Second Sunday after Epiphany

“For to make in Himself of twain one new man, so making peace.” —Ephesians ii. 15.

Why Jews and Gentiles rejected the Gospel of Christ, why St. Paul attributed the dislike of it in both to their worship of the god of this world, I considered last Sunday. How Jews and Gentiles were brought into one Church or body by the Gospel, is the question I wish to examine this afternoon. This lesson too, I think, belongs to the Epiphany; perhaps also, if we can learn it rightly, we may find why the Church prays on this Second Sunday after the Epiphany, with what confidence she prays, that God will grant us also His peace all the days of our life.

The words I have read to you from the Epistle to the Ephesians refer directly to this topic. I have taken one clause out of a long passage; but if you consider that passage and the whole Epistle, you will find that I am not perverting it from its original intention. And there is enough in this single clause to occupy us. St. Paul does not state that problem respecting Jews and Gentiles as many among us would state it. We should ask how men who had been educated under the shadow of the Temple in Jerusalem; who had trembled at the words of the second Commandment; who, before all their other lore, had learnt that the Lord their God was one Lord, could be brought into fellowship with men who found a god in every hill and fountain; whose wide toleration could embrace the thought of new gods on their own soil, or of gods whom foreigners had worshipped on theirs; whose temples might sometimes be forsaken through the scepticism of the philosophers and the indifference of the people, but seldom because the awe of some invisible Ruler made the wrongdoer fear to enter them. We may wonder what convictions each side must have been obliged to sacrifice, what devices could have been found to prevent the principles which neither could abandon, from perpetual jarring.

St. Paul, on the other hand, appears to regard the Jew as an incomplete, or half man, till he found the Gentile; the Gentile as an incomplete, or half man, till he found the Jew. He does not speak of opinions being adjusted or fitted into each other; of arrangements, mutual surrenders, compromises. He speaks of the human being in each as being raised to a new level; as attaining the position for which he had always been intended, but which he had never reached, when they could coalesce and become one body. The child of the Covenant, circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin; the Hebrew of the Hebrews, brought up in the straitest sect of his religion, touching the law a Pharisee; discovers that he himself, with all these advantages, must be a maimed and dwarfed creature, unless he can claim fellowship with those who are out of the Covenant, with those from whom the Law has cut him off, with those whom, not the prejudice of his countrymen, but his own eyesight, tells him are wholly given to idolatry. He must stand on a level with the Gentiles; he must eat with them; he must assert their right to all spiritual privileges, that he may not become an utterly unworthy descendant of those who were separated from all the nations of the earth, of those who bore witness for the Lord God of Israel against all false gods. That the law may not be a dead letter to him, or, worse than a dead letter, a horrible and hateful oppression to him; that he may be able to keep the Commandments as he has never kept them, to delight in them as he has never delighted in them, he must become all things to all men, he must live as one without law.

I have connected this sentence, in the first instance, with St. Paul himself; for we can hardly appreciate the force of it without such a personal application. The two partial men who are to constitute the one new man cannot be reduced into notions or qualities; one must see, in a special instance, how either felt his need of the other. The crucial experiment would be in the case of some one who had most shut himself up in the form of being which belonged to him by his birth and education, who had most despised or hated the opposite. But though St. Paul furnishes an admirable illustration of his own principle, it is not the less general. His language can imply nothing less than that the Gospel was declaring that true manhood or humanity which hitherto had presented itself in two apparently irreconcilable aspects. Let us ask ourselves what these aspects were; what was the characteristic of the Jewish mind, as such; and of the Gentile mind, as such.

