Second Sunday in Advent

“Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.” —1 Corinthians x. 11.

The passage from which these words are taken resembles in its general design the one which we have been reading as the Epistle for this morning. In one as in the other, St. Paul claims the Jewish Scriptures for the use of Gentiles as well as of Jews. In one, as in the other, he declares that all the narratives which seemed to belong to the chosen people exclusively, had a wide human application; that the force of them was not less for those who lived in his day than for those whom Moses or Joshua led; that the progress of ages would make the warnings and the consolations in them more and not less intelligible, more and not less necessary. “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.” And this is the moral which the Church in her Collect to-day has drawn from the words which she has taken from the fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.

There is, however, one peculiarity in this tenth chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians, which is latent, I am convinced, in the other Epistle, but which is not fully brought out there. That the members of the Greek Church may understand the rich inheritance of Hebrew experience upon which they had entered, St. Paul explains to them the sacramental character of the old records. The language is very remarkable. I will read it to you:—“Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea: and were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ. But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted. Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed, and fell in one day three and twenty thousand. Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of serpents. Neither murmur ye, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer.” Then come the words of the text; and speedily after some words to which I shall have to draw your attention in the course of my sermon:—“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?”

Without at present adverting to these words, I wish you to observe,—1st, That St. Paul makes his argument for the unity and permanence of the Scriptures, and their suitableness to the ages in which they were not written, depend upon the fact that the events which they recorded were Sacraments of God’s presence. 2d, That he makes this assertion the ground of direct moral exhortations against idolatry, against fornication, against murmuring, against that sin of tempting God in which all other sins may be included. In other words, the use of the Scriptures for what we should call the most plain practical purposes, as warnings against direct open crimes, as preservatives of a right inward temper, is deduced from what many at first sight would reject as a strange and fantastical estimate of their character.

I trust that our reverence for St. Paul as a Christian warrior, conversant with hard realities himself, eager that all his disciples should be earnest and real, especially watchful of those tendencies in the Corinthians which were likely to make them speculators rather than doers, will save us from pronouncing that he can, even for an instant, when he was treating of so all-important a subject as this, when he was professing to deal with it in so very practical a manner, have deviated into an exercise of fancy or of wit. And yet what are called the typical applications of Scripture are for the most part such extravagant exercises of the fancy and the wit, are so abhorrent from the sense of plain people, anxious for a guide to their feet and for a power that shall enable them to fulfil the plain, hard tasks they have to fulfil, that I cannot wonder if some have wished to forget this passage in the Apostle’s writings, and have even listened with impatience, but not with entire disbelief, to those who have told them that he was allowing the conceits which he had learned in the school of the Rabbi Gamaliel to mar the simplicity which is in Jesus Christ.

I am desirous to speak to you on this subject, on this Second Sunday in Advent, when our minds are fixed by a solemn prayer on the Scriptures which are written for our learning, because I am sure that if the Scriptures are, as many think, losing their hold upon us, the cause of that enormous mischief lies very greatly in our confused apprehensions respecting what is called their direct, and what is called their spiritual signification. Though I admit most fully that there is a protest in honest, manly English minds, against all attempts to strain Scripture from its broad obvious sense, to make it fit the experience of particular minds and the circumstances of particular ages, I am bound to acknowledge also that such interpretations do find favour with minds of a devout and Christian quality, and that they are felt to be an escape from the dry critical expositions which make the customs and habits of an Oriental people the main guides to the understanding of a book, which we have been taught to regard as a possession for ever. The conflict between these feelings has been greater at all times than we know; but we are probably right in supposing that it never was so great as in our own. The critic entrenches himself in philological laws and maxims, boldly maintaining that if the Bible history is a history, it must bear to be tried by these. The sufferer on a sick-bed feels that the words speak directly to him or to her, and that that speech must be true, whatever becomes of the other. Each is liable to special narrownesses and temptations. The student quickly discerns the morbid and self-concentrated tendencies of the mere devotional reader. The devotional reader feels instinctively how merely antiquarian the student is apt to be, how little he understands the wants of human beings. Neither is sufficiently alive to his own perils; neither sufficiently understands how much he needs the help of the other. Each has his circle of sympathizers and flatterers, to keep him more exclusive, to prevent him from discerning between that which is true and false in his mode of thinking. By degrees each spends half his energy in denouncing the other. Bystanders, who have as much interest in the controversy as either, begin to regard it as hopeless and interminable. The indifferent or the scoffing multiply. Both parties regard them with nervous and cowardly apprehension; both, alas! are contributing to their growth, and are strengthening them in their negative conclusions.

