Third Sunday in Advent

“And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation.” —2 Corinthians v. 18.

I spoke last Sunday of the Scriptures, as explaining the nature and purpose of Sacraments. I spoke of our Sacraments as throwing back a light upon the method of the Scriptures, and upon that hope which they set before us. But as my object was to discover the character and virtue of that Sacrament which we call the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, or the Holy Communion, I could not confine myself to these general considerations. The Red Sea, and the Manna, and the Rock, might be, as St. Paul taught us that they were, sacraments of God; the principle which was indicated by them might be a universal one; every event in the history might be regarded by Prophets as a sign and sacrament of the same unseen Presence. But the Scriptures tell us, besides, of the special institution of Sacrifices. These sacrifices, it appeared, had associated themselves with a Eucharistical service; that had been supposed to have a sacrificial signification. It was impossible not to ask whether it had or no. Here, as in all the other parts of the subject, the Scriptures are satisfactory guides. If we treated them as a continuous history, as the history of a gradual discovery of the nature of God and of His purposes to mankind, we were driven to the conclusion, that a time came when the sacrifices of the Law had done what they were meant to do, when a complete and satisfactory sacrifice was offered once for all. The Eucharist, if it meant anything, must be a thanksgiving for this complete and satisfactory sacrifice. It could not be itself the completion of anything that had been left imperfect. But if we accepted St. Paul’s statement, that every sacrifice implies communion with the Being to whom it is offered, if the very end of our Lord’s Incarnation and Death was to establish a complete communion between men upon earth and their Father in Heaven, then the feast which celebrates the accomplishment of the sacrifice must assert only the commencement of a communion, which may be most real now, but the full fruition of which can only be when all the evil which resists the Divine righteousness and love is entirely vanquished.

There is another aspect of this subject, at which I did not even glance in my Sermon last week. The thought of a sacrifice instantly suggests the thought of a priest. All who regard the Eucharist as the completion of an unfinished sacrifice, of course regard the person who administers it as a priest offering a sacrifice. But how is it that that notion appears to be sanctioned by a Church, which asserts the completion of the sacrifice so distinctly and vehemently as ours does? How is it that a prayer which says that a “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction” has been made by Christ, “for the sins of the whole world,” may only be read by one whom we call a priest? How is it that we allow no other to consecrate the elements? It is not an excuse for ourselves to say that Priest is only the contraction for Presbyter. We are bound to explain why we have reserved this office to the Presbyter; what dignity we associate or do not associate with that name; whether we trace any resemblance between his office and that of the priest under the Old Covenant; and if any, what it is.

You will easily see that these questions are suggested to me by the Collect and Epistle for to-day, as the subject for last Sunday was suggested by the Collect and Epistle for that day. Now, as then, I hope not to increase our difficulties by contemplating two topics together, but to lessen them. The subject of the Christian Ministry may seem at first to be made more perplexing by its association with the Eucharist. Ultimately perhaps that Service may help both us and you to appreciate better our obligations and our powers. And on the other hand, if we can gain any understanding of the work which is given us to do, we may appreciate better what the worth of this Sacrament is, and how it is related to the life of individual men and the life of human society.

I have not taken my text from the Epistle for this morning, though the opening words might have tempted me to do so. If I could have explained in what sense St. Paul bids the Corinthians count him and Apollos “ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God,” I might have hoped to lead you into the very heart of this subject. That explanation I believe we may derive from the second epistle which St. Paul addressed to the same Church. There, more fully than in the first, he exhibits his own sense of the responsibilities and terrors of his office. There, more fully than anywhere, he compares the Minister of the Old with the Minister of the New Testament; and in the passage I have chosen, he lays down, it seems to me, principles which we ought to apply to the discussion of the whole subject, principles which teach us the significance of the Eucharist as much as the significance of the Ministry.