No novelties or refinements are necessary, or could help us much, to settle these characteristics. St. Paul’s words to the Romans and the Athenians, that the oracles of God were committed to the Jew, and that the Gentile was seeking God, if haply he might feel after Him or find Him, lead us to the very root of the matter, and explain the various phenomena which present themselves to us. The first phrase, you will remember, occurs in the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. It is carefully chosen. St. Paul does not say, as some of us might say, that the Jews received a revelation, and that the Gentiles were without one. He could not say that without contradicting the doctrine which he had been asserting in the two first chapters of this same Epistle, and of which the whole of it is a development. He there maintains that God did reveal His own righteousness in the conscience of the Gentile, and that the sin of those who worshipped the creature more than the Creator consisted in their not “liking to retain God in their knowledge.” He maintains as distinctly in the second chapter, if we construe the words of an Apostle as strictly as we should those of another man, that there were Gentiles as well as Jews “who, by patient continuance in well-doing, sought for glory, and honour, and immortality;” and that there were Jews as well as Gentiles who “were contentious, and did not obey the truth, but obeyed unrighteousness.” The distinction between them then could not lie in the partial concession or refusal of light by God, nor in the acceptance or rejection of that light by man. But that God had in distinct speech declared what He was to the Jew, that He had severed the Jew from other people in order that that speech might be intelligible to him, that He had made him aware by a whole course of discipline of the difference between the Creator and the works of His hands, that he had made him aware of his own tendency to confound them,—this St. Paul vindicated as the privilege and glory of his people, this was the measure of the extent of their evil, this determined the work which they had to do for all lands. How great the temptations of such a position were, how Jews had failed to understand it and to fulfil it, he declares with the faithfulness of a patriot and of an Apostle, with the tenderness and sorrow of a man. He declares also that the purpose of the election of his countrymen had not been frustrated,—that he himself, the great persecutor of the Church, was an instance how it had been accomplished and was to be accomplished; that God was permitting and commanding him to prove the fidelity of the promise to Abraham; that he might bless all the families of the earth by saying, “Behold your God.”

Here then is one picture. A Jew beginning from God, His covenant, His law, His word, standing fast in the covenant, delighting in His law after the inner man, feeling His word as a fire within him, holding that to bear witness of His righteousness and truth was the great privilege and blessing of all, longing that He should reign over the earth, and that all which men had set up instead of Him should be put down. Here is another picture, of one of the same race, perhaps of the same man in a degenerate stage of his existence. He looks upon God as shrivelled into His own oracles; they speak no more of Him, they speak only of those fortunate favourites whom He has chosen to receive gifts which are denied to mankind. The Covenant is a sentence of condemnation upon the rest of the Universe. The Law is a cause of self-exaltation to those who know they are not keeping it. The Word is no fire, no mighty living power, but a collection of letters to be written out and debated of, an excuse for the formation of sects which have caught some little glimpse of its signification, and who have determined that it shall signify that and only that, and that every conception besides that or beyond that is accursed. I think, if we contemplate these two images, we shall come to the conclusion, that the true Jew must have been longing for a fellowship with all God’s creatures which he had not yet realized; that it was the effect of all his divine education to inspire him with this longing; and that the false Jew, just because it had never been awakened in him, just because he cultivated all the habits and tempers of mind which were alien from it, was losing the perception of that which was peculiar to him, was ceasing to understand that any oracles of God had been committed to him.

Look now at the condition of the Gentile, as it is set forth to us by the same inspired authority. He has a sense of God being somewhere very near him. Where can it be? He feels in this direction and that. Is He in the sky? Is He in the air? Is He in the world below? May He not be nearer still; with us in every circumstance of life, in the throes of birth, in the work of the husbandman, in the work of the physician? May he not be represented in the domestic relations of father and mother, of brother and sister? May He not be seen in the judge and the lawgiver, or in the priest who thinks high thoughts, and offers the blood of the ox or the sheep, which is the pledge of faith between man and man? Must not nature speak of Him? Must not beautiful and glorious man speak of Him more? Here is that feeling after Him Who is not far from every one of us, which the Apostle speaks of with such pathos and such sympathy. Here is the confession going up from ten thousands of hearts, that in Him they live and move and have their being. On the hill of Mars,—in the sight of idol temples and idol altars,—to a frivolous people who had lost the sense to a great degree of everything but the outward sign, St. Paul, the disciple of Jewish lawgivers and prophets, was not afraid to speak thus richly of the thoughts and aspirations which lay concealed beneath the wood and the stone, the gold and the silver, which he said never could be the likeness of the Godhead.

