March 1, 1857
(MORNING)
The passage: Our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power by which he is able to subdue all things to himself.
St. Paul had just spoken of church members whose god was their belly, who minded earthly things. It’s a plausible view that here he meant to contrast his own mind, and that of those who imitated him as he imitated Christ, with theirs. Our translators probably thought so too, or they would hardly have rendered politeuma as “conversation” — a word that in the seventeenth century covered one’s whole course and habit of life, not just speech. But it could never carry what a word built from City and Citizen naturally carries: a condition and privilege belonging to certain people whether they used it or forgot it.
That natural sense, I think, is what Paul intends. He isn’t contrasting his own heavenly temper with their earthly one. He blames them for that temper precisely because he and they alike had a divine politeuma — a status claimed for them, rightfully theirs, implied in their very actions, with which such a temper was utterly at odds. The contrast isn’t between them and him; it’s between them and themselves. Nor is it between them and their professions, as if they boasted a high citizenship while being mere aliens. Their fault was too low an estimate of their status and rights, not too high a claim to it. They would rise above their grovelling ways — and above the conceit that went with them — if they understood what they actually were: what honors and estates were legally theirs, waiting to be claimed, and under what title they were held.
Still, the words “in the Heavens” plainly contrast with “earthly things” in the sentence before. Did the translators then make another, worse mistake — should they have used a future tense instead of a present? Should Paul be made to say “our citizenship will be,” not “is,” in the Heavens? Any reasonable reader will see they were right as it stands; the change would have destroyed the passage’s meaning and moral force. The earthly-minded could rightly answer, “We’re on earth; we need actual goods, not possibilities. Keep your shadows if you like — give us something substantial, even short-lived.” And Paul’s own language and deepest convictions would have left him no answer to that. All his exhortations pushed men from the fantastic toward the real. His whole life was spent presenting a present Saviour, able to free them from present bondage and sustain them under immediate death. Even the plainly future part of this passage — the coming manifestation of the Saviour, the complete redemption from bondage — would be just as emptied of meaning if his readers thought they did not yet have, but would only later have, a citizenship in the Heavens.
But how can such a thought ever become practical for us? Consider how it became one for Paul himself. He was a Roman citizen, valued the privilege, and it served him well more than once. Asking himself why it had been so prized by old Roman families, how provincials came to share it, how it came to be bound up with world dominion — what answer could he find? Was it won by men like those he saw in Nero’s palace, given over to animal pleasure, careless of past or future, minding only earthly things? Did Rome grow great under their care? Or was its power due to the opposite sort — men who scorned such indulgences, held fast the reverence for ancestors that these had lost, believed in some unseen protector of their land rather than a visible idol or a tyrant’s terrifying phantom? Were not the true citizens who built Rome different from the false ones now hastening its ruin, in this: that they minded earthly things less, and had some dream, however confused, of a citizenship in the Heavens?
But Paul was also an Israelite, a child of Abraham, and here the same facts appeared in far greater clarity. He saw everywhere — in every scattered city, in Jerusalem itself — men proud of their origin, clinging to their fathers’ traditions, yet in the fullest sense minding earthly things: money-getters by profession and heart, reading their sacred records through the lens of Mammon rather than Jehovah. Were these like the men those records spoke of? Very like those the prophets denounced for forgetting the Everlasting Covenant, for setting their hearts on gain, for drawing down God’s wrath and hastening the city’s destruction. And therefore the exact reverse of those heroes who had done great things on earth by mastering it. Those men did not mind earthly things; they believed themselves citizens of a city with foundations, whose builder was God, and lived and died in that faith. They held their heavenly citizenship while still on earth, and could hope, once their eyes closed, to understand still more of what it meant, and how many others shared the inheritance.
This was Paul’s schooling in what citizenship means — his preparation to believe there existed a city where Jew and Roman, Greek and Barbarian had equal standing, a city that must be in the Heavens, and whose gates, for that very reason, were never shut to any inhabitant of earth who chose to enter. In other words, he found there is a human society, for men as men, founded on the spirit, not the body — men become members of it because they have spirits, and are made free of it because the Father of Spirits has declared, in His Son Jesus Christ, that He is their Father, and they are brethren. So he mourned that men with such an origin and inheritance should think of themselves merely as sons of earth, living as though their fellowship depended on earthly accidents rather than on their relation to the unseen world. So far as they did this, their intercourse would be capricious and shallow — never deep enough to overcome the pull toward grovelling, separate, animal indulgence, never rising above pleasant words, acts, and the flattery of vanity. But so far as anyone traced their attraction to each other to a higher, diviner source — believing the bonds of friendship no more accidental or self-willed than the bonds of natural kinship, and referring both to God’s eternal love and to our relation to Him — their associations would be genuine and lasting, surviving circumstance, surviving even death.
