January 4, 1857
The passage: This is the will of God, even your sanctification. —1 Thessalonians iv. 3.
As long as we treat the main word in this text as a technical term, I doubt we will understand what St. Paul meant by it. He was not writing a system of theology but a letter to men working and suffering in the world, who needed strength for it. When he spoke of sanctification he spoke of something bound up with their everyday business, something every busy man might feel he needed. A learned man trying to get a definition from a book would always miss it; a simple person actually fighting the battle of life would grasp something of it at once, and see further into it the harder he was pressed. For what does such a man discover, in the first century or the nineteenth? This: it is hard to do what I ought; harder still, with many arguments before me, to know what I ought to do. Advice from others helps, though often it misses my real difficulty — it does not clear the mist from my eyes or heal the lameness in my walk. Still, when the question is about acts, I can take a friend’s advice, or balance opposing counsels. But how different when the question is not what to do but how to be right! I may go a long time without asking whether my words and deeds express what is really in me, or whether I merely adopted them as expected, changing them as I move from one society to another like currency crossing a border. I would gladly dismiss the question, but it returns. I cannot claim to be honest without facing it — and facing it, what insincerity comes to light! In secret hours I am put on a rack far more searching than any the world could apply. And words I once heard lightly now repeat this examination and sharpen the torture: people complimenting themselves and each other on their sincerity, as if that at least were secure to them. What would I not give to buy their secret, to reach so easily the blessing they seem to hold so securely!
Yes — to be or not to be, that is the question. Can we be honest not merely in our dealings with the world but with ourselves? Can we hold to justice in our heart of hearts even if every worldly inducement to injustice were removed and only the risk lay on the side of right? Is it only accident, lack of opportunity, or fear of detection that keeps us decent? Do the conventions of society make us courteous and friendly — and would we, if those conventions vanished, take pleasure in letting loose our contempt and malice?
It is not wise to force this inquisition upon others — often we confuse their consciences rather than clear them. But it is forced on ourselves in private hours, when those around us suppose all is well and try to persuade us of it. Then comes the most terrible crisis: like Sisyphus, a man lifts a stone that keeps descending on him with greater weight. Outward schemes of reform prove useless; they only expose the inner disease and increase the suffering. He must root out that disease — but what is it, except himself? Can he remake his own being? He finds baseness at what seems the very root of it. Is he to plant nobleness and purity there? Who else can? Nature says, it is not in me; Society says, it is not in me. And the very effort to cure seems to increase the disease — he is worse since he began probing its depths. Shall he cover the ground over again, and try to walk on as before, forgetting what he has seen — not in a dream, but in an actual revelation below?
To one who has felt this, the word Sanctification may sound promising, because it speaks of reality, and he is tired of everything artificial. It seems to say: what you are seeking can be done for you — you can be made right not on the surface but within, reformed not in the acts the world sees but in yourself, from whom the acts proceed. He may once have pictured a Saint as either someone of unapproachable, transcendent elevation, or someone marked off from others by external habits — repellent if not offensive. Now his idea of the word changes entirely. The sanctification he wants is the power of stooping, not of rising. His self-conceit is his burden; he wants deliverance into simple sympathy with his fellows, from whom he has stood too much apart. He is sure he is no better than they are, yet he keeps struggling to appear better, to be gloriously inhuman. Who will make him instead simply human, natural, unassuming?
He supposes this inward truthfulness must be a gift, since discipline itself seems to breed formality; he half imagines it must fall upon some favoured soul by the chance visit of an angel. Will such a visitant ever come to him? Are there waters he might step into, once troubled, and be healed of the disease that has kept him bedridden so long?
It is not an angel St Paul speaks of in the text. Writing to ordinary men, once heathens or Pharisees, he says to them all: “This is the will of God, even your sanctification.” A marvellous message when first heard — it seems anything would be more likely true. We struggle to make ourselves right in order to win God’s favor, to bring our minds to a state He can approve and reward. But Paul speaks from an entirely different point of view: it is God’s will to sanctify you. We answer: yes, God has given us a law, told us what to do and not do — that is His will, and if we can conform to it, so much the better. But our complaint is that we cannot; adjusting our will to that will is exactly the difficulty. Who can remove that out of our way?
