Preached at Welsh Hampton, 20th Sunday after Trinity, October 5, 1856.
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a certain king which made a marriage for his son.”—St. Matthew xxii. 2.
If I searched ever so far, I could find nothing fitter than the Gospel for to-day to tell us what the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper means, and why you should receive it.
It is a marriage feast; it is the feast which the great King of earth and heaven makes to celebrate the marriage of His Son.
It is a feast to which most of those who were first bidden would not come. It is a feast to which God bids all from the highways and the hedges, ignorant people, sinful people.
It is a feast at which some present themselves without a marriage garment, who therefore are cast out.
Let us think of each of these things for a few minutes, brethren, and may God Himself enable us to understand His words.
First, then, it is a marriage feast. Men were scattered up and down this world. They spoke different languages; they had different customs; they had rivalries and enmities with each other; it seemed as if they had come upon the earth to fight with each other. Yet they felt a continual drawing to each other, they could not live without each other, they must sell and buy from each other; some of them yearned to be friends. Men and women bound themselves to each other in wedlock. All found that they were sons and daughters, if they were not brothers and sisters. Men must have been made to be one. How comes it that they are so divided? Their consciences said there would not be this separation unless there were a deeper separation besides. We should not be quarrelling among ourselves, if we had not quarrelled with One who rules over us. I say men’s consciences told them this, or rather God told it them through their consciences. And therefore they worked hard to bring about a reconciliation, a union, between themselves and the Being whom they felt they were at war with. They offered sacrifices; they were ready to give up their goods and their offspring too, if they could but make peace with Him. But they did not know with whom they were to make peace. They thought He was like themselves, and was to be won over as they won over those whom they had made their enemies. They did not know that it was a God of perfect love from whom they had separated themselves. They did not know that He was their Father. They did not know that He was seeking after them to bring them into reconciliation. They did not know that all their yearning after Him was awakened by Himself. They did not know that He had kept them in fellowship with each other, that He had made them into families and nations. They did not know that all their discords came from resistance to Him. They did not know that He meant to gather them all into one.
This was the message which Jesus brought into the world. He said, ‘He who rules over you is my Father. He has formed you in me. He has made you one in me. And now I am come to unite you all to myself. I have married your flesh and blood to myself; and that is that I may marry the spirits of you who have this flesh and blood to myself. For I tell you, you cannot live apart from me; your life flows into you from me.’ And when He was going away, He gave bread to His disciples and said, “Take, eat, this is my flesh.” He gave wine and said, “Drink, this is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” That is to say, ‘Do this in remembrance that I have married myself to your flesh and blood. Do this in remembrance that your spirits are united to me. Do this in remembrance that all your life flows into you from me. Do this because ye are married to me, and are one in me.’
2. Therefore you see that it is the feast of a marriage which God has made for His Son. When each of us said just now, “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord;” each of us said, I believe that the Son of God is our husband; that God hath united Him to us. Thus I affirm that what He told the disciples about themselves, is true about us. It must needs be so; for He did not take the flesh of St. Peter and St. John more than He took the flesh of you and me. He took the flesh and blood of man. He gave up that flesh and that blood upon the Cross. Therefore there is the same bond between Him and us, the same marriage between Him and us, that there was between Him and the disciples who sat with Him the night before He suffered. They were the witnesses whom He sent to tell us of it. And we have not more life in our spirits than they had; our life flows out of His life just as much as theirs did.
That is the reason we go on keeping the Lord’s Supper in every parish of England: We know that none of us can live, that we cannot live for one hour apart from Christ, the Son of God. We know that He it is, and He only, who unites us to God, and unites us to each other. We know that if we forget Him, we forget that we are united to God, and are united to our brethren. We know that we are liable now, as much as we ever were, to be at strife. We know that when we have been at strife with each other, and have been doing wrong, there comes into our minds a sense of God’s being our enemy, and that we act as if He were. We know that we shall then try, by all superstitious and wicked acts, to bring Him over to us just as the heathen did. We know that the only way to escape from doing that, is to remember the words He said, that He has reconciled us to Himself, that He may make a marriage for us with His Son; that He has made peace with us in the flesh and blood which He took of the Virgin, which He offered on the cross. And how shall we own that message to be true? This, He says, is the simple way: Receive these tokens that the marriage is not to be made, but that it is made. Claim to be united to Me and to each other in Christ, as I declare that you are.
But those who were first called would not come. Why was that? Because they felt it was their glory to be separate from other men; because they had no real wish to be at one with God. The Jews had been called out by God, that in them all the families of the earth might be blessed; that by them God might testify to all of His goodness and truth. They thought that He had called them out to be a curse to all the families of the earth; they thought they were to tell all the families of the earth, God cares for us and not for you; the only chance for you is to adopt our customs, and become like us. Therefore their minds were wholly alienated from God; they did not enter into His purpose; they were doing all they could to defeat it. And when the Apostles of Christ testified to them, saying, ‘What God said to your fathers by the prophets He would do, He has actually done. He has made a marriage with men in His Son. Come and rejoice with us that He has made peace with all. Come and bear this message with us unto all tribes and kindreds.’—Some of them said, ‘Nonsense, what have we to do with that; we have our farms and merchandise to look after; what do we want to be told of a Father of our spirits, and of our being reconciled to Him?’ Others did not take it so easily; they did not laugh, but were furiously angry. They said, ‘This is robbing us of our privileges; this is putting us on a level with other men.’ So they brought the Apostles who bare these tidings before kings and rulers; they imprisoned them, stoned them, crucified them.
