Sunday before Easter

“Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind.”—1 Peter iv. 1.

I believe there are many people of religious minds who approach the week on which we enter to-day with a feeling of pain and dread. I do not mean that they are awe-stricken; it is one of the complaints which they make to others or to themselves, that they have almost no impressions, such as they would wish to have, of this kind. Their pain proceeds from the recollection of many like seasons in former years, in which they have made efforts to realize in some measure the nature and the greatness of our Lord’s sufferings, and to be affected by them—efforts which failed, and seemed to leave their hearts drearier than they were before. Their dread is an expectation that they shall find the case the same with them in these next six days. They speak of it as a still week, a holy week, words which would seem to express feelings of rest and quietness, such as worn and restless spirits might well long for. But they do not think that it will bring them any such quietness; far rather they believe it will be a time of struggle and disappointment. If they dealt quite honestly with themselves, they would own that they should be glad to forget it altogether. But they cannot forget it; old associations, the language of the Church, their own consciences, force it upon them; it comes charged with a weight of thoughts which they feel they have not strength to lift, which they are almost sure will oppress and confound them.

Perhaps some one will think within himself, “It is not safe to speak of such perplexities as these. What will infidels or indifferent men say, if they hear that all the reports of the blessing, and relief, and calmness of religious exercises, which Christian teachers send forth, are delusive? that holy seasons bring turbulence, and not peace? that the most holy are the least strengthening?” It signifies very little, brethren, what inferences one person or another may draw from this confession. It is safe to be honest at all times and in all places; it is most unsafe to tolerate contradictions in the minds of others and our own. How great this contradiction is, I believe will be only understood by those who have experienced it themselves, and have traced in some measure the working of it through the history of the Church. Just when we are brought into contact with the most awful realities, our minds are conscious of being most artificial. We want to be thinking something, feeling something, which we do not actually think and feel; we try ways which have been suggested to us by our teachers or devised by ourselves, for producing the state which we desire; we half persuade ourselves that we have succeeded; we half pride ourselves upon the attempt as in itself meritorious. Then comes a fearful reaction. Our consciences say to us, “This is wrong; in this course you should not persevere.” Our inclinations point the same way. It seems at once a duty and a pleasure to escape from such an unnatural strain. The heart bounds away from the compulsion which it had imposed upon itself; it looks back with shame upon its own weakness in ever having submitted to it. The facts themselves of this week soon appear to it as dim and fantastic as the medium was through which they were contemplated; the excited devotee becomes the unbeliever and the scorner. The story is as old as it is sad; every age, every year repeats it; ecclesiastical records, our own circles, are strewn with such cases. Where then is the danger? Where the provocation to cavils and suspicion? In looking manfully into the meaning of these facts, or in hiding them? In inquiring whether they do not flow from a false notion; which the Bible and the Church witness against, from which and from its evil consequences we might, by heeding their counsels, have been preserved; or in leaving the mischief to grow, and fresh souls to be destroyed by it? I own that we ought not to venture upon this or any subject which touches so nearly the vital part of our being without earnest deliberation and self-questioning; without despairing of our own wisdom, and seeking all helps that have been provided for us, and the highest wisdom to use these helps. But we must not forget that so much is required of a preacher in all cases; if he trusts in himself at any time, he is a fool; if he forbears to deal with the most inward sores, he should abandon his function altogether.

You must, I think, have felt that no part of the services in which we have been engaged during this Lent, whether drawn from Holy Scripture, or the meditations of holy men who have fed upon it, has aimed at raising our minds to some high pitch. They have had a character just the opposite of this. They have consisted mainly of proofs, instances, confessions, of feebleness and inability. We have been reminded of the necessity of subduing the flesh to the spirit, but it is because the flesh has a tendency to lift up itself, and because there are godly motions which we do not obey while we are inflated by its teachings. We have been told of temptations that may assault body and soul; but it is that we may declare we have no strength to resist them. The Collects for the three last Sundays are set in precisely the same key: to lead us into dependence, out of struggle, out of self-exaltation, is the one purpose of them all. Look at the Epistles, look at the Gospels: you will find that their inmost meaning has been embodied in these prayers; you will find that they have been chosen because they told most of the creature’s incapacity to do anything, or be anything, except a dependent upon a higher will, a receiver of a higher life. The lessons have undoubtedly been the records of the redemption of the chosen family, first out of its natural servitude to idols, then out of the bondage into which it had sunk in the land of Goshen. A process of emancipation is always set before us in every part of Scripture. Freedom is its favourite note, its great promise; but the process is one of bringing the slave of a tyrant into a more complete dependence upon the Master he was created to obey,—the yoke which is broken is that of self-will.

