Advent Sunday

“Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of Man cometh at an hour when ye think not.” —Luke xii. 40.

I do not think I can employ the Sundays in Advent better than in speaking to you of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. I ought to dwell often on the meaning and purpose of that Festival, seeing that you are invited to keep it every Sunday. It is suggested to all Churchmen by the great Festival of Christmas, but there are reasons of great force which lead me to fix your thoughts upon it now. These thoughts must be turned to it very often, without being fixed upon it to any profitable purpose. You read of debates, trials, legal judgments about it in the newspapers; it is mixed with all the frivolous talk of the day. You must often be tempted to think that it is the least serious subject which the journals are occupied with. “Other questions,” you may say, “lead to some result; this is vague and interminable. Others we can refer to practical tests; this belongs to a region of metaphysical abstractions. And yet all the pettiest passions which other controversies call forth are at work here. All the devices and stratagems of party warfare are in requisition in the nineteenth century as in the ninth. This seems to be the topic which Christians specially select for the purpose of showing to all men how little love they have one to another.”

There can be no doubt that these thoughts have arisen in many hearts. It would be sad indeed if no others had been suggested to any of us. There must be a compensation for every evil in God’s universe. All things must work together for good to them that love Him. When we find the question of Sacraments mixing with all the vulgarest and most mundane questions, we may learn the deep and profitable lesson, that they are gifts to common men and not to theologians; that if they have any power at all, their power must be manifested in our daily lives. The disgust at the mixture of low and grovelling feelings with what we profess to regard as transcendent and divine, may lead us to inquire whether there is no refuge from this strife of tongues, no peaceful home to which we may fly. The painful discovery that all the vehemence and all the triviality that we complain of in others has its seat in ourselves, may lead us to ask whether there is not an escape from ourselves as well as from the world. The answer to these questions may open to us the very deepest as well as the most practical meaning of the Eucharist.

But a minister of Christ has no business to assume that these better feelings, if they are left to contend with the others, will get the mastery. He is bound by his office to aid them so far as he can, to take pains that they may not be crushed either by confusions of the intellect, by perplexities of the conscience, or by an imperfect belief in the Power which is at hand to sustain us when we are most feeble and most wrong. A right use of the Advent season may, it seems to me, be one of the most effectual means of counteracting the mischiefs, and of drawing forth the good which is latent, in the present circumstances of our Church. Most people have a sense of something of gladness in the Advent of our Lord when they connect it with Christmas. Most people have a sense of something of awe in the Advent of our Lord when they connect it with judgment. The Church brings both thoughts together in her services of to-day, and in those that follow. Each habit of mind belongs to the very name and nature of the Eucharist. We feel instinctively, that in that service we lose both if we lose either. These controversies threaten both equally. If we can in any wise establish and realize their union, we have averted at least a great part of their curse.

And this is not all. Oftentimes it must have happened to us all to meet with two subjects, in each of which it is very important for us to see our way, beset with nearly equal hindrances. After making various ineffectual attempts to remove them, we are inclined to adopt the conclusion that each is a hopeless labyrinth, that it is mere waste of time to look for an exit out of either. Then we discover that there is a passage between them, and that the one is the clue to the other. I believe that that is the case with respect to these two great topics, I will not say of theology, but of human life. I believe there is a problem respecting Advent, which the earnest and devout consideration of the problem respecting the Eucharist may help us to solve.

What is the problem about Advent? I think you have all been at times perplexed by it. You hear of the Son of Man coming. You are told to be ready for His coming. Expressions of this kind do not occur once or twice in the New Testament, they are characteristic of it. Sometimes you hear of His coming as a thief in the night; sometimes you hear of His returning as a bridegroom from the wedding. In the passage from which my text is taken, both these forms of speech are combined. What do they signify? Are they merely figures which point to the necessity of preparation for death? Is our departure out of this world that which is denoted by the coming of the Son of Man? If so, what has this coming to do with the first coming of Christ? Why are the two brought together in this day’s services, as if there was a close and direct relation between them? But if it is not so, wherein lies the force of the admonition? How can each one of us bring it home to himself? How can a coming of Christ to reign over the earth, or to judge the earth at some distant day, be held forth to generations of men as an event for which they are to be ready, which may come suddenly upon each man? No doubt the point may be explained to the satisfaction of divines and commentators; they may have their own technical way of interpreting the phraseology of the Bible. But surely that which is addressed to the consciences of ordinary men must commend itself to those consciences. That which calls on them to cast away the works of darkness, cannot be itself a dark oracle. That which comes as a message from the true God, cannot require any tricks or subterfuges to explain it. If this language is not strict, what language can be? What is it sent for, but to lay bare the falsehoods and treacheries of our hearts? Is it not urging us to put on an armour of light, in which we may appear before the Judge and Searcher of hearts?