If I thought that what I have called St. Paul’s sacramental idea of the Old Scriptures, was identical with that idea of them as figures, or likenesses, or emblems, or types of events belonging to our Dispensation, or of facts belonging to our spiritual life, I should have no hope whatever of any settlement, now or hereafter, of this strife. But it seems to me that the true understanding of his words, the true application of them to our own condition, would save us at once from any desire to find forced analogies in the divine history, which interfere with our acknowledgment of it as history, and from that inhuman method which takes the juice and meaning out of all events, and leads us to think that the men who were concerned in them were not creatures of our flesh and blood, feeling our wants, bearing our burdens. It seems to me also, that if we rightly appreciated his method, the Bible would become to us a divine book in a sense in which it never can be a divine book while we regard it as a collection of letters dictated by a Divine Being.

It is evident from the passage I read to you, and from those which follow it, that St. Paul is speaking to the Corinthians expressly as a Church cemented by Sacraments. He had the double purpose of teaching them to understand and not to abuse their Sacraments, by faithfully studying the Scriptures of the Jews as records of their Sacramental discipline, and then to understand those Scriptures by the light which fell upon them from the Sacraments of the New Dispensation. I wish to follow him in that course of thought. As I endeavoured last Sunday to show you how the difficulties respecting our Lord’s Advent in humiliation and His advent to judgment ran parallel with the difficulties which were agitating men’s minds respecting the Eucharist, and how by reflecting on each we might arrive at some satisfaction respecting the other: so now I will endeavour to show you that our difficulties respecting the Scripture, and our difficulties respecting the Eucharist, likewise illustrate each other; and that we shall not enter fully into the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper if we study its nature anywhere but in the Bible, or the Bible if we try to understand whither it is leading, and how the different stages of its history are related to each other, except from the Lord’s Supper.

You will not fail to perceive, I think, that the circumstances of our day, to which I adverted last Sunday, call for at least one part of this inquiry. A certain Act of Parliament determines—so we are told by those best competent to interpret such documents—that the Articles contain the whole meaning of Scripture, and that no appeal lies from them to the Scripture. But the Articles themselves assert that an appeal does lie from them to the Scripture. It is this characteristic of them of which we have boasted most. If it is taken away from them, we do not merely contradict a single one of them, we set aside the history and the purpose of the whole body of them. They were formed to protect the Church against a theory which did set at naught the authority of the Scripture, which did treat Scripture as an unintelligible document until its living words were tied and bound in an ecclesiastical interpretation. The Articles assume that the Scriptures are an intelligible document, more intelligible than any which human wit can invent. They denounce certain notions proceeding from the private judgment of doctors, established into dogmas by the private judgment of Popes, which had interfered and do interfere with the free manly study of the Scriptures, which fettered the conscience of mankind, which hindered men from seeking that common and universal Truth they need, and which our Lord says can alone make us free. Our Common Prayer-Book serves this purpose even in a higher degree. It enables us to feel that we have a fellowship with each other, and with men of all ages, in our deepest wants, and in that truth which is to satisfy them. It makes us discontented with all notions, whether derived from other men or from our own narrow wits, and certain that nothing but Communion with a living God Who knows all and loves all can suffice for any. The Prayer-Book therefore presumes the Sacraments as its ground and standard; and the Articles assume the Scriptures as their ground and standard. Acts of Parliament may command us to understand the Articles without the Scriptures; but if we cannot, and if the Articles say that we cannot, we must adhere to the doctrine we have subscribed. We cannot involve ourselves in a daily self-contradiction. If those have involved themselves in one, who have fled to the help of Acts of Parliament, under the notion that the only way to assert God’s truth is to convict their brother of an error, the lesson is a profitable one, and we may lay it to heart.

