This quite upsets our common ideas about the centre of things down here.
We cla.s.s London and New York as the great financial centres; Paris and Berlin as the great fashion and military centres. Rome is the centre of authority of the Catholic Church, and St. Petersburg of the Greek Orthodox. The Man who holds all power in His hands, and on whose word everything depends, quietly brushes all this aside with scarce a move of His hand. The earth-centre of things is the Church. That is, the groups of his followers banded together in various parts of the world.
Sometimes it is seen as a magnificent organization intimately connected with the machinery of government. Sometimes as very small groups of persons with no social standing, despised and reckoned as not worth reckoning with. But this is the thing He is depending on for getting out to His world. All His plans centre here.
He is the light. The light He gave and gives through nature, and within every man"s breast, has been awfully darkened through refusal and neglect to use it, through stubborn self-will. It is so darkened that ofttimes it seems to have been quite put out. His coming amongst us as one of ourselves, living our life, dying on our behalf to free us from sin, rising again victorious over death, sending His Holy Spirit to make all this real and living to each of us,--this is the light at its full shining, the flood-light.
He has made a plan for sending this flood-light to every one in every part of the earth. That plan centres in His followers. He is the light.
The Church is the light-bearer, the candlestick. It is to hold _Him_ up in such a way that men everywhere can get in direct touch with Him. When He is held up, the darkness goes. The darkness can"t stand the light.
This is the immensely significant thing here. This is the sight of Christ needed to-day, a sight of Him as He stands _waiting_ on the Church to carry out His plan for the earth.
The faithfulness of the Church is not measured by compact organization, costly houses of worship, impressive services, eloquent scholarly preaching, and a ceaseless round of organized activities. It can be told only by how much of the spirit of the Christ who died is carried, in the daily life of its individual members, into home and social and commercial circles until men are compelled to feel its power in conviction of the sin of their own lives.
Nor yet is it told by transplanting the western type of civilization to far-away lands, with schools and hospitals and innumerable humanizing influences. All this may be blessed. And it will be blessed and blest.
But it is the incidental thing. It is sure to follow where the Jesus light is allowed to shine clearly through and out. It is quite possible to have these good things without getting the real Christ. It is quite impossible to have Christ Himself without such influences coming, too.
The emphasis must be not on these things, but on Him, Christ. Men need Him. He answers the heart longing, and only He can. He changes the nature, and nothing else is enough. The Church is to take the loving, healing, personal Christ to men in the fulness of His power, and to all men. This is the measure of its faithfulness.
What Christ Sees.
The tremendous question that crowds in here is this, What does this Man of Fire see as He stands among His followers? And He tells us. This is why the vision is given. He wants us to see things as they look to His eyes of flame.
The Man and His message are one thing here. Chapters one, two, and three belong together, and should be held together in our minds. We have put the Man and His message as separate talks to get a clearer grasp of each. But they are _one_.
Now we recall enough of the message to note this. Five-sevenths of the light-holders are in bad shape. The lamps are smoky, badly smoked, and cobwebbed. The light is dimmed. It can"t get out through the lamp. The crowds are standing in the darkness and falling into the ditch by the side of the road.
Two-sevenths let the light clearly out. The others are an intermingling of light and light obscured, but with the obscurity overcoming the other. The net result is an irritating smokiness. And the movement unhindered would naturally be toward a steady increase of smoky irritation and obscurity until no light can get through. This is what He lets us see that He sees.
Now the instinctive thing to do with a smoky lamp irritating nostrils and eyes is to put it out. That is the first instinct. The second is to trim the wick and do whatever else it needs to correct the smokiness.
_Yet He waits._ That first natural instinct is restrained. The candlesticks are not yet moved out of their place. The light still tries to get out through them. The human candlestick may yet do the needful tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and cleaning. With marvellous restraint He _waits_.
It is a tremendous scene that is stretched out here before us,--purity and authority combined in One who is standing in the midst of impurity and failure. The purity is more intense than we can grasp. The authority is greater than any one can realize. The impurity, the failure, are bad clear beyond what we can take in. The whole natural instinct here would be a _cleansing_, instant and radical, a correcting of the evil. Yet He waits. The purity would act through the authority; the authority restrains the purity. Love quietly, strongly holds both in check. This restraint, this inaction is tremendous.
Why this inaction? this restraint? And the answer is simple, and as sweeping as simple. His plan at this stage shall have fullest opportunity. His followers will be given full opportunity to the last notch of time and the latest possibility of their being yet true.
All the intensity of His love, all the eagerness of His expectancy,[63]
all the fulness of His plan for the earth, yes all the millions of the race, all the misery and ignorance, the sin and darkness, the millions of babies being born into wretchedness, and the millions of non-Christian women being held in slavery, and the countless numbers in every land groping along in a darkness that not only can be felt, but that is felt to the hurting point and then past that to the insensitive stupor,--all this waits.
With a heart that feels all that any man is feeling and that breaks under it, He waits that fullest opportunity shall be given His followers to be true. If His Church is set aside it will be only at the last moment when her failure is utterly hopeless. If the candlestick is removed out of its place, it will be only after it has completely removed itself out of all touch with the Light. A candlestick holding out no light is an utterly useless thing to the man in the dark.