And why did he speak so, but because he knew better than any man, because he felt more intensely than any man, the degradation and horror of idolatry; because he knew whither it was leading all people, these clever Athenians especially—into what depths of baseness and moral corruption,—into what incapacity for receiving the light from Heaven? Why, but because he was certain that he, a Jew, to whom had been committed the oracles of God, had a message to deliver concerning that God Whom Greeks and all nations were seeking after, because he was sure that message was intended to reach them through his nation? And why, not confining himself to mythology, did he wander into the regions of philosophical speculation? Why did he quote Aratus, and speak of men as being the offspring of the gods? Why did he use language about the Living God which approached the phraseology of Pantheism, and might be readily turned to its use? Why, but because he recognized the great inquiries with which Philosophy had occupied itself as genuine, and as prompted by a higher Wisdom than that which those who engaged in them possessed or could measure? Why, but because he felt how barren those inquiries proved, how they destroyed the more genial thoughts out of which the worship of idols had issued and which that worship had not utterly crushed, when they assumed to satisfy the wants which they expressed, when philosophers pretended to create the Being and the Unity which they pursued? Why, but because he knew that he could declare to Athenians that Aratus was not wrong, that they were the offspring of God, and in Whom they were His offspring?

So we are brought to a word in my text of which as yet I have said nothing. “To make in Himself of twain one new man.” That is one reading. If we read Him with some of the more recent editors, I do not know that the sense is altered or materially weakened. It is difficult to find any other nominative than “Christ” throughout the sentence, or to imagine one, and therefore the ἐν ἑαυτῷ seems most reasonable. But I do not deny that St. Paul may have written with a feeling that he had spoken of the Father as making peace through His Son. That form of language was so habitual to him, it was so implied in all his other language, that he may scarcely have remembered whether he had used it or not. He may unawares have assumed it when the strict construction of the sentence did not authorize it. The observation of these divergencies from technical rules in his style,—divergencies into which every practical writer may fall, and which are not more characteristic of him than of the greatest of the Greek historians,—often suggests very valuable theological hints; but I am not able to say whether this is an instance of them, and I prefer taking the words in the form with which we are most familiar.

Taken in that form, or in the other, they equally illustrate what I said last Sunday about the Gospel, that it is, according to St. Paul, not the utterance of certain propositions, but the manifestation of a Person. As he spoke to the Corinthians of the light of the glory of Him Who is the Image of God shining forth in the Gospel, so he speaks to the Ephesians of that same manifestation, as making the one new man out of twain. Supposing the idea of Jew and Gentile which we have derived from other passages of St. Paul’s writings to be the correct one, you will see, I think, why no words but these could account for that reconciliation of Hebrew and Greek, which we know was accomplished in spite of violent reluctance and a repulsion in each, when that which had been called the sect of the Nazarenes began to make itself felt as the Church of Christ.

Unless the Jew could actually feel that God was speaking by him and to him, his position and calling were forfeited. He became not a new man, a more complete man; he simply lost all that was precious or venerable in that which he had inherited. Unless he could feel that God was speaking to him and speaking by him, he could not in the least overcome the sectarian tendencies of an evil and degenerate age. For these tendencies arose from the notion that God had ceased to act and to live—that His words were all fastened down in a book, which Pharisees and Sadducees, and all the different schools in each, were to make the subject of their controversies. Unless God spoke to his age more directly, more personally than He had ever spoken before, unless He came forth from behind the law and the prophets, and revealed Himself to them, none of the promises upon which earnest Jews who waited for the Kingdom of Heaven had lived and died, would have been fulfilled, none of the vain selfish hopes, none of the dark exclusive thoughts of God which the false Israelites had cherished, could have been scattered. God speaking to men in a Son, God revealing Himself in a Man, answers every expectation which had sustained the worshipper of Jehovah when his worship had been most deep and awful, when he had most felt that if the Heaven of Heavens could not contain God, how much less the temples of earth; when he had most trembled to confound God with any of the things that he saw, or with any of the thoughts of his own mind. Then the full vision of a substantial truth, of an eternal righteousness, which had sustained the heroes and martyrs of his land in their darkest hours, burst full upon him, then every thought of the Creator, King, Judge, culminated without losing itself in the confession of a Father; then the idea of a Will which was only good, and tended only to good, arose in luminous distinctness behind the law which came out of the thick darkness; then that Will was seen to be fulfilled, perfectly fulfilled, in One Who delighted to do it; then out of the weakness of death came the complete revelation of divine power and wisdom, because of divine love.

