October 11, 1857
The passage: While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them what they thought of the Christ — whose son he was.
Many have thought and said that God is punishing us in India for not communicating our faith to its people. I ventured to ask on Wednesday whether he may not first be calling us to consider what the faith is that we have to communicate. What is truly alive in us will make itself felt; what we have we will somehow pass on. Perhaps our fault is not that we have failed to publish our belief, but that we have failed to believe. Perhaps the question before us is not “Why have you not taught Hindus and Muslims about Christ?” but “What think ye of Christ?”
When our Lord put this question to the Pharisees, he added, “Whose son is he?” Their answer was direct: “The son of David.” The Christ must be a king — a Jewish king, not elected but descended from the royal house.
That much they had rightly learned from Scripture. We might call this answer mere narrow nationalism, but our Lord does not say so — I think he wanted them to be more national, not less. Their trouble was that they belonged to a sect and had forgotten they were Israelites; they kept company with Pharisees who despised publicans and sinners, who were as much children of Abraham as themselves. Had they truly believed in and expected a Son of David, the promised Christ would have burst upon them as he did upon old Simeon. But Moses, David, and the prophets were to them mere names in a book — how could the unrevealed descendant they spoke of be more than a shadow of a dead ancestor?
If our Lord asked us the same question, we would probably not answer “the Son of David” — we would avoid that as too coarse and earthly. But what would we put in its place?
I. One frequent answer is “the Founder of our Religion” — a phrase we would likely use with a Brahmin or a Muslim. I believe we mean something real by it, more perhaps than we say, even more than we know. Many use it out of a kind of shy honesty: they will not claim more reverence than they feel, yet they want to show that this name is bound up with what is most sacred to them from childhood. I grant this — no one who knows an Englishman’s reserve should judge his inward thought by his most awkward words.
But while language may not fairly test an individual, it reveals much about the society that uses it, and we can test it by its effect on the Asiatic who hears it, simple or subtle. The simple hearer will conclude that the Founder of the white man’s religion gave them not their best and strongest qualities but their weakest — perhaps even the very thing that makes them boastful, unjust, tyrannical. The subtle logician, far more common there than here, will spot the circle: “What is your religion?” “Belief in Christ.” “What is Christ?” “The Founder of our religion.”
What will either conclude but indifference or contempt? But we have worse reasons than they for feeling this phrase not merely weak but profane. What has “our religion” been? Can anyone name a time or place since Christ’s coming and describe its religion without blushing? A learned and impartial bishop has written a history of early Christianity, and of what he calls the Latin Christianity of the Middle Ages, and the result reads like the work of a satirist, not a calm narrator. So far as Christianity is only “our religion” — man’s notions about God and his own attempts to realize them — it is black and hopeless throughout. It is only because, through it all, we glimpse a Christ ruling by eternal Truth and Righteousness, not by man’s conceptions, again and again humbling human pride and human failure, that the record does not drive us to atheism and despair. Neither the Teutonic, nor the Greek, nor the Latin practice of Christianity offers refuge from that despair. What we have gained — an infinite gain — is proof that substituting any religious system or church polity for Christ is rebellion against God and misery to man. But we have gained no new power to build such systems; we have largely lost the power our ancestors had to construct and work them.
Let us then stop thinking of Christ as the Founder of our Religion, lest we think of him as founding something that will perish, burned up on his day of judgment.
An earnest missionary would feel little temptation to such language. He would say, “I think of Christ as my Saviour, my Lord and Master; without him I cannot live or die; his service is freedom; I want all men to give up every other service.” What power lies in a man of little learning who can say this because he knows it true! What hidden sympathy he stirs in hearts grown cold in habitual Christianity, or hostile to it! Such testimony, backed by self-denying lives that men could trust, accounts for most of the triumphs Protestants — perhaps the best of those Romanists — have won. Why then have these triumphs been so few? Why does the conversion of nations seem to belong to another age of the world? Is it not that the missionary does not follow his own conviction to its full conclusion? Why does some Hindu now and then sense that there must be such a Saviour, such a Master — and that this Master must be his too? Can a man who has yielded to Christ as his own Master, risking so much on the hope that others might find him too, stop short of Paul’s full conviction — that Christ is Lord of every man, Saviour of the world? Of course he believes this in some sense; it is written, he could not deny it, he would grieve to deny it. But I think he must come to see that he cannot keep his own faith unless he grounds it on Paul’s teaching: he must give up thinking of Christ merely as his own Deliverer and Master, or else give up thinking he has anything to say to others, unless he also holds Christ to be Lord of all men. While we practically deny him that title, the few converts we make stand on shaky ground — often puffed up with a sense of superiority that ruins their character, or tempted to presume on their new profession until they fall into sins as great as those they left. Whereas Paul’s Gospel builds Christian churches and kingdoms out of men with all the same evil tendencies, the same Jewish and pagan errors he exposes in his letters — but held together by a divine Spirit, witnessing to all men of what they are meant to become.