It is possible for the Church to be a magnificent organization, an honoured inst.i.tution, exerting immense influence in national politics, enormously rich in gold and in scholarship and in traditions, and even in carrying forward an aggressive missionary propaganda, and yet be faithless to its one mission. If the Church should fail in this its one mission, then the waiting time is over. The way is clear for the next step in the world plan. And a momentous step that would be, beyond our power to grasp. But the waiting time still holds out.
This is the simple, tremendous plea of this new sight of the crowned Christ as He is shown here. The centre of the universe to Him is this earth. The centre of things on the earth is His Church. The centre of things in the Church is its giving Jesus the Light out to all the earth.
And if this be the way things looked to His eye at the close of the first century, how, think you, do they look at this beginning of the twentieth? Has that momentum of movement toward increasing smokiness slacked? Is the waiting time nearly run out?
The present is a momentous time. Even men of the world speak of the world-wide restlessness as pointing to some impending event of world size. And he who is in some sort of simple touch with the spirit world can feel the air a-thrill with the possibility of world events impending, even while he wonders just what and when.
One in the Midst.
It is most striking how it came about that John got this sight of Christ. The change was not in Christ"s presence, but in John"s eyes.
Christ did not come. He was there. John"s eyes were opened. Then he saw Him who stands watching and waiting. _Christ is here._ The Man of Fire and of restraining love is here on the earth in the midst of His Church looking and longing, listening, and feeling.
If only our eyes were opened to see! There standeth One in our midst whom we recognize not. Wherever any company of believers banded together as a Church to worship and pray and break holy bread are gathered, under whatever local name or in connection with whatever Church communion, _He stands in the midst_, this crowned Christ of the Patmos Revelation.
Our eyes need treatment. The hinge of the eyelid is in the will and in the heart. A bended or bending will opens the eye. A brooding heart opens it yet more in spirit vision. Then we shall see Him, _as He is now_ in our midst, waiting our obedience.
Those forty days between the resurrection and the ascension are seen to be ill.u.s.trations of this. One can see through this Revelation sight that this is one of the chief things the Master is teaching as He still lingers on earth in His resurrection body.
Along the old Emmaus road, gathered about the evening meal in the twilight, twice in the upper room at Jerusalem, He appears to little groups of His faithful followers. Their hearts are burning with the thought of Him, they are talking with both tongue and eyes about Him.
But that He is in their midst is the last thing to come into their minds. Then their eyes are opened to see Him in their midst. It was a forty-days" session in their training school. Then He said quietly as His bodily presence goes up into the blue: "Lo! _I am with you all the days until the end._" Their mission and His presence are inseparably linked.
And it is striking again to note how John"s Gospel ends. The others describe the Ascension. John begins his Gospel with Jesus in the bosom of the Father before the world was, and ends with Him walking and talking with a little group of fishermen along the sh.o.r.e of the waters of Galilee"s Lake.
This is what the Church needs to-day, a sight of Christ _as He is now_.
Nothing else can save its life. And nothing less can save its mission from utter impending failure.
And yet while the distinctive message here is for the Church, it is an individual message, too. It is for each of us. I am the Church, as much of it as I am, counted as one. You are the Church. The Church is made up of you and me and the rest of us. I must take this message for as much of the Church as I am. The Man of Fire is depending on me to be a candlestick for His light. It is on me He is patiently waiting to obey as fully as He means I should.
And on you.
A recent incident is told of a man whose name is a familiar one in the financial world, who died a few years ago. He was the executive head of one of our country"s great railways. And a man of remarkable largeness of insight and grasp, and of unusual power of execution. He dealt in hundreds of millions as easily as most of us deal in dollars, and his rugged honesty has never been brought into question. His greatest achievement bulks big in the material structure of one of our great eastern cities.
But his gigantic tasks ran his strength to ebb tide, and then it was seen that the tide was running out. As he lay in the sick chamber a minister called, whose ministry had touched large numbers of the men in the railroad of which the sick man was head, and in the course of conversation tactfully asked:
"Are you a Christian, Mr. Blank?"
"Yes," was the quiet, prompt reply that rather surprised the minister.
"How long have you been a Christian, Mr. Blank?"
"Two days," came the answer as promptly and quietly.
Feeling that there was an interesting story under these answers, the minister gently pressed the question. Then the story came out.
"You know William, who handles freight out here at ----?" the sick man asked.
"Yes."
"He showed me the way."
"William" had been a worthless, drunken man of the "down and out" sort.
He had been converted at some mission and been radically changed. He had gotten employment at one of the freight-handling stations of this railroad system. It was rough, hard work, but he had gone at it earnestly in his purpose to live an honest life. And in his quiet, earnest way he was always seeking a chance to speak to men of Christ as a personal Saviour, until he became known throughout that part of the system for his simple, earnest piety.
As the sick man realized the seriousness of things for him he had sent for this William. The president of the road whose capitalization ran into hundreds of millions sent for the rough-handed freight handler. And William in his simple, earnest way had pointed the sick man to Christ.
And the man of millions had made a new sort of transaction. Christ and he had an understanding.