You can scarcely have failed to observe that St. Paul does not say in this chapter, “The Israelites passed through the Red Sea, and that was the likeness or type of the baptism which you Corinthians receive when you enter Christ’s Church;” but he says, “Our fathers were baptized in the cloud and in the sea.” In like manner he does not say, “They ate manna and drank of the rock, and that was the likeness of the bread and wine which you eat in the Eucharist;” but he says, “They did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all drink the same spiritual drink.” This is an evident difference of expression, and it indicates a difference in the thought which was to be expressed. St. Paul teaches that the passage through the Red Sea was a sign that the invisible God had taken the Jewish nation to be a people of inheritance to Himself. Every Jew who went through the sea on dry land might accept that sign, might believe that fact. So far as he did, he did not merely escape from Pharaoh the tyrant; he confessed himself to be under the government of a Righteous King, a Deliverer; he became a freeman. In like manner St. Paul teaches that the fall of the manna was a sign, to each Jew who fed upon it, that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Accepting that sign, believing that fact, he entered into a new sense of dependence upon God; in place of the flesh-pots of Egypt, he had not merely the poor nourishment of the desert, he had the rich nourishment which came from trust in an Almighty Friend, from an assurance that He would not desert his race or him. Of the rock St. Paul uses still more remarkable language. He speaks of it as following them. The rock which Moses struck was, of course, stationary; but the water which flowed from it betokened a Presence which was with them always. Each time they drank of an ordinary well, they had a new token of this Presence. The greatest bodily suffering, therefore, which travellers through a desert can endure, was a spiritual lesson; the relief from it was, in the strictest sense, spiritual drink. Every Jew who confessed whence the deliverance came, acquired a new and higher life. He tasted that the Lord was gracious. He became sure that the Ruler of Nature was not a distant Being, was not One Who could command springs to flow forth, but Who had no concern with men. He must be their Lord. He must care for them more than for all things. He must be at their right hand, that they should not be moved. All this the Apostle gathers up in the words, “That Rock was Christ.” It is compendious language, a kind of symbolical shorthand; but it is perfectly intelligible when taken in connection with the words that precede and follow it; and it was not resorted to carelessly. His very object was to convince the Corinthians that they were not under a different spiritual government and constitution from that under which the Jewish fathers had lived. In all its principles and method it was the same. He Who administered it was the same. The Christ Whom Paul had preached to them as taking flesh, as dying, as rising, as ascending, was that Christ, that Angel of the Covenant, that Son of God, Who had led the Hebrew people in a pillar of cloud by day, Who had followed them by night in a pillar of fire.

You will see how much coherency such a statement as this gives to the Old Testament records. At the outset of them we are told that the Lord God made a Covenant with Abraham and his seed; that each one of that seed received a sign of that Covenant. To remember this Covenant; to believe that the sign was not a mere sign, but the witness of a living truth—a truth concerning him at every moment of his existence—this is declared to be the characteristic of the true Israelite. To forget this Covenant; to suppose that the sign meant nothing; to suppose that he was not under the continual guidance and government of the God of his fathers; this was the characteristic of the revolting Israelites; this was the root of lawlessness generally; this, above all, led to the transgression of the Second Commandment, to the worship of visible things. But how did the remembrance, how did the forgetfulness exhibit itself? He who connected the sign of the Covenant with its signification, regarded every event that befell his nation or himself as a sign suitable to the circumstances of that time, addressed to the heart and conscience, meeting their special sins and necessities, pointing to one object. All were tokens from the Unseen Being, recalling him whom a thousand influences were reducing into a slave of tyrants, to his rightful allegiance, to his free service. To him who felt no force in the primary sign, nothing else was a sign. The poet says of a man whose mind had been debased and sensualized till all perception of beauty had been extinguished—

A primrose on the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.

A state of mind, as many of us know, exceedingly possible; one into which we may sink without exhibiting the outward savageness which is attributed to this potter. But it is better surely to see no brightness in primroses than to see nothing in birth, and marriage, and death; in terrible crimes, or noble acts of devotion; in the struggles and the falls of other nations or our own, but something to fill a half-hour of vacant talk, or of bootless reading. Not to regard these as signs is surely a great brutishness. It is that which we find the holy men among the Jews attributing to their countrymen; it is that from which, by earnest prayers and thanksgivings, and vigorous recollections of God’s mercies and judgments, they seek to deliver themselves. And they speak of God Himself as working by all His acts to effect that awakening and renovation in their minds and the minds of their countrymen, which they cannot produce by any effort of their own. They assure them that He does not forget His Covenant, though they may forget it; that it is everlastingly true, and must accomplish itself; that their idolatries and crimes, all which have arisen from their refusal to believe God and to trust Him, will but manifest His truth and His love to the world; that all things are leading us to a more perfect discovery of His relation with mankind, and of His own essential nature; that One is to be revealed in Whom He can hold perfect communion with men, they looking up to Him as a Father, He owning them as His children.

