(Lincoln’s Inn, 7th Sunday after Trinity, July 30, 1854.)
‘Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.’ REVELATION i. 5, 6.
Many persons seem to fancy that the Apocalypse consists mainly of prophecies, or intimations concerning that which shall come to pass in the latter days. That it contains such prophecies,—that its lessons respecting the future should be deeply pondered, because they are lessons upon which we may act—not mere guesses about times and seasons, with which we may amuse ourselves—I thoroughly believe. But I do not think we shall find out their precious import, unless we dwell earnestly upon such a passage as the one I have read to you; the language of which, you will perceive, points to that which is, and to that which has been done.
Some may suppose it a mere interjectional sentence, the expression of a strong passionate feeling, not a part of the substance of the work, not one which can give us any hint respecting its character. The more you read the Apocalypse, the more you will feel that thanksgivings and doxologies of this kind are inseparable from its texture; that you would lose its meaning and purpose if you lost them. Flourishes of rhetoric do not belong to a Bible: they belong, least of all, to that book of the Bible which gathers its previous revelations into one; which explains the very nature of revelation; which shows us in whom, and for what ends, God has revealed Himself, and does reveal Himself in one age or another.
But such a book is the very one, in which words that can no longer be profaned to purposes of ambition and display, acquire their full force as expressions of the mind of God, as the echo of that mind in man. He that bore witness of the Word of God, and of Jesus Christ, and of the things which he saw, had learnt that from that Word all the life of things and of men was derived; that the crucified man was that Word made flesh; that all his visible acts of power and meekness were the outcomings of that which eye had not seen nor ear heard. He had learnt that the Word had been on earth, and suffered and died, that the enslaved spirit and body of his creatures might be set free, that the tongue of the stammerer and of the dumb might be loosed, and might speak plainly. He was claiming the redemption which had been won for him, he was exercising the freedom of a spiritual creature, when he sent back his ascription of praise to Christ, who had loved him and emancipated him.
According to one reading of the text, the word ‘loosed,’ or ‘emancipated,’ ought to be substituted for our word ‘washed.’ I do not say which is the best reading; there are internal, as well as external arguments in favour of each. The word ‘blood,’ and the analogy to Baptism, made our translators partial to one phrase; the perpetual allusions to Redemption in connexion with sins, may incline some to adopt the other. A more important hint is conveyed by a change of the tense in the preceding word ἀγαπῶντι for ἀγαπήσαντι. ‘To Him who loveth,’ for ‘To Him who loved us.’ The present tense seems certainly more in harmony with the spirit of the beloved disciple generally, and with the context of this passage particularly. A third variation in this passage introduces some difficulty into the construing of it; for ‘kings,’ in the last clause, we are told that we ought to read ‘kingdom.’ In that case we can only suppose that St. John here, as in many other places, was falling back into Old Testament forms of expression; that the phrase ‘kingdom of priests,’ with which he was familiar, was dwelling in his mind; and that he did not take any pains to translate it grammatically into the language in which he was writing. The meaning cannot be essentially different from that which our version embodies. I shall, therefore, adhere to it. Let us now consider the passage clause by clause.
I. ‘To Him that hath loved, or that loveth.’ Since there cannot be a moment’s doubt that Jesus Christ is the object of this ascription, the thought may easily intrude itself, ‘After all, it is to Him, and not to the Father, that the most inspired teachers turn in their moments of rapture; His love presents itself to them as their real strength and consolation; upon it they rest; what lies beyond it is dark, if not terrible.’ That you may understand how far this suggestion is reasonable, turn to the opening of the fifth verse; consider the titles by which our Lord is there denoted. Pause especially on the first of them. He is called ‘the faithful witness.’ A faithful witness to what? St. John must interpret himself; ‘This is the message,’ he says, in his first Epistle, ‘which we have heard of Him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.’ Or, take the report which he gives of our Lord’s own last prayer with his Apostles, on the night before the crucifixion, that which we were reading in our course of lessons yesterday: ‘O righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee; but I have known Thee, and these have known that Thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it; that the love wherewith Thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.’ Jesus Christ according to St. John, according to Himself, is the faithful witness of His Father. The world had not known Him; it had suspected that in Him there was some darkness, some enmity towards His creatures; but He had known Him, and had come forth to testify that in Him was no darkness at all. Whatever love there was in Christ was first in Him, with whom He dwelt, and from whom He came. Whoso saw Him saw the Father. And so far is the Evangelist from dwelling upon this love as something separate from the love of God, as more worthy of the creature’s trust and reliance, that he can only depend upon it and rejoice in it because he regards it as the perfect image and reflex of that which is the Nature and Essence of God.