To say, brethren, “our conversation is in the Heavens” would be bold for most of us; conscience would sting us with memories — solitary hours wasted on miserable self-regarding speculation when we might have conversed with higher things; social hours spoiled by carelessness when we might have learned wisdom or gentleness from lips now silent and eyes now closed; hours when our lips drew near to God while our hearts held no converse with Him. But to say “our citizenship is in the Heavens” needs no such faltering. That confession belongs to Lent: it declares God true and us liars, affirming that He has not made our lives insincere, or our friendships poor and short-lived — that all the fragility and transience is our own doing, our failure to recognize the stamp of His eternity on us and on our attachments. We sever by sin and unbelief the links He has fastened; our noise disturbs the quiet deep of memory His Spirit broods over. But His order stands firm however little we abide in it. Human affinities, like natural ones, are all constituted and maintained by Him. The unity of one man’s own frame is less mysterious than the unity between members of the body politic — the latter indestructible, whatever happens to the former, because our polity is in the Heavens. We are made one in Christ.
Therefore the dream each man dreams — that he is the center of the world, that everything can be referred back to himself — is monstrous and ridiculous. Therefore no friendship between men can have its origin in mere choice. Therefore anyone who will own his friendships as derived from Christ, and fulfilled in Him, may have them restored — the youth of old loves renewed, years of famine spent under selfishness’ canker-worm followed by years of plenty from the inexhaustible treasury of God’s love, sought from Him, not from earth or self.
Given this meaning, Paul’s words concern us as much as the Philippians — by their very nature they cannot be local or temporary, and it is for our humbling, not our pride, to accept them fully. What meaning this gives to the Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ! It says: because you are hard-worked, warring citizens of earth, beset by infirmity, temptation, and death, therefore you may claim your citizenship in the Heavens — for the One ascended into Heaven had an actual body, offered it on the Cross, raised it, carried it to God’s right hand. In Him you are united to your fighting brethren on earth, to past generations, to everyone who has passed from your circle into God’s nearer presence. In Him you may confess your cold, hard, selfish acts, your forgotten holy influences and resolutions and aims — and the confession brings forgiveness, freedom, new life. It is God’s will that we cast off the burden of past neglect and sin, self-reproach and shame, unrequited love and unfulfilled duty; that we believe constantly that He regards us not as poor separate creatures but as one body in Christ, justified, offered as a pure sacrifice; that we go forth to every task assured the whole family of God works with us and cheers us, and that the veil dividing us from them will one day be withdrawn. For if our citizenship is in Heaven, if denying that truth has made our lives here bewildered and inconsistent, if this slavery to earthly things has left us unable even to understand earthly things or fulfill rightly the duties they impose — then we may surely expect a day when laws are vindicated and anomalies swept away, when we see ourselves and all God’s creatures as He sees them, not through the mists of this lower world.
So the latter part of Paul’s words is a sure warrant of Hope for what shall be, as the former was a warrant of Faith for what now is. “From whence we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.” If we stood in no relation to this Lord — if He were not Head of a body of which we are members, if He had not come to save that body from division and make it one in Himself, if He had not ascended to raise it above its visible bondage into the eternal life of the Father — I do not know what this expectation could mean to any of us. To expect merely that a man born at some point in a Judean village should reappear at some uncertain future time would be poor comfort to those groaning under misery and sin, and feeble terror to those causing it. It does not matter what wonders we credit His first coming with, or what power we assign His second, so long as we regard those wonders as peculiar to a bygone age — they only stand in cold contrast to our present experience, and a future power we feel no effect of now is too vague, too easily imagined as indulgent or escapable, to overcome a real temptation or rouse flagging spirits to a hard duty. But to believe that He who showed on earth His dominion over Nature and over human wills — a dominion always His, exercised even now over us and over every corner of God’s Kingdom — will vindicate that dominion against all that defies it or sets up hostile tyranny; to believe that He who claimed us as members of one Family in heaven and earth, Himself its Head, will not let us go on treating earth as cut off from Heaven, or the death He made a living way to God as a barrier between us and those about His throne; to believe that this body He has given each of us will not always hinder our spirits but become their helpful servant, will not always separate us from one another but bear clear witness to the necessity and permanence of that fellowship — this agrees with reason, though hard to grasp by sense, and proves itself true the more we hold to it, by its power over our lives and by the victory it gives us over the earthly things that would have us worship them.
