The passage: If our gospel is hidden, it is hidden to those who are lost — in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, does not shine on them.
I noted a few Sundays ago that this Second Epistle to the Corinthians shows more fully than any other of St. Paul’s writings his own struggles as a minister to the Gentiles, and what those struggles taught him about the ministry in every age. I return to it for both reasons. The Epiphany season asks how Christ was made known to the Gentiles; it also asks, if we take our own work seriously, how He is made known to men by the Gospel we preach. St. Paul’s words in the text answer both questions directly.
Every gospel tract tells us that “Gospel” means “good tidings,” but it is worth reminding ourselves of that plain definition, because in reading St. Paul we easily forget it and credit him with a very different purpose. We might suppose he came to the Gentiles to tell them that the traces of God they thought they had found in the world were only imagined, or to reveal a darkness over past and future they had not known before. Either way he could not be a messenger of good news — he could only claim to be telling a dismal truth.
He speaks of this good news being “hid” from those to whom it was proclaimed. We can learn what he means partly from the previous chapter, partly from the later part of this passage. In chapter three he speaks of his own countrymen: a veil lies over their hearts, unremoved in the reading of the Old Testament — like the veil on Moses’ face, hiding a glory too bright to look at. That veil, he says, has been taken away in Christ, and will be taken from the Jewish heart when it turns to the Lord.
The word translated “hid” is related to the word for “veil,” so the two passages must be connected. But how could the same cause block the Gospel among Monotheists and idolaters alike, among those who revered the Old Scriptures and those without them? If a veil hides the light from both, must it not be a different veil in each case? We shall find the answer as we go on.
“If our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost.” The word “lost” might suggest future damnation, but that is not the sense here. Paul is not describing the consequences of rejecting the Gospel but the cause of its rejection — describing something happening before his eyes, just as he elsewhere speaks of men “dead in trespasses and sins.” The translation is not obscure if we test it against common speech: we still speak of men “lost to themselves,” or “lost to all sense of right and wrong” — worn phrases, but forceful ones. When Paul found the Gentiles given over to sensuality, their minds darkened, alienated from God through ignorance and hardness of heart, he called them lost. When he found the Jews shut up in self-righteousness, glorying in their law and their difference from other men, he called them lost too — the same blindness, the same hardness of heart. He knew it well, for he had been lost himself.
He then explains, from his own experience, what darkens the heart in both these apparently different cases: “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not.” One might expect the Apostle of the Gentiles to speak of many gods, a whole Pantheon — yet he names only one, “the god of this world.” How could a single expression cover the beliefs scattered across Asia and Greece, the faith of the Latin Empire and the western tribes, and even the seed of Abraham, to whom belonged the adoption and the covenants and the promises? The answer is that he was summing up not their beliefs but their unbeliefs: the god of this world blinds those who believe not. In the earlier stages of idolatry, worshippers of things in heaven and earth still confessed a being connected to themselves, who sent rain and fruitful seasons, who might be looked to for protection, and who, despite caprice, was juster than those he ruled. But at each downward step, as the sins of the fathers passed to the children, this god with human sympathies degenerated into a mere god of this world — often no more personal than the air he was said to inhabit, yet taking on the worst human vices as his worshippers remade him in their own image. Such a god lay beneath every superstition, ready to emerge whenever faith in something higher was crushed by moral corruption. In Paul’s day this god was continually extinguishing the truth scattered through pagan fable, effacing the traces of a divine Friend and Deliverer that had comforted the poorest sufferers, and turning all visions of a world to come — mixed as they were with Elysian fields and enduring stars — into one indistinguishable Tartarus. And this same god of this world had just as fully supplanted the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the mind of the Israelite — not through fear of nature’s vengeance, since the Israelite, remembering his fathers’ oracles, could not worship nature once he had lost its gracious Creator, but by becoming the Money-god, Mammon, enthroned between the Cherubim, believed to sit in the highest heaven — the god who helped him prosper in trade and might be bribed by sacrifice to let him pass unnoticed into the next world.