Here then is a justification, an ample justification, of those who say that the Bible is a book of business and of life, of plain practical morality, and that we have no business to turn it into a book of riddles and allegories. Here is the justification also of those who say that the history is to be read as the history of a nation, and that it cannot be explained away into a set of spiritual maxims and examples for the use of individuals. The history of the journey through the wilderness, and of all other ages of the Jewish Commonwealth, is a history of simple events; of migrations and wars; of victories and defeats; of pastoral, agricultural, commercial prosperity and adversity; of the sins of men who were of our flesh and blood, of men who spake right and did right because they were true. What makes the history a Bible is, that all these facts are interpreted. They are shown to be signs. The meaning of a nation’s existence is brought home to us. The personal ground of a nation’s law is laid bare before us. Whether the laws are such as belong to all nations, such as mankind was hereafter to recognize as its laws; or whether they are temporary and local, devised for the education of a particular people, still they are brought before us as God’s laws; because the maxim of the whole book is that He is the Educator of that people, and of all people; that all circumstances are His instruments, that all events are assertions of His presence and His rule; that whatever happens to men is intended as a means of showing forth to them His righteousness, and of moulding them to His image.

But if so, here is also the justification of those who insist upon claiming the Bible for themselves and their own time, who must take it as a message to their hearts and consciences, must warp its words from their apparent sense rather than not find that sense in them. Here is the justification for their meaning, the excuse for their outrages on philology. For if the Bible speaks of a Living God, a God Who reigneth for ever and ever; if it sets forth the principles of His government as uniform amidst all changes in the outward tokens of it, they must be right in the essence of their doctrine; they are bound to hold it fast against all schoolmen and all critics. What they want is, that it should be strengthened and not modified. What they want is, to see that they may take the Bible more exactly than they have taken it, and that they may read it now, not less than in the old time, as a book concerning a society; and that so it will become a more precious book to themselves individually than it ever has been. When they trace it as the progressive history of God’s revelations to a family, to a nation, and to mankind, they will understand more what support there is in it for them as men, what awful admonitions to them as men whom God has claimed, not as servants, but as sons.

It is on this ground that St. Paul addresses the Corinthians as those upon whom the ends of the world had come. All the purposes and revelations of the different ages had been converging to one point. The Son of God, the express image of the Father, had been revealed in the nature of man. He had brought that nature through death and the grave, and had exalted it to His Father’s right hand. Gentiles had been told that He had been made of a woman, made under the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons. The highest glory that men could attain had been vindicated as the common possession of Jew and of Greek. “Wherefore,” he saith, “let him that standeth take heed lest he fall.” The temptations which had been about the old people of God, to sensuality, and murmuring, and idolatry, were about them, not less strong than they had been in any former time. “Nevertheless,” he goes on, “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 this way of escape? What was the strength that was to preserve them in the recollection of God’s presence and their union with Him? How would He prove His faithfulness? St. Paul takes his instance from one of the temptations of the Jews, that which he regarded as the root of all the rest, that to which the Corinthians were exposed in its most palpable forms. “Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as unto wise men; judge ye what I say. 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 the escape from the temptation, if they were wise men, and really entered into the meaning of that sign which was given them. The bread which they received at their great Church feast, when they regarded it as the communion of the body of Christ; the wine which they received at that feast, when they regarded it as the communion of the blood of Christ, would be continual witnesses to them that they were members of one body with each other and with Him, and so would be a continual protection against the tendency to worship outward and visible things which haunts all men, and into which they must fall, if there is no power acting upon their spirits to deliver them from it, and to give them a divine object of trust and reverence.

