Fourth Sunday in Advent

“Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of our faith; Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”—Hebrews xii. 1, 2.

The Collects on the other Sundays in Advent seem to have been formed from the Epistles which follow them. The Collect for this day reads as if it expressed the most opposite temper of mind to that which the Epistle encourages us to cultivate. The one says, “Rejoice evermore;” the other complains of the sore lets and hindrances which meet us when we try to run the race that is set before us. How can such a tone of melancholy, such a sense of oppression, be compatible with obedience to St. Paul’s precepts?

I have been trying to show you that the Eucharist reconciles many difficulties; that in the light of it we may understand why our Lord’s Advent in humility and His Advent in glory are brought so closely together in Scripture; why Scripture itself has throughout so Sacramental a character; why the Ministry of the New Testament surpasses the Ministry of the Old, and is not hopelessly separated from it. Perhaps this difficulty also, which touches so nearly upon our commonest and deepest experience, which concerns the clashing of grief and joy in our own lives, might also disappear, if we could enter more into the meaning of this Festival, and partake of it more faithfully.

I cannot separate these two objects. Intellectual perplexities, if so they are to be called, interfere with a simple, honest acceptance of the blessing that God designs for us. Indifference to the gift, or a careless use of it, makes our perception of the ends for which it is bestowed indistinct and fluctuating. It must be so in this highest instance, for it is so in every lower instance. Some may see more truly than they act; some may act more truly than they see. But vision does become dim through insincere acts; acts do become heartless and self-contradictory if they are repeated without any desire or effort to know wherefore they are enjoined, whither they are tending. Light and warmth may be different in themselves; but it is not safe to refer them to a different source, or to reckon on the continuance of either where the other is wanting.

I do not think it is impossible or improbable that the words in the Epistle to the Philippians may have suggested the thoughts out of which the prayer in the Collect grew; because I do not know what is more likely to make us desire that God would raise up His power and come among us and with great might succour us, than the discovering how little we are able to rejoice unless He does give us the recollection of His presence and of His goodness. The Philippians themselves were apparently more desponding than most of those to whom St. Paul wrote; for that reason he tells them more of their right to gladness. But the text I have chosen from the Epistle to the Hebrews gave the form to the petition, and was evidently in the mind of the writer. Nor is there any that I know which so fully expresses the meaning of the Communion, or may serve so well to gather up the hints I have thrown out respecting it in former Sermons, and to prepare us for the Christmas participation of it.

I. There is nothing we are so familiar with in the books of rhetoricians as invocations of departed worthies to look down upon their descendants, either that they may reprove them for some baseness, or encourage them to strength and victory. Considering how such language has been abused by those who have attached no meaning or scarcely any meaning to it, who have regarded it as little more than a figure of speech, it is wonderful how much power there still remains in it—how it stirs the blood of us who hear, even when we have not much faith in the sincerity of the speaker. He is often startled, like other enchanters, by the spirit he has raised; perhaps commends himself for the skill which could make a somewhat stale imposture successful. He does himself injustice. He has been truer than he gives himself the credit for being; the heart of man responds not to his artifice, which is paltry, but to the truth hidden within the artifice, which is mighty. Men’s consciences tell them that it is so; that they are habitually unmindful of the presence of unseen spectators; that when that thought of it is awakened in them they are not in a more false and unreasonable state of mind, but in a truer state, than their ordinary one. How it can be so they may not ask themselves; their instincts are better than their logic; they know that they are for the moment better and more serious men for the impression that has been made upon them, and they cannot refer a moral benefit to the belief in a lie.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews has been recalling to his Hebrew brethren the acts of those ancestors with whose names they were most familiar. All those acts he had traced to their faith in an Invisible Lord, and to the substantial hope of which that faith was the ground. They subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, stopped the mouths of lions, out of weakness were made strong, only because He Whom they could not see was more real and living to them than any of the things which they did see. Then he speaks of those whom he had contemplated apart, as a body. They are a cloud of witnesses; they are watching the Israelites of that day, who are engaged in a race as serious, as full of hindrances, as full of hope, as their own. Each runner, when hardest pressed, when most out of heart, might be sure that he had those spectators, and that their sympathies, and all the mysterious aid which comes from sympathy, were with him at every moment.