But when we have reached this point, have we not learnt how the seeker after God,—he who had felt that God must be close at hand, that He could be lost in no vague or general abstraction, that every place must speak of Him, that the highest discovery of Him must be in man,—must have also seen in such a Person the only satisfaction of his wants, the only fulfilment of his anticipations and prophecies? The actual Friend of Man who entered into conflict with the actual sorrows of men, with hunger, palsy, leprosy, with deafness, blindness, madness, the grave; the actual Friend who bore the burden with them that He might overcome it,—this was the God-man Whom they had been feeling after, if haply they might find Him; this was He Whom they had tried to picture in a thousand forms, and whose nature they knew they were contracting and distorting in each of these forms. He Who had bid the winds and waves be still, He Who had been into the dark formless world, He Who had brought His body back from it, He Who had ascended on high, was it not He Who vindicated their title to be the offspring of God? was it not He Who justified the glory they had put upon man? And did He not justify just as much the thought which had struggled with the belief of man’s exaltation in the mind of the tragedian, that his only posture is that of humiliation, that he is only safe when he confesses a Will above his own, and bows before it? And did not the same revelation justify the assurance of the philosopher, that there must be somewhere and somehow an Ideal of truth, and righteousness, and beauty, which men did not create for themselves, which is no image of theirs, but which is the image of the perfect and eternal Substance, which He can enable them to apprehend and to embrace?

In such a Person, then, that one new man in which Jewish and Gentile elements might both be reconciled, could be found. And surely only in such a One. If there were no such Being, no one of whom it could be said, He is the complete manifestation of God, He is the living centre of all human beings and of all human thoughts, I do not see what explanation we have of the history of the old world, or of its passage into the modern. But without Him I can as little understand how there is ever to be peace in that jarring world to which we belong. That the coming into it of the Son of Man was the sign that peace was meant for the earth and goodwill to men, the Angels’ song proclaimed. That the coming of the Son of Man into it was not to bring peace, but rather a sword, that it was to make a man’s foes those of his own house, He himself proclaimed. History has interpreted the paradox. Because He is the Prince of Peace, all the enemies of peace within the heart of man have been stirred up, all have found that they had a common interest in driving Him out of His proper kingdom. And this is not all. He does not come to make a solitude and call it peace; He does not come to destroy all that is distinctive in nations or in individuals, for the sake of producing a dead uniformity. He comes to arouse men, and all the thoughts and energies of men, out of sleep; not to put them into sleep. All that is strongest in man hears His voice and starts into life. Therefore the Jew becomes more intensely a Jew, and the Gentile more intensely a Gentile, before they consent both to receive their law from Him. And when they do receive it, though it crushes their pride, it justifies His Father’s purpose in the destiny which He has fixed for them, in the education which He has given them. We are not therefore to be surprised either at a greater amount of positive bitterness and hatred proceeding from the lusts that war in our members since the manifestation of Christ in the world, nor are we to wonder that those who are to do His work best, and to be ultimately the truest ministers of peace, should stoutly refuse to abandon any position which has been given them, or any great conviction which they have themselves won.

