Septuagesima Sunday

“For many are called, but few are chosen.”—Matthew xxii. 14.

These words have suggested anxious thoughts to many minds. Some of them take the form of this question, “By what tests can we distinguish the few who are chosen from the many that are called? How can we constitute a Church which shall be composed of the first class rather than of the second?” Some of them take the form of this question, “How can I know whether I belong to the called or to the chosen?” If it is needful for us to have either of these doubts settled, we may be sure that our Lord has given us the means of settling it. For it appears from St. Matthew that He used the words twice, and that on each occasion He connected them with a Parable which was to illustrate their meaning.

The first Parable you heard in the Gospel this morning. The Master of a Vineyard sends men to work for him at the third hour of the day, at the sixth, at the ninth, at the eleventh. When they are gathered together at the end of the day, all receive the same wages. The first complain; they think they are entitled to more. He who had hired them answers one who was finding fault, “Did I not agree with thee for a penny? May not I do that which I will with my own? Is thine eye evil because mine is good? Go, there thou hast that is thine: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.” The doctrine here seems to be a levelling one; it does not establish differences, but destroys them; all are treated equally. And yet these words follow,—“For many are called, but few are chosen.”

In the Parable of the King making a marriage for his Son, we also find distinctions broken down. The servants are told to go out into the highways and hedges, and to compel the poor, the halt, the lame, the blind, to come in to the feast. But then follows an act of discrimination. One is there who has not on a wedding-garment; he is asked how he could enter without it; he is speechless. The Giver of the Feast commands him to be bound hand and foot, and cast out. Such an offence and such a punishment may seem to be naturally enough explained by the aphorism, “Many are called, but few chosen.” For its obvious meaning, we shall be told, is this: The outward call to the Christian feast is addressed to men without any limitation. All are invited to come. But only a few are actually intended by God to receive the blessing; only one here and there is within that circle who are sealed for His own, whom He has chosen to eternal life.

This interpretation of the words has great plausibility. A person who has once embraced it will not readily discard it. Nor should he be urged to do so. There is so much of the deepest and most precious truth mixed up with his conclusion, that he would suffer greatly in the clearness of his mind, in the sincerity of his heart, if he cast it hastily aside, merely because he found it beset with some difficulties. A man should be very sure that he has got the juice out of every notion or theory which he has entertained, before he determines that he will throw it away as if it were a mere husk. Sudden reactions and revolutions of opinion have produced in all times, are producing in our own, effects which it is melancholy to witness, and which should make us very careful very jealous of ourselves, when we try to undermine another man’s conviction, of what kind soever it be. It is not however asking too much of any who reverence our Lord and His words, to believe that He did not contradict Himself, or apply any sentence of such solemn import as this lightly. It is not too much to ask that they will seriously consider both these Parables before they satisfy themselves that they have arrived at the sense of a passage which is common to them. And that consideration must surely suggest one thought of a somewhat startling and alarming kind.

The persons in the Parable of the Vineyard who, it is intimated, were not chosen, but only called, are precisely those who thought themselves entitled to a privilege which others did not possess. They could not acquiesce in an equal gift, in a common benefit; they must have that which they could boast of as their own, and to which they could prove that others had not a right. The very phrase which such men would have adopted to express their feeling would have been this: “Those labourers who came in at the eleventh hour were no doubt called to their work. They could not have taken a spade or a pruning-knife into their hands if they had not been called; but we who were summoned early in the day, we are assuredly the favourites of the great Husbandman, we are evidently chosen by Him, the objects of His special regard. This we and they shall find to be the case when we are reckoned with at the end of the day. Then the distinction which has been bestowed upon us will be manifest to all.” This was their calculation. Our Lord says it was a presumptuous and false calculation. It was defeated by the discovery that all were dealt with equally; and the pain which that discovery cost these hirelings was the proof that the sentence which they had passed upon others was true against themselves. They were called merely, not chosen.

