First, then, we have in that majestic If I will!' the revelation of the risen Christ as the Lord of life and death.
In His charge to Peter, Christ bad asserted His right absolutely to control His servant's conduct and fix his place in the world, and His power to foresee and forecast his destiny and his end. But in these words He goes a step further. I will that he tarry'; to communicate life and to sustain life is a divine prerogative; to act by the bare utterance of His will upon physical nature is a divine prerogative. Jesus Christ here claims that His will goes out with sovereign power amongst the perplexities of human history and into the depths of that mystery of life; and that He, the Son of Man, quickens whom He will,' and has power to kill and to make alive.' The words would be absurd, if not something worse, upon any but divine lips, that opened with conscious authority, and whose Utterer knew that His hand was laid upon the innermost springs of being.
So, in this entirely incidental fashion, you have one of the strongest and plainest instances of the quiet, unostentatious and habitual manner in which Jesus Christ claimed for Himself properly divine prerogatives.
Remember that He who thus spoke was standing before these seven men there, in the morning light, on the beach, fresh from the grave. His resurrection had proved Him to be the Lord of death. He had bound it to His chariot-wheels as a Conqueror. He had risen and He stood there before them with no more mark of the corruption of the grave upon Him than there are traces of the foul water in which a sea bird may have floated, on its white wing that flashes in the sunshine as it soars. And surely as these men looked to Christ, declared to be the Son of God with power, by His resurrection from the dead,' they may have begun, however foolish and slow of heart' they were to believe,' to understand that to this end Christ both died and rose and revived, that He might be the Lord both of the dead and of the living,' both of death and of life.
These two Apostles' later history was full of proofs that Christ's claim was valid. Peter is shut up in prison and delivered once, at the very last moment, when hope was almost dead, in order that he might understand that when he was put into another prison and not delivered, the blow of martyrdom fell upon him, not because of the strength of his persecutors, but because of the will of his Lord. And John had to see his brother James, to whom he had been so closely knit, with whom he had pledged himself to drink the cup that Christ drank of, whom he had desired to have associated with himself in the special honours in the Messianic Kingdom--he had to see him slain, first of the Apostles, while he himself lingered here long after all his early associates were gone. He had, no doubt, many a longing to depart. Solitary, surrounded by a new world, pressed by many cares, he must often have felt that the cross which he had to carry was no lighter than that laid on those who had passed to their rest by martyrdom. To him it would often be martyrdom to live. His personal longing is heard for a moment in the last words of the Apocalypse, Amen! even so, come, Lord Jesus! '--but undoubtedly for the most part he stayed his heart on his Lord's will, and waited in meek patience till he heard the welcome announcement, The Master is come and calleth for thee.'
And, dear friends! that same belief that the risen Christ is the Lord of life and death, is the only one that can stay our hearts, or make us bow with submission to His divine will. He who has conquered death by undergoing it is death's Lord as well as ours, and when He wills to bring His friends home to Himself, saith to that black-robed servant, Go, and he goeth; do this and he doeth it.' The vision which John saw long after this on another shore, washed by a stormier sea, spoke the same truth as does this majestic I will'--He that liveth and became dead and is alive for evermore,' is by virtue of His divine eternal life, and has become in His humanity by virtue of His death and resurrection the Lord of life and death. The hands that were nailed to the Cross turn the keys of death and Hades. He openeth and no man shutteth; He shutteth and no man openeth.'
