The passage: John says that when he saw him he fell at his feet as though dead, but the Lord laid his right hand on him and said, Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last and the Living One.
Fear is not found only in religion’s first beginnings. While love is imperfect there is room for torment; only love, which alone can fill a heart, casts out fear. What holds in the beginnings of religion holds, in some degree, until the religion, that is the love, is perfected.
The unknown that is yet known to exist will always be more or less formidable. When it is known as immeasurably greater than we and as making demands on us, the more vaguely we grasp the demands the more room there is for anxiety, and a guilty conscience can raise anxiety to terror. The kind and degree of terror depend on the mind that dwells on the Supreme. It needs no exalted idea of God: those fear him most who imagine him like their own evil selves, only stronger, free to work his arbitrary will on them. Thinking him only a little higher than themselves brings no unity with him—who are so far apart as those on the same level of hate and distrust? Power without love and dependence without righteousness wake a worship without devotion, a loathsome flattery. Where the notion of God is better but the conscience troubled, his goodness does little to remove apprehension; the same sense of evil and offence that gave rise to the bloody sacrifice still works in most who call themselves Christians. Naturally, man’s first emotion toward the being he calls God, yet knows so little, is fear.
Where fear can exist, it is well that it should, causing continual uneasiness until nothing less than love casts it out. For one who does not know God and cannot be satisfied with himself, fear of God is as reasonable as it is natural, and serves powerfully to develop his true humanity. Neither the savage nor the self-sufficient sage, whether we call him degenerate or undeveloped, is rightly human; the humanity is there but must be born in each, and for its birth everything natural, fear included, must do its part. Until love, which is the truth toward God, can cast out fear, it is well that fear hold: it is a bond, however poor, between what is and what creates, which can be broken only by tightening an infinitely closer one. God must be terrible to those far from him, for they fear he will do—is doing—with them what they cannot desire and can ill endure. Such as many men are, and all without God would become, they must prefer a devil, for his supreme selfishness, to a God who will die for his creatures and insists on giving himself to them and on their being unselfish and blessed like himself. They must become what is the power and worth of life, or die; the vague sense of this frightens them. They love their poor existence as it is; God loves it as it must be—and they fear him.
Men of low, undeveloped nature hold such false notions of what is good and what the Power requires that they cannot but fear, and their devotion is lost in sacrifices of ingratiation. God takes them where they are, accepts what they honestly offer, and helps them outgrow themselves, to offer the true offering and know him whom they ignorantly worship. He will not abolish their fear except with the truth of his own being; until they apprehend it, he receives their sacrifices of blood, the invention of their sore need, changing only their modes for the time. He destroys the lie that is not all a lie only by the truth that is all true. Though he loves them utterly, he does not tell them there is nothing in him to fear; that would drive them from him for ever. While they remain as they are, there is much in him that cannot but affright them, and they do well to fear him; it is the only true relation between them. To remove that fear other than by letting them know his love with its purifying fire, which for ages perhaps they cannot know, would give them up utterly to evil. Persuade men, while they still love their own will and are slaves to passionate impulse, that fear is vile and an insult to God, who will have none of it—what follows? They will insult God as a discarded idol, a superstition, a falsehood under whose evil influence they have too long groaned. How much will they learn of him then? Nor would the old fear be long in returning, now before powers once thought inanimate and endowed with souls by fear’s imagination: spiritual chaos would come again. God loves righteousness; rather than do an unfair thing he would lay down his Godhead and assert himself in ceasing to be; that his creature might not die of ignorance he died as much as a God could die, divinely more than man can, to give him himself. Such a God may well look fearful from afar to a creature who recognizes no imperative good in himself, fears only suffering, and has no aspiration, only wretched ambition. But as such a creature comes nearer to him in whose likeness he was begun—as the eternal right begins to disclose itself, as he becomes capable of the idea that his kind belongs to him as he could never belong to himself, and nears the capacity to see that his individuality is perfected only in love of his neighbour and his being ends only in oneness with its source (I do not say as he sees these things, but as he nears seeing them)—his terror of the God of his life will abate. Though far from guessing the bliss awaiting him, he draws nearer the goal of his nature, the central secret joy of sonship to a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, does nothing he would not permit in his creature, and demands nothing of him he would not do himself.