It was natural for Paul, having rebuked the earthly-minded by telling them of their heavenly polity and pointing them to their ascended, invisible King, to declare his sure conviction that He would change the body of our humiliation to be like His body of glory, by the power that subdues all things to Himself. Natural, because without this his earlier words would be incredible — if this were false, the rest could not be true. If men are not spiritual beings possessing bodies, but merely bodies into which some spark or soul has intruded, then there can be no polity in Heaven; the notion is a fond dream, an outrage on fact. But if they are spiritual beings, their bodies must suffer wrong, degradation, and death, incapable of free exercise until the Spirit fully asserts its true state and is united to its rightful Lord. All through life we are slowly learning, amid perplexity and relapse, what our spirits truly are, who their Lord is, what their redemption means. Many instruments serve this schooling — Nature some, sorrow more, weakness, temptation, the sense of sin, and the need for deliverance still more. By what little we know of others’ education we may judge God’s method with us, and be sure He is working the same in them. But bodily suffering forms so large and regular a part of this discipline, so steady a means of teaching the spirit to feel its wings and long for freedom, that we know the body’s redemption must belong to a later stage. Its pains are themselves continual prophecies of that redemption — the loss of strength and beauty, their unwonted endurance, even the look that remains on a corpse. Surely all these prophecies shall be fulfilled! Surely no energy exists without its perfect development and purpose fulfilled; surely no loveliness of infancy or manhood of which Death can say, “I have crushed it.” For He shall make it like His glorious body — this is Paul’s declaration, the pledge of Christ’s Sacrament. As we eat His flesh and drink His blood, let us say boldly: we will believe this for others and for ourselves, not for our own comfort, but for His glory who gave His soul to death and brought His body through death, that death might have no dominion over us, that we might rise above it and above earthly things, inheritors of His divine and eternal life. And there is another blessing in this: the meaning of the great Hymn we sang today shall be fulfilled. Winds and waves, lightnings, storms, and green things even now praise the Lord; a few of us are privileged to hear His voice in Nature’s harmonies. How much more, when the souls of the Righteous are purified in the blood of the Lamb and their bodies redeemed from corruption, will they lead the songs of the heavens, and teach all things to bless and magnify the Lord for ever!
First Sunday in Lent
The passage: Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them and turn and tear you.
Churchmen in old times and our own have liked this text. From it come maxims and practices: “holy things for the holy” — hide the Altar from public view, keep a careful reserve about sacred mysteries.
Englishmen generally have little sympathy with these applications and denounce them. But they have their own version. They learn early that their most sacred things must be kept from the vulgar, scarcely mentioned even among friends. The schoolboy, however eager to share, senses he had better not throw down certain things among his companions lest they be trampled. This reserve deepens with age. The very words of this text — “dogs,” “the swinish multitude” — are familiar to us and affect us even when we don’t use them; election candidates, in their depths of servility, show they know these terms by heart. This is one precept of the Sermon on the Mount that doesn’t repel us by its severity — we practise it, in our own way, before we preach it.
But treated as a precept of our Lord, it raises difficulties, especially for us clergy. The maxim about giving holy things only to the holy has tradition behind it, is built into church forms. But what were we sent into the world for, if not to proclaim what is holy to the unholy? Did not our Lord say the physician is for the sick, not the healthy? Was not His work among publicans and sinners? Did He withhold His divine wisdom from them, or from the dogs who surrounded Him among the Scribes and Pharisees? How can we follow His example if we only speak His message to those we’ve first certified are not dogs or swine?
And there’s another question, for you as much as for us: by what skill do we tell who are dogs and who are swine? Let’s read what comes just before this text: “Judge not, that ye be not judged… why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother’s eye, and considerest not the beam in thine own?… first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Our text follows immediately. The two seem to clash violently: I may not judge my brother’s faults until I’ve dealt with my own greater ones — yet I’m to treat certain people as dogs and swine.
But perhaps these precepts illuminate each other more than we think. Perhaps obeying the first is the way to discover the reason for the second. Suppose it were true that the moment I judge my brother, I am casting the holy thing to the dogs; that the moment I look for the mote in his eye, I am casting pearls before swine. At first this seems monstrous. But if the context favors it, it’s worth asking whether our own experience favors it too.