No one will say that any strain is put on our Lord’s first Parable by this comment; it is the clear natural sense of it, which would present itself to any one’s mind who had not been told that he must adopt another; it is quite independent of any particular notions respecting the application of the story to one or other Nation or Age; it is just as true, whether we say that the labourers at the third hour were the Jews, and those at the eleventh the Gentiles, as whether we suppose it speaks of different stages in the lives of individual men. Anyhow, the way in which our Lord Himself applied the Parable will remain the right way; and that way, I repeat it, should make us pause and consider, nay, even tremble, before we certainly conclude that He must have taught an exclusive doctrine on one occasion by these words, which He adopted for the express purpose of teaching us the sin of exclusiveness on another.

I. The point is very clearly brought out in the Parable of the King’s making a marriage for His Son, but not more clearly than in that with which I am comparing it. The persons who come to the feast are certainly not self-invited, just as the labourers in the vineyard do not take upon themselves to work before they are hired. This is the principle of every one of our Lord’s discourses and illustrations. Any one who believes them to be what He said they were, revelations of the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, will conclude at once that men are brought into that Kingdom by a divine, mysterious power; that, if left to themselves, they would certainly not belong to it. This assumption goes through Scripture; you find it on the surface of every passage; you find it, the more you penetrate to the heart of the Book. A calling of God lay at the foundation of Jewish life and history. The first father of the nation was a called man, the whole nation was a called nation. Our Lord, while He sets forth the steps by which the Covenant would unfold itself to take in all tribes and languages, never for a moment abandons this idea, or the forms of expression which denote it. The King, the Husbandman, the Sower, are still the sources of the blessing which the subjects, the labourers, the land, receive. The notion of good coming to man from any operation or movement of his own, from any determination that he will make a world, or climb to heaven, for himself, is at least as alien from the New Dispensation as from the Old.

II. But if this is so, how can we suppose that the general calling proceeded from the voice of certain Messengers who were sent by the King, and that the limitation of that calling proceeded from Himself? In that case the Messengers either exceeded their commission, or He Who sent them led them to suppose that His Will was more large and free and gracious than it actually was. The Parable most distinctly refutes both positions. The King bids certain persons to the marriage of His Son. They refuse to come, going their way, one to his farm, the other to his merchandise. Then He commands His Messengers to go forth into every open place and secret corner, urging, compelling outcasts to come to the feast. Who could conjecture from language like this that the designs of the agents were more comprehensive and gracious than those of their employer; that He had a secret reserve in his goodwill towards those whom they were to press, with so much urgency and passion, that they would not shut themselves out of His blessing?

III. Would you not say then that the meaning must be this: “Here are certain blessings which the Lord of man designs for man; not for one here and one there, but for man as man. They are blessings which cannot be snatched or purchased, but must be received as gifts from an unseen hand. They are blessings of such a nature that man cannot attain the end of his being unless he possesses them. And for that reason they are blessings to the heart and will. If these are not consenting, if these do not go along with the heart and will of the Bestower, the gifts are wasted. That which alone can taste the feast rejects it. And rejects it—why? Because it is too common. Because these invited guests want something which they can have to themselves—a farm which they inherited and can hold against the world, merchandise which they have won by lucky adventures, and hope to increase. As long as the treasures they are offered are such as all may possess together—except they can be held on the same tenure as those they have sought for and appropriated hitherto—what are they good for? By such arguments they show that they are indeed called—called to very high honours, the highest which God Himself has for His creatures,—called to them by His own loving voice,—but not chosen, because there is nothing in them which responds to that voice, because their minds are wholly estranged from His mind.”

This is the lesson which we should, I think, at once deduce from this Parable, if we attached that sense to the Marriage that God made for His Son, which Apostles and saints and martyrs attached to it. The union of the Son of God with our nature seemed to them the great blessing of all. None which God could bestow could exceed that; every other was interpreted by it. All the dreams of men in all nations and ages had pointed to this Marriage; whether they were dreams of a perfect emancipation from evil, or of a perfect union among men, or of a perfect fruition of God, they could have no other realization than this.