No — that is not what the words say. Paul certainly believed God had given men a law; no one believed it more, or had felt more fully the anguish of that belief, his own inability to keep it, his own dislike of it. It was through this that he learned the Will of God was his Sanctification. Beneath the law he found a Divine Person, a Divine Will, its author, acting upon him and working in him to will and do of His good pleasure. This Will was not compelling him to acts, nor setting motives before him to incline him toward acts; it was speaking directly to his will, making him be what he was created to be, so that he might do what he was commanded to do.
You might think Paul had a beautiful soul, naturally shaped to receive this Sanctification, submitting to it as gracefully as dew falling on an open flower. That would be a great mistake. By his own account it was through resistance, reluctance, the vehemence of his own self-will, that he became aware of the might of the Will subduing him. Had he not discovered this in himself, he would never have spoken so boldly to the Thessalonians: “This is the will of God, even your Sanctification.” He could say: there is no hard, rugged soil in you that was not in me, no pride choking the avenues love might enter that did not choke my own reason and heart. All I have learned proves this Will is not partial, not choosing some specially soft nature to work on; it is a Will to good and nothing else, seeking to bring all wills into harmony with itself.
Paul had the same difficulty believing this that we have — greater difficulty, since he understood the resistance of the human will far better than we do, having seen it in more terrible cases and realized it more fully in himself. But the faith — “This is the will of God, even your Sanctification” — rose out of all these experiences, and above them. When his calculations failed, when his hopes were crushed, he fell back on it. Other things might be doubtful; this was certain. On this ground he stood; heaven and earth stood on it; if heaven and earth passed away, this would not.
I said men find, the deeper they go into themselves, more corruption and darkness, until they suppose the very root of their being is nothing else. Paul had gone into these depths and found this rottenness; in himself, he says, he found only that. But he discovered a root below himself — a true divine root, for himself and for every man. Each man, contemplating himself apart from Christ, is that evil creature in which no good thing dwells. But no man has a right to contemplate himself apart from Christ; God does not so contemplate him. He was formed at first in the Divine Word, and in Him he lives and has his being still; to be ignorant of Him is misery, to know Him is life and peace. Paul was sure it was God’s will that men should be what He formed them to be, should find the true source of their life, and not struggle to cut themselves off from it and destroy themselves. If so, the Will of God was their Sanctification — a Will to graft them onto this living stock, that they might grow and bring forth living fruit. This Will was not lazy or inoperative, acting today and ceasing tomorrow; it was the Will of the Everlasting Father, fully uttered in Christ the Divine Word when He took on flesh, gave Himself up to death, and rose again — and it would go on acting through the energies of the Almighty Spirit, the Comforter promised to abide with the Church forever. Every man in the Thessalonian Church was to take this as addressed directly to himself, not to argue that some special infirmity put him outside its scope — the more evil he was conscious of, the more proof that these words were meant for him. And the same principle that made it a sin to deny them to himself made it a sin to deny them to any of his fellows, whatever their temptations, however they had yielded to them: there was no limiting this sentence. The Will of God, in its fullest sense, was their Sanctification — not a paltry benevolence wishing creatures outward ease and happiness, with which no man is ever content, not a Will to save them from toil, suffering, or rightful punishment, but a Will to impose these so long as they purify and elevate the spirit within, remove its impediments, and bring the man to the only state in which he is truly a man, renewed in the image of God.
In this sense, I ask you to consider the words we have heard in the Epistle, Gospel, and Collect today, and to apply them in the year we are entering. It may seem a fall to pass from Christ’s Nativity to His Circumcision — from a Child born and a Son given, to the severities of the old law of servants. It would indeed be a fall if the Christmas message — that God sent His Son that we might receive the adoption of sons — were weakened by the Circumcision message, if the covenant now done away were forced upon us again, who have received the sign of the truer covenant. But we keep the festival of Christ’s Circumcision precisely so that we do not suffer this degradation. We are always in danger of it — always ready to imagine that we are not redeemed, not claimed as God’s children, not grafted onto a holy root; always supposing that by some painful acts, devised by ourselves or borrowed from other times, we must bring ourselves into a condition we ought to attain but which God has not already given us. St Paul teaches — the Church repeats his lesson year by year — that Christ’s Circumcision answers all such reasoning and forbids all such experiments. The purpose of Circumcision was fulfilled when the Son of Man underwent it; His birth and death explained why it had been instituted, destroyed its use, preserved its meaning, and brought forth the substance of which it was the shadow. If the Nativity says that Christ’s Sonship is the ground on which our life and humanity’s life stand, the Circumcision says we have no acts to perform in order to place ourselves on that ground — that every obstacle to claiming it as ours has been removed — that we have no right to demand anything of anyone before telling him it is his, by the constitution of God’s universe, by the Mind and Will of God Himself.