To parry these questions is impossible. But is it less difficult to parry those others which are suggested by the consideration of the Feast of the Lord’s Supper? I do not speak of some which may start up in particularly captious, sceptical hearts. I speak of those which have tormented Christendom for centuries, which have not been more debated in schools than in nations, which have affected the condition of all Europe, which are to this day the watchwords of opposing Churches. All these, you know, turn ultimately upon the presence of Christ. When we come to that Feast, is He there, or is He absent? Is it a real presence or an imaginary presence? Do we meet Him there only because we believe Him to be there? Or is He there, and is that to be the ground of our belief? If He is there, must He not be equally present to those who believe and to those who do not believe? If He is there, may not He be worshipped there? If He is not there, does the Sacrament signify anything? Is there any substance, any person, to whom the outward sign refers? Are we bound to anything by it? Is there any bond between the visible and the invisible world?

Surely these are practical questions like the others, most practical. Like them, these cannot be put by under pretence that they are too mysterious for us. They are not too mysterious to be debated in drawing-rooms; they cannot be too mysterious to be spoken of in churches. They are not too mysterious to disturb the hearts and consciences of poor men and women; they cannot be too mysterious for us to hope that God, Whom we invoke daily as the Author of peace and the Lover of concord, of Whom we ask daily that He will grant us in this world knowledge of His truth, will enable us to see our way into them, that we may not lose the peace which Christ gave and of which His hand and His side were the assurance, that we may not lose the truth, which He saith can alone make us free.

We speak of the Advent or coming of Christ. I do not, of course, in the least object to this language. It is perfectly Scriptural. But yet it is important to observe that our Lord Himself speaks much oftener of the coming of the Son of Man. As He does so in this passage, it may be worth while to inquire whether that name does not throw light upon some of the first set of questions which embarrassed us. What was the desire of nations? What was it that the different tribes of the earth, so far as we can gather their longings from the different songs, mythologies, complaints of philosophers who scorned the people, complaints of those who represented the people, were seeking for and could not find? Surely it was a Son of Man. It was One higher than men, Who could govern them. It was One acquainted with men, Who could feel as they felt, suffer as they suffered. To unite the two sides of the character seemed impossible. But each presented itself with mighty force and attraction to one and to another. To that ideal it was felt there must be some reality corresponding. What we say when we speak, as we have spoken to-day, of Christ’s coming in great humility, when we speak of His entering Jerusalem sitting upon an ass, amidst hosannas which proclaimed that He was the heir of David’s throne, is that He did combine what seemed to be contradictory, what yet the heart of human beings confessed to be essential elements in the Divine Man they waited for. We affirm that He appeared Who had a right to rule the wills of all human beings, Who established that right by never exalting Himself above any, by being the Servant of all. We feel that we are setting forth His being and character most consistently when we speak of His birth in the manger, of His temptation, of His cross, as interpreting the power which He used when He bid the winds and the waves be still, when He restored the man whom no man could bind with chains to his right mind, when He raised the dead. All His Royalty and Divinity, we say, were expressed most completely in His humiliation and His sorrow. These declare what the very nature of power is, in Whom it dwells fully and perfectly. These, we say, declare the mind of Him from Whom all things proceed. He that has owned Jesus as the Son of Man, has in Him seen the Father of All.

This has been the faith of Christendom, the faith which has given all their worth and interest to Advents and Christmas Days. These have declared that a Son of Man, such a Son of Man as this, has actually proved that the dominion over men is His, that from Him they receive the life of their bodies and the life of their spirits, the power to see and hear, the power to think, believe, hope, love; that in Him they are constituted by God’s eternal law, that apart from Him they have no life at all.