For this involved a purpose in God to reconcile man with Himself; this involved the assurance that men could draw nigh to Him as justified and redeemed children; this involved the gift of a Spirit Who should bring them nigh. Such a gift as this to the race must be the subject of the Gospel. The invitation must be an invitation to celebrate this Marriage, to give thanks for it, to enter into the joy of it. The message must be carried to the highways, because those who dwelt in those highways, the most ordinary, the vilest stuff which bore the form and features of humanity, were made partakers of the most unspeakable privilege which humanity could possess or could receive. And therefore the man who had not the wedding-garment must be the man who remained shut up in his solitude and self-sufficiency, who was detected by the all-seeing eye of the Giver of the Feast as having no understanding of its universal nature, no appreciation of that Divine Love which had stooped to unite itself with the conditions of earth, no desire to give up his miserable pride that he might be filled and possessed with the same love.

IV. Such an interpretation brings this Parable at once into the closest harmony with that of the labourers in the vineyard. There those who had agreed for a penny a day—who from the first had gone to the work in the temper and spirit of hirelings—are utterly discontented when they find what their hire is. They had supposed they were to get something for themselves. The real reward is, to be delivered from the love of getting, to be made like Him Whose eye is good and not evil, Who wishes all to receive of His own blessedness. All are called to inherit a blessing; those only do inherit it who have the Spirit of the Master; for to have that is the chief part of the inheritance. To have that is to choose what God chooses; that is, in the highest, most inward sense of the word, to be chosen.

V. I trust these considerations may be of some help in enabling us to find the solution of those two puzzles to which I alluded, if indeed they are puzzles, and not mere doubts which we raise, without wishing to see our way through them. As to the first: how we can form a Church, or select one, which shall consist of those who are not called only, but chosen; the answer which history gives and that which these Parables give are, I apprehend, precisely the same, and quite satisfactory. If there is any sense in either word, “called” or “chosen,” God must call. God must choose: we cannot. We are told that the Husbandman sent whom He would into the vineyard; that the King called whom He would to the feast; that at the end of the day the Husbandman ascertained by His questions whose eyes were evil when His were good; that the King came in to see the guests, and to know who had not the marriage-garment. If we fancy we can take any of these functions, we must learn from some other than our Lord how we are to perform them. He vindicates them to His Father: He says, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” And by His voice in History he says, “Wherever men have tried to construct a Church which should be ascertained by tests of theirs to consist only of chosen men, it has ended by the members of that Church being angry that others should receive the same wages with them, and by their denying that the King has really made a Marriage for His Son with their race.”

VI. But to the second demand: how we may discover whether we ourselves are called or chosen, the answer must be different; for no vigilance on this point can be too great, if only it is rightly exercised. The more we know of ourselves, the more we shall know how exceedingly prone we are to practise the sin of those who murmured against the good man of the house; to esteem our work hard and toilsome work; to fancy that we deserve some pay for it which others can never obtain. We shall know how little we have entered into that celestial Marriage which we are invited to celebrate; how often, when we have professed to celebrate it, low, grovelling thoughts about our own felicity have driven out genuine thankfulness, and have hindered the true offering of Christ’s finished Sacrifice for the world. How did we make these discoveries? We did not make them at all. The Husbandman who has called us to serve Him gave us the consciousness of our hardness and ingratitude. The King, Who comes in to take part in the festival, makes us understand that we have not the garment in which alone we can receive and entertain Him. From such exposures of our own evil we must not shrink. They may show us that we are acting—that we have been acting—merely as those who are called; that we have not craved for that higher and more blessed gift of being united in spirit with our Lord, of entering into His righteous and gracious mind. It is well to bear His reproofs, because He has said, “As many as I love I rebuke and chasten;” because we may be quite certain that He does not call any whom He excludes from the circle of His chosen, upon whom He refuses to bestow His grace. The evil must be in us; in the pride which rejects the counsel of God against ourselves; in our reluctance to open the door at which He knocks. The called therefore may become the chosen—yea, every common calling upon earth, to do the most humble work, may be taken as a summons from the great Husbandman to bear our part in cultivating His vineyard, to serve Him with His own free Spirit, to enter into His own Joy.

The call from the King to sit down at the feast which celebrates the marriage of His Son may be welcomed as a pledge that He will put on us the Marriage-Garment—that He has verily and indeed chosen us to be very members incorporate in that body which is the blessed company of all faithful people.