Paul had been raised in the faith that named Christ Son of David, and he never renounced it. He was not converted away from it when the vision on the Damascus road revealed that the Jesus he persecuted was the Christ.
That vision, he says, revealed Christ within him — the King he had thought distant now claiming the throne of his own heart. But he did not therefore think Christ less the King of his nation. He at once set about convincing the Jews, publicly, that Jesus was their King, owed homage by them as a nation. And when he turned from them to the Gentiles, it was to proclaim the Son of David as the Son of Man, the King of the Jews as King of the whole earth. He came to understand why David, in spirit, called his promised heir “Lord” — how this Christ had truly been Lord of David and of all kings, prophets, and holy men of old, who had sung of him and named him Head of the Everlasting Age, Prince of Peace, the Man in the midst of the throne. He saw that the revelation of the last days — Christ’s coming in the flesh, his death, resurrection, ascension — was the revelation of the hidden Father: that he came as Son not only of David but of God, to adopt men into God’s family and anoint them with the Spirit that had anointed him. This was not a new dispensation because Christ was newly making himself known — he had existed before all worlds, delighting in the sons of men, and all had received of his fullness, grace upon grace. It was new because he had freed and adopted a race that had lived under tutelage and bondage, so that the full name of God and of God’s city could now be written upon them.
If we answer the question as Paul answered it, we would say: We think of Christ as the King who led Israel through the Red Sea into the Promised Land, the true King of nations that dreamed up other kings and gods of their own making, the source of all that was righteous, true, and brave in the chosen people, and the only source of whatever was righteous, brave, and true among the heathen too. We think of him as made of David’s line in the flesh, born of a woman, dying on a cross to redeem the sons of women and atone for all the world’s sinners. We think of him as declared Son of God with power by his resurrection, ascending to lead captivity captive, seated at God’s right hand in our nature as the representative of men. We think of him as proving his kingship by sending the Spirit of love, truth, and unity to fight the spirits of falsehood, hatred, and strife that tear men apart. We think of him as coming to judge and punish the nation that set up its own righteousness against his, that refused to own other men as brothers, that gave itself to hypocrisy, cruelty, and malice. We think of him as Judge of all nations, confessing or rejecting his name, separating in each what is good from what is evil, pledged at last to burn what is false with unquenchable fire while losing nothing of true life and worth. We think of him as the source of all manliness, freedom, and gentleness in Christendom — every unmanly, slavish, ungentle act by any Christian, whatever his rank, done against his authority, most hateful to him when done in his own name. We think of him as giver not only of rain and harvest but of moral instinct, a sense of justice and beauty, a power to act rightly and generously, to pagans and Muslims alike; every Hindu feeling about incarnation and sacrifice a groping toward him who could truly become one with men and offer himself for them; the inspirer of the Muslim’s belief in one living God and hatred of idols. We think of him as withering the strength of the Hindu who turns to unclean rites and bloody sacrifice, and as upholding the Latin nations against Islam, which divides man from God, making man a slave and God a tyrant. We think of him as fighting, age after age, for the truth Romanists have witnessed to — one family under one Head, one Father, one Spirit — and against the falsehood that the family on earth is cut off from the family in heaven, ruled by an earthly lord, its spirit capable of lying rather than being the Spirit of truth. We think of him as fighting on the side of Protestants when they resist these fictions and assert the rule of the Son of Man against those who usurp his name — and against Protestants when they set their own sectarian notions against his universal and eternal kingdom. We think of him as the source of England’s national strength, valor, freedom, art, science, and justice, sure to march with her armies when they fight for righteousness and humanity, and sure to call her strictly to account for every unjust or inhuman act, for worship of gold or any false and cruel god that degrades its servants into base creatures. We think of him as searcher of every heart now and judge of the living and the dead hereafter, the King who will reign until every power, willing or unwilling, is made subject to him.