Thus the coming of Christ, that first coming in great humility, imports a continual lordship of His over the being and faculties of man. He did not dwell for thirty-three years upon earth to show forth a spectacle to men of One with whom they had had nothing to do before, with whom they were to have nothing to do hereafter. He came, so Apostles teach us, because by Him all things had been created and by Him all things consisted, because He had been appointed heir of all things, because all things were upheld by the word of His power, because the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in Him bodily. And this purpose, they say, was not accomplished till He rose from the dead and ascended on high, till He claimed the glory which He had had with His Father before the worlds were. That was the vindication of His title to be Lord. That proved Him to be the Christ who could baptize men with the Holy Spirit. That was the beginning of a society which could be nothing but universal, because it stood on the Name of the Son of God and Son of Man. That led captive men’s captivity to sense and visible things. That was necessary that the promise might be thoroughly accomplished, “The Lord God shall dwell among you, and He shall be your Father, and ye shall be His children.”

By this language we are able to understand that other language which refers to the coming, or to the appearing and unveiling of the Son of Man after His Ascension. We ought, it is said, and said most truly, to give the same effect to the same words when they refer to the most different times and circumstances. Let us try to do so. Let us think how Apostles who believed in this Coming of Christ must have thought of every event in the history of the world, and of every event in the life of an individual man. Must not the first have been regarded as discoveries to the world of its true King, of Him Who rules all its secret movements, Who really directs all the springs of that policy which statesmen and sages pretend to direct, of Whose constant order and government calm times are the witness, Whose righteous authority is attested by those great crises, those moments of vengeance, when the framework of society is rent in pieces, and the crimes and oppressions of men who have made themselves the ministers of evil instead of good, are visited with a plague of fire and a plague of blood? One of these great acts of retribution stood out before the Apostles as the coming of the Son of Man in their day. It had an importance which could be assigned to no one that had preceded it. For it gathered up into itself all the history of the previous world, it inaugurated the history of the new world, it declared Jesus to be the Son of Man Whom the Jewish nation had existed to bear witness of, in Whose name its kings had reigned and its prophets had prophesied, Whom it rejected because He came to bless all the families of the earth, Who was exalted on high to be the blessing of all those families in spite of that rejection. This was the revelation of Christ in that day, which Jesus taught His Apostles, which the Apostles taught the Churches they founded to expect, and even to long for, though with awe, as the judgment-day on their own land, as the redemption-day of humanity. The destruction of the Temple was to be the sign of the Son of Man, the sign that His body was the temple in which God would meet man and man might meet God.

This unveiling of the Son of Man they speak of in language which can leave no doubt that they meant us to measure all subsequent movements and catastrophes in the universe by the same rule, to regard them as days of the same Lord, as manifestations of the same invisible presence. When again, as in the text, the address is to the conscience of individual men, when they are told to be ready because they know not when the Son of Man cometh, I do not see why we should doubt that there is a direct reference to the same events, for the life of every man is bound up with the life of his nation and of his kind. That which affects a society for good or for evil, must affect every member of it for good or for evil. The very test of the difference between one member of it and another is the use which he makes of these general admonitions, the interpretation which he puts upon them, the earnestness with which he lays them to heart as messages to himself. But I admit that this meaning does not and cannot exclude the truth that every judgment which is not national, every family chastisement, every sickness, every voice of parents and friends speaking from without, every secret monition in whatever form it may come to any one of us, is a call to recollect the Son of Man, is in the strict sense a visitation from Him. And here again our experience may tell us what special force there is in that phrase to describe the hints and pricks which are administered to our consciences, and the judgments that are pronounced upon our thoughts and acts. What is it that we are convicted of? Is it not of some selfish, self-seeking deed or purpose which showed that we did not take up our position as men; that we did not acknowledge the obligations which the law of kind lays upon us? Are not these reminiscences the torments of a sick bed? Do not they witness—It is a Son of Man who is Lord over us; we have despised these His brethren, therefore we have despised Him?

We may then very well admit that when our Lord says, “In such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh,” He gives us all and more than all the warning respecting the hour of death which preachers have ever drawn out of His words. Assuredly it is no contradiction of His other teaching—it does not jar with any conception of His Advent which we receive from Him—to say that, though on earth we may fancy ourselves under a law of selfishness, though here we may act as if we had no ties and relationships to those who surround us, when we close our eyes on the things with which they have been familiar, we pass into a region where we shall know assuredly that the Son of Man is reigning, where it will be impossible any longer to think that we are out of His presence, or to escape from that divine law of love which binds man to man, which binds earth and heaven together. The lie upon which we have acted must then be laid bare; the whole scheme of our existence must be exposed and broken in pieces; we must confess Him who gave Himself for men to be the Lord of all.