His primary assertion, “All things are of God,” does not assuredly belong more to the New Testament than to the Old. It is the characteristic Hebrew maxim, that upon which the ancient economy stood, that upon which the whole Bible is constructed. But he was uttering no truism. His simple language lays the axe to a whole scheme of religion with which those Corinthians, who had been bred in Heathendom, were very familiar, and which was not the least strange to the Jew, however his divine oracles might bear witness against it. The questions, how men might worship one God or many Gods, how they might please or propitiate one God or many Gods, how they might become Gods, were the questions which the priests of different nations had striven to answer; with the last of them philosophers also had occupied themselves. The different methods of prayer, of sacrifice, of purification, which different priests had invented or sanctioned, the different personal or local calamities which they were designed to meet, indicated the characteristics of the various nations. They grew continually in number with new wants and new sins. They provoked rival experiments; they gave rise to popular reactions; they prompted civil rulers to interfere, that they might turn the sacerdotal inventions to their own account, or oppose them if they were making civil society untenable. That one grand proposition, “All things are of God,” might seem to lie beneath all these attempts, and to justify them. When it took the form in which the Jewish history presents it to us, it undermined them all. The experiments of man to reach God are treated as hopeless. God declares Himself as seeking men whom He has made in His own image, as claiming them for His servants, as making them aware of a relationship to Him which is higher than that of servants. But this idea was, if possible, more unintelligible to the pharisaic Jew than to the heathens. Their Gods might be capricious and full of mortal passions and impulses; but at least there was a hint of a friendship and sympathy between them and their worshippers. All that the Pharisee learnt from the teaching of his holy men was, that the God of Abraham stood apart from such fellowship and sympathy, that He dwelt in darkness inaccessible, that out of the darkness issued decrees which were committed to writing, and which men were to observe. And since it was very hard for men to keep these decrees, and terrible punishments threatened them if they did not, His priests, like the heathen, were to devise means for averting the tyrant’s wrath. The Pharisee boasted, no doubt, that he had divine authority to guide him in the choice of those means. God, he thought, had favoured his race, and had vouchsafed to it the knowledge of the methods by which He might be conciliated. He said so; but he lied, and he knew that he lied. He could not destroy the whole meaning and life of Scripture, he could not set at naught the principle which was at the foundation of it, and then make it his guide. It was not his guide, for all that he read and worshipped the letter of it. As our Lord told him, he substituted for the commandments of God the traditions of the Elders. These taught him with what words and ceremonies he was to draw nigh to the Majesty of Heaven; or, to speak plainer language, these taught him the arts by which he was to hide himself from God, by which he could make the Holy One of Israel cease from before him, and not interrupt him in his course of baseness and falsehood.

St. Paul then just as much destroys the edifice of religious notions and practices which had been raised by the Rabbinical schools, and the architecture of which he had at one time so delighted to study, as that which had been growing for centuries in the heathen world, and had been receiving all strange and incongruous additions from priests, from kings, and from people, when he asserted that “all things are of God,” and when he explained the force and purpose of his words by subjoining, “Who hath reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ.” Here God is Himself declared as the great Reconciler, as entering into communion and fellowship with men in that Son in Whom He had originally created them; as using all His law, His judgments, His terrors, as instruments for effecting His great purpose, for bringing the wills of creatures who had revolted from Him into union and consent with His own. And this purpose, so far as it consisted in removing all barriers between His creatures and Himself, every obstacle which could hinder the communion of man’s spirit with the Father of Spirits, every vision of wrath which could make him unwilling to draw nigh, every thought that some compensation must be made for sins committed, or that some acts of merit must be done before he arose and returned to the house from which he had been an exile; this reconciliation, he declares, was effected when God raised His Son, Who had borne our death, out of the grave, when He exalted that Son in our nature to His right hand.

On these two clauses the third, of course, depends: “He has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation.” St. Paul could have no conception, therefore, of a Christian Minister, except as a man who was sent to testify that all things were of God, and that He had in Jesus Christ reconciled us to Himself. It is involved in the first proposition, that the Minister must regard himself as receiving his authority and commission from God. St. Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, was here speaking in the spirit and the language of a Jew. No Jew could think that he held any office whatsoever except by God’s appointment. Whether he offered sacrifices in the Temple, or made curtains for it; whether he led the people and gave them laws, or served by the standard of his fathers with the meanest family of the meanest tribe, he was still designated to his work by God; God would give him the wisdom and the courage and the strength that were required to fulfil it. If the priest had not been taught to consider himself as chosen and clothed by God for his service at the altar, he would have been the one exceptional man in the whole commonwealth. And what a perilous exception! Of all persons in the commonwealth, he was one who might do most mischief if he set up an independent authority, if he lost the sense of being under a government. Of all persons, he had the greatest temptations to confound himself with God, to make himself a god. Surely it was necessary that he, of all men, should be fenced round with statutes and ordinances to show him that he was not his own master. And yet the nature of his function made it a contradiction for him to think that he was the servant of men. He was likely enough to fall into that opinion, but the effect of it was that he became their slave and their tyrant alternately, or both at once.