How entirely in accordance with the purpose indicated by these prayers and Scripture passages is the whole discipline of this season! The nature of that discipline is most accurately determined by the end at which it aims. Accuracy in the regulation of its measures there is none, and can be none in any church; where it is attempted most, there is most of digression and latitude. But the principle is invariable—subjection, not exaltation;—a principle as much condemning feats of abstinence,—that rivalry and outbidding one of another in acts of mortification which some foster——as the indulgence of appetite; both having the same root, and tending to the same effect. If fulness of meat is denounced by Sages as well as Saints, it is because those upon whom it is charged are full of pride, they do even what they lust. But those who, like John the Faster of Constantinople, made up for the absence of food by taking in a larger amount of worldly ambition and spiritual self-glorification, are surely giving their evil natures, not a Lent, but a Carnival.

The Collect for to-day is the climax of our Lent teachings. It seems to tell us that Passion Week is to explain the purpose and principle of the humiliation to which they have been urging us. But there is something in its language which may add to our perplexity. It speaks of our following the example of Christ’s great humility. That, we say, is just what we have tried to do, and have so utterly failed in doing. We can do anything rather than this. To be humble at all is difficult enough; more difficult even than to be merciful or just. But to ask that we may be humble as Christ is humble, seems mocking God as well as ourselves. I should think so; and I should think St. Peter was guilty of the like mockery when he bade us arm ourselves with Christ’s mind, and when he tells us before that He suffered, leaving us an example that we should follow in His steps, if it were not for the words which open the Collect, and from which the whole meaning of it is deduced, words which express the very spirit of St. Peter, and of all our Lord’s Apostles. These words add no new burdens to Passion Week. They teach us how we may be delivered from the diseased temper which would convert it into a burden,—how we may enter upon the full deliverance which it promises.

I. The words are these: “Almighty and everlasting God, Who of Thy tender love hast sent Thy Son.”

We are not taught here to make an effort that we may realize how great our sins have been, or are; how justly we have incurred the wrath of God by them. We are not taught to ascend from this consideration to the thought of our Lord’s sufferings, of their adaptation to the hugeness of our guilt, of their adequacy to put it away. I do not mean that there is the least denial expressed or implied of this adaptation—the least wish to keep it out of men’s sight; but I mean that the method is altogether different from this, the very opposite of it. The Church starts from the highest ground, does not work its way up to that ground from the lowest. She does not therefore insist upon our taking some measure of this divine love, that there may be in us a corresponding affection and gratitude; that results she hopes will be produced much more truly and certainly hereafter: her first duty is to assert the love of God absolutely, apart from all consequences that may flow out of it, from all contemplation of it or returns to it by the creature. No one can deny that this method is derived from the Scriptures. It belongs to the whole New Testament; to the Epistle of St. Peter as much as to the Epistles of St. Paul. If it comes forth more broadly still in the writings of the beloved disciple, that is because they are gathering up the meaning of all the foregone Scriptures into themselves; because they contain the full and final revelation to which all previous revelations were leading. The passages, “God so loved the world,” “God is love,” are not rapturous utterances of a devotional sentiment; they are the scientific foundation of a Catholic and Evangelical Theology. If we will not acknowledge them as that basis, if we will substitute for the maxims and method of the Bible maxims and a method of our own, we shall find that we have destroyed Christian Theology and Christian morality together.

