Second Sunday in Advent

The passage: All these things happened to the Israelites as examples, and were written down to warn us, upon whom the end of the ages has come.

The passage this text is drawn from resembles the Epistle we read this morning. In both, St. Paul claims the Jewish Scriptures for Gentile as well as Jewish use, and declares that narratives which seemed to belong only to the chosen people had a wide human application — that their force was no less for his own day than for those Moses or Joshua led, and that the passing of ages would make their warnings and consolations more intelligible and more necessary, not less. “All these things,” he writes to the Corinthians, “happened unto them for ensamples: all these things were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.” This is the same moral the Church draws today in her Collect, taken from Romans xv.

There is, however, a peculiarity in this chapter that is present but not fully drawn out in the other Epistle. To help the Corinthians understand the rich Hebrew inheritance they had entered into, Paul explains the sacramental character of the old records. He writes that our fathers were under the cloud, passed through the sea, “were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea,” ate the same spiritual meat and drank the same spiritual drink — for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, “and that Rock was Christ.” Yet God was not pleased with many of them, who were overthrown in the wilderness; these things are examples warning us against lusting after evil as they did, against idolatry, against the fornication that killed twenty-three thousand in a day, against tempting Christ as they did and were destroyed by serpents, against murmuring as they did and were destroyed by the destroyer. Then come the words of our text, followed shortly after by: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?”

I want you to notice two things here. First, Paul’s argument for the unity and permanence of Scripture, and its fitness for ages that had not yet written it, rests on the fact that the events it records were Sacraments of God’s presence. Second, he grounds direct moral warnings on this — against idolatry, fornication, murmuring, and the sin of tempting God, which may include all the rest. In other words, he derives the plainest, most practical use of Scripture from what many would at first call a strange and fanciful view of its character.

Our reverence for Paul as a practical Christian warrior, eager for real earnestness and wary of the Corinthians’ tendency toward mere speculation, should stop us from supposing that he lapsed, even for a moment, into fancy or wit while treating so weighty and practical a subject. And yet the “typical” applications commonly made of Scripture are usually such extravagant exercises of fancy and wit, so repugnant to plain people wanting a guide for their feet and strength for their tasks, that some have wished to forget this passage of Paul’s, or have listened, half-persuaded, to those who say he let the conceits of Rabbi Gamaliel’s school mar the simplicity that is in Christ.

I want to speak of this on this Second Sunday in Advent, when our minds are fixed by a solemn prayer on the Scriptures written for our learning, because I believe that if the Scriptures are losing their hold on us, much of that mischief lies in our confused notions of what is called their direct and their spiritual meaning. I fully admit that honest, manly English minds protest against straining Scripture from its plain sense to fit particular experiences and circumstances; yet such strained interpretations do appeal to devout minds, as an escape from dry criticism that makes Oriental customs the chief guide to a book we are taught to regard as a lasting possession. This conflict has probably never been sharper than now. The critic entrenches himself in philological laws, insisting that Bible history, if it is history, must be tried by them. The sufferer on a sick-bed feels the words speak directly and truly to her, whatever becomes of the critic’s rules. Each has special narrownesses: the student quickly sees the devotional reader’s morbid self-concentration; the devotional reader senses how merely antiquarian, how little alive to human need, the student is. Neither sees his own peril or his need of the other. Each has sympathizers who make him more exclusive and prevent him from telling true from false in his own thinking, until each spends half his energy denouncing the other. Bystanders come to see the controversy as hopeless, and the indifferent and the scoffing multiply — feared by both parties, yet fed by both.

If I thought this sacramental idea of the Old Scriptures were the same as treating them merely as figures, likenesses, or types of things belonging to our own Dispensation or our spiritual life, I would have no hope of ever settling this strife. But the true understanding of Paul’s words, rightly applied, would save us both from forcing analogies onto sacred history that deny it is history, and from that inhuman method which drains events of their meaning and forgets that the people in them were flesh and blood like us. Rightly grasped, his method makes the Bible divine in a sense it never can be while we treat it merely as a collection of letters dictated by God.