Did, then, St. Paul transfer to the new economy what he had learnt in the old? This is scarcely the right way of stating the case. He rather learnt the true position of the Old Testament Minister by feeling that he was called to be a Minister of the New Testament. Often as he had read the books of Exodus and Leviticus, he probably never had understood what was written about Aaron the Priest, till he felt that he had a divine designation to be an Apostle.

To deliver such a message as he felt that he had to deliver, unless God Himself had committed it unto him, would have seemed to him the strangest, the most monstrous of all assumptions. For was it not a message of reconciliation from God to man? Was it not a message that He had actually reconciled men to Himself in Jesus Christ? How could he declare that reconciliation if he did not believe himself to be an ambassador from God? How could he declare that all things were of God if he did not own himself and his words as of God?

The continual assertions in St. Paul’s writings that he was an Apostle not of man nor by man are vouchers for this conviction, as far as he himself was concerned. But was this message to be heard no longer when he had left the earth? Then it had been a false one in his mouth. For he had proclaimed a permanent reconciliation with men; he had taught that the Church existed to testify of it. Or was each of those who should declare this news hereafter to see a light brighter than that of the sun, and to be struck down, and to be led blind into a city? That light, that blindness had told St. Paul that One Whom he persecuted had taken the nature of man and was the King over men for ever. Must it not be that all offices among men were now, as heretofore, divine offices? Did not the revelation of this King show under Whom they were held, by Whom each person was called to the one for which he was intended, to Whom each person was responsible for the duties which were entrusted to him? Did it not behove any one, who would do his work faithfully, to confess whence his trust was derived, and to seek strength from Him Who had laid it upon him, that it might not be abused? Was not the obligation to make this acknowledgment, to act on the faith of it, heaviest upon those who preached a Gospel of Reconciliation to men? If there was no such Gospel, if the notion was a dream, the fancy that men were called to preach it in one time or another is of course an equally gross fiction. But suppose the Gospel to be a reality, suppose it to be for all times, suppose it to be the proclamation of a Living Person in whom God is united to men and in whom God converses with men, then it is strange to suppose that men should not be called to set it forth; then the danger is of men supposing that their gifts or their wit constitute them the proclaimers of it, and that they are not, as much as St. Paul was, ambassadors of God, who must give account to Him whether they have borne true or false witness of Him, whether or no they have testified by words and acts that all things are of Him, and that He has reconciled them by Jesus Christ unto Himself.

Accordingly, St. Paul never suggests, for an instant, that the difference between the Old and the New Testament ministry is, that the one was appointed by God, and the other not; that the one would last from age to age, and the other not; that those who had the one might call themselves ministers of God, and that those who had the other might call themselves ministers of some society which had chosen them to do certain offices on its behalf. What he does say is, that the ministers of the Old Testament were, to a great extent, ministers of a letter written and graven in stone, and that those of the New Testament are ministers of the Spirit; that the ones are ministers of condemnation, and the others of righteousness; that the ones are to exhibit the glory of God under a veil, and that the others are to present it openly, as revealed in Jesus Christ. These are very great distinctions certainly; they point first to the existence of a discipline, preparatory to the full manifestation of God in the Word, made flesh and dying for men; secondly, to a reconciliation grounded upon that manifestation, and to the gift of a spirit of Righteousness, Who should make men inwardly righteous, and should fit them for communion with a Righteous God. They point, therefore, to those truths which are fully embodied in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; to the truth of a perfected atonement for the whole world; to the truth that men are invited to be partakers of the holy life which dwelt fully in Christ; and to the truth that their spirits are admitted, in Him, to the knowledge of His Father and their Father.

To this connection of the Christian Ministry with the Christian Festival, I have desired to draw your attention this afternoon. That connection is expressed in the practice which reserves the administration of the Eucharist to the Presbyter, assigning to the Deacon, as his highest honour, the right to assist in the celebration of it. If such a rule exalted the Presbyter, or priest, above other ministers, above the congregation; if it afforded any warrant for those inventions by which the priest, in all ages, has been tempted to bind and enslave the sin-stricken consciences of men; if it led to a confusion between the minister of the Old and the New Testament, so that the latter was reduced again under the condition of the former, no length of prescription in its favour, no amount of traditional evidence for the authority whence it proceeded, could justify a Church in retaining it; seeing that it would clash with eternal principles, to which all prescription and traditions must yield. But if it bears a deep and solemn testimony to the fact that the utmost which a Christian minister can do is to assert the reconciliation of God with men in Christ, and on the strength of that accomplished fact to beseech them to be reconciled to God; if it declares that none of the schemes which priests have devised for the reconciliation of men with their Maker can be of the least avail, and that it is a sin and a treason against God to suggest them; if it points out wherein the function of the New Testament priest is more glorious than the function of the Old, because he is the herald of that which the other showed to be necessary, and of which he held out the promise; then I think we may understand why this old and long-established bond between the office of the Presbyter and the service of the Eucharist was not consumed in those fires by which all old ecclesiastical maxims and conventions were tried at the time of the Reformation, and why it may still endure fires more hot and searching than those. This at least I am sure of, that there is no more significant, often more terrible, hint to our consciences of the end for which we exist, of the Gospel we are to deliver, of the paltriness of our words to convey it, of the intercourse which God holds with the heart and conscience, while we are, at best, the instruments for removing impediments which obstruct the hearing of His voice, while we may be creating impediments instead of removing them. To be taught that the very highest act we can perform for men is one in which we utter nothing of our own, in which we are merely servants, is the greatest humiliation to our priestly arrogance, and the greatest lesson respecting all the rest of our work, that I can imagine.

