This picture is really the water-mark on the paper of John’s Gospel.  Hold up the paper of John’s Gospel to the light.  The best light for the purpose is found on Mount Calvary.  High altitudes have clearer light.  You see more distinctly.  Now look.  Hold still that you may see all the outlines more distinctly.  There’s the form of a Man standing in pleading attitude, with outstretched hands.  His face combines all the fineness of the finest woman’s face, with all the strength of the strongest man’s, and more, immensely more, all the purity and tenderness and power of God’s face.  It is God Himself in human form coming a-wooing to earth, and we call His name Jesus.  This conception is the very atmosphere of John’s Gospel.

Jesus is the witness of the Father to men.  He knew the Father.  He knew Him by closest intimacy.  He lived with Him.  He came down to tell what He knew.  He wanted others to know too.  He wanted them to know even as He knew. Telling is the whole of Jesus; telling men of the Father.

His mere presence, His character, His warm sympathy, His practical helpfulness, His words, His actions, most of all His dying and His rising, all these were a telling, a witnessing, a wooing; telling the Father’s love, telling the damnableness of our sin by giving His very life blood to get it out of us; so telling us how we might really know the mother-heart of the Father.

Jesus the Dividing Line.

There are several contrasts between the first three Gospels and John’s.  It is very striking to notice one in particular in this connection.  One reading the first three Gospels for the first time is impressed with the fact of Jesus’ rejection.  This stands out peculiarly and dominantly.  It was the great fact, told most terribly in the death of Jesus.  It was the thing that stood out sharpest in the generation to which Jesus belonged, the generation for whom these three Gospels were written at the first.

But John wrote his story for an after-generation, a generation that had not known the man Jesus by personal touch and observation.  And so it was for all after-generations.  And John makes it very clear that Jesus was rejected, and accepted.

He was indeed rejected; that fact stands out as painfully here as in the others.  He was rejected by the little inner clique that held the national reins, and held them with fevered tenacity, and drove hard.  And the reason for it is made to stand out as plainly as the fact.  The envy and jealousy, the intense bitterness and viciousness and devilish obstinacy back of the rejection stand as boldly out to all eyes as to Pilate’s.

But the other side stands out sharply too.  Jesus was accepted.  He was accepted by all classes, by the cultured, and the scholarly, by thoughtful studious leaders and officials of the nation.  He was accepted by the great middle classes and by those in lowest scale socially, and by the moral outcasts.  Intense Hebrews, Roman officials of high rank, half-breed Samaritans, and men of outside nations group themselves together by their full acceptance of Jesus.