Most true, however, it is, that St. John does demand a love which has not remained hidden, but which has come forth into light and manifestation; most true it is that he only pretends to know the unfathomable depth below, through that form and those acts which belong to the region of human thought, and sympathy, and obedience. Christ has been the faithful witness of the Father by bearing death, and being the first-begotten from the dead. Unless He had sounded the abyss of human misery, He would not have disclosed the abyss of divine love; unless He had gone through that misery and risen out of it, He could not have vindicated the divine love from the greatest calumny of the Evil Spirit against it. And unless He were indeed the Prince of all the kings of the earth, He could not have brought the love of heaven to bear upon the government and transactions of the earth, nor have offered to the sons of earth a continual refuge from their oppressors in the Judge, before whom they are ever standing and receiving their sentence. Be assured, then, that Christ only can love any because He dwells with Him who is love, and comes forth from Him; and that we never shall understand that love, if we do not behold it in the acts and sufferings of the Mediator.
To Him that loveth us. What is the limitation of this us? How are we to know who have been, who are included in it? St. John was the beloved disciple, the disciple who leaned on Christ’s breast at the Last Supper. He does not fear to give himself the name; writing in his old age, with his heart humbled and broken, he still dares to claim it. And why may we suppose that the Divine Spirit permitted this boldness, and urged him to it? I think, because that Spirit was teaching and compelling him, more than all the other disciples, to show forth Christ’s love, as having no partial ground, as resting on the eternal ground, and, therefore, as comprehending all within its circle. Supposing St. Paul or St. Peter had used this all-embracing language, it might have been said: ‘Yes, but there was a special graciousness, a peculiar affection, altogether different from that which went forth upon you—how different from that which goes forth upon mankind!’ St. John can say, ‘Even so; I was the object of that affection. I was permitted to experience it. I never knew the fulness and tenderness of it better than I knew it at the Last Supper. And this is my privilege; to announce this love to you, that you may share it, that you may have fellowship, as I have, with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.’ I do not know how the axe could have been laid to any notions of a limited love, bestowed upon certain qualities, or attracted by a certain faith, more completely; or yet how it could be shown more completely that the love of Christ is not vague philanthropy, but personal, and living, meeting and awakening all the qualities and tendencies of the creatures on whom it is bestowed. Supposing we had the Epistles and Revelations of St. John, without being told anything of the relation in which he stood to the Son of man while he was upon earth, we might have been lost in the thought of a benevolence too vast and vague for any individual sympathy. If we had the record of St. John’s place among the disciples, without hearing him declare the message which he had received from Christ, and which it was his work to proclaim to men, we should have found a precedent and a warrant for all that glorification of different saints, as objects of Christ’s partial regard and mysterious favour, which have been so common, and so hurtful, in some parts of the Church; a kind of warrant for the notion, more prevalent in our day and more mischievous, that there are circles and schools which He favours, to the exclusion and condemnation of mankind at large. Now that the individual and the universal are so wonderfully combined in the lessons and the life of the same man; now that we know this to have been the great and distinguishing reward which was conferred on him above others, that he should tell all men what God felt to them, and had wrought for them; we are able to enter through the disciple into the mind of the Master, who suffered for all and for each; through the Master into the mind of the Father, who rules in the armies of heaven, and without whom not a sparrow falleth to the ground.