II. I have not yet dwelt upon the word mankind, which stands so prominently forward in the Collect. It is all-important, I conceive, for our present purpose. All admit that Love, if it exists, must come forth, must find an object. The impatient, sin-sick, self-ridden soul asks in its first confusion, “Am I that object?” The spiritual director makes it his chief object to meet this demand, putting his disciple upon questions and tests by which he may ascertain whether he is interested in this love, or upon ways by which he may realize his interest in it. The Church is as earnest as he can be to bring this love to bear upon the individual heart and conscience, yet knows that she has a higher duty,—the duty of witnessing for God; and that if she fails in this, she cannot perform the lower one. She therefore suspends her reply to this question; she begins with a broader, mightier proclamation: God’s truth and love is to man himself, to the whole kind. No doubt such general language sounds, for the moment, unsatisfactory to the particular sinner whose thoughts are all turned upon his own well-being. He may, it is very likely, court the physician who deals altogether with his symptoms for more practical consolations. And yet I think there is a promise in his heart of a greater deliverance, of a more radical cure, coming from these words than from the other. He will feel at least that they bring him more into direct contact with the Bible. For while he has found again and again in it passages which seemed directly meant for his own special case, he has also been disturbed by so much that seemed vague and general. He has wished that he could strip the Old Scriptures of their Jewish history; that there was not so much in the New about Churches. He cannot quite understand how the great proclamation of all should be, “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill to men.”

III. But those words must commend themselves in their full power to his mind, if he at all takes in the meaning of 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 start from reflections on themselves and their own transgressions, begin with calculating how much punishment these transgressions must have merited. Then they consider what amount of compensation would be adequate to remove this punishment. Then they inquire who could offer it. So, by a series of hard efforts of reasoning, they ascertain that only a divine person could satisfy the demands of justice, and that in order to satisfy them he must unite himself to the nature of man.

Look at these cold, dry processes of the understanding, which require corresponding efforts of the feeling and the fancy to bring them into even apparent association with the events of Passion Week, and then consider the language of the Collect. He Who is declared to be Love——He Who has tender love to mankind, is said, for that reason, to have sent His Son. There is One in Whom this love is expressed:—One Who can manifest it,—One Who is with God, and is God. And thus He manifests it to mankind: in taking their flesh; in dying upon the Cross. The mysteries of Christmas Day and of Passion Week are not severed from each other: one as much as the other is presented as proceeding from the Eternal Absolute Love of the Father; one as much as the other as the submission of the Son to that Love,—or an act of willing conformity to it. He is wringing no hard consent from a reluctant Judge, to pardon rebels. He is bringing down into this nature of man that love which had created man,—that love from which man by selfwill had become separated. This love becomes human by acts of simple obedience. The Son of God yields Himself to it,—refuses every temptation to act independently of it. He will be nothing else than a Son; will in all things glorify His Father; will not prove His title to be a Son by making stones bread, or by casting Himself from a pinnacle of the temple, or by taking the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. He will assever that He is one on the warrant of the voice at his baptism; will act as if He were baptized with the Spirit, doing what is appointed for Him, suffering what is appointed for Him. By the Eternal Spirit of His Father He heals the sick and casts out devils; by that same Eternal Spirit He offers Himself to God.

Now, brethren, see how this course of thought, in which the Church follows the Scripture, which explains the very meaning of the Gospels and gives them their coherency, which the Apostles are tracing out in all their discourses and in all their letters; see how directly it appeals to the conscience and heart and reason of man. Do they not one and all testify, “Yes, this is love; herein is love;—if it be a reality and not a dream; if it is to come into contact with me, and not for ever to stand far off from me,—thus, even thus must it declare itself. So, and so only, can I know what it is, or feel its presence, or be reduced by it into obedience”? When the Incarnation and Passion come before us in this way, do we feel any pretext for saying, “They are merely fine ideas, man’s dream of the perfection of his own nature, which he feels to be capable of infinite affections, infinite self-sacrifice”? Does not everything that is honest and true within us cry out against such language, “No, verily, I demand realities, not fiction——an actual personal Love coming out to me from above, not a conception of my own, going out from me to clothe itself in some superhuman shape. My heart asks this, my reason asks it——will be content with nothing else. And as for that capacity of self-sacrifice which you talk of in human nature, its reality depends wholly upon the question whether there is a Being to Whom this self can be given up; whether this Being Himself shows me the example and principle of sacrifice; whether I am formed in His Image or not. For if this be not so, I know there is no capacity of self-sacrifice in me; I may talk and dream of it; it may, as you say, be a fine idea, but there will be nothing of it in the practice of life. There you will have the fearful hypocrisy of self-will, of self-gratification, counterfeiting self-surrender.”

