In the last century, preachers were wont to speak continually of our Lord as an example. In our time there has been a kind of revolt against that phrase as a hard and even as an unpractical one. 'It is very well,' we say, 'to have an example; but can we follow it? Christ is divine, and we are human. No doubt He was human, too, in a sense; but then surely His divinity helped His humanity, so as to put all His acts at an immeasurable distance from ours.' I believe there is a genuine feeling at the bottom of this complaint. I believe it is a very wearisome and a very useless thing to talk to men about examples, unless you can show how that he who exhibits the example has some connexion with them, and some power over them. But, on the other hand, we are bound to inquire what has been the effect of example upon the world, how the men whom we meet with that are better than ourselves operate upon us, how it is that we can be impressed by the records of men who have departed. Christ's divinity is not a hindrance to our understanding the might of His example; it rather explains to us the whole doctrine and law of example. Are not that doctrine and law to be found in this passage? If He were not the Master and Lord, if the disciples did not say well in calling Him so, then His act would have been a solitary one, belonging to Himself, one which they could not imitate; but if He were their Lord in the highest sense of the word, in that sense which John has been setting forth to us throughout his Gospel,--if He were the Word in whom they had been created, the Word who was their life and their light, the Word from whom every energy of their spirits was derived,--then everything which dwelt in Him could descend upon them; whatever shone forth in Him could be reflected in them. And this would take place, not by their raising themselves to contemplate a lofty ideal, but by their submitting to a gracious and loving Will. The Highest of all showed Himself to them in washing their feet. All they had to do was not to think themselves greater than He, not to think that unworthy of the disciple which was not unworthy of the Lord.
The difficulty to the formal divine is no doubt this:--'If cleansing the feet symbolizes the removing of defilements from the inner man, is not that Christ's work alone? Can the disciple follow His example in doing that work?' Our consciences tell us that he can. We do know that we may receive purification from one another, that the tenderness, and love, and patience of one man act in a marvellous way upon another, when those qualities seem the furthest from him, when he most confesses that they do not belong to him. We do not set ourselves deliberately to follow examples. The examples get the mastery over us; there is a life in the men who exhibit them which awakens life in us. These are facts not to be gainsaid for the sake of any system. Upon them have been built theories about the righteousness of the saints, and the transference of one man's righteousness to another, which are, no doubt, very immoral and ungodly. But St. Paul's words, which are the plea for these theories, '_I fill up in my body the sufferings of Christ_,' are both moral and godly. For they are grounded upon the idea which St. John is setting forth here: that Christ, the Divine Sufferer, is the source of all purification and of all life; and that all men, in their proper spheres, may share His sufferings, and transmit and communicate the purification and life that flow from them to their fellows. All difficulties about example are capable of that solution. If we are members of one body, if He is the Head, why should not there be a continual circulation of life from each member of the body to every other? How can the departure of men out of this world hinder that circulation, or cause us who are here to feel it less? May not their power have become greater as the mortal fetters have been taken from them? May not we feel it more?