The fire of God—his essential being, his love, his creative power—differs from its earthly symbol in burning only at a distance. The farther from him, the worse it burns; as we turn and approach him the burning turns to comfort, which will grow to such bliss that the heart cries out, with a gladness no other can reach, that it desires no one in heaven or on earth but him. The glory of being, shining on the corrupt and deathly, must like the sun consume the dead. What it burns in the soul is not of the soul, yet the foul growth feeding on the soul clings so close that the burning is felt through every spiritual nerve. When the parasites are consumed—when the man yields his self and its low world and returns to his lord and God—what he felt only as burning he will feel as love, comfort, strength, an eternal ever-growing life. For now he lives, and life cannot hurt life, only death, which ought to be destroyed. God is life essential and eternal, and death, which is corruption living only in the decay of life’s things, cannot live in his sight. If any child of the father finds he is afraid before him, that the thought of God is a discomfort or a terror, let him not stop to dress but rush in his nakedness, a true child, from his own evil and God’s terror into the salvation of the Father’s arms, the home he was sent from that he might learn it was home. If an evil father is won by the sight of the child he was vexed with running to his embrace, how much more will the Father of our spirits, who seeks nothing but his children themselves, receive him with open arms!
Self, accepted as the law of self, is life’s one demon-enemy; God is the only Saviour from it and from all that is not God, for God is life and all else is death. Life destroys death and all of death’s kind.
When John saw the glory of the Son of Man, he fell at his feet as one dead. Whether he saw him in what we vaguely call a vision, or as humanly as when he leaned on his bosom, I do not care to ask: it would take all glorious shapes of humanity to reveal Jesus, and he knew the right way to show himself to John. It seems to me that the words spoken can have come from no mere vision, that the very Lord himself spoke them, while John plainly received them as a message to give again. Points in the description of the Lord’s appearance commend themselves even to our ignorance by their grandeur and fitness. Something akin to terror overwhelmed the three disciples who saw his glory on the mount; but since then John had leaned on the Lord’s bosom, followed him to the judgment seat without denying his name, borne witness to his resurrection, and suffered for him, and was now “in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” Why should he be afraid? No glory even of God should breed terror; when a child of God is afraid, the word Father is not yet freely formed by his spiritual mouth. The glory can breed terror only in one who can be terrified by it, and while he is such it is well the terror be bred and maintained until he seeks refuge from it in the only place where it is not—the bosom of the glory.
One point is not distinguishable in the Greek: whether it means “one like unto the Son of Man” or “one like unto a son of man.” The authorized version has the former, the revised the latter. I incline to the former: John saw him like the man he had known so well, and the dazzling glory—nothing blinds so much as light—made him unsure, not any unlikeness mixed with the likeness.
But the appearance of The Son of Man was not meant to breed terror in the son of man to whom he came. Why then was John afraid? Joy to us that he was, for the words that follow—surely no phantasmic outcome of uncertain vision or blinding terror! They bear the best sign of their source: they must be from the heart of our great Brother, the one Man, Christ Jesus, divinely human!
It was only the imperfection of the disciple, unfinished in faith and so in everything a man needs, that caused his terror. The Lord’s words imply this: he speaks of the very thing that made John afraid as the thing that ought to have taken all fear from him. For what was the glory John saw—the head and hair pouring out radiance, white as white wool, snow-white as his garments on Mount Hermon; his eyes like a flame of fire in the midst of it, and his countenance as the sun shining in his strength; the feet with a darker glow, like fine brass burning in a furnace, a humbler glory than the head’s, as if in memory of his humiliation; the girdle under his breast, golden between the snow and the brass—but the effulgence of his glory who was himself the effulgence of the Father’s, the poor expression of the unutterable truth that was the very reason John ought not to be afraid?—“He laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last, and the living one.”
Our terror must be endless until we come heart to heart with the fire-core of the universe, the first and the last and the living one!