I think the consideration of this passage might be very useful to those of us who have been wont to think of the Eucharist rather as a transcendent service for the use of high saints, than as a protection for weak and sinful men from even the grossest and lowest vices. The Bible never makes that kind of distinction between the sinner and the saint which we sometimes make. All are regarded as taken under God’s care and government; all may receive the signs of that care and government, and may believe them, and may cast themselves upon Him to save them from that which degrades and destroys them. There can be no higher blessing than this to the greatest saint. If he supposes he does not want it, he sinks back into the condition of the worst sinner; he renounces his dependence. He is in peril of a worse and deeper descent than the mere sensualist has ever known. If that sensualist claims the deliverance which Christ offers him, if he seeks the righteousness which is not his own, he becomes a saint. There can be no higher title to the name than that which is acquired by continual trust, from a sense of past wrong and present weakness. The morality of the Gospel is exalted because it is so universal. This highest idea of participating in the life of Christ is only possible, when we regard ourselves as members of the same body with the lowest. So we understand how that life can only be given through that flesh and blood which He shared with the worst of us, through that death which He died with the malefactor.

Again, this consideration might be of great use to those who are wont to suppose that if we have a very lofty idea of the worth and nature of this Sacrament, we must touch upon the borders of idolatry. St. Paul teaches us that the loftiest thought of all, that which makes it an actual communion with the body and blood of Him Who has glorified our humanity at the right hand of God, is the effectual deliverance from idolatry. A low notion of the Sacrament, by turning it into a mere ceremony, leads directly to superstition and idolatry. That view which treats it as the sign of Christ’s eternal presence with men, and of their right to claim fellowship with Him, shows how this Sacrament is the consummation of all the sacraments by which God educated His people out of idolatry in the days of old, and how it may make everything that happens to us in our common life, sacraments to save us from ever exalting the creature into the place of the Creator.

This is part of the help which we may get from the application of the Sacramental principle of Scripture to our own cases. Not a little also, I think you will see, may be learnt respecting that subject which has perplexed us all so much, about the participation of Sacraments by the wicked. We may see how nearly falsehoods border upon great truths, and how much mischief we may do if we use our methods instead of God’s to distinguish them. St. Paul says that all did eat the same spiritual meat and drank the same spiritual drink; and yet he teaches us strongly that the food was not received; that they would not have it because they did not recognize the meaning of the sign. He speaks of our being all members of one body, because we all eat of that one bread. He surely instructs us that we cut ourselves off from the body, by denying our relation to the Head of it; not that the relation is an unreal one. All these differences make themselves clear in the light of Scripture and the practice of life. Dogmatists make divisions and destroy distinctions.

There are still other difficulties concerning the Eucharist, through which the study of this chapter might help us to see our way. They refer to sacrifice. Some call the Eucharist a sacrifice. Some call it the commemoration of a sacrifice. Our Service is very express in giving it the latter name. We speak of the “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice and oblation, which Christ made upon the cross, for the sins of the whole world.” No principle is so important for us to vindicate as this. All history attests the tremendous consequences of the notion, that the sacrifice still requires to be perfected, that we are not to give thanks for it as complete. But St. Paul speaks in this chapter of a sacrifice, as implying communion, a fellowship with the Being to Whom it is offered. He speaks of the sacrifices of the Gentiles as offered to demons or demigods (we unfortunately translate the word “devils”) and not to God; and of the fellowship of the heathen being therefore with these imperfect beings, with all their mortal and earthly passions, and not with the True God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the reason which he gives why the Corinthians should not eat things sacrificed to idols, though they were innocent things in themselves. It implied a participation in the worship of those lower beings, an acknowledgment that men were subject to them, when Christ had redeemed them and brought them to His Father. Let us understand then, well, what this finished sacrifice has done for us; let us understand why we are to give thanks for it. If it had left us merely to the recollection of the past, it would be unlike all God’s elder sacraments; for they brought the Jews, who received them truly, to recollect that He Who brought their fathers out of Egypt was with them in the promised land, with them in whatever land of exile they might be called to dwell in, and that they might offer themselves as sacrifices to God. These sacraments told them that they must not be content with the present or with the past, that God intended them for a more perfect communion with Him, that He intended to manifest Himself fully to the world. No lower belief, no feebler hope, can assuredly sustain us, upon whom the ends of the world are come. The sacrifice has been made once for all. But it has been made that we might be united to the great High Priest, Who has entered within the veil, and Who is presenting His finished sacrifice continually before His Father. It has been made that we might look onward to that day, which is to wind up all the revelations and all the sacraments of God, when His servants shall see His face, and His Name shall be in their foreheads, and “there shall be no night, and they shall need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God will give them light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.”