And now let us turn to the other subject. If this be the idea of Christ’s coming, whether to the world or to individuals, which the New Testament sets before us, what is to make us ready for His coming? What is to save us from that sleep into which our Lord warns us that we may fall? what is to arouse us if it has overtaken us? Surely we must be reminded of His presence with us. The natural notion that what is invisible is unreal; that He does not govern us because our eyes do not see Him; that He does not govern the world because the world fancies that it governs itself, this must be set at naught. We must have an assurance—a continual assurance—that the senses are as little judges of what is true in morals, as they are in physics; that self, which appears to be the centre round which everything here revolves, is no more really the centre than our earth is the centre round which the heavenly bodies revolve. What shall give us this assurance? What shall make the enormous paradox which Christendom has confessed, upon which all the civilization of the modern world has depended—that One who died upon the Cross is the King of Man, and that in Him all the glory of God is revealed—a part of our lives, a substantial principle which may determine all our acts; which, if it does not determine them, may torment us and be a witness against us when we regulate them on another and an opposite maxim? Assuredly an ordinance which told us that Christ was not present with us, but that we may by an effort of memory bring back an act which He once performed, a suffering which He once underwent; that we may even, by an act of imagination, bring His Person to our mind, would confuse us as much about His first coming as His second. The Death which it would present to us would be an event merely, not a power drawing all to itself, not the pledge of a victory over Death and Hell. And the hope such a service encourages must be as little satisfactory as the vision of the past. It must be a hope, not of a revelation to every eye of that same Son of Man who had been pierced, but only of certain rewards and distinctions which shall be bestowed upon those who have believed in Him or loved Him more than others. But would a service which supposed that, by a miracle, at a certain season, He made Himself present to those from whom He was habitually absent vindicate much better the purpose of His incarnation and the effect of His death? Would not such a service make void the idea of an actual union of God with men in a Mediator, make void His own words, “Lo, I am with you always;” make void the intimations of that truth which are brought to men by His visitations in the different circumstances of their lives?

Is there then a theory of our Eucharistic service which is more comprehensive than either of these, and may supersede them both? God forbid that I should propose such a one, or should wish you to embrace it! My desire is to show how miserably men fail when they try their hands at theories, in matters which concern the relation and the intercourse of God with His creatures. It is not that I believe this relation is less real than that of men with each other; it is not that I hold this intercourse to be more accidental or uncertain than that of men with each other. I know no ground for the relationships among men but their common relation to God. I know no security for the permanence of fellowship among men but that fellowship which depends upon no chances, which the Unchangeable God Himself has established. But this relationship and this intercourse are, as I hold, represented to us in Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself, outward and visible signs of a spiritual grace which He Who cannot lie gives to us. They are not, and cannot be, represented by theories which are the products of our intellects, which have no hold upon the deeper spirits of human beings, which cannot present themselves in any forms, which are of necessity partial and one-sided, which deal with what is dead, not with what is alive. I do not oppose a new theory to old theories that have worn themselves out by the friction of centuries, and yet that will never confess themselves to be defunct. I oppose to them the Sacrament itself which is the subject of them; I say that that was appointed by Him Who knew what is in man, and that it has not grown old and will not grow old; that it is as fresh now and as adapted to all human wants as when the first disciples received it with joy and singleness of heart, praising God and having favour with all the people. What this Sacrament asks of you and me, of lawyers and of divines, is that we will not fancy it wants our patronage, our explanations. It asks that we will leave this man and that to utter his rash, hasty, and imperfect dogmas about it, and that we will not try to enact in opposition to them other dogmas as rash and imperfect; that we will allow Christ to take care of His own ark and of that which it contains, without supposing that we can make it steadier or safer by stretching our clumsy hand to keep it from falling. On all such vulgar and profane experiments God in the history of His Church has pronounced His judgments long ago. Every new age will try to prove that it is wiser than He is, that it knows better how to maintain His cause than He does. He has poured contempt on all that has been attempted for this purpose even in a noble spirit, by learned men of deep minds in other times; He certainly will expose the puny mimicry of ours.

