Rogation Sunday

“Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle: or who shall rest upon Thy holy hill? Even he that leadeth an uncorrupt life: and doeth the thing which is right, and speaketh the truth from his heart. He that hath used no deceit in his tongue, nor done evil to his neighbour; and hath not slandered his neighbour. He that setteth not by himself, but is lowly in his own eyes: and maketh much of them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth unto his neighbour, and disappointeth him not: though it were to his own hindrance. He that hath not given his money upon usury: nor taken reward against the innocent. Whoso doeth these things shall never fall,”—Psalm xv. (Prayer-book Version).

The Tabernacle which went with the Israelites through the wilderness was the witness that the Lord Himself was in the midst of them. They were told that He would dwell in it. When it was brought, amidst the shoutings of the King and people and with the sound of a trumpet, to Mount Zion, it did not acquire any new sacredness, but it imparted a sacredness to the place on which it rested. God was felt to be there: the city stood because He was present in it.

If, then, David or any Psalmist dared to ask this question, “Lord, who shall dwell in Thy Tabernacle, who shall rest upon Thy holy hill?” you might have expected him to answer, “Those priests who have been set apart by a special consecration,—upon whom garments of glory and beauty have been bestowed, upon whose foreheads holiness to the Lord is inscribed,—they may venture to approach His habitation; as Moses ascended Sinai, they may ascend Mount Zion.” There would have been no vulgar superstition in such language. It would have been quite unlike the notion of a heathen worshipping on the hill that he might be nearer the Sun. It would only have intimated that a transcendent excellence, a kind of spiritual absorption, was demanded of any one who aspired to commune with the Everlasting God.

But how strangely different are the actual words of the Psalm! The qualities which are required of one, not who visits the Tabernacle merely, but who dwells in it,—not who ascends the hill only, but rests on it,—are those of an ordinary citizen, those without which a man cannot fulfil any of his common duties in the world. Nay, the qualities are chiefly negative. It is not said that he must be brave, magnanimous, ready to sacrifice himself. He is not to be corrupt in his life, not to take reward against the innocent, not to lie. One of the conditions reads as if it were drawn merely from the civil code of the Israelites, as if it were temporary and local; but all are of the same mundane, commonplace kind. You cannot point out one which a person aiming at a sentimental, refined morality would care to introduce.

And yet the more we read the writers of the Old Testament, the more we shall be convinced that they had an awful, overwhelming sense of the Divine Majesty, and that they regarded the privilege of drawing nigh to it as the highest that could be conferred on any creature. Consider what we are told respecting the communings of Moses with the Lord God of Israel; consider what it was that sustained the heart and hope of every prophet, when he was crushed to the earth by the sins of his land and his own, and by the vision of coming desolation; consider the habitual language of the Psalmist, in hours of despair and in hours of rapture. The result in all cases will be the same. To be without God is to be cast down in the soul; to be in deep waters; to be in mire where no ground is. To be shown the light of His countenance is more than all treasures of corn and wine; in His presence is fulness of joy; to awake up after His likeness is to be satisfied. Whatever explanation there may be given of the apparent easiness of the terms upon which the blessing is to be realized, the explanation cannot be that the blessing itself was thought to be a light one, or that any other was set in competition with it.

