John 19:27

John 19:27

Look at that hour. Notice

I. Its anticipations. It has always seemed to me to be a fact fatal to the unpropitiatory theory of that hour, that it had been anticipated and expected by Christ Himself. It did not startle Him or take Him by surprise. He did not avoid it or recoil from it. "The hour cometh," said He. On the other hand, He did not hasten His advances to it; He did not precipitate the event which hailed Him and beckoned Him to that hour. "My hour is not yet come." Amidst the mournful feelings which evidently oppressed Him with an appalling weight, we are surprised at the cheerfulness with which He contemplates the advance of that hour. He stands amidst a rapidly-weaving web and mesh of harrowing and agonising events, time and eternity rapidly plying the shuttles. He is gradually being caught in the entanglement of a web by which He is to be at once agonised, and which He is to destroy.

II. Its realisations. The end was a mediatorial sacrifice. I see Him leading on victoriously Time, with all its wreck to thrones and kingdoms and empires, to the end of that hour; for He won the right. He descended, that He might ascend far above all principality and power; forms, spectres of the holy dead, pointing of the prophetic finger, seem to pass before the cross in that hour. Did not that hour behold the agony of nature? I stand by that hour, and read by its volcanic flame, by the livid and lurid hues, that nature has fallen from God as well as man. I see that the whole creation is groaning and travailing in pain, waiting for the great end of time; to wit, the redemption of the very body the vesture behind which the fallen moral being has retreated.

III. The consequences flowing from that hour. (1) It changed the world. (2) Its moral influence over other worlds must be commensurate to the majesty, magnitude, and magnificence of the interests involved in it.

E. Paxton Hood, Sermons,p. 179.

Reference: John 19:28. Homilist,2nd series, vol. ii., p. 169.