“Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind.”—1 Peter iv. 1.
The passage: Because Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves with that same mind.
I believe many religious people approach this coming week with pain and dread. Not awe—they complain of having almost none of that. Their pain comes from memories of past years when they tried to grasp the greatness of Christ’s sufferings and be moved by them, and failed, leaving their hearts drier than before. Their dread is the expectation that this week will bring the same failure. They call it a still, holy week—words suggesting rest—but they expect struggle and disappointment instead, and if honest, would admit they’d rather forget it altogether. But old associations, the Church’s language, and their own consciences won’t let them; the week comes freighted with more than they feel able to carry.
Someone may think it unsafe to voice such doubts—won’t unbelievers seize on the admission that holy seasons bring turbulence rather than peace, that the most sacred exercises are the least strengthening? It matters little what inferences others draw. It is always safe to be honest, and unsafe to tolerate contradictions in ourselves or others. Anyone who has lived through this contradiction knows it: just when we meet the most solemn realities, our minds feel most artificial. We strain to think and feel what we do not actually think or feel, using methods urged on us or invented by ourselves, half-persuading ourselves we’ve succeeded, half-priding ourselves on the effort. Then comes reaction: conscience says this is wrong, and inclination agrees; the heart springs free from its own self-imposed strain and looks back ashamed at ever submitting to it. The facts of the week grow as dim as the distorted lens through which they were viewed, and the excited devotee turns scorner. This story repeats every year, filling Church history and our own circles. Where is the real danger—in facing this honestly, or in hiding it? In asking whether it springs from a false notion the Bible and the Church actually warn against, from which their counsel might have saved us—or in letting the harm spread and destroy more souls? We should not approach so vital a matter without deep self-questioning, distrust of our own wisdom, and every available help used with the highest wisdom. But a preacher who trusts himself is a fool, and one who avoids the deepest wounds should give up preaching altogether.
You must have noticed that nothing in our Lenten services—Scripture or the meditations of holy men drawn from it—has aimed at lifting our minds to some high pitch. Quite the opposite: they have been proofs and confessions of feebleness and inability. We’ve been told to subdue flesh to spirit because flesh tends to exalt itself and smother the spirit’s promptings. We’ve heard of temptations to body and soul so that we might confess we have no strength to resist them. The last three Sundays’ Collects are pitched in exactly this key: leading us from struggle and self-exaltation into dependence. The Epistles and Gospels chosen for them carry this same inner meaning—the creature’s incapacity to do or be anything except a dependent on a higher will, a receiver of a higher life. The lessons have told of the chosen family’s redemption, first from idols, then from bondage in Goshen: Scripture always sets emancipation before us, freedom as its great promise—but the process frees the slave of a tyrant only by binding him more completely to the Master he was made to obey. The yoke broken is self-will’s.
How well this matches the whole discipline of this season! That discipline is defined exactly by its aim. There’s no precision in its outward measures, and church attempts at precision produce only more excess and looseness. But the principle never varies: subjection, not exaltation—condemning feats of self-mortification and rivalry in abstinence just as much as indulgence of appetite, since both spring from the same root and lead to the same end. Fullness of meat is denounced by sages and saints alike because it breeds pride and self-indulgence. But those like John the Faster of Constantinople, who traded food for worldly ambition and spiritual self-glorification, gave their evil natures not a Lent but a Carnival.
Today’s Collect is the climax of our Lenten teaching. It seems to explain the purpose behind all this urging toward humiliation—but its language may deepen our perplexity. It speaks of following the example of Christ’s great humility. That, we say, is exactly what we’ve tried and utterly failed to do; we can manage almost anything else. Simple humility is hard enough—harder than mercy or justice. To ask that we be humble as Christ was humble seems to mock both God and ourselves. I would think so, and would think St. Peter guilty of the same mockery in urging us to arm ourselves with Christ’s mind and follow his steps of suffering—except for the opening words of the Collect, from which its whole meaning flows, words that carry the very spirit of St. Peter and all the Apostles. They add no new burden to Passion Week; they show us how to be freed from the diseased temper that turns it into one, how to enter the deliverance it promises.
