. 11), and from that of the martyr in His command of the situation. As the Lord of Life, He speaks of His human life as His creature. 2. He had power to take it again. (1) Here His majesty is more apparent, for He speaks of a control over His life which no mere man can possibly have. When soul and body are sundered, there is no force in the soul such as can reconstitute the body. In the Biblical cases of resurrection, the power came from without. (2) Here barbarism and civilization are on a level. Science has done wonders in bringing the various forces of nature under control; but no scientist cherishes the hope of undoing the work of death, or of keeping it indefinitely at bay. (3) When Christ claims to take His life again, He stands in relation to His life, which is only intelligible if we believe Him to be the Son of God. II. WAS HIS ACT AND THE FATHER'S CONJOINTLY? 1. He is repeatedly said to have been raised by the Father. This was Peter's language (Acts 2:24; Acts 3:15; Acts 4:10; Acts 5:30; Acts 10:40), and Paul's (Acts 13:30-37; 1 Thessalonians 1:10; 2 Timothy 2:3; Romans 4:24-25; Romans 6:4; Romans 3:11, etc., etc.). 2. On the ether hand, our Lord speaks of it as an act distinctly His own (Mark 10:34; Luke 13:33; John 2:19, and text). 3. There is no contradiction here. The resurrection does not cease to be Christ's act because it is the Father's. When God acts through mere men, He makes them His instruments; but the power which effected the resurrection is as old as the eternal generation of the Son (chap. John 5:26). 4. There is a moment when imagination, under the conduct of faith, endeavours, but in vain, to realize when the human soul of our Lord, surrounded by myriads of angels, on His return from the ancient dead, came to the grave of Joseph and claimed the body that had hung upon the cross. III. SUGGESTS THE FOLLOWING CONSIDERATIONS. 1. What Christianity truly means. Not mere loyalty to the precepts of a dead teacher, or admiration of a striking character who lived eighteen hundred years ago. It is something more than literary taste or a department of moral archaeology. It is devotion to a living Christ. If it were a false religion, literary men might endeavour to reconstruct the history of its earliest age. This is what has been done with the great teachers of antiquity, and with Christ. But there is this difference. What Socrates, etc., were is all that we can know of them now. They cannot help us or speak to us. But in the fulness of that power which He asserted at His resurrection, Christ still rules and holds communion with every believer. A living Christianity means a living Christ. 2. What is the foundation of our confidence in the future of Christianity? Based as it is on a Christ who raised Himself from the dead, it cannot pass away. (1) Mankind has lavished admiration on great teachers; but they have died and been forgotten. Their age proclaimed the dust of their writings gold; a succeeding age scarcely opens their folios. Why are we certain that this fate does not await Christ? Because men's loyalty rests not on His words mainly, but in His Person. Christ is Christianity. And why is it that, in thus clinging to His Person, Christian faith is so sure of the future? Because she has before her not a Christ who was conquered by death. (2) Had it been otherwise Christianity might have perished more than once; by the wickedness of the Roman Court in the tenth century; by the hordes of Islam in the first flush of their conquests, or by the great Turkish sultans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; by the accumulated weight of corruption which invited the Reformation; by the Babel which the Reformation produced; by the relation of the Church to corrupt governments: by the dishonest enterprises of unbelieving theologians. Men said the Church was killed under Decius and Diocletian, after the French Revolution. But each collapse is followed by a revival, because Christ willed to rise. 3. What is our hope for the departed? Because Christ lives, they live also; because He rose, they shall rise. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. WEB: I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.