Fifth Sunday after Trinity

“For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world,”—1 Corinthians xi. 31, 32.

It is, I fear, a very common feeling, among laymen as well as clergymen, that ordinary words, when they are applied to theological subjects, lose their original signification, and become parts of a merely technical nomenclature. The words “judge” and “judgment” have a meaning in common cases which men at once recognize, if they are not able strictly to define it. They have no doubt that a judgment is an act of discrimination; an attempt to separate the tenable from the untenable, the right from the wrong. When they speak of judgment as a faculty, their language, be it ever so loose, shows you that they wish to describe a power which ascertains boundaries, which draws the line between acts or thoughts or words that without it would be confounded. But when we refer to any events or series of events as Divine judgments, it seems that we are not carrying this sense into a higher, clearer region, but that we are almost entirely losing it. By a judgment, in that application, we appear to intend little more than a disaster which, because we do not know to what other origin we should attribute it, we refer to the Father of all. A fortune, a child, a deliverance from expected ruin or death, we call a mercy; a famine, a pestilence, an earthquake, we call a judgment. We cannot account for the former class of events, except by supposing that the Ruler of the World has a gracious design towards us; we cannot account for the latter, except by supposing that we have in some way grieved Him. In each case we feel as if there was some departure from the ordinary rule of His government, some interference for us or against us. And we ask ourselves, Why has it happened? What act of ours can we fix upon which we may most naturally connect with it?

St. Paul’s words in the text, which contains the expressed essence of a great many passages of Scripture, furnish us with a means of testing this mode of speaking and thinking.

“If we would judge ourselves,” he says, “we should not be judged of the Lord.” Evidently we could not paraphrase the word “judge” in the first clause, by “bring a calamity on ourselves”; therefore it must not be so paraphrased in the second. We must be commanded to judge ourselves in the ordinary sense of distinguishing between what is right and wrong, precious and vile in ourselves; this therefore must be the main characteristical design, according to the inspired Apostle, of the judgment which God exercises over us. In the next verse he affirms that it is so. But without at present speaking of that verse, there is enough in the one I have quoted to remove a great many erroneous impressions, and to suggest many deep truths.

I. St. Paul certainly assumes that there is in us a capacity of judging ourselves. We can overlook our own acts and feelings; we can pronounce sentence upon them. Every man’s conscience, and the language of mankind, confirm this belief. We know that we are abandoning a prerogative which we have no right to abandon, which we cannot safely abandon, when we are not taking cognizance of that which we do to others, of that which is passing within us. It would be no mercy, but a great degradation, if we were excused from this jurisdiction.

II. St. Paul says next, that the Lord will not excuse them from it. He takes the office which they have abdicated. He manifests Himself as a Judge when they will not judge. Remember to whom these words were spoken. The Corinthian Christians were not men of dark, reprobate characters. St. Paul says of them that “they came behind in no gift.” It is clear from his letter that they did not. And yet that letter is full of complaints and objurgations. Why? Because good and evil lay side by side in their minds, confounded, not contrasted. Zeal and party spirit; a sense of the value of spiritual gifts, and vanity in the use and appreciation of them; impatience of imperfect teaching, tolerance of practical corruptions; high spiritualism, mixing itself with gross sensuality,—these were their characteristics. They imply no absence of what is best, no absence of love for what is best. But they imply that best and worst passed easily and rapidly into each other; there were no landmarks. It was these men who did not judge themselves, and therefore were to be judged by the Lord.

III. Perhaps you will say, that by judging themselves the Apostle means exercising discipline in the Church, casting out unworthy members of it. No doubt that the Corinthians failed in this duty; he who had committed sins of which a heathen would have been ashamed, was nevertheless tolerated in their communion. And yet the Apostle never objects it to them that they were reluctant to judge each other; he especially beseeches them not to be so active in that work. “Judge,” he says, “nothing before the time when the Lord shall come, Who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and manifest the counsels of the heart.” Judging others was in fact their besetting sin. They were ever determining that this man was not so wise or so spiritual as themselves; one was slandered as a narrow Judaical follower of Cephas; another, as a mystical disciple of Apollos; a third, as seeking a dangerous freedom with Paul. And on this very account they could not judge themselves; the faculty of judgment lost its edge; it exhausted itself in unprofitable, unlawful efforts. It was ever busy looking outward for motes; the consciousness of the beam within became continually less alive.