Take the very instances before us. I meet a man with a snarling, savage, currish nature — he barks and growls at everyone, especially when they mention anything noble or holy, as if he can’t bear to acknowledge goodness exists. Seeing this, I judge him: he is of the Dog species, nothing else. Or I see a man who is gross, sensual, delighting in uncleanness. I judge him too: he belongs to the Epicurean sty, the species Swine.
Now in this very act — however justified it seems — I am giving the holy thing to the dogs and casting pearls before swine. For there IS a holy thing in that snapping, biting man, a man beneath all that is disagreeable and offensive; and I have handed that holy thing over to its tormentors — not only in my classification, but in fact. By denying there is a better, truer being in him, I confirm his own worst unbelief, strengthen the habits he’s yielded to, and persuade him he can do nothing else.
Is it different with the other man? There are precious pearls in the heart of that victim of his lusts. But I refuse to see them; I see only the swine trampling them, and I leave him to their mercy — even provoke them to fresh violence. I’ll have my reward: next time I see him, fewer pearls, and the swinish propensities turned on me, fiercer than before.
How has this happened? Because in my eagerness to judge these people, to fix them once and for all in their classes, I never asked whether these same canine and swinish traits might be found in me — whether I too carry the bestial nature that, in different forms, seeks to blot out God’s image in them. How terrible when that nature reveals itself in us too — when the judge is judged, the measure we used is measured back to us! Then we begin to suspect there is nothing in us but this evil nature, no spirit fighting against the flesh, no holy thing that hasn’t been thrown to the dogs, no pearls the swine haven’t trampled to nothing! It is not true — may God convince us it is not! May His Spirit, who convicts us of sin, convict us also of righteousness! May He show that the dogs would not howl so if there were no holy thing irritating them, that the swine would not tear the ground if there were no pearls they sought to trample! But discovering this grows harder the less justice we’ve done to others — justice we owe them as much as ourselves.
It may seem I have overturned the ordinary reading of this passage. I’d suspect myself if I had, for ordinary interpretations have great value even when they mislead — they’re usually shallow rather than false, and can be maintained on a sound footing without contradicting confessed truths. I hope that’s the effect of what I’ve said. I fully grant that the command not to give holy things to dogs nor cast pearls before swine bears directly on how we preach the Gospel and speak of the highest truths in ordinary conversation. What that bearing is, we’ll learn best by first getting rid of the painful doubt whether our Lord’s practice contradicted His own words.
The more closely we examine His discourses to the multitude, His disciples, His enemies, the more convinced we’ll be that His practice perfectly illustrated these words. He spoke to men who might, if any could, be called dogs — those described in the twenty-second Psalm, those who yelled at Him on the Cross. Yet He never withheld from them any holy truth, any revelation of God’s character, any announcement of reconciliation. But He never gave the holy thing to dogs, because He spoke not to the dog in the man but to the man in the man. He told how God was like a Shepherd seeking the lost, like a Woman sweeping her house for lost money, like a Father recovering the prodigal eating husks. He said, “Come unto Me, ye that are weary.” He said, “Ask of Me, and I will give you living water.” These messages went not to the carping, cavilling nature but to the spirit crying for deliverance and hungering for righteousness. If the message of peace met only a warring temper, He told His Apostles the peace would return to them — not wasted. The Kingdom of God had come near to those who heard it, had witnessed in their consciences; they were treated as men, not dogs; the dog-nature might rage, but the holy thing was taken from its teeth, not thrown to it.
So too He found men and women who had yielded to swinish lusts. To them also He preached deliverance, not condemnation. He withheld no holy promise from them. He said to the sinful woman, “Go in peace, thy sins be forgiven thee” — because His love had called forth her faith, which saved her from herself, raised her from the bestial nature. The merchant had found the goodly pearls; the swine could trample them no more.
But woes were mixed with His blessings — the most tremendous woes ever pronounced on nations or men. These were addressed to the dark, disputatious, filthy nature in nations and men, in Pharisees and Publicans, in you and me — announcements that the fan was in His hand to purge His floor, gather the wheat, burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. They especially denounced the judging, condemning temper that made the Jew an enemy of God, of mankind, of himself. The more seriously and heartily we believe these words belong to all time, the more the fleshly tendencies akin to dogs and swine tremble and are confounded, and the more the imprisoned Spirit, the trampled pearl, lifts itself and gives thanks to God — hearing in these curses on its tyrants the voice of the Deliverer, the assurance of its redemption.