That it has not sufficed for this purpose, that we have been able to set up our pretensions in spite of this warning, and even to convert it into an apology for them, I do not wish to deny. I believe it is very needful for us to consider how we have fallen into this error in past times, how it may be repeated in our own, that we may not be high-minded, but fear; that we may be taught to rely upon nothing in our circumstances, upon nothing in ourselves, but upon God, Who governs our circumstances, and will govern us if we do not fight against Him. I shall not speak now of notions respecting the Ministry and respecting the Eucharist which have prevailed in other Churches, and have hindered them from being witnesses of God’s reconciliation to man. How grievously the Romish doctrine of an uncompleted sacrifice has affected the whole life of Christendom; how it has thrown back the world not into Judaism only, but often into Heathenism; how it has given rise to a system of ethics which destroys the distinction of right and wrong, to a system of politics which is an excuse for any tyranny and for any anarchy—I feel more strongly than I can express. But the Laudian doctrine respecting the Priesthood and the Eucharist, which is a native formation, and which is saved from some of the consequences of the wider scheme by the conditions of English civil life with which it has been encompassed, exhibits, I think, a no less instructive and alarming example of the way in which the most blessed institutions may be robbed of their character, and be turned to mischief, if we suffer ourselves to forget the reasons which the Scriptures give for their existence. The fact that the Eucharist cannot be administered without a Presbyter became to the members of this school the groundwork of all teaching and all belief. Their great business was to maintain that certain blessings were transmitted through the hands of lawful ministers in this Sacrament, of which those must be deprived who sought them through other hands or in any other way. Thus men’s minds were fixed upon a certain object which they were to attain, and upon certain means and agents through whom they were to attain it. The old inversion was renewed. It was not God declaring that He had reconciled men to Himself; it was men by a certain process reconciling God to themselves. The old consequences of the old inversion were renewed. The priest was regarded as the depository of the grace which he transmitted. The ordinance was not a witness of a direct communication between men and a living God through the ascended Mediator. It forced itself upon your notice. It eclipsed the sun in the heavens, instead of being a transparent medium for conveying its rays to the earth. I speak of the theory as it stood out in the controversial books, and as it expressed itself in a number of acts which startled those who did not trouble themselves with books. God forbid that I should say the men who held the theory did not many of them receive a life through the Sacrament, which one would rejoice to share with them! That is the very point I am maintaining. I say we cannot block out the light of God’s countenance from men, however we may try; that Sacraments are stronger than all sacramental systems; that suffering and sinful men betake themselves to the one, while they debate and declaim about the other. It does not prevent these sacramental systems from being very mischievous and accursed things, that God comes forth Himself to counteract the denial of Himself in which they might issue.

I believe He did so come forth in the days of Charles and of Laud. The strength of the protest against their system lay in the deep and true conviction of their opponents, that God is living and reigning, and that He has not delegated His powers to any body of ministers, or shut up His grace in any ceremonies. That conviction, with the assurance that the business of the minister was to proclaim a Gospel or good news concerning Him to men, called forth all the energy and courage, which at last proved invincible. The Puritans

insupportably advanced,
Their arms made mockery of the warrior’s tramp,

because they were asserting the presence of a Living Being against those who were setting up offices and ordinances which without Him are dead, because they were appealing to the consciences of sinners, which can recognize His voice and cannot understand any other. But it was soon proved, to the satisfaction of those who had struggled—I think bravely and nobly and usefully struggled—against our priestcraft, that

New Presbyter was but old Priest writ large;

that ministers making no pretensions to sacramental endowments might bind the spirits of men as tightly and as cruelly as those who thought that they were the sole possessors of them; that men who thought their function was only to preach the word, might substitute for that word hard dogmas and hard practices, which misrepresent the character of God, and make themselves objects of faith instead of Him. For here again the old teaching intrudes itself. All things are no longer referred to God. The Gospel is not a message from Him, that He has reconciled the world to Himself. Men are by certain acts of faith to bring themselves into reconciliation with Him; divines must ascertain the quality and degree of those acts of faith. They must define the ways in which men may approach God, and ascertain that they are at peace with Him. Whatever ministers may call themselves, when they undertake this office they must cultivate all the arts of priestcraft.