IV. And this was the very reason why their neglect of outward discipline was so gross and shameful. They had no sense of the sacredness and dignity of that Communion which bound them all together as members of one body; its profanation was easily borne. The party symbol, the party sympathy, was everything; their calling as baptized men, the common rights into which it introduced them, were nothing. Such want of discrimination respecting themselves, therefore, did not the least imply too magnificent an idea of their privileges as Christians, too eager a claim to possess them. It is St. Paul who urges them to believe that all things are theirs, whether life, or death, or things present, or things to come, or Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, because they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. They are blamed, not for their presumption in believing this, but for that confused habit of mind which made them ignorant at once of their high position and their great perils,—of the light into which they had been brought, and the darkness which was threatening to extinguish it.

V. All these considerations show us that the Divine judgment which St. Paul spoke of, could not be necessarily one which distinguishes between this person and that; choosing out the godless man for its object, passing over him who was acting consistently with his profession. The argument of the Epicurean poet against Providence, that the lightning strikes the temple and its devout worshipper as much as the boldest defier, might not be refuted in this case more than in any other; it might receive new confirmation. The human judgment had not made, and could not make, this separation; it had no commission for such a work; it had erred in not discovering the thoughts and intents of the heart over which it was sent to preside, in not keeping that heart with all diligence. The judgment which was needed because this task had been forgotten, would do what it had failed to do; would take men apart to question them about themselves; would reveal to them their own hidden counsels; would awaken them to consider what God had created and redeemed them to be, what they might be if they were really walking in His way, what they would become if they lived in themselves and to themselves, as if they were separate from Him.

VI. Now, brethren, I think that we have some principles here, which apply to ourselves. I am far from thinking, as I said very recently, that it is desirable or right to find fault with our own age, and to speak of its manifold inferiority to the ages gone by. But if there are any qualities which all agree to be characteristic of us, any upon which we are inclined to value ourselves, it cannot be amiss to inquire what dangers have followed and do follow from the possession of them. Most of us are agreed that we live in a critical rather than in a creative period. Whatever other faculties we have or have not, the critical faculty developes itself in us in our very boyhood. Whatever other faculties we cultivate or do not cultivate, we give all possible scope and exercise to this. Criticism, in one shape or another, is the occupation of nearly all who aspire to write or to speak. Politicians, artists, religious men, all alike are critics; some censors of their predecessors as well as of their contemporaries. I do not complain that we are born into a time which has this strong bias. I am sure it is not to be violently counteracted. I am sure there must be a meaning in it, and that we should try earnestly to know what that meaning is. But it is impossible to deny that the effect which followed a similar predominance of this temper in the later ages of Greece—the effect which St. Paul discovered in the Corinthian Church—is just as conspicuous among us. Judging others, we have lost to a very great degree the power of judging ourselves.

I am willing to adopt the Apostle’s language in our case. I am ready to admit that Englishmen of the nineteenth century “come behind in no gift”; that they have at least as many fine and noble impulses as men had in any other day; that we have shaken off some follies to which our forefathers yielded; that we are awake to some sins which they blindly committed; that our social standard is often higher; that we confess many obligations and responsibilities which, a century ago, were not thought of; that we can pronounce sentence upon evils from which we have not yet been delivered.

But this we all do feel at times; this, if we are honest, we shall confess. We may not want any good; but we are grievously wanting in energy and manliness, to choose the good and reject the evil. We allow right and wrong impulses to act upon us together, as if they all came from the same source, and might, one as much as the other, be obeyed. We dwell in a twilight of half-realized truths, half-followed convictions; we catch frequent glimpses of a celestial light, which we do not trace to its source, and therefore which we boast of as our own, and which soon becomes darkened by shadows cast from the mind that it should have illuminated.