It is possible for a person trained in those rhetorical practices to which I have referred, and knowing that religious men of all Schools and Churches have resorted to them unscrupulously,—it is possible for him to think that these words are an instance of them, and a warrant for them. It might not remove that opinion to point out the exceedingly practical character of the previous chapter, the impatience which the writer must have felt for fine speeches, when the heroes whom he reverenced were all doers of work; when it was to work, and the trust that is the soul of that work, that he was awakening the flagging spirits of the Christians in Palestine. With our artificial notions, we should dispose of all such arguments. We should say that, this being his object, he of course thought himself obliged to use all such passionate appeals as experience shows to be effectual, at least for a while, in stimulating torpid natures. The true answer is, that the argument of the Epistle, where it is most strictly argumentative, had all been directed to the purpose of proving that Christ has rent asunder the veil which separates those who have left the world from those who are in it; and that it was a formal, logical, inevitable conclusion from these premises, that this cloud of witnesses were actually with them, not brought to them by some violent effort of the fancy. He who believed those premises, had no doubt a duty to perform after he had stated the grounds on which he believed them. Every power which God had given him was demanded, that he might break the fetters with which sense, and fancy the creature of sense, were binding the minds of his readers, and hindering them from looking straightly and steadily at the facts of their position. He had a right to any forms of speech, to any illustrations which nature or human life could supply him with; not that he might conjure them into some unnatural excitement, but that he might clear away the enervating delusions to which they were, from indolence and despondency, surrendering themselves.

The writer of this Epistle, then, is not sanctioning and imitating the insincerity of those orators who make it part of their trade to talk of heroes and saints looking down from their shining seats; but he is explaining why honest men, in their best and truest moments, when they most needed to be braced for action, when death was looking them in the face, have felt the need, and confessed the power, of the conviction that they were not alone or unheeded, that the hosts on their side were greater than the hosts against them. It is horrible to think that they did what they ought to do, because they believed what they had no right to believe. It would be a comfort surely quite infinite, to know that they had a right to believe it then; that we have a right to believe the same always; that the dispositions in us, which withstand the belief, are the false ones.

Now the words of my text, well as we may know them, often as we may read them, do not give us the requisite assurance that it is so. We can say they were addressed to the Hebrews; to the Hebrews of a particular age; that they proceeded from an inspired writer; that they do not sound the least like those which we, in the nineteenth century, are wont to hear. In hours of blessed sorrow, these reasonings may be knocked down; chronology may be abolished; we may feel sure that whatever was true then is true now. But this does not last; old doubts recur; if we keep something of what we learnt in such hours, we are too apt to think it was meant specially for us; we are the favoured persons who may, if we can, turn Scripture promises and consolations to our use. If we can! But how much lies in that! Can we, shall we ever be able, till we are taught again that we are not better than other men; that no truth concerning God’s nature and His relation to man can be of private interpretation?

The Communion is the continual re-affirmation of these words to each age of the Christian Church, and to each member of it. The Communion says to us all: “The pillar of cloud, which followed those Hebrews who embraced the Gospel when St. Peter preached it at the feast of Pentecost, over whom St. James presided, to whom St. Paul, or some one who had the mind of St. Paul, wrote, is following you. Numbers have been gathered into that cloud since. Every new face that looks out of it has been ploughed with furrows like those of his forerunners. Every one has been in the race; every one, by being in it, has learnt to feel with those who are in it now.” So this Festival speaks. For if the doctrine of the Epistle to the Hebrews is not a true one, then the existence of this Supper cannot be explained; it has no business to exist. If it is a true one, he who partakes of the Supper need not try to picture to himself those who were combatants once, as spectators now. This Sacrament bids him remember that they are so. The fact may be as strange to him as light to the eyes of children. But the light is with them, and they have organs to take it in. This object also is quite independent of our powers of vision; by degrees we may use them to look at it, as simply as children look at a lamp or at the sun, though with an increasing, not a lessening wonder.

