July 19, 1857
“For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection.” Romans vi. 5.
In the Collects of the Church we have often been taught to speak of Christ taking our nature and suffering our death. That this language is strictly copied from St. Paul,—and not copied merely, but impregnated with his spirit,—no one, I think, who studies his Epistles can dispute. But St. Paul uses also a kind of language which, though quite in harmony with this, must not be confounded with it. He does not only speak of our Lord being made like to us, but of our being made in His likeness. And he does not limit this mode of expression, as we might expect him to limit it, telling us that we may be made holy like Christ here, or be made glorious like Christ hereafter. He speaks of our death being cast in the mould of His Death; of His being the only standard by which we can measure, the only type by which we can understand our own: “We have been planted together in the likeness of His Death.” Evidently we should dilate this phrase most unwarrantably, we should reduce it almost to nothing, if we took it to mean only that, as Death came upon Him, so it must come upon each of us. We knew that before; it required no evidence to convince men that death was a fact with which every child of Adam has to do. But men did need to know what this fact signified. It was as strange and monstrous as it was indisputable. Though it was the great commonplace of the world, each new case exhibited some new variety of it; it was essentially individualizing, though it was universal. You got no nearer to the sense of it by collecting the greatest number of instances and generalizing from them; you felt that such a process took you away from the reality. You were in closer contact with it while you were watching one actual death-bed, than while you were reasoning about a thousand; and yet, if you found it suddenly staring you in the face, laying its skinny hand on you, even that experience was felt to be most imperfect. Men have always wanted to know, men do want to know, what Death is, as well as what Life is; and they have always felt that the finest, sagest, divinest definition, if it proceeded from the lips of God Himself, could not tell them.
I. “We are planted together in the likeness of His Death.” Will the consideration of His Death then remove the veil which is over our own? At first, you would say, “Oh no! There may be honour, there may be glory in this record, but there is nothing which I can connect with myself, or with my fellow-men. Here is death with every possible aggravation, bodily and spiritual; Death without the sense of Retribution and Justice; Death involving inward agony; the sense of divine desertion. Have we been planted in the likeness of this death? we who are guilty, in the likeness of that which is perfectly innocent? we who often pass so easily out of the world, in the likeness of this bodily anguish? we who feel so little what it is to enjoy or to want a Father’s Presence, in this likeness of Him Who cried, ‘Why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ Surely it cannot be. This Death may, in some marvellous manner, by some divine decree, affect us infinitely, but how can we dare to think of that which befalls us, except as presenting the most awful contrast to it?”
This objection to St. Paul’s language is twofold. The fearfulness of our Lord’s Death forms one part of it; the perfect holiness and innocency the other.
(1) With respect to the first, let us remember that we are inquiring for the essential nature and character of that which every human creature, which the whole human race, has felt to be the curse whereof every other that exists is a part, whence every other is derived, in which every other terminates. You are asking, solemnly, earnestly asking, to see it apart from any qualifying accidents which may come to particular sufferers through ignorance of its nature, through any gracious mitigations, through the want of participation which one has in the misery of another. A plague, or the rout of an army, slays its hundreds of thousands. Each one dies by himself; you cannot add up the different experiences, and yet every one groan speaks out a portion of the universal woe. Is not that glimpse which you have of death here in this one Person a glimpse of death itself? Does not the conscience of each feel, has not the conscience of Christendom felt, that it is? You could not take away anything you read of in the Gospels or in the Twenty-second Psalm. You would take away something that belongs to the very nature of death if you did. The Gospels speak as they always do, with intense simplicity. No word is wasted, every comment is spared; not one miserable shred of human eloquence is allowed to mingle with the stern record of facts. In the Psalms there is the inward history, and a history so exact and human that it has expressed to thousands in every age what they had known in themselves only the more because they felt there was an infinite beyond, into which they could but just look. We cannot then deny the truth of the words, because His Death was one of concentrated human and divine sorrow. If there were not this depth in it, you could not see in it the archetype of all other sorrow.