The true key to the difficulty is found in a principle which goes through the whole of the Jewish polity and of Old-Testament history. God is throughout spoken of as bringing His people into a true and right state, a state of fellowship with Himself. “He planted them,” says the Prophet, “wholly a right seed;” by which words he of course does not teach them that they were by nature right or pure, or that they were less naturally wrong and impure than other men, or that their Covenant had changed their evil nature into a good one. The Prophet was continually making them feel that the reverse of all these assertions was true; that they were naturally evil, and that they were as capable of indulging their evil heart, and they did actually indulge it, as much as any men who were not in the Covenant. Just so far as they followed their nature or trusted it, just so far they were the rebellious and the stiff-necked people of whom I was speaking to you last Sunday, out of the chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy which we have been reading to-day. And this was because they were refusing God’s government, not entering into the Covenant, which implies that a man is good and right only while he renounces any goodness and rectitude of his own, and refers them to God. Therefore it was no contradiction to say of any men whomsoever who had been taken into God’s Covenant: “They are wholly a right seed: whatsoever of wrong springs up in them is of their own seeking; it will come from their choosing a way of their own, from their liking to be independent of their actual Ruler.” But what was the necessary corollary from this statement? Surely, that there must be certain evil habits or tendencies which denoted a determination not to abide in the state into which God had called them. Such habits and tendencies being those to which men are prone, as a matter of course, if they are not seeking to counteract them, become the habits and tendencies of society,—those which are contracted without any deliberate purpose, by mere contagion,—those which establish themselves very soon into rules and maxims, of the Jewish world as much as of any other. To resist them was to believe God’s Covenant; to believe that He had established His throne upon His Holy Hill of Zion; to believe that from that throne proceeded both law and the powers which make law effectual; to believe that He could and would put down, in the nation which He had chosen, and in every member of it, that which was contrary to His mind and will.

To resist such habits and tendencies was to deepen and strengthen this faith day by day, to gain ever new tests of its solidity, to learn more and more the nature of the Being Who enkindled it, and Who was the object of it. To resist these habits was to acquire a fixed dwelling in God’s Tabernacle, a rest upon His holy hill. If the Psalmist had spoken of great and heroic efforts by which a man won admittance into that Tabernacle,—climbed to a seat on that holy hill—he would have contradicted the whole idea of heroism which he and his fathers had been taught to cherish. They were to get no high places for themselves at all; they were simply to do what they were told to do; to go where they were bidden to go. Whatever stood in their way, whether the obstacle were a material or a spiritual one, they were in God’s strength to beat down. They were to assume that He was with them; not to assume it in every possible case, was to abandon their faith. No Jew could dare to say that God was present with him because he was better or more believing than his brethren. The Lord was in the holy hill, the Protector of the city, the bond of Jewish fellowship. The man who wanted to be something better than a citizen,—to have any individual privileges, instead of being one of that fellowship,—must go without the Divine protection; he could not abide in the Tabernacle, or rest on Zion.

Hence it is obvious that the highest aspirations of the Jew, as a spiritual being, were inseparable from his most ordinary civil life. The priests, with their anointing oil and their garments of glory and beauty, did not dissolve the link between the outward and inner existence; they were the appointed witnesses of it. They went into the Holy Place with the sacrifices for all the daily transgressions of the common Israelite, as witnesses that there he was meant to abide, that he had wandered from that which was his proper native home, through carelessness of God’s Law and of his brother’s well-being; that from that home was continually issuing a power of reconciliation and restoration. The priest’s office suggested the highest idea of dedication to God, of intercourse with Him, but not as a strange superhuman gift, appertaining to a class of votaries, who, for the sake of it, cast all common interests aside; far rather as the gift for human beings, without which no man was able to live truly as a man, which might be realized most by those who were most on the watch to maintain their places simply and honestly, most aware of all the influences which were at work to draw them from it, and make them artificial and base. The confidence that the living and true God had called a man to be one of His servants and soldiers, would keep him from lying to his neighbour in his word and deed. Every lying word, act, and course of conduct, would weaken that confidence. The man who determined to cast away lying, not to be a usurer, not to take reward against the innocent, must be lowly in his own eyes, considering what temptations there were in him and around him to these evils. He must make much of them who, through fear of God, were able to overthrow these enemies,—who could take refuge from them in His righteousness.

On Ascension Day we shall use this Psalm: I rejoice in the selection of it for that high Festival. I think it bears mighty witness to the truth which I was trying to assert last Sunday,—that the life of the Nation and the life of the Church,—the life of the Old and New Testaments,—stand in the closest relation with each other, and that we, in England, have still to study at the feet of the ancient Israelites. Let us apply then the lessons the Psalm has taught us to our own case.