But oh, the joy to be told by Power himself, the first and the last, the living one—told what we can then see must be true, but are so slow to believe—that the cure for trembling is the presence of Power; that fear cannot stand before Strength; that the visible God is the destruction of death; that the one safety in the universe is the perfect nearness of the Living One! God is being; death is nowhere! He told Paul that strength is made perfect in weakness; here he teaches John that weakness, not strength, is what to fear. All appearances of strength that might rightly move terror are false; the true Strong is the One, as the true Good is the One. The Living One has the power of life; the Evil One only the power of death, whose very nature is a self-necessity for being destroyed.
But the glory of even the mildest show of the Living One is such that the dearest of his apostles, the best of the children of men, is cowed at the sight. John has not yet learned that glory is part of his inheritance, that nothing in a man made in God’s image is alien to the most glorious of heavenly shows; so he falls as dead—when lo, the voice of him who was and is and is for evermore tells him not to be afraid, for the one reason that he is the first and the last, the living one! For what shall be the joy, peace and completion of him that lives but closest contact with his Life?—as close as before he issued from it, only infinitely higher in kind, since now it is willed on both sides. He who has had a beginning needs the indwelling power of that beginning to be complete, not merely to his consciousness but in himself, ended where he began, with an “endless ending.” Then he is complete as God is, one with the self-existent. John Boanerges, far from trembling because he on whose bosom he had leaned now stood with the glory of his love streaming forth, ought to have felt the more joyful and safe the more the living one’s strength was manifest. Jesus was never fit to be trusted because he wore the weakness of the flesh, but because he was strong enough to take that weakness as the garment in which his strength could best work; now that strength shone with its own light. Had John been as close in spirit as in bodily presence, he would have fallen at his feet, but not as one dead: as one too full of joy to stand before the life that was feeding his, to embrace and kiss the feet of him who had now, as in a second resurrection from above, arisen before him in yet heavenlier glory.
It is the man of evil, of self-seeking design, not he who would fain do right and submit at once to the Master’s word even in his worst time, who is reasonably afraid of power. When God is no longer the world’s ruler and there is one stronger than he, when there is might inherent in evil and making-energy in what is by nature destruction, then will be the time to dread power. Even then the bad man would have no security against being ground up for some no-idea of the Power of darkness. And then the good, instead of trembling, should resolve with the Lord of light to endure all, to let every billow of evil break on him, and do no smallest ill or tell the whitest lie for God, knowing that territory so gained could be only a province of the kingdom of darkness. If there were two powers, one of evil and one of good, as men in ignorance have not unnaturally imagined, duty would reveal who is born of the good power, while one born of the evil could do nothing but be evil. But Good only can create; and were Evil ever so much the stronger, men’s duty would remain the same: to hold by the Living One and defy Power to its worst, like Prometheus on his rock defying Jove and for ever dying, thus for ever foiling the Evil. Evil can destroy only itself and its own; at worst it could cause a succession of deaths, from each of which the defiant soul would rise to more victorious endurance, until it laughed Evil in the face and the demon-god shrank withered. For those who believe that good is the one power, and that evil exists only because for a time it cannot help subserving the good, what place is there for fear? The strong and the good are one; and if our hope coincides with God’s and is rooted in his will, what should we do but rejoice in the glory of the First and the Last?
The First and the Last is the enclosing defence of the castle of our being; the Master is before and behind, began it and will see it endless. He garrisons it; he is the living, live-making one.
The reason for not fearing before God is that he is all-glorious, all-perfect. Our being needs such a God; children can do with nothing less than the Father, the infinite one. Beyond all the order the intellect can descry, the imagination devise, the hungriest heart long for or the fullest heart thank for, as the heavens are higher than the earth, rise the thought, the creation, the love of the God who is in Christ, his God and our God, his Father and our Father.
Ages before Jesus was born, where even Moses and his law were yet unknown, the suffering heart of humanity saw and was persuaded that its peace lay only with the first, the last, the living one:
Oh, that you would hide me in the grave… and remember me!… You will call, and I will answer you; you will long for the work of your hands.