II. It is not always easy to persuade ourselves that we are actually running a race, any more than that there are spectators of the race. Here again the thought has become so hackneyed that we almost suspect it has no significance. But it has taken such hold upon men in all countries and periods, that our consciences tell us it cannot be based upon a conceit. Those who are engaged in the contests of the world for eminence and success have felt that it is applicable to them. They live to distance other runners, by fair means or by foul. Prizes—precious or worthless—are before them; he who will give up most for the sake of them has the best chance of winning them. The Greek games and the Roman amphitheatre were continually suggesting thoughts to the mind of St. Paul. In that Epistle to the Philippians out of which we have been taught to-day, he speaks of forgetting the things that are behind and reaching forth to the things that are before, pressing to the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. That he was not trying to distance any in this course, is clear enough from the eagerness with which he beseeches the Philippians to follow in the same path, to do the same thing; from the earnestness with which he testifies that his greatest reward is to have them as the sharers of his joy. But though there was this all-important difference between him and those with whom he compared himself, he had the strongest inward conviction that the comparison was a true one, and that the strivings of men’s spirits after a spiritual reward, a spiritual goal, are as real as any efforts and energies of their bodies can possibly be.

He speaks therefore of casting down or putting aside every weight, as runners of course were bound to do. The word has reference not merely to the care which they must use before they start, to be free from any unnecessary burden which could put them at a disadvantage, but to the previous training by which they had acquired lightness of limb, to their abstinence from the meats and drinks which would make them dull and feeble. St. Paul may import this likeness almost literally into the other region; he may mean that the activity of the spirit is weakened by the same causes that weaken the activity of the body, and that on the whole a good discipline for the one would also be a good discipline for the other. But he must mean, I think, more directly those burdens which press upon the conscience, crush hope, interfere with manly action. He must mean that incubus of the past, which sits so heavily upon some of us,—the recollection of evil deeds done, of good deeds omitted, of thoughts left to travel their own way, of base feelings and desires cherished, of hours of intercourse abused that can never be recalled. He must mean the weight of the present, with all its petty anxieties and vanities; with the occupations not of the hand but of the mind, which appear most unworthy of a spirit living among spirits. He must mean the aching sense of responsibilities which are not fairly encountered; the uncertainties about our path, which of different roads we should take, the doubt whether we have not lost our way altogether, and, instead of running a forward race, are not moving in continual circles back to the point from which we started. He must mean the weight of the future; of doubts of what is coming upon ourselves and upon the world; doubts whether everything may not prove at last to be built upon the sand; doubts whether all we believe is not shadow; doubts whether all we see is not shadow. These are heavy weights surely. Who knows how heavy, in the brother who is saying the same prayers with us, who is kneeling by us at the same altar? And yet there is a weight which I have sometimes felt to be more terrible than these,—the weight of a leaden indifference; as if we cared nothing about either past or present or future, about the world or ourselves or God; as if all were dead alike.

Now when we are told to cast off these weights, every weight, the first sound of the words is pleasant enough; but the second thought of them is distressing. Do they not mock us? Who can cast off that which is part of his very self? Who can say that that which has been shall be abolished; that that which is with us now shall not be; that the thick mist that overhangs what is coming shall be changed into clear sunlight? How are those eyes which are watching us to help us to do this? If they found the secret, it has died with them, or they did not impart it to us. And they cannot impart it now. I think, brethren, they did impart it, some of them, before they died; and that perhaps, even now, we may be learning the lesson from them. Is it not that which the Communion of the Lord’s Supper is teaching us? Is not that repeating to us the command, “Cast thy burdens upon the Lord,” and telling us how it might be obeyed? For He to Whom past, present, and future are all one, He Who is, and was, and is to come, invites you, His creature, to claim fellowship with Him in His Son your Lord. Seeking Him, you do cast away these burdens which are pressing down your spirit, the burden which He bore Who bore the sin of the world. You can cast yourself, with all that has been, with all that is, with all that you are fearing shall be, before Him Who knows it all. You can come with all your darkness into His light. You can rise up new men in Him Who has died and risen for you, putting off the old self, putting on that new and redeemed man which is created after God in Christ Jesus.

