Sunday after Ascension Day

“And what is the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and hath put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be the head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all,”— Ephesians i. 19-23.

The Epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians may be called the Epistles concerning the Resurrection. They declare how God, by raising up Jesus from the dead, justified us from all things from which we could not be justified by the works of the law. To these Epistles the Reformers in the sixteenth century turned for instruction and consolation. They found in them the very message which they were wanting to hear. It was a message to the burdened conscience; it told each man who had committed sin and become the servant of sin, where he might find his Deliverer and True Master.

In time the references in these Epistles to the Resurrection of Christ began to be less heeded. They were said to be expositions of the doctrine of justification by Faith—“The Resurrection was a general act; how could that justify the particular sinner?” If it did not, what was his justification? The answer brought back a subtler kind of self-righteousness than that from which the preaching of the Reformers had proclaimed emancipation. Justification by works was to be disclaimed in words, as Popish and horrible; but the Faith that was demanded was to all intents and purposes a work, a most painful work,—a work which might be as good a foundation for self-glorification, as well as self-torture, as those which it had displaced. How is this danger, this real and practical danger to be escaped? Only, I have endeavoured to show you, by recurring to the exact language of the Apostle, by asserting that the resurrection of Christ from the dead is God’s witness of our justification; that if we do not receive that witness, Faith has nothing to rest upon; that if we do receive that witness, we acknowledge God as the Justifier, and give over boasting of our own acts, external or internal.

The effect of thus exalting the wisdom of the Bible is no doubt this: that we are obliged to regard the justification as much more general than the modern disciples of Luther would make it. But if by doing so we vindicate his doctrine from the most terrible inversion,—if we show what Faith is,—if we explain why St. Paul unites his assertion of justification with his Gospel to all nations, and with a protest against Jewish exclusiveness; we have some compensation for the dangerous latitude which under his authority we introduce. And we have this further compensation: we are able to feel the connection between these Epistles to the Romans and Galatians, and the Epistle to the Ephesians, which the Reformers prized and understood less; and which some of their recent followers would deny to St. Paul altogether, because it does not appear to them to proclaim the formula of justification in the terms in which they suppose that their Lutheran apostle ought to proclaim it. The Epistle to the Ephesians may, I believe, be rightly called the Epistle concerning the Ascension. If we so regard it, we shall find that it abundantly confirms all the testimony which St. Paul deduced from Christ’s victory over death in his other Epistles; and that it also gives the full meaning and force to the hints of the glorification, as well as the justification of humanity, which are contained but not developed in them.

I have endeavoured to show you, in some recent sermons, that we Englishmen, if we are faithful to our own peculiar vocation, must attach a greater, not less, importance to the doctrine of Justification, as St. Paul sets it forth, than the Protestants in other lands. It is the bulwark of our national existence and national morality. When we confess God as our Justifier, we confess that He has chosen us to be a righteous people and that our wrong-doings all imply a departure from the state into which He has brought us. When we cease to confess Him as our Justifier, our acts are done either without reference to Him, or without reference to our position as fellow-citizens; we make our own code of duties; He is not the ground of our common life, but only of certain special services, by which we hope to recommend ourselves to Him, or which we perform for the sake of making our own individual condition and prospects better. But a Justification which concerns a nation, cannot have its basis in the faith of individuals. It must rest upon acts of God done for men generally. If the individual sinner will not accept these as the warrant of his faith,—if he will not humble himself before God, because he has not acknowledged the love and forgiveness which are manifested in these to him and to his race,—the Scripture testifies against him; his conscience testifies against him; in due time, his acts will testify against him. He may call himself a believer, or what he pleases, but his belief will bear no fruits, or bad fruits; no person from seeing his works will glorify the Father in Heaven.

On the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, then, by the Will of the Father, our English faith and whatever right acts proceed from it must stand. But last Sunday I strove to show that this and these acts point also to an Ascension. Taking the fifteenth Psalm as my guide, I maintained that the highest idea of communion with the King on the Holy Hill of Zion which an Israelite could possess, was associated with the most commonplace civic morality; that the communion was impossible if the morality was wanting; that the communion made the morality permanent by grounding it on the Nature of God Himself. The Church, by choosing this Psalm for Ascension Day, gave me a right to apply the lessons which it teaches to English Christians. I told you that I believed it was not our want of some sublime ideal of devotion, but our indifference to truth and honesty in our ordinary dealings with each other, which unfitted us for communion with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. I told you that I did not think we should repent of our dishonesty and untruthfulness, or should become better citizens, till we believed that God had exalted His Son to His own right hand on purpose that we might draw nigh to Him, the God of Truth, the Faithful God, and might be delivered from all that has kept us at a distance from Him and from each other. But before I concluded, I said that the Ascension was the vindication of national morality and national unity, because it proclaimed a universal Morality and a perfect Unity. It may help us in England to be true servants of the Lord our King, true defenders of our soil and tongue and institutions, because it reveals One clothed in our nature, Who is “far above all principality, and power, and might, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come;” One “who is Head over all things to the Church, which is His Body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.”