(2) But the other reason seems at first sight far more decisive. The one Death concentrating all that is pure and holy, the other the very stamp and witness of sin. Mighty as this difference seems, if we admit the language of Scripture, the belief of the Church, we must awfully feel that it had been in some way extinguished; that the Perfectly Holy did bear sin; that His Death made it possible for sinners to be holy. And this belief has always been associated with the belief that His Death was a voluntary sacrifice. Herein its holiness, its perfectness, its power consists. Death had been felt to be a dark necessity, the submission to a power which was not human, not divine, and yet which must be obeyed. Good men had tried to feel differently; had in a measure been able to feel differently. They had given themselves up to God for sorrow or joy, for life or death; they had, especially in vigorous action, realized the conviction that He only was their Lord. But there was something in the character and conditions of Death, when they looked directly at it, when they contemplated it in reference to themselves, which seemed to enforce a different view. It seemed scarcely right, scarcely consistent with the sense they had of evil and punishment, not to regard it as a horrible separation, a deep abyss, as something into which the light of God’s countenance did not penetrate. Our Lord’s Death is the one termination — need we fear to say it?—the one possible termination of such a state of feelings. Only, if Death can be contemplated at once in its most dreadful aspect, of a division from all creatures,—in the inward being, from God Himself—and as an entire, cheerful, absolute surrender of a child to a Father, is its dark contradiction explained, its sting taken out. When once such a manifestation had been made, it might be said to all creatures, “Behold the likeness of your death! You have never seen it till now. You have never known either its horror or its blessedness, either its curse or its sweetness. Here you see it all. Henceforth look not for it in its particular forms and cases; in other men or in yourself. Look at it here. The Cross is the only interpreter of it. This only shows you its individual, its human, its divine signification. To investigate the wounds of the thousand fiery serpents which have been torturing each human conscience, is as impossible as by that process to cure them. Turn to the one Brazen Serpent; see the Death of man translated into the Death of the Son of God, and you know both what the bite is, and that it is healed. While we are busy with our own selfish experiences, with aggravating our tortures, and not our tortures only, but our sin, in the hope of making amends for one and being delivered from the other, there can be only an ever-increasing contradiction, a deepening evil, in all that we think and do. Each new search for a solution of the puzzle makes us feel it to be more hopeless and infinite. Believe this to be the real likeness of your death, and you will find, as you contemplate it, the power which there is in it to destroy that which is the poison of Death, its selfishness. We have been planted together in the likeness of this Death. It is a solitary thing no longer. Here we know it to be the centre of attraction and unity to the whole race. Accordingly, the most simple, most childlike penitents have proved the deep philosophy of St. Paul to be a truth for themselves. Under the dark overwhelming sense of the Death in themselves, and the evil which, in themselves, is inseparable from it, they have turned to the death upon the Cross. In their despair they have been led to the bold, marvellous conviction, that they could find the true likeness of that which had been all dark, in this clear and perfect light. Nothing seemed to them at first so amazing a paradox; nothing proved itself at last to be so undoubted a truth. For there can be no demonstration like that which comes through the disappearance of confused, superstitious, selfish doubts from the heart; through the discovery of real union with our fellow-men, where we had thought was the very root of division; through the melting away of pride, and the growth of childlike submission; through the apprehension of a Father in Whom is no darkness at all, where darkness seemed to reign absolute and alone. And a willing surrender of self, peaceful dependence, calm hope, sympathy with every suffering human creature; these are the further attestation, known and read of all men, that those do not follow a cunningly devised fable, who habitually turn to Christ’s Death as that in the likeness of which they have been planted. In every service, in every Eucharist especially, we proclaim the same truth; if we deny it, the act we engage in is a mockery. Oh! that it were not so often a mockery! Oh! that we did deliberately and continually assure ourselves that it has the most real foundation! We who kneel at the altar are not a set of creatures divided from each other by a set of little, partial, contemptible interests, only united by that great curse which is at last to terminate those interests and our connection with each other. This Death,—this common Death,—the Death of Him Who died for all, is that in the likeness of which we are planted; here is the bond of perfect human fellowship, here is the assurance that Death cannot break the bonds which hold us to each other, because the Love which established them had, in death, proved itself to be stronger than Death.”
II. And therefore the Eucharist combines inseparably, as St. Paul’s words combine, Death and Resurrection. We have been planted together in the likeness of His Death; we shall be in the likeness of His Resurrection. One assertion is the ground and assurance of the other. For what is the likeness of His Resurrection? If Death be the division of man from man,—of each man in himself,—of the race from God; Resurrection must be the reverse of all these, it must import that each creature is again at one with itself, with its fellows, with God. If Death import a surrender to God, as of a child to a Father; Resurrection must import that the surrender has been accepted. He Who had felt forsaken of God, rose again in the glory of the Father; He Who had cried, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me!” was not left in hell, neither did His flesh see corruption. He Whom all His disciples forsook, stood among them and said, “Peace be unto you: as My Father hath sent Me, so send I you.” Finally, He Who said, “Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit,” breathed on them and said, “Receive ye the Holy Spirit.” It is proved that His union with the Father was not broken in that hour in which He poured out His soul to death. By that union His human soul is quickened, His human body is quickened; by it He becomes the source of a divine life to all creation. We cannot describe His Resurrection in the words of the Bible, without implying that it is a Resurrection for us as well as for Himself; that we are planted together in the likeness of it. Therefore in the Epistle for this day, our Baptism is spoken of as grounded upon the Resurrection as well as the Death of Christ, as adopting us into the meaning and the power of both. Christ has died: we are bound, St. Paul says, to reckon ourselves as dead to sin. Christ is risen: we are bound to reckon ourselves alive to God. It is not that we are to make out a title to one privilege or another. He has proved the title. It is not that our faith creates the privilege. We are but called upon to believe that which is true. We do not plant ourselves in the likeness of His Death by an effort of our belief. We are planted in it. What we are required to do, is to acknowledge the fact; not to make Death an everlasting contradiction and lie; not to make ourselves an everlasting contradiction, by determining that we will be without a centre, that we will each die a separate death, and live—no, that is impossible—we cannot live a separate life. Life implies union, fellowship, a common head; the denial of it is suicide. And if we are willing to confess a fellowship in the groans and Death and humanity; if we are willing to offer up ourselves cheerfully for Death, believing that a Father, not an enemy, receives the offering, and that we present it in His Name Who has offered up Himself once for all, the other gift is contained in this. These souls cannot perish if His has not perished; these bodies cannot perish if He has brought His back from the grave. As He had no life apart from His Father, we have no life apart from His. The renewal of life in Him, from its source and fountain, was the renewal of all creation. We have a right to say that the dreariest winter contains the pledge of a spring. We have a right to say that we cannot look into the heart of Death without discovering the certainty of a nobler birth. We have a right to say that nothing in this wide world lies out of the law of Christ’s Cross and Passion, and that therefore there can be nothing which is not overshadowed by His Resurrection, and which has not the capacity of a glorious life.