The passage: The truth will make you free. Everyone who commits sin is a servant of sin. A servant does not stay in the house forever, but a son does. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed (John viii. 32, 34-36).
I could not make sense of this passage as it stands. A man cannot be in the Father’s house by being sin’s servant, yet here the servant is in the house, and it is the Father’s, not sin’s. The saying looks muddled and the reasoning faulty; he must be there on some other ground. Left to myself I would have given up, suspecting the Lord’s words had been misreported, or that I could not follow an argument resting on several basic truths. But most such puzzles, I am sure, began with a scribe who wrote a worthless note in the margin to explain what he did not understand. The next copyist took it for a missing line and put it into the text, corrupting the saying and obscuring its meaning. How much we owe the scholars who went back and found what was really written! Dr. Westcott’s notes give another reading that he thinks reasonably likely to be the true one. The difference looks small, but it swaps doubtful ore for fine gold. Given the choice, I must hope for what is logical and bright over what is illogical and dull.
The reading I take to be true goes: ‘Everyone who commits sin is a slave. But a slave does not stay in the house forever; a son does. So if the son makes you free, you will really be free.’ The Authorized and Revised versions follow the reading that adds ‘of sin.’ That is true in itself, but I think useless for the argument that follows. I suspect my reading is what suggested to Paul the opening of Galatians 4—words of spirit and life, though misused to draw the doctrine of adoption, which is poison to a child’s heart. The Lord is not saying that the sinner is sin’s slave, true as that is, but that he is a slave—to God, as the argument shows. The two fit: no slavery to sin can stop a man being as much God’s slave as God in his mercy chooses. Sin makes him a slave instead of a child; slavery to sin is his ruin, slavery to God his only hope. God hates slavery and wants children, but he may keep a slave in his house a long time, hoping to wake the slavish nature to the sonship that is its birthright. The slave cannot stay forever, and a father need not keep his son a slave because the foolish child prefers it.
Anyone who will not do what God wants is a slave whom God can compel, however patiently he waits. A man who obeys because he knows this, or fears punishment, is still a slave, though one within earshot of his master. Far above him are other slaves: all for whom God is not everything. They may commit no great sins and may be trying to do right, but while they ‘serve’ God from duty without knowing him as their father and the joy of their being, they are good slaves, but slaves, and bad ones if they stopped trying. They are far less servile than those who obey from fear, yet being slaves they can never do any duty perfectly; they must keep trying, wearily and painfully, knowing that if they stop they are lost. They prove they are slaves by being glad to be adopted by their own father! Where are the sons, then? I know no one yet wholly a son or daughter. There may be such people, but I have not known them, or was not fit to recognize them. I do know some who are enough sons and daughters to be at war with the slave in themselves. Nothing I have seen comes near the glory of sonship, but thousands, a remnant so far, side with the father of their spirits against themselves and all that divides them from the one they have never left, for in him they live and move and have their being. These are not slaves but true, if imperfect, children, fighting beside God against the evil separation and breaking down the dividing wall. Only the rings of their fetters remain. They know the dying slave in them, hate it and struggle to be rid of it. The real slave has no wish to be a child or end his slavery, thinks the child’s claim presumption, clings to the traditional, approved service of forms and ceremonies, does not know the will of the maker of the seven stars and Orion, let alone care to do it, and never asks, ‘Father, what do you want me to do?’ Such people give themselves away by complaining. ‘Do we not well to be angry?’ they say, like Jonah, and being slaves I do not see how they can help it. Sons and daughters stop complaining of life’s hardships—aches, poverty, hunger, rejection by what is called Society—for anyone who believes in a perfect father can hardly blame him for what he dislikes. Ah, friend, you and I may be slaves, but there are sons and daughters of the kind I mean.