I. The Lord, on the holy hill of Zion, was an object of distinct definite contemplation. When we speak of the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, do we mean a Being less distinct, less personal? Do we suppose that when Jesus said, He that hath seen me hath seen the Father, He meant our minds to wander in a hazy abstraction, from which the men of the elder world were delivered? Our reverence, let us be sure of that, is not promoted but destroyed by vagueness and unreality: and certainly that atmosphere is favourable to the growth of the most dark and degrading superstitions. A Being of Absolute Righteousness and Truth and Love, to whom our secret thoughts and hearts are open, is an object of awe to the man and the child, to the sage and the peasant. A mere Presence or Spiritual Essence does not really awaken awe in any one of them. They may talk of it and write about it, but they do not bow before it. And then the deep witness in the conscience of each of them that there is something more than this; something which is speaking to them, searching them, judging them, drives them to guess and conceive what this something may be. They clothe their fears with shapes; these shapes are various as the fears or as the local circumstances of those who are tormented by them; their moral nature is derived from that of their votaries; out of a Pantheism which boasted of its universality and freedom, there springs the most slavish and dividing idolatry.

If we believe really that Christ, the Son of Man, is gone up on high, in an actual body, to Him with whom He dwelt before all worlds, we believe that the King who dwelt on the Holy Hill of Zion has revealed Himself more distinctly, more perfectly, than He did of old; that we are admitted into a far higher knowledge of Him than the Jews were; that the communion which the Psalmist spake of as possible for himself, possible for Jews, is, in its highest idea, realized for us; that the purpose and effect of the dispensation of God has been to remove the obstacles which interfered with it. The Jew was still haunted by the sense of distance in space. The Ascension of Our Lord removes that burden from the spirit. He has led that captivity captive. He proved that there was in Him a power to break through the impassable barrier which served to separate earth from heaven. The freedom which He asserted for the body He had taken implies a like freedom in the spirit assuming it,—that it can break through those humiliations of sense which it had always felt to be unworthy of its birth, and yet which it had vainly striven to shake off.

II. The Ascension of Christ, like the placing of the Tabernacle on the holy hill, claims equal privileges for us all. No Englishman who believes it may say to his brother Englishman, “The highest privileges of the New Covenant are not for thee;” just as no Israelite might say to his brother Israelite, “The highest privileges of the Covenant with Abraham are not for thee.” David asserts the same doctrine which we heard Moses asserting; St. Paul is in strict agreement with both. Christ has claimed for us a place in his Father’s House, the place of sons and daughters. His Father is our Father. In that right we may ascend the holy hill. To say that we ascend it in virtue of any feelings, sensations, holiness of ours, is to set aside the Incarnation, Sacrifice, Ascension of Christ.

These are not acts done for a set of wise, good, faithful, elevated persons. They are not done for certain favourites of Heaven. They are announced in the streets and highways as done for the outcasts that dwell in them, because they were done for all human beings. We must receive them as common blessings, or not receive them at all.

III. And what then is the reason why we do not receive them, seeing that they are so freely given? The fifteenth Psalm again gives the reason. It appertains to us in all its strictness. Yes, brethren, this plain, simple, vulgar explanation of the secret is the true one, and the only true one. It is time for the Minister of God to resume that homely language. We have talked as if people might be very good in all their relations with their neighbours, and yet something might be wanting to make them servants of God. They must be something over and above honest and true citizens in order to dwell upon the holy hill, and abide in God’s Tabernacle. We did not learn that mode of teaching from the Old-Testament books. They say boldly: “You are not honest and straightforward in your dealings with your neighbours; therefore you do not think that God is honest and straightforward in his dealings with you. You do not trust Him. You do not confess your sins to Him. You do not draw nigh to His holy hill.” Has the New Testament altered that lesson? Does it introduce another? No doubt there is this difference: the New Testament tells us more perfectly than the Old how we may rise out of the most base, corrupt, dishonest habits; how God has revealed His righteousness in Christ, for the remission of sins. But He has revealed His righteousness. Therefore He has said that no unrighteousness can have any fellowship or intercourse with Him. He has revealed His truth. Therefore He has shown that no falsehood can have intercourse with Him. Christ, Who is the way and the truth and the life, has ascended on high that there might be a way for us into the presence of the Eternal Living Truth, that we might share His Nature.