I. As I find here the realization of the widest Catholicism, and the most Catholic Church of which men have ever dreamed, I am desirous that you should not overlook the connection between these latter words of the chapter and the nineteenth, which I took for the first words of my text. The Apostle desires that the Ephesian Christians may know “what is the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe.” I can easily imagine that a person who has been wont to speak of the privileges of Believers till he has brought himself to think (or to think that he thinks) of them as separated by their belief from the rest of human beings,—I can easily imagine that such a person will exclaim triumphantly, “See then, that clause determines the meaning of all which follows. Whatever glory the Apostle, or rather the Spirit of God, may unfold, these are the persons to whom He will unfold it.” Even so. I rejoice to think it. And therefore let us consider who these persons were, and what He wishes them to know about their condition. They were a very small society, aliens from the Synagogue, aliens from the Gentile temple, regarded with scorn by those whom they met in the market-place. They were obliged to live much within their own circle. They had the best causes for thinking that it was dangerous to wander beyond that circle; that all breezes from the world without ought to be excluded; that all openings through which they might obtain glimpses of it should be stopped up. It is to these persons that St. Paul speaks of a fellowship that was quite illimitable. The reward of their faith was, that they could not separate themselves from any creature bearing the form of a man. To do so was not to believe in Christ. To believe in Him was to acknowledge One Who represented mankind at the right hand of the Father.

II. Such a faith as this, carrying them so far above all appearances, contradicting the conclusions of their natural understandings, overcoming the temptations that most beset them, could not be attributed to anything less than a Divine Operation on their spirits. That it could be awakened in them, that it could be kept in exercise, was a proof of the exceeding greatness of God’s power. But the Apostle cannot measure that power by this manifestation, wonderful as it is. He cannot even explain the existence of this faith in any individual man, except by saying that it was according to “the mighty power which” the Father “wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him on His own right hand in heavenly places.” Here is the measure and standard of God’s working. Here is that complete manifestation of it, of which every other is only a subordinate part. The power which kept the Son still trusting when he was passing into death, the power which raised the Son from the dead, is not another power, but the selfsame with that which kindles faith in any single soul; which enables any single soul to confess its relation to God and its brethren; which lifts it out of its own solitary hell. The power which raised up any man into the largeness and freedom of fellowship with God and with the universe, is the power which exalted Christ to the right hand of the Majesty on High. A conviction most helpful to all who will take it in; one which will explain innumerable passages in the Divine Economy; one which brings order into our most confused thoughts; one which may often save us from despair when we feel our own faith and the faith of those who surround us to be weakened. It makes us feel that we are indeed members of a body into which all life passes from the Head. It shows how entirely we invert God’s method, and destroy the very principle and root of all personal faith, when we place it before those acts of Christ which reveal God’s universal will and purpose.

III. In the verse of which I have just spoken, the Resurrection and Ascension are used to explain the principle of faith. In the next verses they are held forth to us as its object. The world had quailed before a multitude of powers, visible and invisible; before taskmasters that had caused them to make bricks without straw; before more cruel taskmasters, who had told them they must please an invisible master that would reap where he had not sown; before shapes that were created by their own evil consciences; before tyrants that slew the body, and then had no more that they could do; before subtle and horrible tempters, who sought to destroy both soul and body in hell. Before these, men had trembled; these they had sought to conciliate by accursed sacrifices. To these they had brought their first-born; to these they had offered up their own selves, doing all the false and wicked acts which false and wicked beings could commit and inspire. St. Paul declares that far above all these; far above all these imperial and sacerdotal oppressors; far above the cruel gods, the spirits of evil to which they and their victims had done homage, He was exalted Who had been meek and lowly, Who had proved Himself the Good Shepherd, first by seeking the sheep that had gone astray, then by giving His life for them. All that had trampled upon man was proved to be poorer and feebler than He Who had come as Man’s Deliverer. He Who wore a crown of thorns was proved to be the Prince of all the kings of the earth, He Who had gone down into hell, had triumphed over the principalities of hell, making a show of them openly. This St. Paul held to be the true faith of a Christian; hereby it was marked out as different from the faiths that had gone before it, or that still struggled with it in the world. Either they pointed to such a Conqueror as this; bearing witness that such a one must be; rudely and imperfectly grasping at some one aspect of His character; or else they were the assertion of some form of tyranny which men had felt to be intolerable; against which they had struggled wearily but not hopelessly. There might assuredly be honest believers in Christ who did not see what was implied in their confession. If they had understood it in the length and breadth of it, they would not have needed the teaching of an Apostle, or his prayer that their eyes might be enlightened, that they might know the grandeur of their calling and the nature of the testimony they had to bear. But if these believers thought it positively better to have a faith for themselves than a faith for the Universe, they must in turn learn to say, “We do not believe that He rose again the third day from the dead, or that He ascended into Heaven, or that He sitteth on the right hand of the Father.”

