Lecture II. The Announcement of the Son of David

And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.—St. Luke i. 46-48.

St. Luke’s introduction, which we considered last Sunday, is strictly prosaic. He speaks of the carefulness with which he had studied the reports of those who had been eyewitnesses of Christ’s acts. He claims no exemption from the ordinary toils of a historian. He seems to think that he is more bound to perform them because his subject is so awful, and because he believes himself divinely called to unfold it.

The narrative begins with a quietness befitting this preface. We hear of two old people, both of the sacred Jewish family, who are walking in all the commandments of the Lord blameless. They are childless. Zacharias punctually fulfils his duties as a priest. At a certain time he goes according to the order of his course into the House of the Lord. It is his lot to burn incense.

Then we arrive, some will say, at the supernatural part of the story.

‘And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense. And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John. And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth. For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb. And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years. And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings. And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season. And the people waited for Zacharias, and marvelled that he tarried so long in the temple. And when he came out, he could not speak unto them: and they perceived that he had seen a vision in the temple: for he beckoned unto them, and remained speechless. And it came to pass, that, as soon as the days of his ministration were accomplished, he departed to his own house.’

This narrative of an angelic visitation does not bring us into a supernatural region. We are in one already. The Temple-worship meant nothing if there were not an actual established intercourse between the visible and the invisible world. The Jew believed that He who dwelt behind the veil had made a covenant with his fathers and him, that He had given them a law, that He had appointed their priests and their sacrifices. In His name they protested against all worship of visible things. And therefore the visits of angels are not in the Old Testament what they are in Pagan records. The heathen started from the human ground, was continually feeling after God. Ever and anon, he was sure that communications from heaven did reach the earth. Without such, the condition of man seemed to him utterly dreary, inexplicable, hopeless. But these communications are disorderly interruptions of the course of human life, even if they confer on it some of its chief blessings. The Hebrew starts from the divine ground. He does not want casual appearances to testify that God is speaking to men. That He should not speak is for him the perplexing anomaly. Life must cease, according to the lessons which he had received from his childhood, if God were withdrawn from His universe; above all from the creatures whom He had made in His image.

But there were times when it did seem as if He were withdrawn from His universe; when the children of the Covenant seemed to have lost sight of Him; when their worship had been either turned to other objects, or had become utterly hard and unreal, a punctual observance of rites, not a living intercourse. At such times we do hear of angel visits. They come to those who are beginning to think that the world is deserted by its Deliverer, and given over to its oppressors. They come seldom to the great of the earth; rather to peasants like Gideon, who are threshing their wheat by the winepress when the Midianites are possessing the land of Israel, and the Israelites are bowing down to Baal. They are sent to break the yoke of some great superstition which has degraded the people. They are never imparted to any man that he may be exalted, but that he may understand God to be the God of his countrymen as much as himself; that he may be a witness to them of their true unchanging Lord; that he may stir them up to defy and mock those who pretend to be their lords. These are almost invariable characteristics of the angelic appearances in the Old Testament. The one which startled Zacharias, and sent him dumb to his house, will bear the test. It told him that he was the priest of a living God, not of one about whom he might read in a book; of a God who directed the minds of His creatures, not of one who merely demanded from them a certain quantity of sacrifice and incense.

We hear that, when the promise of the angel was fulfilled to Zacharias, when his child was actually born, when he had written on the table that its name was to be John, his tongue was loosed. He could not but sing, as his fathers had sung in every great crisis of their history. He had felt, no doubt, that there was some merit in his punctual observance of the commandments, some great distinction between him, the Levite, the descendant of Aaron, and the people who might not enter the Holy Place. Now, when the weight that had crushed his heart and his wife’s heart had been removed, all such self-glorifying thoughts disappear. He speaks of the Lord God of Israel, who has visited and redeemed His people. The wonder of a common birth, an ordinary father’s joy mingles in his thanksgiving with the belief that God is accomplishing His purposes to the land, that there is to be an unveiling of Him, such as all prophets had longed for. The child is to be a prophet of the Highest, to give knowledge of salvation unto His people by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’ See how impossible it is for any true Israelite to think of God except as a Deliverer of his nation and of mankind.

But there is another story in this chapter, the scenery of which is altogether different. We are no longer in Jerusalem, amidst the worship in the holy Temple, amidst the clouds of incense. We are in a despised city of Galilee, in the house of a poor maiden. To her, too, we are told, an angel comes, and thus he speaks: ‘Hail, thou that art highly favoured: the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women. To her he says: ’Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.’ She is at first, like Zacharias, troubled at the angel’s saying, and casts in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. But she receives it with awe and submission; ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’

The remark seems too obvious to be necessary, that we have here the announcement of a King and a Kingdom. But my object in these lectures is to fix your minds upon those commonplaces in the Gospels, which we overlook, or explain away, or change for some more refined notions of our own. I wish you to see that, at all events in the judgment of St. Luke, these names, Son of God and Son of David, are not introduced to prove a doctrine or establish a mission; that they are essential to the Gospel, as a Gospel; that it would have no significance apart from them. ‘He is to reign over the house of Israel; of His kingdom there is to be no end;’ are the key-notes to all the subsequent history.

The Song of Mary, when she rose with haste and came into the hill country of Judea, and had heard the salutation of Elizabeth, is the hymn at the birth of a King, as the one I have just spoken of is the hymn at the birth of a Prophet. It is the hymn for mothers, as that is the hymn for fathers; not the less the hymn for all mothers because the Virgin felt herself to be the mother of the Child; the mother in a more eminent sense than any other could claim to be. It is the hymn of the Jewish mother who feels that she cannot be merely that. ‘The promise being fulfilled to Abraham and his seed, all generations of men must call her blessed.’