It is plain from this passage and what follows that Paul speaks to the Corinthians expressly as a Church bound together by Sacraments. His double purpose was to teach them to understand and not abuse their own Sacraments by studying the Jewish Scriptures as records of sacramental discipline, and then to understand those Scriptures by the light of the New Dispensation’s Sacraments. As I tried last Sunday to show that our difficulties over Christ’s Advent in humiliation and His advent to judgment run parallel to our difficulties over the Eucharist, each illuminating the other, so now I will try to show that our difficulties over Scripture and over the Eucharist likewise illustrate each other — that we cannot fully understand the Lord’s Supper except through the Bible, nor the Bible’s direction except through the Lord’s Supper.

You will see that present circumstances call for at least part of this inquiry. We are told that an Act of Parliament determines that the Articles contain the whole meaning of Scripture, with no appeal from them to Scripture. But the Articles themselves assert that such an appeal does lie — this is the very feature of them we have most boasted of. Remove it, and we do not merely contradict one Article, we undo the purpose of the whole body of them, which was to protect the Church against a theory that made Scripture unintelligible until bound by ecclesiastical interpretation. The Articles assume Scripture is intelligible, more intelligible than anything human wit can invent; they denounce the private judgments of doctors and popes that fettered conscience and hindered men from seeking the common truth that alone can make them free. The Prayer-Book does this even more: it gives us fellowship with each other and with all ages in our deepest wants, and makes us discontented with mere notions, certain that only communion with a living God can satisfy us. So the Prayer-Book presumes the Sacraments as its ground, and the Articles presume Scripture as theirs. An Act of Parliament may command us to understand the Articles apart from Scripture; but if we cannot — and the Articles themselves say we cannot — we must hold to what we have subscribed. We cannot live in daily self-contradiction. If those who fled to Acts of Parliament to convict a brother of error have entangled themselves in one, that is a lesson worth taking to heart.

Notice that Paul does not say the Israelites passing through the Red Sea was a “type” of Corinthian baptism — he says our fathers “were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Nor does he say the manna and rock-water were “likenesses” of bread and wine — he says they “did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all drink the same spiritual drink.” This difference in wording marks a difference in thought. The Red Sea crossing was a sign that the invisible God had taken Israel as His own; each Jew who accepted that sign did not merely escape Pharaoh but confessed himself under a righteous King, and became free. The manna was a sign that man does not live by bread alone but by every word from God’s mouth; accepting it, a Jew entered a new dependence on God, richer than Egypt’s flesh-pots, nourished by trust in an Almighty Friend. Of the rock Paul says something still more striking: it “followed” them. The struck rock itself was stationary, but the flowing water signified a Presence that was with them always, renewed at every well they drank from. The worst suffering of desert travel thus became a spiritual lesson, and relief from it, in the strictest sense, spiritual drink. Whoever acknowledged the source of that deliverance gained a new life: he tasted that the Lord was gracious, and became sure that the Ruler of Nature was not distant but must be his Lord, caring for him above all things, at his right hand so he should not be moved. All this Paul compresses into “that Rock was Christ” — symbolic shorthand, intelligible in context, not used carelessly. His purpose was to convince the Corinthians that they lived under the very same spiritual government as the Jewish fathers, administered by the same Being: the Christ he had preached as taking flesh, dying, rising, and ascending was the same Angel of the Covenant, the same Son of God, who had led the Hebrews by cloud and by fire.