Understanding who was blinding these minds helps us understand what Paul wanted them to believe instead — the purpose and effect of his Gospel. This is in the last clause: “lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, Who is the Image of God, should shine unto them.” The good tidings concerned God — the true, living God set against the false, dead god of this world who blinded Jew and Gentile alike. But this true God could not be declared in anyone’s words; He could only be shown in a Person, a living Image, seen in a man’s life and death. Paul’s task was to proclaim that God had shown such an Image of Himself as would confound every image men had made of Him from nature or from themselves — to say: “This is the Image of your God, the one your hearts and your fathers’ hearts were seeking; He whom you dreamed of in every thought of goodness, justice, or deliverance from wrong; He whom you fled and wished dead in yourselves when clinging to wrongdoing, because you felt Him judging it; He whom you replaced with lying counterfeits when your souls grew dark and base; He who was always seeking you, through blessings and punishments, to bring you out of bondage into knowledge of His guidance.”
So the Apostle would say further: “This good news is not mine to give. My rhetoric cannot make a way for it into your souls — and if it could, what good would that do? The message concerns a Person; you are called to submit to a living Ruler, to embrace a living Friend. No heap of words, however readily received, can produce this obedience or this fellowship — God does that, not we. He has created you in His Son and wants you to know who that Son is; He has formed you in His image and does not want you to mistake another image for His. His light is shining toward you, seeking entrance as light seeks the eye. Another god, the god of this world, works to intercept that light, to veil it, to disable the organ that should receive it. What I ask you to believe — I who have known both darkness and light — is that Christ’s light is stronger than all darkness and can break through it.”
If this is the character of the Gospel to the Gentiles, we see why the Church connects it with Epiphany. To the wise men, who questioned the stars for the King they sought, Jesus in the cradle is revealed as that King — an inward glory felt through the infant’s weakness. A veil is lifted from these seekers’ hearts, and they confess that even the grandest forms of the outward world can help them only by leading to a Lord who shares their own nature. A like manifestation came to every Gentile, learned or simple, who confessed the crucified Jesus as the Wisdom and Power of God: all his past studies and experiences of misery and sin, all his dreams of a good God and tendencies to worship an evil one, became evidence that the Image now shown him was the one after which he was made, and to which he must bow. Nor does the Church limit this to Gentiles any more than Paul does: all Jesus’ acts among His own people between Baptism and Crucifixion — stilling the waves, healing the demon-possessed — are treated as Epiphanies, manifestations of His inward glory, a preliminary Gospel later preached more fully to the whole world after His resurrection. Of all the lessons our Services teach through their titles and structure — lessons that grow richer the more I see the confusions caused by private opinion, loose tradition, and the fashions of our age — this seems to me the most precious.
It teaches us, first, what kind of work our missionaries do in heathen lands. Before leaving home they may think their task is to awaken the natives to a sense of religion, concern for their souls, awareness of life’s brevity, anticipation of judgment and eternity. But wherever England’s rule or any other government extends, they will find such feelings already present, more intensely than at home. If this is all they think their calling is — if they have not learned that it is not even part of their message — they will soon wish they had stayed home, for that work is already being done, more effectively, by the Yogis and Fakirs whose influence they hope to overturn. Unless they bring a Gospel concerning God — one that can meet the anxieties about religion, soul, death, and the future which weigh on peoples still capable of noble thought and great deeds, and can turn thoughts of judgment and immortality from deadening, fear-driven sources of fraud and falsehood into moral and quickening ones — our missionaries are not doing what Paul and his contemporaries did. They are not announcing a Redemption or testifying to the glory manifested in the Person of Jesus Christ.
What they do abroad, we must do at home. Paul’s message to the Jew was not essentially different from his message to the Gentile. We might expect him to preach the true God only to idolaters, and only Jesus Christ to those who already despised idols — but no: he had to declare the true God to both, and combat a false god in both. The English preacher today must learn the same. His Gospel too concerns God. He must proclaim that the God manifested in Christ Jesus is the God, the only God, and warn men of every class and opinion — from the fiercely religious to the dogmatically secular — that they are in danger of worshipping, indeed have worshipped, another god entirely unlike Him, and that it is essentially the same god different types of people bow to. There is truth in the saying that there are no atheists: the self-declared atheist worships the world, or something in it, or himself, submitting to a power no less terrible for being self-chosen. But in Paul’s sense, every one of us risks becoming an atheist — not some milder unbelief, but the literal denial of God, disbelief in an all-righteous, all-true, all-loving Being who made us in His likeness and would have us righteous, true, and loving. To hold that belief fast through both crushing and delightful days is the hardest thing for human beings — not some other difficulty in Christianity, removable so all else comes easily, but this very belief: that God is not false, unjust, or indifferent as we are. Men endure great suffering for their souls, and accept the harshest demands on conscience and reason, who cannot accept this — or accept it only as a dead proposition, explained away at the first difficulty. We can never grasp this truth, never overcome this natural atheism, unless we take the Gospel to mean that God has manifested Himself, and is manifesting Himself, in His Son Jesus Christ; that only in that Image can we know Him or ourselves; that apart from Him we have only animal birth and death, and the deeper death of sin; that in Him we are raised, redeemed, united to God and each other; and that through Him the Spirit works in us to make His nature and will known to others.