III. And so the force of those next words, “The sin that doth so easily beset us;” the sin which is about us, encircling us like a girdle, becomes also apparent. The image of a load or burden comes home to us all; our consciences recognize it instantly, but they are not always satisfied with it. The sense of evil is something so very intimate, so very personal, that any phrase which expresses merely an oppression under which we are labouring, seems inadequate to represent it. Is it always a pressure at all? Do we never hug it and entertain it? If disgust follows after, did not relish and enjoyment go first? Was not the indulgence courted? Had we any wish to be severed from it? Questions hard to answer; nay, questions which it is often most unwise to ask. For does not this debating about the nature and degree of sin often keep us in sin? Whilst we are thinking how much wrong we have been guilty of, is not the wrong accumulating; is not the guilt becoming greater? Do we not want something better than any hints about self-examination, which may force us to stay on the level of self, which may make the judge a partner of the crime? Does not the Communion point to another and more excellent way? Does it not speak of a life-blood which cleanseth from all sin; of a divine dying Love which is more subtle than sin, subtle as that is, and can enter into hollows of the spirit where that cannot enter, and can at last drive it out and occupy the ground which it has occupied? Whether we understand what these promises mean or not, will anything else suffice to deliver us from that close, penetrating evil, that poison in the blood, from which we are suffering? If we cannot understand, will not God give us understanding? Is it not the very thing that we ask of Him? At all events, can there be any refuge from a cold, selfish, dark nature, but in the nature of a pure and loving Being, in Whom is no darkness at all?

That examination of ourselves which the Church, following St. Paul, enjoins upon those who would eat of that bread and drink of that cup, is not, I apprehend, an examination into our own state of mind, to see whether we have internal qualifications for coming to the Feast, but an examination whether we want to get rid of ourselves, whether we would really have a Deliverer, if we could find Him, from all that degrades us, a Friend in Whom we could inherit that righteousness and truth which we have not, and are never meant to have till we forget ourselves and seek them in Him. It is certainly a profane thing to come to a Sacrament which tells us of fellowship with a righteous Being, if we would rather be without such fellowship; which tells us of a new and noble nature, if we prefer our old and base nature. And therefore to examine ourselves whether we be in the faith—that is to say, whether we count Christ to be the Deliverer and the Giver of a new life to Mankind, which the Bible says He is,—must certainly be a most desirable preparation for the Marriage Supper. If He has not taken upon Him the nature of man, if He is not the Bridegroom of Humanity, if He has not died that we may enter into His eternal and risen life, the Sacrament must be a falsity, and therefore we are false in coming to it. And through the dulness of our spirits, and through their fondness for routine, such a forgetfulness of this does steal over us continually, that we cannot be too thankful for any admonitions which tell us that God is in earnest whether we are or not, and that as He wishes us to inherit a blessing, He would rather plague us with diseases and sundry kinds of death, than that we should be defrauded of it through our distrust and unthankfulness. Such admonitions, like all that happens around us, and all the experiences within us, are meant as goads to drive us to the Father of our spirits, not as reasons why we should turn away from Him. They are not to unsettle us with anxieties and frettings, but to show us how we must get rid of all these, because we have a race which they will be a perpetual let and hindrance to us in running.

IV. This is the next subject on which the text dwells. These weights and this besetting sin are thrown off because we cannot run with them, or can only run impatiently and irregularly. Does this running merely refer to those acts, which are sometimes called religious, by which we are supposed to be preparing ourselves for another world? It means, I apprehend, the whole course and business of a man in the world, everything that he is busy about, wishing for, toiling for, what he is thinking in his lonely hours, what he is doing in society, his domestic life, his political life, his very lowest occupations. Whatever he is about, he is running some race. There is something which he supposes it possible he can come at some day or other. What the text says is, that there is one common object and goal for all men, that all in their different works and callings may set that before them; that if they do, every such work or calling will become human and not selfish; the work and calling of a man, and not of an animal; of a creature who looks upward, and not of one who goes upon his belly and eats dust. All such callings and works require patience; patience to do the thing that has to be done faithfully and well, patience to bear up against all the obstructions that interfere with the doing of it, patience to make it subservient to a higher and universal end. It was therefore, brethren, that in the old times the State looked upon this Communion of the Lord’s Supper as a qualification for its offices. That doctrine was turned to an abominable use, to grovelling ends of party and secularity; and all have reason to be thankful that no statute any longer enforces the obligation. But the principle which was implied in it cannot be repealed. That remains true whether we understand it or not; the full understanding of it would, I believe, be the secret of all moral and social reformation. It is, that no offices which are administered by men, or affect the wellbeing of men, may be held as if they were bestowed by earthly patrons, or as if they were the prizes of successful wit and cunning; that they are stewardships from God, to which men must appoint, and which they must hold every hour under a sense of God’s presence and judgment; for the abuse of which they must therefore seek His forgiveness, for the right performance of which they must cast themselves upon His grace; otherwise their acts will be done either in cowardly deference to other men’s judgments, or in self-willed dependence upon their own, in each case equally to the injury of those whom they are sent into the world to serve.