IV. The Apostle’s language had been so large and yet so minute that it might seem to close all the avenues through which the subtle and versatile Spirit of Unbelief might force an entrance into the heart. “He may be mightier than the rulers of earth; but is He, than the rulers of air? Mightier than the visible; but is He, than the invisible? Mightier than these in this age or this world; but what of the world or the age to come?” St. Paul knew all these suggestions. He had provided against them all, Yet he is not satisfied.

“Inferiority may not mean subjection. Christ may be greater than the powers of evil. But who can say that they are put under His feet?” St. Paul is bold enough to say so. St. Paul, who had thrice suffered stripes,—St. Paul, who had hardly escaped from the mob at Ephesus,—St. Paul, who was in Nero’s hands at Rome,—St. Paul dares to tell these disciples of his, that the powers of the world are put under Christ. St. Paul, who says in this very Epistle that he is still wrestling, and that all his brethren are wrestling, with principalities and powers, with spiritual wickedness in high places, dares here declare without a qualifying clause, that all these also are put under Christ. And he knew what he was saying. He himself—or whoever it was that wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews—explaining what he means, explains it in connection with the facts which appeared to contradict it. He has quoted the Psalm which affirms that all things are put under Man; all sheep and oxen, and the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the air. He adds: “Now we see not yet all things put under him. But we see Jesus, Who for the suffering of death was made a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour.” I do not think he could have conveyed his meaning more clearly. It is no doubt an unfinished strife as far as we are concerned. We are still in the midst of it; every event that befalls us showing how desperate it is; our bodies showing that the visible oppressors are still sitting on thrones; our spirits bearing more terrible scars from the blows of their masters. The animal is not yet everywhere submitting to the yoke of the man; the man is continually bearing the yoke of the animal. And how often does he put on a yoke that is worse than animal? The malice, falsehood, hypocrisy, that possess him—these do not come from the fowls of the air or the fishes of the sea. But One Who bore our nature, did, so we believe, establish the lordship of the human over the animal; of the human over the devilish. One, so we believe, Who has that nature, has also proved his claim to another Nature, of which ours is the image. He, so we teach, is crowned with glory and honour, is at the right hand of God; binds us to God. His Ascension declares that all things are now put under Him. That is the warrant of all hope for the future. The confidence with which the Apostles believed that the kingdoms of the world had in very deed been proved to be the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ, explains the longing with which they looked forward to the final unveiling of Christ; their zeal to keep that longing alive in their disciples. They could not define the limits of His conquests, who had ascended on high that He might fill everything. Would any part of His voluntary or involuntary creation be able to maintain its independence of Him? Would not all confess Him to be Lord, in the glory of God the Father?

V. But what is the witness of this constitution in Christ? what is it that lives to prophesy of this ultimate victory? He has given Him to be Head over all things to His Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all. “How hard it is,” people often say, “to get a satisfactory definition of the Church! Where shall we find it?” Nowhere, I believe, if not here. If this account of it appears to you inadequate, the Scripture will not help you in your search for another.

The Scripture has been teaching us how God chose out a family to testify of Him and of His relation to men; how He chose out a nation to testify of Him and of His relation to men; how, finally, He sent forth members of that family and that nation, to bid men of all lands enter into covenant and fellowship with Him, because He had set forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law,—because He had given up that Son to die the death of all men,—because He had raised that Son from the dead in His human soul and body,—because He had exalted Him in that soul and body to His own right hand. On that warrant men were invited to come to be baptized. Being baptized, they were to declare that they were the adopted children of God, because they were members of Christ’s body. They were to say to all men, “This is your Head, as He is ours; you have the right to take your place in this Body, as we have; if we say that you are excluded from it, we cut ourselves off from it.”