This, brethren, this is the charge which no special pleading in favour of the age can evade; which accounts for the discontent and weariness that earnest men exhibit in it, in spite of the excellence which they cannot deny to be in it; which makes good their complaints of its practical feebleness, even when you feel as if it had a strength somewhere which might move mountains. If this time were so paltry, so heartless as it is sometimes represented to be, the contemplation of it might be more disgusting, but it would be far less saddening. It is difficult to weep over the fall of a mere voluptuary; but that strength and bravery and gentleness, all beautiful and graceful endowments, the eye to see and the will to command, should be wasting themselves in fruitless efforts, useless exhibitions, vain imaginations, and sinking down at last, after achieving nothing for the world, only a pain and oppression to their possessor; this is a mournful spectacle indeed. And yet who has not witnessed such? who, I might say, is not witnessing them continually? And what, you ask yourself, was wanting? Where did these spirits finely touched and to the finest issues, come short? Can we find a better answer than St. Paul’s? They did not judge themselves. They did not resolutely discriminate, in the multitude of impressions that poured in upon them, which were to be entertained, which were to be repelled. They delighted in their energies, and were conscious that they were not given for nothing; but in what direction and to what end they should be used, who should guide them, this they were not careful to consider. They knew that there were in them highest aspirations; that they could not be, as some told them they were, earth-born. But how these aspirations should be in them, by whom they were bestowed, how they could exist in an element of corruption and death, were problems often entertained, never fairly grappled with, never resolved. Therefore if their habits and associations led them into the region of free philosophical inquiry, they were speedily convinced that religious people had misrepresented and degraded man, treating him as a beast or a devil when he had the capacity for everything godlike and true. But they did not boldly enough ask whether this misrepresentation might not arise from a one-sided theory of the Gospel. They assumed that the Gospel itself denies the glory of humanity, which it proclaims more loudly than any philosophical system ever did, and which it reconciles with the facts of experience that seem to confute it. They reject the Apostle’s doctrine and these facts together, and have at last to verify both in their own experience; finding that there is a flesh in each man as well as a spirit, and that if there is no one to humble and exalt the second, the first will make him its slave.

With some, of no less valour and nobleness, the experience comes in a different form. They betake themselves, not to speculation, but to civil life. They begin with scorning the practices of vulgar politicians; with the loftiest determination to do nothing which shall degrade their fellow-men, everything which shall raise them. But they find they have coarse materials to work with; those whom they would serve and enlighten do not understand them. They are provoked and become passionate. They revenge themselves for their high thoughts of the species by bitterness to individuals; they fall into despair, and probably at last are content to run along in the old rut, which they had exhorted all to forsake.

Some have had their minds formed in a different atmosphere from either of these, and have looked upon both with profoundest pity or contempt. They have dwelt in quiet cloisters, amidst old religious associations, surrounded with the memories of other days. Their own they have mourned over, as degenerate and wretched, deficient in all chivalry and saintship. To cultivate these in themselves——to escape as far as possible from this world in which it has been their trial to be cast,—have been their objects. They have been ready to make all sacrifices; they are fearless in following principles to their results; they would die to restore that which they find decayed and almost dead. But the habits of the time exhibit themselves mightily in these denouncers of it. Severe condemners of others, they too have lost the power of judging themselves. Awe of the unseen is mingled with the superstition which makes us subjects of the visible. The reverence for Sacraments which speak of Redemption and Communion with an Ascended Lord, rivets the chains which God uses these divine instruments to break. They desire a universal fellowship, and shut themselves in a closer, narrower circle, and invent new and more exclusive watchwords, till, weary of such palpable inconsistencies, they fly to a system which obliges them to accept the decrees of a mortal as a dispensation from those exercises of personal judgment to which St. Paul exhorts every Christian man.

I have chosen my specimens, not from the weakest and worst, but from the strongest and best of our time—from those who might have been its truest champions,—that we may see better what our peril is, and how it is associated with that passion for criticism which, under certain conditions, I doubt not God intends us to cherish. And now let us see what helps we too have for recovering that power of criticizing our own acts, our own selves, which seems to have perished while we have been busy in trying and condemning all except ourselves.