These recollections may be of some service to us, if we are heartily seeking in our own days to be Peace Makers, and so to be called the children of Him Who is the Peace Maker. Nor will it be without profit to observe that, innumerable as the forms of opinion and the habits of feeling among us may seem to be, they do resolve themselves at last into those two capital divisions of which St. Paul speaks. If we search long, we shall not find any classification at once so scientific and so available in practice as that which he resorted to, when he described the Jew and Gentile as forming the elements of the full Christian man. Wherever we turn, we shall find these elements trying to assert their separate existence, trying to set themselves in deadly hostility to each other. On one side we shall perceive a vehement dogmatism, which treats all facts as settled, all principles as concluded, by the oracles of God which have been committed to us; then a strife between those who maintain this dogmatism, to whom these oracles have been committed, who shall define their meaning; what their meaning is. On the other side we shall perceive a protest against authority, a restless desire to find what is or is not to be held, believed, or worshipped; this desire leading to the most dissimilar conclusions, ending with many in an utter despair of any. These appearances are on the surface; all take notice of them. All see the inconsistencies and evils which these tempers engender. All observe the terror with which the Dogmatist regards the awakening of doubt, the movement of inquiry,—his desperate resolution to suppress them; his chafing against Providence because he cannot. All observe the contempt with which the Sceptic treats these experiments, and then the justification which he continually offers for them by his own weariness and despondency, his assurance that he has faculties which can solve the riddle of the Universe; and that it remains a riddle still. But is there nothing beneath these merely outside phenomena? Is there not in the heart of that hard, insolent, self-complacent boaster of his own round and compact system, a strong and irresistible faith that Truth must be revealed to men by Him Who is Truth, and that He has revealed it and does reveal it? Is there no faith, strong, irresistible, in the heart of that weary, restless, contentious—also sometimes insolent—denier of that which his fathers have confessed, of that which he is required to confess, that we cannot receive Truth from any but God, and that it is worth while to wait long, even to die, rather than not receive it of Him? If once we can do this justice to the men about us, or rather if we can thus justify God’s ways to them when their own are most crooked, we may begin to trace in all that we read and see of the world, evidences that men never have been able to dispense with these two convictions, that Truth must come forth and make itself known to them; that they must be always inquiring for it. There must likewise be witnesses for these two convictions, some in whom the former, some in whom the latter, is predominant. Often we shall find them mixed strangely together, heretical dogmatists as numerous as orthodox, Protestant as Romanist, Atheistical as Christian. In the other rank there is a Scepticism of the heart as well as of the intellect. Men of the most religious temper often give as much evidence of scepticism, impatient scepticism, as the most indevout; not a few resort to some vain and unsatisfactory superstitions merely to escape from their scepticism. It is commonly more difficult for those to understand one another who belong to the same class—who have the same essential character—than for those who are most unlike; nay, there is often an unconscious attraction of the Sceptic to the Dogmatist because he needs or envies his confidence, and a continual conflict between the brother Dogmatists and brother Sceptics.

Where is this to end? We have tried all schemes. Persecutions, accommodations, indifference, all have had their turn; all have been practised under the most favourable circumstances, by persons resolute to make them succeed, and possessing all means and appliances for effecting their purpose. And still the question is heard through earth and rises to Heaven, Whence is Peace to come;—Peace from the strivings which are rending the heart of mankind;—Peace from the strivings in our own hearts? Do you think we shall ever find a better and fuller answer to that cry than the one which was given long ago, “He hath made of twain one new man”? There is a Centre of Peace in the midst of this endless agitation. Dogmatists do not see it, because they put their own conclusions in place of the manifestation of a divine Person; because they think that what we want is something that we may hold, and not an Eternal God Who may hold us, and in knowledge of Whom standeth our Eternal Life. Sceptics do not see it, because they are going up into the Heaven or down into the deep to seek for that which is close to them. But Dogmatists and Sceptics, when they are wearied of the greatness of their way, when they have been stripped bare of their different kinds of pride, may at last meet at the same Cross. Then they may find that the manifestation of the Perfect God in the Perfect Man is the subject of all Divine Revelation; is the object of all human search; that in His Sacrifice is the Union and Reconciliation of Godhead and Manhood, and therefore of those elements in men which are discordant, so long as we feel that God is at a distance from us, and that all our seeking for Him is not the consequence of His seeking for us. Thus we perceive that the only true Peace we can desire for the world is that Peace which involves not the repose of Death, but the fulness of Life; that it must be His Peace, Who called all things into life, and Who by His Son overcame Death. Then we understand that this is the Peace—His Peace, not ours—which we may ask Him, Who governs all things in Heaven and earth, to grant us now and evermore.