I. The words are these: “Almighty and everlasting God, Who of Thy tender love hast sent Thy Son.”
We are not told here to labor at grasping how great our sins are, how justly we’ve earned God’s wrath, and then to climb from that to the thought of Christ’s sufferings as matched to the size of our guilt. I don’t mean this adaptation is denied or hidden—but the method here is the opposite. The Church starts from the highest ground rather than working up to it from the lowest. She does not require us to measure this divine love first, so that gratitude may follow as a result—that she trusts will come later, more truly. Her first task is to assert God’s love absolutely, apart from consequences or our response to it. This method plainly comes from Scripture—the whole New Testament, Peter’s Epistle as much as Paul’s. If it appears most fully in John’s writings, that’s because they gather up the meaning of all earlier Scripture, the full and final revelation toward which everything else led. “God so loved the world,” “God is love”—these are not devotional raptures but the scientific foundation of Catholic and Evangelical theology. If we refuse this foundation and substitute our own maxims and method, we destroy Christian theology and Christian morality together.
I have not yet dwelt on the word mankind, so prominent in the Collect, though it matters greatly here. All agree that love, if real, must find an object. The impatient, sin-sick soul asks first, “Am I that object?” The spiritual director makes it his chief task to answer this, testing his disciple to discover or realize his interest in that love. The Church shares this urgency to bring love to bear on the individual heart, but knows she has a prior duty—to witness for God—without which the lesser duty cannot be done. So she suspends the personal question and begins with the broader proclamation: God’s truth and love reach to mankind as a whole. Such general language may sound unsatisfying at first to the sinner absorbed in his own case; he may prefer a physician who addresses only his symptoms. Yet I think a promise of deeper, more radical healing lies in these wider words than in the narrower ones. He will sense they bring him closer to the Bible itself—for while Scripture often seems to speak directly to his own case, it also unsettles him with so much that seems vague and general. He wishes he could strip the Old Testament of its Jewish history and the New of its concern with Churches. He cannot quite see how the greatest proclamation of all could be, “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill to men.”
But those words should carry their full force once he grasps the next clause: “Who of Thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent Thy Son to take our nature upon Him, and to suffer death upon the cross.”
Those who begin from reflection on their own sins calculate first the punishment deserved, then the compensation needed to remove it, then who could offer it—arriving by hard reasoning at the conclusion that only a divine person, united to human nature, could satisfy justice’s demands.
Compare these cold, dry mental processes—which need forced efforts of feeling and imagination to connect them to the events of Passion Week—with the language of the Collect instead. God, who is Love, who has tender love for mankind, is said for that very reason to have sent His Son. There is One who expresses and manifests this love—One who is with God and is God—manifesting it by taking human flesh and dying on the cross. Christmas and Passion Week are not separate mysteries: both flow from the Father’s eternal, absolute love, and both show the Son’s submission to that love, his willing conformity to it. He wrings no reluctant consent from an unwilling Judge to pardon rebels; he brings down into human nature the very love that created man and from which man’s self-will had separated him. This love becomes human through acts of simple obedience. The Son yields himself to it, refusing every temptation to act independently—refusing to prove his sonship by turning stones to bread, or leaping from the temple, or seizing the kingdoms of the world. He rests on the word spoken at his baptism, acting as one baptized with the Spirit, doing and suffering what is appointed. By that same Eternal Spirit he heals the sick and casts out devils, and offers himself to God.
See, then, how this line of thought—which the Church draws from Scripture, which gives the Gospels their coherence, which the Apostles trace in every discourse and letter—speaks directly to conscience, heart, and reason. Does it not answer, “Yes, this is love—if real, if it truly reaches me and doesn’t stay forever distant, it must declare itself exactly this way. Only so can I know it, feel it, be brought to obey it”? When Incarnation and Passion are presented like this, can we call them merely fine ideas, man’s dream of his own nature’s capacity for infinite self-sacrifice? Doesn’t everything honest in us protest, “No, I demand realities, not fiction—an actual personal love reaching me from above, not my own idea projected into some superhuman shape. My heart and reason ask this and will accept nothing less. And that capacity for self-sacrifice you speak of in human nature—its reality depends entirely on whether there is a Being to whom the self can be given, who himself shows the example and principle of sacrifice, in whose image I am made. If not, there is no such capacity in me; it may be a fine idea, but it will never appear in the practice of life—only the fearful hypocrisy of self-will counterfeiting self-surrender.”