‘To Him that washed us.’ ‘Hath washed’ might be better, but there is no question that this word is in the past. Be the word Avoavn or Aovcarn, the tense is the same. The Apostle is often very inattentive to tenses; he adopts a Hebrew freedom in the use of them; as if he would infuse into us the great Hebrew truth, that God is, and was, and is to come; that the Eternal has no portions nor divisions. But here he is exact; the washing or the deliverance has been effected; He that loveth us, hath given us this one solid and satisfactory proof of his love, the only one which could enable us to appreciate it, or partake of it.
The second ‘us’ must, according to all reasonable interpretation, have the same force and dimensions as the first. Those whom He has washed, or set free, are those whom He loves. Yet there is a pretext for confining the word in the one use, which did not exist with respect to the other. Sins, as I have contended throughout these sermons, are actual, not metaphorical, chains. They bind the spirit as truly, as consciously, as material fetters ever have bound the body. Every one has, in a more or less degree, the sense and certainty of this bondage. The less we have of it, the more passively we are slaves; every attempt in man to raise himself is a tacit acknowledgment of it. But if so, how can we speak of these chains as having been actually broken for any one; how can we dare to speak of them as broken for all? Punishment we might think of as remitted for a whole set of beings, for a whole race; but sin, the cause of punishment, that of which each person must accuse himself, which is so intensely individual and inward; how can we for a moment speak of that as washed away, or taken from us, while we feel it in ourselves, while we see it multiplying and bringing forth new fruits in the world?
The question must be asked over again in this year 1854,—it must be asked as if it had never been asked before; though the Bible, the Christian Church, the Gospel which God has sent us to preach, have had no other purpose than to answer it. Unless we have courage to say to men, here and everywhere—to men of whose condition we know nothing, except that it is an evil one—‘The chain of sin has been loosed for you—’you have been cleansed from sins, emancipated from sins, by the blood of Christ’—we have no message to deliver from heaven to earth—we should not run—for we have no tidings which our brethren are concerned to hear. Unless we have courage to say in the most respectable, most religious congregation or circle of Englishmen,—‘So long as any of you abide in evil practices, and habits, and principles, so long are you slaves, in spite of Christ’s redemption,’—we are false witnesses of God, we are deceiving people with promises that will not be performed, with names and phrases that will prove their ruin. How may two such opposite statements be reconciled? How may we at once say, ‘The emancipation has been effected; nothing can be more complete: there is a liberty with which Christ has made us free, one and all;’ and yet acknowledge the more strongly, in the full length and breadth of it, the fact of the world’s misery and wickedness; the fact that every man is a participator in it, and must seek every day a fresh purification,—must confess every day how great a weight is sitting upon him,—how feeble all those energies are with which he tries to cast it off?
You will see at once, if you turn to the confessions of different Churches, that they have been exercised with this difficulty, and that every one of them has attempted to assert the fact of a full and complete redemption, without explaining away experiences which it especially behoved them to recognise and to encounter. Our own Church is particularly distinct and strong in affirming the doctrine of the text. It speaks of Christ being ‘A sacrifice, not only for the original guilt, but also for the actual sins of men.’ The expression is remarkable: it takes for granted the redemption from original guilt from guilt you will observe, not punishment—as that which was the common admitted belief of the whole Church, and goes on to affirm—what had been denied in a most practical manner—what the reformers were especially raised up to assert,—that the sacrifice was also the perfect means of deliverance from the sins which men were committing day by day. All I wish is, that preachers and hearers should enter into the sense of these words; that they should not merely repeat them, or confess their adherence to them, while, in fact, they are contradicting them, and setting up a directly opposite doctrine in place of them.