This privilege we are to claim for ourselves, and this gospel we are to preach to others, because only so can we come, or bring them, within the scope of this Sanctification — which, as I have said, refers to the Will of God, to His perpetual operation on spirits He has formed in His image, created in His Son, reclaimed and regenerated in that Son, that they may draw life from His life and bring forth fruits befitting such a root. This Sanctification takes effect through all the discipline God brings to bear on the hearts and spirits of men — through the signs that make them aware of their relation to Him, the inward attraction that binds them to Him, the illumination of His purposes, and the severities and hardships that remind them of their evil nature, reprove them for yielding to it, and force them to abjure it and seek His protection. Here is that Circumcision made without hands, of which the Church speaks today; by it God teaches that He watches over us no less than over His people in any older generation, dealing with us on the same principles set forth in their history — only He has brought us to a point they were always approaching but never reached, and given us light on His methods and His ultimate purpose that He did not grant to them.
We enter the New Year with the assurance that whatever befalls us must be an instrument in God’s hands for this inward circumcision, for fulfilling the Will of God which is our Sanctification. I do not know what else could sustain us in looking into the dim future. Anxiety and restlessness dominate us when we speculate about what is coming, and equally when we consider what we ought to do, whether a hundred incompatible duties press upon us at once. Beneath the first lies the notion of a Fate that may crush us at any moment; beneath the second, the notion of a Taskmaster making tremendous demands, reaping where he has not sown. Despondency, irregularity, and indolence naturally follow from both. But substitute a Father for a Fate, and the Will of God which is our Sanctification for a Taskmaster, and the whole condition of the mind changes: you can wait, for you have hope; you can work, for you have an Inspirer of your work who will bring it to its right issue. He is preparing events, and preparing you to meet them, be instructed by them, make use of them. The events lie under a Will to simple and perfect good; you lie under the more immediate direction of that same Will; you can enter into its meaning and are invited to work with it. True, you are subject to an outward law, as Christ, the Everlasting Son, was subject to one. But you can obey it in the spirit of a son, as He did, and His Spirit is with you to shape your purposes and acts into His likeness. You will bear sharper crosses than you could ever contrive for yourself; Christ in His very infancy was marked to bear a cross, and took it in simple filial obedience — and the Will that laid it on Him sustained Him under it, that He might sustain all whose nature He has assumed and whose burdens He has shared.
There is another lesson in this Circumcision Festival that should stay with us through the year. We sometimes say the Jewish Covenant has nothing to do with us, no resemblance to ours, because it was a covenant with a nation. God forbid that this should set a difference between us and them — that we should think their nation was under the direct care of a Living, Righteous Lord while ours is left to foolish mortals, or that it is God’s will to sanctify us as individuals but not to cut off from our nation whatever hinders it from fulfilling its tasks! Let us not destroy our patriotism — and with it our personal morality, which is inseparable from it — by such doctrine. The Father of all does not care less for particular nations because He has redeemed mankind through His Son’s birth and death. We are holy as individuals only because we share in the universal holiness Christ has put upon our race. All God’s Sanctification is meant to unite us more closely to our fellows; all His severe Circumcision is meant to separate us from the selfish inclinations that set us at war with them. Whatever punishments He intends for England this year are meant to destroy the weeds ruining its soil — and those weeds grow in the soil of our own hearts too, sowing seeds that stifle good there as well as in the nation at large. We know that the worship of money, the meanness of party, the hypocrisies of tongue and soul cannot reasonably be traced to some imaginary public — they are found in you and me, and in you and me they must be rooted out. This is proof that the Covenant with the nation cannot be separated from the Covenant with its members, and that Sanctification for one would be ineffectual if it did not include the other. This is why we should pray for national repentance and reformation, rather than trust to a repentance in ourselves that thinks of us apart from the sinners around us. This is why we can hope for no Sanctification at all, until we believe it is God’s will to sanctify us all.