Such is our Lord’s example. How do we follow it? How do we commit the error He warns against, and how escape it? We commit it whenever we try to present the Gospel of God TO the disputatious, quarrelsome dispositions in man. Most of us know how prone we are to this, and must confess with shame how often we’ve fallen into the very sin we charged on others. We speak what we think — or know — are truths. Others reject them or don’t understand. We say: it is stubbornness, unbelief, God has hardened them. We are somewhat angry for their sakes and God’s sake, but much more for the affront to us. The dog-nature in us meets the dog-nature in them. The holy thing is cast to the dogs; noisy debaters fight over it, gnawing it as if it were coarse earthly stuff, not divine at all. It matters little who wins — the thing they fought over has perished, or been reduced to a dry bone, in the strife.
I think we commit the sin of casting pearls before swine when we appeal to the lower nature’s motives on behalf of truths meant to raise men out of it. When we leaven God’s Word with carnal, idolatrous conceptions, on the pretense that a carnal generation can only receive it so — when we say we must speak of sensual rewards in a sensual paradise, since what higher thing could they understand? — when we say we must speak of outward material punishments hereafter, since what could they know of a worm in the conscience, of exile from a Father’s presence? — when we use to the poorest, most ignorant man a single phrase we do not ourselves believe, that we could not ask God to justify as His truth — then we are casting pearls before swine, cultivating and making mighty what God hates and curses, what He sent His Son to deliver us from, what shall be cast into the lake of fire. And as surely as God’s laws cannot change, as surely as Christ’s words will not pass away when Heaven and Earth pass away, these swine we have fed and fattened will turn and rend us. There is not a pious fraud ever invented for pious ends that has not served impiety, weakened mankind’s faith, become a weapon for its opponents. There is not an unworthy inducement ever urged to make men good that has not helped make them wicked. Woe to the world, woe to the Church, for these offences! May God teach us it were better to have a millstone about our necks and be drowned in the sea than to cause this!
Here, then, is ample justification for the Churchman’s reserve, the Englishman’s reserve. There is danger in bringing holy things to the unholy, danger of profaning what belongs to the heart’s inmost sanctuary. But Churchmen and Englishmen alike are liable to do this, whatever their ecclesiastical theories or constitutional haughtiness, if they do not reverence their fellow-creatures more than they are wont, and respect themselves more than they are wont. Stiffness, dignity, and pretension will not keep us from giving holy things to dogs and casting pearls before swine.
How may we be saved from doing it? Only by remembering that there is no man alive without a holy thing in him to which we CAN speak, and without that dog-and-swine nature to which we MAY speak. Only by holding constantly before us that the holy thing is not his own possession, no part of his private self, but is his because he is Christ’s, and Christ is God’s; because Christ is the head of every man; because so long as he keeps the marks of a man he is related to the One who took our nature and was not ashamed to call us brethren. Only by saying to ourselves, hour by hour: “I live only because He lives; I am righteous only because He is righteous; whatever divides me from Him divides me from my kind — that is earthly, sensual, devilish. Whatever unites me to Him is what He gives us from His own fullness, that we may be true men and so true children of His Father.”
Holding this faith, we shall avoid casting the holy thing before dogs and Christ’s pearls before swine. We shall be able to confess this Lent how often we have committed this sin — lowering the Gospel to our own baseness and that of those we addressed — and how God has punished us by lowering ourselves and disabling us from raising them. The evil nature in ourselves, if not in others, has again turned and rent us, mastering us because we did not confess Him who has mastered it. Alongside this, another confession, equally necessary: how much we have judged our neighbours, how quickly we detected evil propensities in them, how eager to cast them out before knowing what answered to them in ourselves. It may not always be open sinners we’ve judged — those manifestly yielding to swinish inclinations we may have regarded with lofty compassion, feeling safely distant. But contempt for those nearer ourselves, whom we can compare ourselves to — especially contempt for them as inferior to us in gifts and insight — has this not been each of our easily besetting sin? We need not reproach ourselves for spreading God’s Gospel too freely, for drawing the lines too carelessly between those we claim as God’s children entitled to His reconciliation, and the dogs and swine. Our fault has run the other way: we have withheld from them what might have raised them into men, refusing to see that as God’s purpose toward them. And so we have not attained the true standard of manhood ourselves; we have sunk to the level we deemed safe to assign to them. May God give us true repentance for this transgression, and endue us with the Holy Spirit that will overcome the flesh in ourselves, and enable us to claim fellowship with whatever is His in our brethren!