See how much coherence this gives the Old Testament. At its outset, God made a Covenant with Abraham and his seed, and each of that seed received a sign of it. To remember the Covenant, to believe the sign was not empty but the witness of a living truth touching every moment of one’s life — that was the mark of the true Israelite. To forget it, to think the sign meant nothing, to suppose oneself no longer under God’s continual guidance — that was the mark of the rebellious Israelite, the root of lawlessness, and above all of the sin against the Second Commandment, the worship of visible things. The one who kept the sign and its meaning together saw every event as a sign suited to the moment, addressed to heart and conscience, meeting particular sins and needs, all pointing to one object — tokens recalling him, from among the thousand forces reducing him to a slave, back to his true allegiance and free service. The one who felt no force in the primary sign found nothing else a sign either. As the poet says of a man whose mind had been so debased that all sense of beauty was gone: “A primrose on the river’s brim / A yellow primrose was to him, / And it was nothing more.” That state of mind is possible for any of us, without the outward savageness of that figure. But it is a lesser fault to see nothing in primroses than to see nothing in birth, marriage, death, great crimes or noble devotion, in the rise and fall of nations — nothing but material for idle talk or idle reading. Not to see these as signs is a great brutishness, one the holy men of Israel charged upon their countrymen and sought, through prayer and thanksgiving and remembrance of God’s mercies and judgments, to be delivered from. They tell us God Himself works through all these events to awaken and renew minds that could not renew themselves; that He does not forget His Covenant even when men do; that it is everlasting and must fulfill itself; that even Israel’s idolatries and crimes, born of refusing to trust Him, will only manifest His truth and love to the world; that all things lead toward a fuller revelation of His relation to mankind and of His own nature — toward One in whom He can hold perfect communion with men, as a Father with His children.

Here, then, is ample justification for those who insist the Bible is a book of business and plain morality, not to be turned into riddles and allegories — and also for those who insist its history must be read as the history of a nation, not dissolved into spiritual maxims for individuals. The story of the wilderness journey, and of the whole Jewish Commonwealth, is a story of plain events — migrations, wars, victories and defeats, prosperity and adversity, the sins of men of our own flesh and blood, and the right acts of men who were true. What makes this history a Bible is that these facts are interpreted, shown to be signs. The meaning of a nation’s existence, the personal ground of its law, is laid bare. Whether its laws are universal or merely local and temporary, they are shown to us as God’s laws, because the whole book’s premise is that He is Educator of that people and of all peoples — that every circumstance is His instrument, every event an assertion of His presence and rule, meant to display His righteousness and to shape men into His image.

But this is equally a justification for those who claim the Bible for themselves and their own time, who must find in it a message to heart and conscience even at the cost of straining its words — an excuse for their liberties with philology. If the Bible speaks of a Living God whose government is uniform beneath all changing outward forms, they are right in the essence of what they hold, and must keep hold of it against every scholar and critic. What they need is not to modify this conviction but to strengthen it — to read the Bible more exactly than before, as concerning a whole society, and so find it more precious to themselves individually than ever. Tracing it as the progressive history of God’s revelation to a family, a nation, and mankind, they will find in it more support as men, and more solemn warning, as those whom God claims not as servants but as sons.

On this ground Paul tells the Corinthians that the ends of the world had come upon them. The purposes and revelations of every age had converged on one point: the Son of God had been revealed in human nature, had carried that nature through death and the grave, and exalted it to the Father’s right hand; Gentiles had been told He was made of a woman and under the law so that they might receive the adoption of sons; the highest glory men could attain was now the common possession of Jew and Greek. “Wherefore let him that standeth take heed lest he fall.” The old temptations to sensuality, murmuring, and idolatry were no less strong for the Corinthians than they had been for Israel. “Nevertheless there hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” What is that way of escape, that strength to keep them mindful of God’s presence and union with Him, that proof of His faithfulness? Paul takes his instance from the temptation he regarded as the root of all the rest, and the one most visible among the Corinthians: “flee from idolatry… The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.”

Here, then, was their escape, if they were wise enough to grasp the sign’s meaning: the bread received at the Church’s feast as communion of Christ’s body, the wine as communion of His blood, would be continual witnesses that they were members of one body with each other and with Him — a continual safeguard against the tendency, which haunts all men, to worship visible things, a tendency they must fall into unless some power gives their spirits a divine object of trust and reverence.