If we try to understand what man is, what the relation between God and man is, from the fall of Adam; if we take that as determining the condition of our race; we set at nought the letter and still more the spirit of our article. We deny that original guilt is taken away by the Sacrifice of Christ; we deny that that Sacrifice has established a perfect reconciliation between God and His creatures. And then whatever efforts we make to give a sense to the other words of the sentence,—however we may persuade ourselves that we do get rid of our actual sins by believing in Christ’s sacrifice,—we shall find ourselves in continual embarrassments; explaining away the strong statement of yesterday by the weak one of to-day; trying to persuade men that they are redeemed, and pardoned, and new creatures; and then calling upon them to find reasons and proofs in themselves, which they honestly confess they cannot find, why these blessings, which others have not, belong to them. Whereas, if we will start, as the Church does, from the Incarnation and Sacrifice of Christ, as being a full declaration concerning man and God; a full revelation of the nature of both, and of the causes which have separated them; a full proof that in Christ they are for ever atoned; then the sins of each particular man are interpreted by that one all-comprehensive statement of our Lord—‘He will convince the world of sin,… because they believe not on Me.’ There is no original guilt separating our race and kind from Him who created us in His own Son. The Fall is a fact in history, just as the Bible presents it to us; but it is not a fact from which we can dare to deduce the Law under which we are living and acting: for the Bible, in setting forth Christ as the Son of God and the Son of Man, as the Redeemer and Restorer of man to his union with His Father, and to all the spiritual freedom and prerogatives which that union implies, proclaims to us another Law, the only human Law; that law in our members which resists it, and brings us into captivity, being altogether inhuman, one that separates us from our brethren as much as it separates us from God.
Believing in Christ, we believe this; not believing in Him, we treat that law in our members as if it were some fatal necessity which forced us to sin; we yield to it; we become utterly enslaved by it; the appetite in us lives; the man in us dies. And what slays the tyrant and raises the dead? Nothing but this same news. ‘Christ has come to deliver you; He has taken ’your nature and died for you.’ The spirit, in its deep death-sleep, hears that voice, which had mingled in its dreams with the songs of earth and the laughs of evil spirits; it starts up with a wild fright; it finds that its true Lord and Brother was inviting it back to its native home. And how else does it recognise Him, but by that blood-token, by the hands and side, as having this right over it, this fellowship with it? What can it say but ‘Thou hast set us free, Thou hast washed ’us from our sins in Thy blood. This united Thee to ’our death; this is the assurance that we are sharers in ’Thy life.’
- It is a King that our spirits cry for, to guide them, discipline them, unite them to each other; to give them a victory over themselves, a victory over the world. It is a Priest that our spirits cry for, to lift them above themselves to their God and Father; to make them partakers of His nature, fellow-workers in carrying out His purposes. Christ’s Sacrifice is the one authentic testimony that He is both the King and Priest of men. But since He is come to make them like Him—since He has taken their flesh and blood that they might have His Sonship—they have a portion also in all that appertains to that Sonship. ‘He has made us,’ says St. John, ‘kings and priests unto God and His Father.’ The kingly right of government over the earth, which was assured to him at creation, is redeemed for him in Christ. Earth is the instrument of his purposes, not the mistress who may command him. But she is so, while he reclaims that other more precious prerogative of ruling himself, which Christ has also asserted for him, which in Christ’s might, while he depends upon Him, he can exercise. And so we understand why kingly authority has been so venerable and dear in men’s eyes; why it has also been at times so intolerable. While the King acts as God’s minister, ruling himself, treating earthly things as gifts and talents for the use of men, he serves to awaken the sense of kingliness in his subjects. They become free in their spirits, and they have the self-restraint, the obedience of men. But when he is a slave, they become slaves; with the restless conviction that they were made for something better, meant to be like him who governs them; with the ignorant and fantastic dream that they should be better, if they could put themselves in his place, and have his opportunities of self-indulgence and self-destruction. He is the true King, who sacrifices himself that he may raise up kings; who are like him in proportion as they have his spirit of sacrifice.