The life that is to come forth from her is a new life to herself. It raises her wholly out of herself. Her soul magnifies the Lord, her spirit rejoices in God her Saviour. A communion is opened between her and Heaven; she knows that she is not merely a child of earth. And yet she is most truly a child of earth. He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden.’ She has never understood her own nothingness so much as in this moment of exaltation; there has never been awakened in her such awe of the divine Majesty as now when she is brought so near to it. ‘He that is mighty hath done to me great things, and holy is his Name.’ And that which I pointed out as characteristic of the other song is far more characteristic of this. Instead of feeling more separate from other creatures by reason of the honour that has been put upon her, her deepest joy springs from the sense of union with them; God’s care for her is the pledge of His care for them. ‘His mercy is on them that fear him, from generation to generation.’ All the greatness is His; what she hopes for is the manifestation of His glory, and the overthrow of those that exalt themselves into His throne. ‘He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.’ There speaks the true Israelite. The downfall of the powers which men have worshipped to their own misery and slavery—the manifestation of Him who alone has a right to the worship of His creatures—this she hails as the ultimate deliverance to the race. To her, as to Hannah and every mother of the land in the days of old, the mystery of birth, its feebleness and its glory, explains the condition of man and the purpose of his Creator. ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ And she, in the fullest sense, perceives, what others had perceived in a low sense, how the gift of the Child is the witness of the permanence of the divine Word, so that nothing which was assured to the times of old could fail of its fulfilment in the times to come. ‘He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; as he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.’

In these hymns there is that union of the Old and New Testament, that contrast between them, which I thought that St. Paul’s fellow-worker would be more likely than most other men to recognise and to bring before us. A sense might be given to that remark which I should consider utterly false. It may be said that these hymns are the work of an artist who had a purpose of his own, who composed them to teach the world certain lessons which he deemed important. If they had been devised to express a certain sentiment, I do not believe they could have expressed that sentiment. If they had been written to denote the passage from one period to another, I am sure they would not have helped us to understand that passage. Artificial compositions—(even if they are not dishonest as these must have been)—compositions with a set theme always fail to make the impression which is left on us by the outpouring of a heart at some great moment of its grief or joy. The actual sufferer, the actual rejoicer, is the spokesman of human beings; the sophist and rhetorician vainly try to expound what human beings might feel or ought to feel. The song of Zacharias is emphatically the song of a man whose tongue is unloosed; who for the first time has entered into the meaning of the books which he has been reading since his childhood, of the services in which he has been engaged ever since he became a priest. A speech may be invented with tolerable success for a general on the eve of a battle, though such as have really come down to us stir the blood far more; but the mimicry of this kind of feeling must have been odious and contemptible. I know not where you could find the stamp of fraud more clear and ineffaceable than on a document which attempted it. If the words of Zacharias have lasted to our day, and have been accepted by men of different races as vital and true words—as words which speak to and speak forth the human heart within them—I cannot persuade myself that they bear that stamp of insincerity.

The Virgin’s song has endured a severer test in the ages through which it has been transmitted to us. It has lived on—it still lives on—through an adoration of her which makes her adoration of Him who did to her great things, her profound lowliness, her identification of herself with the race which was to call her blessed, the strangest contradictions. If it has borne a continual witness against these profanations—if they have not been able to change its letter or its spirit—how much may it have done to keep alive, in a multitude of hearts that have stooped to the most dangerous sentimentalism, even to the vulgarest idolatry, the belief of a great Head of humanity, whom she was permitted to bring forth—of an Everlasting Father, whom she might dare, in Him, to approach. No cold prosaic words, nothing else than a lyrical rapture, could have been a genuine expression of her spirit, could have become an expression for the true spirit of Christendom during eighteen centuries.

I believe, my friends, that if that song has effected something for mankind, its greatest work yet remains to be effected. First, I claim it for the wives and mothers of England. Let those who bind themselves to what they think a holier state—a state more like that of the Virgin—use it as devoutly as they will. I do not grudge it them. I earnestly trust that they will meditate upon it, and enter into it far more deeply than they have ever done. The correction of whatever is mischievous in their theories or their practices lies in it, not in our protests against them. But those who have accepted another condition—who have believed that God called them to it, and sanctifies it—should understand how the birth hallows every birth, with what dignity the Mother invests all maternity; how her joy is the warrant and example of all joy; how it links the infant that blesses any one household to humanity.

Secondly. Since this century is the one in which this word humanity is most spoken of, in which humanity is becoming an object of worship, let us who sing this song consider whether we have ever accepted it in its full sense—whether, if we did, it might not deliver us from the perils of this idolatry, and might not enable us to realise the truth which the idolatry conceals. Is not Mary’s song a witness against the disposition of humanity to exalt itself, or to exalt any one of the creatures who share it, into the throne of heaven? Is not her song a witness for the redemption and glory of humanity in the person of its Lord? Has not the Church herself fallen into the error which is now reaching its climax in those who renounce the Church? Has she ever fully proclaimed the principle which might subvert that error? Has she ever confessed, as the Israelite did, that God glorifies Himself by raising to a divine life the humanity which, without Him, must sink into utter death.

Lastly. If this song may help us to look on the lowest creatures we see on earth with a reverence which we have never paid them yet, if it should make every child an object of awe to us, may it not teach us also how to think of those whom we remember to-day as having passed away from the earth? They have shared in the adoration which has been bestowed on the Mother of their Lord. Did they not share with her—do they not share with her—that sense of a low estate which God regarded? Are they not a communion, because they give all glory to their Divine Head, and take none to themselves? Shall we not claim our places in their communion just in proportion as we magnify Him—as His Spirit enables our spirit to rejoice in God their Saviour and ours?¹