VII. When we are judged we are chastened of the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world.

Much is said in pulpits about the blessed effects of God’s discipline upon men. But is it right to say that discipline does at once and of itself produce blessed effects? Is it your experience that the mere suffering of pain softens and subdues a man’s character? Does it not often exasperate all his worst feelings? Does it not make him angry with God and with all men? I do not allude to particularly ill-disposed people, I would rather appeal to the best disposed. I believe they would answer most readily, “Suffering has brought forth an amount of evil in us, which we did not know there was in us before.” What I suspect such persons would add to the confession is, “And thanks be to God it did! Now we know ourselves a little better than we did before. Now we know Him a little better. For it is this revelation of what is dark in us which drives us to His Light. It is because we find we can trust ourselves so little that we have learnt we may trust Him altogether. In us, that is, in our flesh, there is no good thing.” So St. Paul’s words have been made good to one and another of us: “Not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me.”

What do such examples teach us? Surely they afford us a very wonderful hint as to the design of God’s judgments. They are not mere punishments, though they may be that; they are not merely, or immediately, instruments of making a hard ground ready for seed or capable of bearing fruit, though this may be the ultimate result of the process. But first of all St. Paul’s words must explain the object of it. The voice out of the whirlwind, the still small voice which follows, is to awaken in us that slumbering faculty, without which we are not truly men, because we are not truly showing forth the image of God. He comes amongst us that our criticism may be turned to a more practical, as well as in truth to a more glorious service, that the power of saying to this thought and inspiration, “Go, and it goeth,” and to that, “Come, and it cometh,” may not be utterly taken away from us; that we may not be the passive slaves of the influences to which at one moment or another we are exposed, that we may not, in the language of the text, “be condemned with the world.”

What does this language import? what is the condemnation from which this judgment rescues us? The world, considered as apart from God,—considered as a society which frames its maxims and its practice without reference to Him,—this world is condemned to a very hopeless kind of darkness. Its members cannot see any light which should guide their own footsteps, for they confess no light but what proceeds from themselves. They are always stumbling against each other, never doing justice to each other, for the same reason. We are saved from this condemnation, when God makes us sure that He is with us, that He is guiding us,—that He cares for other men as well as for us, that He is shining upon them as well as upon us. We are saved from this condemnation, when we are sure that He has revealed Himself as reconciling men to Himself in His Son, as binding them together in His Sacrifice, as guiding them by a Spirit who dwells with each and with all. All God’s chastisements are to show us how little we have understood the relations in which we stand to each other, what hard judges we have been of our fellows,—how miserably tolerant we have been of the selfishness which keeps us apart from them. All God’s chastisements therefore are to purge the Church of its worldly elements, not by making it censorious and exclusive (for these are essentially worldly elements), but by making each man see in himself all the evil which he has detected in his brother; in his brother, the image of that Lord Whom he desires to behold when the night is past and the day has dawned.

There are some national chastisements, brethren, which are more terrible perhaps in the eyes of God and of His saints than wars, famines, pestilences. When terrific crimes are perpetrated in a land, when they are even suspected, and the evidence which makes them probable awakens no awe in those who hear it and in those who read, but only the excitement of hearing some new thing, the satisfaction of finding something to break the monotony of existence,—perhaps a certain admiration of evil when it puts on an unusual and a gigantic shape,—then surely that land should know God’s judgments are upon it; then each citizen of it should ask himself, “What is this judgment to do for me?” and the answer still arises in St. Paul’s words: “It is to make thee judge thyself, that thou mayest not be condemned to that indifference which is so fearful a characteristic of a God-denying world.” Such possibilities of evil lie in that nature of which I am a sharer! Such possibilities of evil, which moral and religious influences do not prevent from ripening into actual enormities! God of our fathers! reveal to us the possibilities of good which lie hid for all of us in Thine Own Self! Reveal to us the Redemption from evil which Thou hast wrought for us in Thy well-beloved Son! Enable us to disclaim the curse which lies so near to each of us, that we may claim the blessing which Thou hast made the inheritance of all! Grant that Thy judgments here may bring us to such a right judgment of ourselves and of Christ, that when He shall appear as the Judge of quick and dead, we may say, “This is our God; we have waited for Him. He is come to save us from our darkness; He is come to take away the covering which is cast over the nations. He is come to fill the whole earth with His light.”