And so it is with the other office. The Son of God is the Priest for ever, the sympathising Priest touched with the feeling of man’s infirmities; because He is filled with the holiness and love of God; bearing the sins, because He is one with the All-Righteous. And He comes to make us priests; to give us all the power of offering up spiritual sacrifices to God; of offering up ourselves; of feeling with our brethren; of bearing their burdens; of entering into the holy place with them and for them; of presenting to them the image of Christ’s Father and their Father. Just so far as any priest on earth does this, just so far will he obtain the recognition that is good for him; not a better recognition than His Lord, but one that is the same in kind. He will help to raise up priests to God among those who do not bear that name officially. He will be ever leading men on to that spiritual freedom, without which they cannot serve the God whose name is the Redeemer. And it is because we who are named priests of God have so grievously forgotten this calling; have not believed that we possess it; have brought men into bondage instead of freedom; have neither felt with them nor with him who loves them, and has washed them in His blood! it is for this reason that we hear complaints of our craft which are just and reasonable, though the men who utter them may have a very dim and confused sense of the liberty which they want; and may only desire to be rid of us, that they may not be reminded of their spiritual rights, and may sink into brutes without compunction or remorse.
Therefore, brethren, this is the sum of what the Apostle tells us in this great ascription, and of what I have been trying to say to you in these Sermons on Sacrifice,—that we are all raised to a new and regenerate condition in Christ,—and that this is our true human condition,—and that it is one which we may all of us claim,—and that we shall only claim it when we believe that there is a Son of God and a Son of Man, who has delivered us by dying for us, and when we vindicate as the highest gift He can endow us with, as the greatest fruit of His Cross and Passion, the spirit of self-oblation, the spirit in which He offered Himself to God. Then we shall know that the Gospel is not a cunningly-devised fable; then we shall be certain that the blood has been poured out, that the redemption and reconciliation has been made; then we shall enter upon our kingly and priestly life. And since that life must be for our brethren as well as for ourselves, for men of every caste and character, we ought to know how we have a right to regard them; what we have a right to tell them, respecting themselves and respecting Him who created them. While we are uncertain about that point; while we do not know whether we are to fly from them as devils, or to recognise them as children of one Father; whether we are to esteem them as creatures whom He has doomed to destruction, or creatures whom He seeks to rescue from the destruction into which they fall through ignorance of Him, and of His purposes to them; I cannot understand how we can think one hopeful thought or speak one helpful word. But in believing the fact which our Catechism and our Articles, and the Bible far more mightily than either, proclaim, that man is a redeemed and restored creature, we do not,—as I have tried partly to show you to-day, as I hope more fully to show you next Sunday,—blink any of the facts which prove that the world is lying in wickedness; or check any of the hopes that it is to become a habitation of righteousness; we do not make ourselves fairer than we are; or lead any one to wish and pray less that he may rise to a holier and purer condition of being. The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper gathers up into itself all that I have been saying to you on Sacrifice; yea, and all that the Apostle is saying in the wonderful passage I have been commenting on. And while at that Feast we give thanks for a Sacrifice, an oblation and satisfaction, that has been made once for the sins of the whole world; while we join with angels and archangels round the throne, in praising for that finished Sacrifice which sets forth, as nothing else can, the thrice holy name of God; we come also to confess sins in ourselves, of which the remembrance is grievous, and the burden intolerable. We come to seek a Redemption for our own souls and bodies, and for the whole creation, from that travail and death which the Son of Man underwent for all. We come as citizens of a commonwealth over which Christ is the King of Kings and the High-priest, in which we ourselves are kings and priests; but we come certain that, unless God feeds us with the flesh and blood of His Son, we have no power to fulfil any of our tasks in that kingdom, to enjoy any of its immunities and rights. Our confidence is that He has provided the spiritual food, that He does awaken the spiritual appetite; that the blood of the Lamb which has been shed, has taken away the sins of the world, and that it has power to take away the bitterness, and cowardice and torpor which are our daily individual sins. We can in that festival, we can in every act of our daily lives, give thanks unto Him who has washed us from our sins, and made us kings and priests to God; we can say, Glory and dominion be unto Him for ever; for we believe glory and dominion are His for ever. And we are sure that to this prayer and ascription of ours, God has given and will give His own Amen.