Slaves of sin seldom grumble at that slavery. They grumble only at their slavery to God, and at the painful messengers he sends to free them from both. They must be sons or slaves; they cannot get rid of their owner. Whether they deny God, mock him by acknowledging and ignoring him, treat him as a king of whims and formalities, offer him dull services he cares nothing about without troubling to learn what pleases him, or strain to appease him with some yoke the Son never wore or asked them to wear, they are slaves, no less for being God’s, and so thoroughly slaves that they do not want to become sons and daughters and find the good of life where alone it lies. Could a creator make a creature whose well-being did not depend on him? And if he could, would the creature be greater? The slave at heart says at once, like Milton’s Satan, that the one furthest from his maker is freest. That makes existence itself a slavery, with a creator and as many slaves as he cares to make, whose refusal to obey is an unwitting protest against their own nature. To them creation is an injustice: God had no right to make beings less than himself, and since he could not make equals, he should not have made any! Yet they do not complain of being created, only of being expected to act justly. They refuse to obey yet take every advantage they can from the one who made them. They want a freedom unlike God’s, and unknowingly seek a more complete slavery. There is no middle way between perfect harmony with the Father and slavery, obedient or rebellious; and the rebel rebels by the Father’s strength in him. Divine in essence, he flings his existence in the face of his own nature.
Yet their rebellion is in a way his own spirit rising in them against their lies about him. They do not see that if they, his work, are such a joy to themselves, the life that works them could be a greater joy still, for it is nearer to them than they are to themselves and yet reaches infinitely beyond them. No bond is as close as that between creator and created. Where it is denied the split is widest; where it is lived the closeness is beyond words. The rebel’s protest against slavery comes from the truth of God in him, which he cannot wholly shake off, and from a slavishness too low to love truth, a meanness that takes everything and admits nothing, as if his existence shamed him. God’s liberty is in contest with the slavery of the creature who cuts his stem from its root so he can call it his own and love it, and who balances on the wobbly wall of his own being instead of the rock it is built on. He calls ruling himself—the greater governed by the lesser, since the conscious self is smaller than the whole self—a freedom beyond the whole range of God’s universe. If he says, ‘At least I have it my own way!’ I answer: you do not know which way is yours. You have no idea where your urges and likings come from: diseased nerves, the roar of a wandering bodiless devil, an infant hatred in your heart, an ancestor’s greed or lawlessness, or a far-reaching chord from a heavenly orchestra. The moment one reaches your awareness you call it your own way and glory in it! Two devils, one at each ear, could soon have that lordly me willing opposites from one moment to the next, then drive you mad when you found you could not choose a way and its opposite together. It all turns on the relation of creator and created, which few yet feel. To live without the eternal creating life is impossible; freedom from God can only mean blindness to the facts of existence and to the glory of a creature who joins his creator in making him, who wants the loving will that gave him life and choice to finish making him and draw him into the creating heart, so that he lives not by his own poor power but as one with the life behind his life. He knows the Father’s life as the flame of his own, and rejoices that in all that is done in the universe the Father will give him as full a share as perfect generosity can. If you call that irreverent, I doubt you have seen the God revealed in Jesus. But all will be well: the little god of your poor contentment will starve your soul to misery, and terror of eternal death creeping up on you will drive you to seek a perfect father. Hidebound Christians! The Lord is not cramped; you are cramped, in your narrow, unwilling souls. Some of you need shaming; some need the fire.
A reader may cry out, like a child waking from a dream of endless seeking, ‘I am bound like Lazarus in his grave-clothes! What can I do?’ The Lord’s answer, drawn from this saying—which, like a parable, speaks to the conscience and heart rather than the intellect—is this: ‘You are a slave, and a slave has no hold on the house. Only sons and daughters have a lasting home with their father. You must be freed from your slavery, and that is why I am here. If I make you free, you will be free indeed, because the only way I can free you is to make you what you were meant to be: sons, like me. But you must become sons. You must want it, and I will help.’ It is as if he said: ‘You will have the freedom of my Father’s universe, because once free of yourselves you will be free of his heart. Yourselves are your slavery, the darkness you loved more than light. You have honoured yourselves and sought honour from people, not from the Father, so even in his house you have been only passing slaves. We in his family are all one, with no party spirit and no self-seeking. Join us and you will be as free as we are.’
If the poor starved child cries, ‘How, Lord?’, the answer depends on what he means. If he means ‘What is your plan for cutting my bonds?’, the answer may be darker still, and the bonds tighter. If he means ‘Lord, what do you want me to do?’, the answer comes at once: ‘Give yourself to me. Do what I tell you, understand what I say, be my good, obedient little brother. I will wake in you the heart my father put there, the same kind I have, and it will grow to love the Father completely, as mine does, until you are ready to be torn to pieces for him. Then you will know you are at the heart of the universe, of every secret, of the Father. Only then will you be free, and then free indeed.’