What came of it? These Jews had decried Him who bound them together. They had set at nought their king. Nothing could keep them at one. They became more and more divided. They tore each other in pieces. At last the day which had been foretold arrived. The Romans, so the Lord of all had appointed, destroyed them and their city. They became vagabonds on the face of the earth. So it was proved that the message was a true message. The King of Kings had made a marriage for His Son. It was a real feast which they had refused to partake of.
It is a feast to which God bids all sorts of people. That was the chief reason, as I told you, why the Jews spurned the invitation. They did not like it to be thought that all were the better for this marriage. They did not like to keep a feast at which publicans and sinners, yes, and heathen, were asked to sit down. In other words, they did not believe in the marriage at all. For if the Son of God has taken man’s flesh and blood; if He is the Lord of men’s spirits, there is not a single human creature of any tribe or kindred who has not a share in the blessings of it. There is not one to whom we may not say, ‘Your Lord and ours calls upon you to remember that He has taken your flesh and died for you. Come and give Him thanks that He has done so. Come and have fellowship with His Father and your Father.’ If you say, ‘But was not this marriage then made for the sake of righteous and holy people? Was it not with them that Christ united Himself?’ I say, no, Brethren. It is by claiming to be united with Christ that a man becomes righteous. Whilst he tries to be righteous in himself, whilst he wishes to be separate from his true Lord, he cannot be righteous.
If a son goes away from his father’s house, and says he will have nothing more to do with his father or his mother, or with any of his brothers and sisters, and if his father or one of his brothers went to persuade him to come back, do you think the man ought to say, ‘By-and-by, when I am very righteous and good, I will come back and make it up with you and live with you again.’ How could he do that? How could he become right while he denied his birthright and his parents? Do you not see that the proof of his being better would be, to do what he was urged to do, to confess that he had a father, and that he was altogether wrong ever to have broken away from him? Well, the case is exactly the same here. No one can make himself right while he stands apart from his Father in Heaven and his Elder Brother. The way to be right is to turn round to his Father and say, ‘I have forgotten Thee, my heart has been far from Thee. And I should never have remembered Thee, or have wished to find Thee, or to be at peace with Thee at all, if Thou hadst not sent me word by Thy Son that I am Thy child, and that Thou wouldest have me call Thee my Father in Him. But as Thou hast sent me this word, as Thou hast said that He has come down and taken my flesh, and died on the cross in it, on purpose that he might bring me to Thee, I yield myself; I will fight with Thee no more; I will not be the fool I have been in setting up my bad will against Thy good will. I desire that Thou shouldest rule me henceforth, and shouldest take away all my ignorance and wilfulness from me.’ That is what a person says who heeds this message, ‘Come to the wedding-feast.’ He does not the least pretend that he has any goodness of his own. It is because he feels that he has not, and that he cannot have, that he wants to be thoroughly joined to Him, in whom all goodness dwells. And since he cannot, poor creature and beggar as he is, join himself to the Great Prince of the whole earth; he is greatly astonished and rejoiced to hear that this great Prince has joined Himself to him; that He has stooped to the state of the very lowest of us, on purpose that the very lowest of us might receive forgiveness, and strength, and life, and all that he wants from Him. So you see why our Lord speaks of sending out into the highways and hedges, and getting in all manner of guests. You see He could not say otherwise. For all these people are human beings, and Christ has not been ashamed to call them brethren, and he has proved that He is their Brother by dying their death; and it is a sin for any one to cut himself off from God’s great family in heaven and earth, and to remain at strife with those who belong to the same race with him; so surely all may be told that they need not and must not commit this sin, but may come and join with all the rest of their family in keeping the Marriage Supper of their Lord.
But, lastly, we hear of some coming there without a marriage garment, and being, therefore, thrust out. I have told you already what this wedding garment is not. It is not a man’s own goodness, that God does not expect him to bring. What is it then? It is the goodness, and mercy, and love of God Himself. When He made that great marriage for His son, when He united Him to our flesh and blood, He showed forth in Him all His own goodness, and love, and truth; as St. John wrote, we saw His glory as of the only begotten Son of God, full of grace and truth. He showed it forth in Him, that we might say, This is what we want; this is what we have not in ourselves. When we say this in our hearts we begin to believe in God’s love and righteousness, or, as the Scripture says, to put our trust in Him. So we become partakers of all these good things of God, just as we take in the meres and the distant hills with our eyes, though they are so much greater than we are. But if a man will not trust in God’s love and righteousness; if he does not think that God is loving and righteous; if he does not wish to be like God in His love and righteousness; if he had rather be just what he is in himself, then he will not put on the wedding garment which God has provided him, and God, who sees all of us that come to that feast, and reads the heart of each one of us, sees that we do not come there to seek Him; that we come there for some other end than that; for some low miserable end of our own; and so His light does not shine in on us; He leaves us in the darkness we have chosen; and we grow worse and worse, darker and darker, for having mocked Him and trifled with Him.
You say, ‘That is very dreadful.’ Surely it is. It is dreadful to distrust God who is all good, and to trust in ourselves in whom apart from God there is no good at all. It is dreadful to think highly of ourselves. If you think that, come to this feast that you may confess God’s infinite goodness, which is manifested in his Son, His goodness in marrying that Son to our nature, that we might be clothed with his spotless garment of Justice and Love, come and own how empty you are that he may feed you with the food of eternal life. Depend upon it, he will send none away who desire that food. He will cast none into outer darkness who seek for His light.