Is that the end which we English Christians are proposing to ourselves? Then let us rejoice and sing; for Christ has ascended on high that we might be delivered from our old evil life, and that we might possess a righteous life in Him. We may give up lying one to another, we may be set free from that worship of money—that delight in its power of self-multiplication—which is the spirit of usury, and which does breed all immorality and dishonesty, which has reduced the Jewish nation to baseness and degradation, and which must reduce every nation that is possessed by it to the same degradation; we may shake off the vanity and self-gratification which accompany these tendencies, and become lowly in our own eyes; we may learn to make much of honest, God-fearing men, instead of being crawling sycophants to rich men. But if this is not what we want, if we want a religion that will make us easy and comfortable in the frauds which belong to our different crafts and professions,—if the shopkeeper lifts up his voice loudly in denunciation of Popery or some unpopular opinion, that he may more securely and with less sense of self-reproach adulterate his goods, and use the false weight and the deceitful balances which are abominable——if lawyers and clergymen adopt a seemly respectable Christianity that they may not be forced to ask themselves whether they are speaking words honestly and simply as in the sight of Almighty God, whether they are doing acts which they can ask Him to scrutinize—then, brethren, we ought to be told, one and all of us, that the hill of Sinai, on which the thunders sounded loud and long, is not more terrible than the Zion on which God dwells; that the New Testament is not more but less tolerant of such practices than the Old; that God will appear as a swift witness against our crimes and falsehoods as He did against those of the Jews; that Christ has not ascended on high to make it more possible for us to have fellowship with God here or hereafter, but rather to testify that between us and a God of eternal justice and truth there can be no fellowship whatever. And this, not because we are wanting in some celestial transcendent qualities which men have dreamed of as befitting a Church, but because we have those qualities which are destructive of nations.

I have brought my discourse to the point at which I was aiming. When I spoke a fortnight ago of national righteousness and national holiness, I was prepared for two opposite classes of objections. One would proceed from those who can recognize nothing but individual righteousness and holiness: those I reasoned with last week. The second would proceed from those who say they believe in a holy Catholic Church, but that what this has to do with a nation they cannot conceive. In fact, they look upon the nation and the Church as scarcely compatible, as for the most part direct opposites. I believe that in the sense which this theory gives to the words “Catholic Church,” they are deadly opposites; that a nation is now, as it ever was, pledged to treat idolatry as its curse and destruction, and that a Church which tries to organize itself into an independent visible society with a visible head must by its very nature encourage idolatry, and always has encouraged it in fact. I believe further, that a nation is pledged to maintain a wholesome, practical, manly morality, entirely opposed to that morality of “touch not, taste not, handle not,” which a Church such as I have described must by its nature favour, and has always favoured in fact,—a morality consistent with the grossest deviations from common truth and honesty. And I solemnly conjure those Protestant assertors of individual holiness of whom I spoke last Sunday, to see well to it that by their teaching they are not hindering the great protest against idolatry which is involved in the very existence of a nation,—and substituting for it a poor pitiful protest against some legislative act which they have determined, by certain indications of their own, to be idolatrous——whether they are not substituting certain capricious and artificial maxims for the homely morality of the Bible, and whether thus they may not be preparing their sons for that very system which they most dread.

But on the other hand, I would maintain that a holy Catholic Church, in its truest, widest, deepest sense, does lie beneath the holy and righteous nation; that they are not contraries, but that one is the vestibule to the other; that each is the support of the other; that this Church is no imaginary utopian society, no artificial society, but a real society constituted in Christ our ascended Lord. Thus the ascension of Christ to the right hand of the Father, that He might fill all things, is the meeting-point between these two divine principles, these two human societies. In it we find the consummation of all the expectations and hopes of the old world, that in it we might find the beginning of all that is purest and holiest in the new.