Christ died to save us, not from suffering but from ourselves; not from injustice, still less from justice, but from being unjust. He died so that we might live as he lives: by dying to ourselves, as he died to himself, to live to God. Without that we cannot live to God, and whoever does not live to God is dead. ‘You will know the truth,’ the Lord says, ‘and the truth will make you free. I am the truth, and you will be as free as I am. To be free you must be sons like me, what you were created to be: answer as sons to the Father who calls you, fear nothing but evil, care for nothing but his will, and trust him absolutely, for he alone can be trusted.’ Jesus showed us the Father not only by acting and loving as the Father does but by his joy in him and total obedience: the devotion of a perfect son. He is the Son of God because he and the Father are one in thought, mind and heart. The universe hangs on this truth—not the doctrine, but Jesus’ truth to his Father itself—and the freedom of the children, the redemption of their whole world, hangs on their recognizing it, which means becoming true as he is. ‘I and the Father are one’ is the central truth of the universe, and the truth at its outer edge is ‘that they also may be one in us.’
So the only free man is a child of the Father. He serves everyone but can be made the slave of none, being a son of the lord of the universe. By his own truth he is free, a king in himself. The Son rests his claim to royalty on this: he was born, and came into the world, to witness to the truth.
Kingship
The passage: Pilate asked, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say I am a king. For this I was born and came into the world: to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice’ (John xviii. 37).
Pilate asks whether Jesus is a king, after hearing that his kingdom is not of this world. Jesus answers that he is indeed a king, but not as the world understands it. He could have had its rank and rule: with his disciples and twelve legions of angels he could have thrown the Romans into the abyss after the nations they had already tumbled in. He could easily have been the just king the Jews dreamed of—never seen anywhere, yet always haunting the hopes of the poor and their helpers—ruling the nations under Rome from Jerusalem, and not only handing out what people call justice but forcing atonement. But he did not care for government; it would not serve his Father’s aims or satisfy his own heart. What was perfect empire to the Son of God, compared with helping one person love his neighbour and be good like his Father, for that person’s joy and the Father’s glory? That was where true kingship began. He would rather wash his tired brothers’ feet than be the one perfect monarch the world ever had. It was empire he rejected when he told Satan to get behind him like a dog to heel.
What then is the kingdom he cares to reign over, since he says he came to be a king? A kingdom of kings and no other: only where every person is a king does he care to reign, in his Father’s name. As no European king would want to rule cannibals, savages or animals, he has no wish to rule anything this world calls a nation: a king must rule his own kind. He is king not by conquest, inheritance or election but by what he essentially is, and his subjects must be kings in the same way, by nature. In his kingdom no one tries to be above another; ambition is the dirt of the world’s kingdoms. He says: ‘I am a king, born to bear witness to the truth. Everyone of my kind, who is of the truth, hears my voice; he is a king like me, and one of my subjects.’ Pilate, like most Christians today, asks for a definition of truth, in set terms for his intellect, instead of setting about being true. But at once, whether sure the inquiry is useless or planning to resume it once Jesus is freed, he goes out and tells the people he finds no fault in him. Whatever we make of that, he is far less to blame than ‘Christians’ who, instead of working to be pure ‘even as he is pure,’ to look after their brothers and sisters, and to serve God by being honest at work, ‘serve’ him by going to church or chapel, condemning their neighbours’ opinions, or teaching others what they ignore themselves. Neither Pilate nor they ask the one true question: how am I to become a true man, a man worth being? The Lord is a king because his whole life—thought, imagination, will and every smallest act—is true: true to God, because he is altogether his; true to himself, because he forgets himself altogether; true to others, because he will bear whatever they do to him and never stop declaring himself the son, messenger and likeness of God. They will kill him, but it doesn’t matter: the truth is as he says!