And here again we see how inseparably the Eucharist is connected with the Ministry, and how any narrow and lowering notions respecting the one, necessarily affect the treatment of the other. When the Gospel which ministers preach is no longer a Gospel to mankind, a message that God has reconciled the world to Himself in Christ, but only a message how certain men may, by certain methods, acquire peace of conscience and the rewards of Heaven; then this Sacrament becomes inevitably the badge of a sect, or the witness of who are its true and spiritual members; not God’s seal upon our union with Christ, not His invitation to us to hold communion with Him. My text gives the one basis for a Church, for a Eucharist, for a Ministry. Change it for any other, and no contrivances will prevent the Church from sinking into a narrow and artificial corporation; the Eucharist, first into a mere expression of human feelings and thanksgivings, next into a means of procuring the blessings which we are to be thankful for; the Minister, first into a mere representative of the convictions or desires of a certain society, then either into an organ of its prejudices or the founder of some sect which separates from it.

In modern times, when people have become weary of the oppressions of a body calling itself a Universal Church on the one side of them, and of the sects which they see tearing nations into pieces on the other, the notion has gone forth, that if men could but shake off all the associations which are connected with the priesthood as a divine institution, and could merely elect officers to perform the devotional services which they think requisite for the satisfaction of their consciences or their religious impulses, a Church might grow up suitable to our time, or to some better time that is approaching. Those who propose such an experiment should be listened to with all respect and attention. Probably their plans would embody many useful hints and devout suggestions; undoubtedly they will lay bare many evils which are eating into the heart of society now, many sins of Churchmen and statesmen which must be repented of and forsaken, if society is not to perish altogether. The more they make us ashamed of ourselves, the greater should be our gratitude to them. But if they lead us to think that there can be any reconstruction of a Church, which has not the doctrine that all things are of God at the basis of it, which does not lead us to regard all offices as more, not less divine than we have regarded them hitherto, I believe we can expect nothing from such a change but the reproduction of all ancient corruptions, and the removal of the good which has counteracted them. We have not believed wrongly, my brethren, that we are called by God to our work, and that we cannot perform it if we are not called to it. We have been very wrong in not making it evident to you that our calling is for your sakes, that we are witnesses of His care for you. We have not been wrong in saying, that when we stand at His altar and give you the bread and wine, we are there as His ambassadors. We have been very wrong indeed in pretending that we can be anything else, that we have any dignity or sacredness of our own whatsoever. We have not been wrong in asserting a communion between God and His children. We have been very wrong in limiting it according to notions and fancies of ours; in not believing and rejoicing that God may make the truth and the power of which we testify known without our testimony; in not desiring that all shall be prophets, that all shall have God’s Spirit; as that old legislator did, who would not suffer the order of the Priesthood to be changed, because that concerned not him, but the Nation and its Lord. Do not tell us that we have not a right to speak by words and signs of a complete Redemption which God has wrought out for men. Denounce us that we have not understood the length and breadth of that Redemption; that we have so often represented God as the author of slavery, not of freedom; that we have so often ourselves been the enslavers of those whom His Spirit is seeking to make free. Do not say that we are mocking you, when we speak of ourselves as priests presenting Christ’s finished sacrifice for you, and blessing you with the food of His body and blood. Only complain of us because we have not told more of the High Priest within the veil, the Elder Brother of the whole family, in Whose Name we and you may draw nigh together to one Father. And join with us at the altar in confessing these sins of ours and yours to Him, and ask there for strength to fulfil your ministries, to prove that God has given you a work as well as us. Then you will find that the security against the falsehoods and the oppressions of men is in the God of truth, the God Who delivers, the God Who reconciles; that while we trust Him, all will be the ministers to us of good; that if we lose sight of Him, the means which He has contrived for our blessing will become our heaviest punishments; that the pledges which He has given us of our unity with Him and each other, will become the watchwords and the weapons of an endless strife.