- There is nothing new in any of this; it is all contained in the words we say every Sunday — “his Son, our Lord.” None of it approaches the scope of Paul’s language about Christ as Head of all Principalities and Powers, of every name named in this world or the next. And yet it will clash with the thinking of those who confine Christ to a set of notions, habits, and services they call religious — so cut off from real life by their unreality that “religious” and “unreal” become almost synonymous in their minds. I fear many who consider themselves unusually devout, who have known real seasons of fervent devotion, will feel that Christ’s name loses its sacredness when brought out of their private experience into contact with the rough business of the world.
If thoughts like these tended to cut Christ off from the innermost soul, to weaken belief in him as deliverer from the burden of sin, to make him more an outward ruler and less a ruler of reason and will, I admit that would be a harm nothing could make up for. Were that their effect, they would only reinforce what is most dangerous in our current religious habits: the tendency to think of Christ as belonging to the past, found only in a book, and to miss that he was present here — in this lonely place, in this storm, when the enemy’s knife was at my throat, and I did not know it. My aim is not to put the Son of Man at a distance but to show how near he is in every daily trial, great or small. My aim is not to make light of conscience’s terrors or its need of deliverance, but to show that every act of self-torture, every burning of a widow, every superstition and the crimes it breeds, is itself a witness to those terrors and a cry for deliverance — so that our thought of Christ should not be bounded by the limits of Christendom. My aim is not to suggest some other name could free men from this anguish, but to insist that the Son of God has explained its secret: that man’s sin is rebellion against a Father, and that Christ sacrificed himself to remove that sin and unite men with the Father. This is why I protest against any thought of Christ that would sever the bond between him and what is deepest and most human in every person born, and dying, into the world he was born and died into.
I believe, brethren, that all we say about this Indian chastisement will sound — will be — empty and meaningless unless we hold these thoughts of Christ. How can we tell people that God punishes them for not confessing Christ if in the same breath we say Christ is not Lord and Saviour of Hindus and Muslims, nor even of the whole English nation, but only of certain individuals with privileges not shared by their countrymen or by mankind? How dare we say God punishes us for withholding homage to a King who is not theirs, for failing to proclaim a Saviour who is not theirs? Or do we mean some other God — not the Father of men revealed in Jesus Christ, but a God who takes vengeance at will, who does not seek to make men holy as he is holy? They already know that God — no need to tell them of him! The danger is that our own sons may come to worship him too, bewildered as they are by vague traditions of a Saviour for mankind whom they scarcely dare call a Saviour for themselves, by unaccountable native instincts toward belief, by an awareness of right and wrong without knowing its source, by a sense of power without knowing whether it comes from mere weapons or some singular gift given to the English race, by the conviction that this power should repress crime and assert righteousness, and by the temptation to use it recklessly for private passion and revenge — until at last they bow before a Siva, dressed in some holy name learned from the West, but worshipped only as a destroyer.
Truly, Christ has been ruling over our nation and our empire, whatever we may have thought of him — or none of this would have happened to us long ago. Truly he has shown his presence in that distant land, his care for Britons, Hindus, and Muslims alike — or no Christianity of ours would have offered the least protection against what it has met there. And now he speaks — not only to our rulers, but to fathers, to schoolmasters, to all who shape the men who will carry the English name abroad.
I do not think he is telling us to devise some new scheme of education to prove ourselves wiser than our forefathers. The institutions they founded carried higher thoughts of Christ than they themselves, or we, fully grasp. They taught their children what we sometimes dismiss as “pagan lore,” but they had a truer name for it — “humane lore.” They believed, even without saying so, that the servants of the Son of Man should know what men everywhere and always have felt, done, and longed for; that Christ’s revelation interprets the thoughts he himself had awakened in them, and that he is their fulfillment. What a discipline for citizens of an empire on which the sun never sets! All we need is to connect it to a deeper discipline learned at a mother’s knee, to the struggles of individual conscience, and to expand it to meet the questions of modern history and the thought of nations modern discovery has opened to us — treating the Bible not as a book standing aloof and frowning on such inquiry, but as the key to its meaning. Then we would have armor to send our young men safely into the fiercest battles. Let us only teach them to think of Christ as the source of all that is pure and true, the enemy of all that is vile, in their own hearts and in the hearts of everyone they meet or read of; teach them that neither their thoughts nor ours measure what he is; tell them he will make them his knights, that the banner of his Cross will be over them in every land, in whatever furnace they are cast; and let us, ourselves included, look for the hour when he appears in his Father’s glory, filling the whole earth.