From this follow further conclusions about the duties and failures of modern preachers. There are many complaints about the pulpit’s weakness today. Those who feel they need no more sermons themselves, tired of commonplaces and doctrines they consider untenable, still want the poor — for whom the Gospel was first meant — to hear it, since the poor still need something of the kind, and may grow dangerous without it. For them, we are told, truth and falsehood scarcely matter; give them the strongest dose — sounding rhetoric, vehemence, terror of coming destruction, since nothing else will reach them. “How absurd,” says the critic, himself quite unmoved, “for preachers who claim to believe such things not to preach them with all the fury such convictions demand — the only method that can move this class today! If religion is everything, why not use the most direct means to produce it, as camp-meetings do?”
To this plausible argument, the answer seems clear. If we believe what the New Testament teaches, we should look to the New Testament, not to later teachers who claim its authority, for guidance on both the substance and manner of our preaching — and we cannot appeal to a less severe judge, for Apostles and Evangelists will not excuse our coldness any more than the revivalists or the sceptics who draw such conclusions from our supposed premises. But when we look to Paul for how the work began that produced Christendom and converted the world, we find no evidence that his preaching differed from ours by appealing more to nerves than to reason, or by painting more vivid terrors of coming vengeance to force instant belief. That he stirred consciences as none had before, awakening a sense of evil never felt before, is certain — but he did this by presenting the gracious Lord of that conscience, against whom it had rebelled. The sense of wrong came when Christ’s righteous Image was set before men and confessed as God’s own, to which they must be conformed. If we fail to set forth such an Image, or fail to believe it truly is the Image of God’s glory and the pattern of all good in men, we need look no further for our lack of influence, rich or poor, wise or foolish. We will gain no true influence over “the poor,” for whom the Gospel was designed, by any trick a cultivated man would see through and mock. Such methods serve the god of this world and strengthen his empire, keeping the light of Christ’s glorious Gospel from shining. Every base motive we appeal to, every dishonest argument we use, separates us further from the truth and makes it harder to commend ourselves, through manifest truth, to every conscience before God. It is a gross error, contradicted by plain fact, to think nineteenth-century enlightenment has made falsehood ineffective for those who dare use it — the enchanter’s trade has never been more prosperous. But thank God, this same scepticism makes it unsafe for us to use such tricks as earlier, more innocent preachers once did in Christ’s cause. We are driven back to the position of the early preachers of the cross: we must proclaim the Spirit of truth and love and a sound mind as the enemy of every spirit of falsehood that works through the senses and produces wild excitement and bodily contortion. We must proclaim, without hesitation, that God is light with no darkness in Him, and that those who claim fellowship with Him while walking in darkness lie and do not the truth. Our Gospel belongs to the poor only because there is a man in every beggar whom the god of this world tries to hold in death, and whom the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ addresses as His child. Finding him debased, brutalized, or false, we announce deliverance from that condition, a salvation won by Christ taking his nature and conquering his enemies. We may also speak of wrath to come — the Apostles spoke of it more to the rich than the poor, for God’s wrath burns then and now against ungodliness and unrighteousness, and falls on nations and individuals when these reach their fullness. There is a still more terrible wrath, the one men nurture in their own hearts as their very nature, when they surrender to the god of this world. From both forms of coming wrath the Gospel calls men to the one true refuge: the eternal Truth and Love of God shown to all in His Son. Until we recognize our own utter want of truth and love, we may imagine some other refuge, limiting God’s goodness to our own, even fancying we care more for His creatures than He does. Woe to the preacher who indulges that monstrous fancy! Happy is he if, through the most painful discoveries of the heartlessness and atheism he shares with those he preaches to, he becomes merely a witness to the glory of the Image of God. Then, feeling most strongly the blindness the god of this world seeks to work in his own mind and in his hearers’, he can say with confidence: “I know the light is stronger still; I know no blindness can finally withstand it.”