Jesus is a king because his business is to bear witness to the truth: all of it, every true relation in the universe, first that his Father is perfectly good, and that the crown and joy of life is to want and do the will of the source of all will and life. That deals hell’s power its death-blow. For hell has one principle: ‘I am my own, my own king and subject, the centre my thoughts go out from and return to. My glory and pleasure are my chief concern; my ambition, to draw all eyes to myself. My kingdom is all I can make acknowledge my greatness; my judgment is the faultless rule of things; my right is what I want. The more I am everything to myself, the greater I am: the less I admit I owe anyone, the more I forget I did not make myself, the more self-sufficient I feel, the greater I am. I will be free to do whatever I feel inclined to do, wherever the inclination comes from. To do my own will, as long as I feel anything to be my will, is to be free, is to live.’ To this principle of hell and of the world, whether preached or only lived, the king gives the flat lie. It is as if he said: ‘I ought to know: I have been from all eternity the son of the one you come from, whom you call your father but will not have as one. I know all he thinks and is, and my perfect freedom, my pure individuality, rests on my having no will but his, because his will is right. He is righteousness itself, love, fairness and self-giving, and he wants his children to be like him. I was born to bear witness to the truth by being it in my own person, the likeness and visible form of the God who is true. My very being is his witness: he is the truth, and I am the truth. Kill me, but while I live I say: as I am, he is. If I said I did not know him I would be a liar, and should a king who has come to say what is true turn his back for fear of people? I say my Father is like me, and you hate to hear it because you are not like him. I look low to you because you judge by show, so you call it blasphemy; but it would be blasphemy to say he is what you imagine, since you love show, power and people’s praise. I do not, and God is like me. Kill me and I will rise again; you cannot keep me dead. Death is my servant; you are its slaves, because you will not be true and let the truth make you free. Bound and in your hands, I am as free as God, because God is my father. I know I will suffer to the death, and if you knew my Father you would be ready for it too. He is my strength. My Father is greater than I.’
Remember, friends, I said ‘It is as if he said.’ I am daring to offer a shadow of the Lord’s witness, surely cast by his deeds and words; if I am wrong, he will forgive me. I fear only that, seeing and writing these things, I may fail to witness and prove a castaway: a talker, not a king; an arguer about the truth, not a disciple ready to die with him; a hater of lies about God who is himself a liar, speaking the truth but not doing it.
So the Lord witnessed to the one God, the Truth, by standing as he was before the eyes and lies of men. The true king stands up true, speaks the truth, and will die rather than lie. His robes may be rags or purple; it makes no difference, though rags are likelier. The Lord was most royally dressed when his robes were a mockery. Of those who witnessed before Christ, some were sawn apart and some conquered kingdoms; it made no difference which.
The truth is God; the witness to it is Jesus. Its kingdom is human hearts. Human happiness is the true God. God’s thought is the truth of everything, and all well-being lies in true relation to him. Whoever answers this with his whole being is of the truth. Whoever knows these things and sees them to be true, but does not run his life, actions, judgments and love by them, is the worst kind of liar: hand, foot and face scorn what his tongue confesses.
The sons of Zebedee and their ambitious mother little knew what the throne of Christ’s glory was, which they begged to share. The king crowned by his witness witnessed most fully when he hung on the cross like a sin, as Paul boldly says: treated as a liar, he still gave his witness. High on the cross, the throne of his witness, he holds to it: ‘I and the Father are one.’ Every mockery endured is a fresh witness. He witnessed far more when Pilate brought him out for the last time, perhaps seated on the judgment seat in mock royal robes, saying ‘Behold your king!’, than if he had sat on the throne of the whole earth. Because of that robe, crown, sceptre and throne of ridicule, he was the only real king who ever sat on any throne.
Is every Christian expected to bear witness? Anyone content to bear none is not in the kingdom of heaven: whoever believes, whoever sees the truth, must live as its witness. Is our life, in bank, farm, home, shop and study, a witness to the truth, or are we petty, self-serving, world-flattering, fawning slaves, who smile when contempt is poured on the truth and say nothing when it is wronged in front of us? We needn’t argue and defend it with logic, but we must show we are on its side. By truth I do not mean opinion: treating opinion as truth wrongs the truth. A soul that loves the truth and tries to be true will know when to speak and when to be silent, but will never look as if it does not care. We need not say all we think, but we must not even look as if we thought what we do not. The girl who said before a company of mocking companions, ‘I believe in Jesus,’ witnessed truly to her Master, the Truth. David witnessed to God, the Truth, when he said that mercy belongs to the Lord, who repays everyone according to his work.