Here was the Gospel which the nations received. Here is the explanation of all Christian brotherhood, and of all the acts which have ever proved that brotherhood to be something more than a name. If this society called Christian had not courage to say, “We are called out to be members of a body of which Jesus Christ, the Son of Man and the Son of God, is the glorified Head, we are actually one with Him where He is, He is actually dwelling with us where we are,” they disclaimed their history; they renounced the charter on which their calling and their privileges rested; they made themselves something which God had not made them; and, of necessity, just so far as they were guilty of this apostasy, they made themselves a curse to the world which they were appointed to bless.

We cannot speak this language too strongly: it must be spoken far more strongly than it has ever been spoken yet. All the blessings which individual men have ever received from the Gospel of Jesus Christ all the strength that it has imparted to men dying at sick-beds, or dying at the stake,—all the conversions from darkness to light, from sin to righteousness, of which it has been the cause,—all the brave, self-denying acts which it has ever prompted,—all the earnest thoughts and hopes which it has ever kindled, can be traced directly to the belief which our Communion Service expresses,—of which it declares the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper to be the pledge; that we dwell in Christ and that Christ dwells in us; that we are very members incorporate in the body of Him that filleth all in all. Take away that faith, and you do not take away some grand mystical conception of Christianity; you take away all that has made it practical, all that has made it dear to the hearts of sinners and sufferers, all that bound together men of different races, classes, countries, ages. Take that faith away, and the Church becomes either a collection of individuals who are exalting themselves on their separation from the rest of mankind, and who, as is meet, prove by their continual jealousies, suspicions, strifes, schisms, that a bond of opinion and profession is no bond at all; or else it becomes a huge political system, an incubus upon the life of nations, of families, of individuals, asserting loudly by its acts and its words that it must have another head than Christ, that it does not regard itself as the body of Him that filleth all in all.

What is our duty, then, brethren? For the sake of numbers in our own land, who can find no peace in narrow societies that are bound together in the profession of certain opinions and under certain leaders, and yet will not abandon what they have learnt in those societies—are not disposed to exchange those leaders for any that we prefer to them; for the sake of thousands who are groaning under our sins, who have the same inward needs as we have, and yet feel as if they were cut off from all fellowship,—as if they were consigned to a hopeless unbelief; for the sake of the nations abroad that have struggled vainly, madly, for freedom, and feel that there are some chains upon them which are mightier than those with which unjust monarchs or evil laws have bound them; for the sake of all that a religious system has driven into Atheism, because they would not worship a god who is a tyrant, but who are yearning to be told of a God who is a Deliverer; for the sake of all that is dear and precious in history, all that is worth retaining in the present, all the good that prophets and sages bid us hope for against hope in the times to come; let us assert the old faith of Ascension Day. Let us make the members of sects understand that we are setting up no opinions of ours against theirs, no leaders of ours against their leaders; that we desire to justify all that they and their fathers have clung to in their darkest and their bravest hours, all that their leaders taught them when they were inspired with most indignation against our indifference to Christ and His Gospel; that what we preach is Christ the One Head of a body which time and space cannot bound, Christ the source and the object of their faith and ours, Christ the destroyer of all sects, inasmuch as He unites man to God. Let us make Spaniards, Frenchmen, Italians, understand that we do not ask them to leave their churches for ours, to accept any single English tradition which is not also theirs, or to travel through the path by which God led the Teutonic nations in the sixteenth century. Nor do we encourage them to rid them by any sudden and violent effort of that spiritual despotism which we believe is hindering them from being, not Protestant, but Catholic; which is preying upon their national because it is preying upon their moral life. We only say, “Believe, as the Church in all ages and in all countries has professed to believe, that Christ, the common Brother and Head of men, has ascended on high, and that all powers in this earth, and everywhere else in God’s creation, are subject to Him. Determine that you will follow that faith into all its consequences; then we know that chains which no other charm has been able to break will fall from your hearts; then it will be given to you to set your countrymen free. If you seem at first to your enemies a paltry and feeble band, they will find soon that invisible hosts are on your side. Not the relics of the saints, but the saints themselves, with all that have been refused that name on earth, but whom God has counted worthy of it; all that have given their lives for their land and for the Truth, will fight for you. He Whose eyes are as a flame of fire, and on Whose head are many crowns, the Word of God, will go forth before you; and your tyrants—those who seem so mighty to-day—you shall see them again no more for ever.”