Brethren, this notion that the Divine is only the apotheosis of the human, not its ground;—that a man is to become a god by thinking himself one;—this philosophical reproduction of all that has been most corrupt, most superstitious in the world’s history,—or man’s first disobedience,—is at once the natural reaction against a theology which takes account only of man’s depravity, and the natural deduction from a theology which begins from man instead of from God. I have used the first part of the prayer as a protest against the method which is common to both. I believe the latter part of it—the prayer itself—is the deliverance from that self-exaltation and that perpetual restlessness which must be the result of both. Grant that we may both “follow the example of His patience, and also be made partakers of His resurrection.” To follow the example of Christ’s humility seemed at first an amazing, almost a profane ambition. Does it sound even more amazing, more profane, that we should follow the example of the passion itself—that we should imitate this sacrifice? Profane and awful indeed, if the Passion were not the simple surrender of the human will to the Absolute Will, the refusal of the Son to be anything except in union with His Father! Profane and awful indeed, if the power of the Sacrifice, the power of the law of God which the Sacrifice reveals, were not this, that it can take away our unnatural, monstrous striving against the Will which we are created to obey; that it can subdue us; that it can deliver us from the Self which has been our curse and torment all our lives through! “In that He died, He died unto sin once.” This perfect giving up of Self was the extinction of that which stood between man and God. He would be nothing in Himself, that God might be all in all. And so we follow the example of His patience, when we are content not to seek for anything in ourselves, not to hope for anything from ourselves; when we resist to the utmost the feverish desire, in whatever form it presents itself, to glorify ourselves instead of God, to climb by any ladder of ours to God. To follow the example of His patience is to receive, in whatever method God sees fit to send it us, the blessing of deliverance from self-willing and self-seeking; to be partakers of His resurrection, is to enter upon that new and true life which He has in God,—the life of trusting Him and discovering in Him whatever we have sought in vain in ourselves.

If this be true, Passion Week need not be to us a time of weary struggle, and darkness, and confusion. We may accept it as a message to ourselves and to the world concerning the purpose of God, and concerning the way in which He is bringing our wills into accordance with it. Its pledges are for all characters and habits of mind. There are some on whom the realizing, imaginative power has been bestowed in a large measure. It is a precious trust; let them hold it as a trust. Let them remember that their conceptions are worth nothing in themselves; that they are good so far as they bring their minds into closer contact with the verities to which they refer, and that, without great humility, they may be the means of darkening these to the minds of their brethren and to themselves. There are some who feel they have no realizing faculty whatever; they bring before themselves no scenes, no pictures; the sight of hallowed places does not bring reverence or delight; memorable seasons in their own lives or the life of the Church do not recall the acts or persons of which they speak. Such persons may turn their weakness to perfect faith, may take the strongest hold of the truths, of the facts, which imagination can the least body forth. They may say to themselves, “Passion Week is given us to remind us that these things are altogether independent of our thoughts about them. I will thank God that they are. I will thank God that in His tender love to mankind He did send His Son; that that Son did suffer death upon the cross. This is real. I will leave my faculty of realization to Him, to do with it as He will.” There are some of quick and exquisite sensibility, whom the records of human sorrow and suffering, even without the sight of them, affect mightily, and whose springs of tears are deeply moved when they think of the King of men dying for men. This too is a gift; one for which those who possess it should be thankful, only asking that they may not turn their sympathy into a luxury, and forget that it is to bear fruit in the business of life. There are those who say that they cannot be roused, even by the most pressing sorrow of their own, to seriousness, or melted into tenderness; still less can enter into the sorrow of Christ. Let them confess this hardness. Let them bless God for having made them aware of it. Let them submit to all the bitter mortification of it. And then the deeper sorrow of Christ and His great humility will work in them the repentance that is not to be repented of, the godly sorrow in which there is no effort and no pretence. They may leave God to take care of this sensibility; to give them as much of it, or as little, as He sees good; only asking Him that they may bear more constant witness of His love, because they know that they have none of it in themselves, and that all which can ever come forth in them must be His.

Thus all may learn the force of St. Peter’s words in the text. We want Christ’s mind for armour in actual battles. Passion Week, which tells us how His mind came forth in His sufferings, is to clothe us with that armour. It is no time for the indulgence of luxurious feelings. It is a time for mourning over the want of feelings. It is the time to acquire strength for action, for endurance. This great load of self,—of selfish thoughts, of selfish plans, of fears for self, of hopes for self—is crushing us all, individuals, nations, Churches. Passion Week is the message to us that it may be thrown off. Christ bore it for us and 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 with Him freely give us all things?”