V. It may appear to some, but I hope not to many of you, as if the latter words of the text must take it out of the circle of our common duties, and restrict it to those which are more sublime. The Apostle says, “Looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of our faith, Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Here is the full interpretation of what has gone before. We have here the correction of some of the worst tendencies of religious as well as of worldly men; we have here the vindication of our whole human life from the narrownesses and corruptions of both. How often do preachers bid us think of death as the end of all the works we are engaged in! how often do they bid us run with that goal in sight! The writer of the Epistle points to a different goal. Jesus Christ, the Giver of life, is the goal of the race. If the runners have their eye upon any object but Him, they will miss their prize. How often are we told to think of our faith, to consider whether we have a right to claim Jesus Christ as our Saviour! The Epistle bids us look from our faith to a Living Person Who is the only root of it, the only end of it. Our faith is not in itself, but in Him; if we think of it instead of Him, it perishes. The Epistle bids us look to One Who bore the Cross for man, died the death of man, rose again as man, ascended on high in the nature of man. All the acts which we are bidden to contemplate, by which we can recognize Him, are acts which concern our race. And the encouragement which is given us is, that we cast off the slough of that slothful, cowardly, self-seeking nature, which belongs to us as individuals, and may be clad with that enduring, self-sacrificing nature of Him Who died and lives for all. How this is to be done, He Himself shows us; for He had an end before Him, as we have before us. He had His Father’s eternal love always before Him. In darkness, and agony, and desertion, He had to cast Himself and us upon that love. The joy that was set before Him was the joy of making men partakers of it.

And now, then, we may begin a little to learn the force of those words, “Take, eat, this is My body; drink, this is My blood.” Of that human and divine nature which was in Him, those who are let and hindered in running the race that is set before them may participate. This is the pledge that God does raise up His great power and come amongst us, in the midst of our weakness and ignorance. This is the pledge that we may cast down every weight that presses upon us, and upon our fellows, and upon the world, before His Cross; that we may lay other men’s sins and our own—for are they not the same, are we not sharers of a common evil, of a common death, however various the forms it may take?—before Him Who was made sin though He knew no sin. This is the encouragement to give thanks for all men and for all things; for our birth into a world of sorrows; for all the sorrow we have found in it; for all that has compelled us to feel we are of one blood with all human beings. This gives us a warrant to pray for all known and unknown, friends and enemies, and to hope for all. This is the assurance that Christ’s coming in the flesh was indeed glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, goodwill to men. This is the pledge of the pierced side and the wounded hands, which is given to us as it was given to the Apostle; we remember to-day that Christ is risen indeed, and that He is our Lord and our God. This is the pledge that we are members not merely of a fighting body, but of the Church of the first-born, of the assembly of just men made perfect. This is the pledge that we have no need for Christ to descend into earthly elements, because our spirits may be with Him in those heavens where He is. This is the witness that we are not dreaming a dream, but expecting that which, by the eternal laws of God’s Universe, by the oath of Him Who cannot lie, must be, when we look for a coming of Christ in the glory of His Father and the Holy Angels, for a day of Redemption, when He shall claim the Universe which He has purchased. This is the voice coming to us all out of the depths of sorrow and anguish: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice.”