This notion that the divine is merely the human glorified rather than its true ground—that a man becomes a god by imagining himself one—this philosophical revival of the world’s oldest corruption and superstition, man’s first disobedience, is at once the natural reaction against a theology obsessed only with human depravity, and the natural result of a theology that begins from man rather than from God. I have used the first part of the prayer to protest the method common to both errors. I believe the second part—the prayer itself—delivers us from the self-exaltation and restlessness that both produce. Grant that we may both “follow the example of His patience, and also be made partakers of His resurrection.” Following the example of Christ’s humility seemed at first an outrageous ambition. Does following the example of his passion—imitating his sacrifice—seem even more outrageous? It would be, if the Passion were not simply the human will surrendering to the Absolute Will, the Son refusing to be anything except in union with his Father. It would be profane, if the power of this sacrifice—the power of the law of God it reveals—were not exactly this: that it can end our unnatural striving against the Will we were made to obey, subdue us, and free us from the Self that has tormented us all our lives. “In that He died, He died unto sin once.” This complete surrender of self was the extinction of the barrier between man and God. He would be nothing in himself, that God might be all in all. So we follow the example of his patience when we stop seeking anything in or from ourselves, resisting every urge to glorify self instead of God, to climb to God by our own ladder. To follow his patience is to accept, however God chooses to send it, deliverance from self-will and self-seeking; to share his resurrection is to enter the true life he has in God—trusting him, and finding in him what we sought in vain within ourselves.
If this is true, Passion Week need not be weary struggle, darkness, and confusion. We may take it as God’s message about his purpose and his way of bringing our wills into harmony with it—a pledge for every kind of mind. Some are given a strong power of imaginative realization. Let them hold this as a trust, remembering that their vivid conceptions are worthless in themselves, valuable only as they draw the mind closer to the truths themselves, and that without great humility such conceptions may obscure those truths for others and for themselves. Others feel they have no such faculty at all—no scenes, no pictures form in their minds; sacred places stir no reverence, memorable seasons recall nothing vividly. Let such people turn their weakness into pure faith, holding most firmly the truths imagination can least picture. Let them say, “Passion Week reminds me these things are real quite apart from my thoughts about them. I thank God they are. I thank God that in tender love he sent his Son to die on the cross. This is real. I leave my power of realizing it to him.” Others of quick, tender feeling are deeply moved by human sorrow, even unseen, and weep to think of the King of men dying for men. This too is a gift, to be received with thanks—only let them guard against turning sympathy into mere luxury, forgetting it must bear fruit in life. Still others cannot be roused even by their own sharpest sorrows to seriousness or tenderness, much less to feel Christ’s sorrow. Let them confess this hardness, thank God for showing it to them, and submit to its bitter humiliation—and then Christ’s deeper sorrow and humility will work in them the repentance that needs no repenting of, godly sorrow without effort or pretense. Let them leave this sensibility in God’s hands, to give as much or as little as he sees fit, asking only that they may bear steady witness to his love because they have none of their own, and whatever comes forth in them must be entirely his.
So all may learn the force of Peter’s words. We need Christ’s mind as armor for real battles. Passion Week, which shows us how that mind appeared in his sufferings, is meant to clothe us in that armor. It is no time for indulging feeling, but for mourning the lack of it—a time to gain strength for action and endurance. This great weight of self—selfish thoughts, selfish plans, fears and hopes for self—crushes us all, individuals, nations, Churches alike. Passion Week tells us it may be thrown off. Christ bore it for us and for the world; at his cross we may lay it down. God will enable us to do so—for if he gave his Son for us all, will he not also freely give us all things with him?