This passage should help those who think of the Eucharist as a lofty service for advanced saints rather than a protection for weak, sinful men from the grossest vices. The Bible never draws the sharp line between sinner and saint that we sometimes draw. All are under God’s care; all may receive and believe the signs of it, and cast themselves on Him to be saved from what degrades and destroys them. No greater blessing exists even for the greatest saint; if he thinks he does not need it, he sinks toward the condition of the worst sinner, having renounced his dependence, and risks a deeper fall than any mere sensualist has known. If that sensualist claims the deliverance Christ offers, seeking a righteousness not his own, he becomes a saint. The highest title to that name comes only from continual trust arising from a sense of past wrong and present weakness. The morality of the Gospel is exalted precisely because it is universal: this highest participation in Christ’s life is only possible when we count ourselves members of the same body as the lowest, since His life is given through the flesh and blood He shared with the worst of us, through a death He died alongside the malefactor.

This should also help those who fear that a very lofty view of the Sacrament borders on idolatry. Paul teaches that the loftiest view of all — that it is an actual communion with the body and blood of Him who has glorified our humanity at God’s right hand — is exactly what delivers from idolatry. A low view, treating it as mere ceremony, leads straight to superstition and idolatry. The view that it is the sign of Christ’s eternal presence and of our claim to fellowship with Him shows this Sacrament to be the consummation of all the sacraments by which God once educated His people out of idolatry, and able to make everything in our common life a sacrament guarding us from ever putting the creature in the Creator’s place.

This is part of what we gain by applying Scripture’s sacramental principle to ourselves. It also helps with the question that has long perplexed us: the participation of the wicked in the Sacraments. We can see how closely falsehood borders on great truth, and how much harm comes from using our own methods rather than God’s to tell them apart. Paul says all ate the same spiritual meat and drank the same spiritual drink, yet also that many did not truly receive it, because they failed to recognize the sign’s meaning. He speaks of our being members of one body because we eat one bread — teaching that we cut ourselves off from the body by denying our relation to its Head, not that the relation itself is unreal. Such distinctions grow clear in the light of Scripture and the practice of life; dogmatists, by contrast, make divisions that destroy true distinctions.

There are still other difficulties about the Eucharist concerning sacrifice, which this chapter helps clarify. Some call the Eucharist a sacrifice, some a commemoration of a sacrifice; our own Service plainly favors the latter, speaking of Christ’s “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice and oblation… for the sins of the whole world.” Nothing matters more than holding to this, for history shows the terrible consequences of supposing the sacrifice still needs perfecting rather than being complete and worthy only of thanks. But Paul speaks of sacrifice as implying communion, fellowship with the being to whom it is offered; he speaks of Gentile sacrifices as offered to demons, not to God, so that heathen fellowship was with these lesser, mortal beings rather than the true God and Father of Christ. This is why he tells the Corinthians not to eat things sacrificed to idols, though innocent in themselves — doing so implied sharing in the worship of those lower beings, acknowledging subjection to them when Christ had already redeemed them to His Father. Let us understand, then, what this finished sacrifice has done, and why we give thanks for it. Had it left us only with a memory of the past, it would be unlike all God’s earlier sacraments, which brought Israel to recognize that the God who delivered their fathers from Egypt was with them still, in the promised land or in exile, and that they too might offer themselves as sacrifices to Him. Those sacraments told them not to rest content with present or past, since God intended fuller communion with them and meant to reveal Himself fully to the world. No lesser belief, no feebler hope, can sustain us, upon whom the ends of the world have come. The sacrifice was made once for all — but made so that we might be united to the great High Priest who has entered within the veil and continually presents His finished sacrifice before the Father, and so that we might look forward to the day that will complete all God’s revelations and sacraments, when His servants shall see His face, His Name shall be on their foreheads, there shall be no night and no need of candle or sun, for the Lord God will give them light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.