But He never has scorned, and never will scorn, any one who seeks not to defend this Sacrament, or to make theories about it, but to receive it. All are invited to do that. If a man is told that the wicked are either not partakers of Christ’s body at all, or are partakers of it to their own destruction, he may well say, “Then assuredly I must not approach that table, for I am one of those wicked. My conscience tells me that I am.” But when he has arrived at that conclusion he may say further, “Verily, I can see no way out of this wickedness, unless some one has come into the world to deliver me and my kind from it; unless some one shall enable me and all of us to be partakers of His righteousness. I hear that such an One has been: my fathers said so. Here is the Sacrament which assured them that it was so. Here is the Sacrament which told them that they might eat and live, that they might cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light. It speaks to me who feel the need to do that perhaps more than they did, as it spoke to them. It bids me partake of One Who died that I might live, and live for evermore. My spirit wants that food. Whether I have faith or whatever is said to be needful for that end, God knows; I leave myself in His hands. I am weary of myself; I want to be delivered from the burden of self—I want to have that life of the Son of Man Who did not spare Himself, but gave Himself for men. It may be that I want much more than this; if I do, I believe God will give it. This I know that I want, and this therefore I will seek.”

Another may have been harassed much with thoughts of death and of the preparation he ought to make for it. He may have tried hard to follow rules that have been given him; to fix his thoughts steadily on the possibility that this year or the next his soul may be required of him. He has found it generally impossible. The duties of life have thrust themselves in his way, he could not neglect them; if he has neglected them that he might be fitter for his change and for that which is to follow, a sense of bitter contradiction has seized him—he has felt he was cultivating that selfish habit of mind which has the very nature of sin. Then he hears of being ready for the Son of Man. He is told of a Sacrament which sets forth His death to death till He comes. “To set forth that death to others, to partake of that death myself,” he thinks, “must be surely better than to make painful and desperate efforts for realizing my own. So I enter into the common death; so I come into sympathy with all my fellows; so I acquire the mind of Him Who never sought to please Himself, Who died that we might have life.”

I give you instances of the way in which men may be led to apprehend the inner nature of the Sacrament, that which is most puzzling to dogmatists and theorists, by the sheerest necessity, by the experience of their own errors, of their own profoundest evil. Such persons, if they find Christ at the altar, will certainly find Him also in the study, by the fireside, in the midst of their common work. Such men, if they worship Christ then, will gain help to preserve them from all idolatry of any outward things whatever, whether they be the elements of bread or wine, or anything else that is sacred because it is God’s creature, and accursed when it is made into a God. For those who eat this heavenly food in haste because it is the Lord’s Passover, with their staff in their hand and their shoes on their feet, well know that they need it to deliver them from forgetfulness of an unseen Presence, from devotion to anything visible. They have not time to speculate and debate. They want strength to live. They want to be ready for the Bridegroom, whether He call upon them to toil for Him here or to feast with Him hereafter. They want to partake of His humility because they are sure that that was in truth the greatest manifestation of His glory.

And if we come, brethren, with these desires to the Eucharist, it may be for our blessing, and not for our hurt, that we have read of it in the midst of reports of the crimes of states and of individuals, of tyrannies and slaveries abroad, of mercantile frauds at home. It can bear to come in contact with these things, for the Son of Man Himself came into closest contact with a tyrannical, slavish, Mammon-worshipping world. He came into it that He might raise us out of it. He came into it that we might know that the Spirit of Cruelty, the Spirit of Lies, is not our King or the King of Men; that we have a Father in Heaven Who will not let us yield in any act of our lives to the oppressor, if we will yield ourselves to His Spirit. In our baptism, our godfathers and godmothers declared that we were the children of that Father; they renounced in our name all our oppressors. In the Eucharist we assert our sonship; we claim to be partakers of the Son, in Whom God owns us as members of His family; we ask that nothing in heights or depths, or things present or things to come, may separate us from His love or break our allegiance to Him. In that Eucharist we declare that our hope is in a Lamb of God which has taken away the sins of the world by the sacrifice of Himself; therefore we ask that we may be ready when the Son of Man comes to claim us as sacrifices to God, and that we may not be found choosing another master for ourselves, and shutting ourselves up in a hell of selfishness and despair. In the Eucharist we gave thanks for a death not for ourselves only, but for the whole world; therefore in it we look forward to a Redemption which shall be not for ourselves only, but for the world, when Christ shall appear without sin unto salvation.