First Sunday of the Year
January 3, 1858
“Or despisest thou the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?”—Romans ii. 4.
The passage: Do you despise the riches of God’s goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not realizing that God’s goodness is meant to lead you to repentance?
The year we have passed through has been, for Englishmen at least, one of terrible excitement—not public excitement only, but shared at every hearth. Even had it been a quiet year, each of our own private circumstances would still have carried reminders of change, and warnings of more change to come.
Yet it is likely that many a man’s first thought on New Year’s Day was one of complaint—that the past has been full of dreary sameness, with little hope of its being broken. Will this year differ at all from the last? Will the same round of work continue, society remain the same machine, my actions be no freer, my judgments still swayed by the fashions around me? Will my tomorrows simply repeat my yesterdays—resolutions made only to be broken, petty necessities always outlasting the will?
These forebodings arise from very different circumstances. Some recall long, monotonous suffering, and, weary in spirit as in body, ask why the new year should not bring as useless a burden of sorrow as the old. But is the monotony of pleasure any lighter? How many forms of enjoyment are already exhausted, how hard to invent new ones, how impossible to force enjoyment even when invented; how the need for stronger stimulants grows as the capacity to be stimulated shrinks; how what was meant as escape from duty becomes the most exacting duty of all! Whichever way you turn—to the man burdened by dull time or the man rich in devices for filling it—you hear the same lament over the vanity and vexation of years past, and the same prediction for the year now beginning.
It is sometimes supposed that “vanity and vexation” ought likewise to be the preacher’s chief theme—that he should imitate his great Old Testament predecessor, while borrowing the New Testament’s teaching about a future and eternal state to shake or sober his hearers. If he takes this course, I doubt he is drawing rightly on either Testament. Ecclesiastes is indeed a faithful record of real experience: a man walking a labyrinth, thinking he glimpses the way out, reaching the spot, and finding himself baffled again and again. His advantages only deepen his sense of hopelessness; the king is more lost than the common man, and the wise man’s opened eyes let him see the stones in the path that the fool trips over unaware. Even religious reflection brings little comfort—he notes that the just sometimes fare as the wicked do, and the wicked as the just; that it seems unwise to be “righteous overmuch” or “wicked overmuch.” He sets down these one-sided observations honestly, since the book’s worth lies in its truth to experience. But at last comes a clear, beautiful gleam of light: there is a way out of the labyrinth, for the beggar as for the king—but for the king only when he casts in his lot with the beggar. Scheming out the universe, even with some thought of Providence mixed in, has gained him little. But if he will “fear God and keep His commandments,” acknowledging One who governs him and submitting to that government, the earth may grow brighter, and the weary maze may prove, after all, to have a plan.
Suppose, then, a modern preacher took this book as his guide. He must follow experience wherever it leads, without twisting its conclusions to fit a moral, without softening the perplexities of the religious man or blaming the worldly man out of spite; he must admit that trials which reach no satisfactory outcome are still worth something. He must not claim exemption from the vanity others feel—his own disappointments must be personal, caused by his own errors, not his neighbors’. And the discovery he is brought to must be one good for every man alike: that vanity and vexation end when a man stops trying to build worlds with himself at the center, and finds instead a Centre round which his world and all worlds revolve.
But we would be badly misled if we took this “Royal Philosopher” as typical of Old Testament preaching. To find the true public preaching of Israel we must turn to the Prophets, who begin where Solomon ends. They assume a Divine order to the world, a God who has covenanted with the Nation, calling all its members to fear and trust Him, giving them commandments, promising them a right heart to keep those commandments. The Word who speaks through their lips guides the course of empires and of individual lives alike. Past, present, and future are bound together; nothing is indifferent or barren; every human task can be made grand and fruitful—though every task may also be turned to evil, thrown into a witch’s cauldron to mingle with the foul charms already brewing there. Yet even those who tend that cauldron know their hour is coming; their own withered hands must point their slaves toward crowns and sceptres that God will grant despite all their sorcery. And the true prophet, even while he must wail over his people’s love of vain things, foretell the vexation awaiting those who trust in idols, and sing of the utter helplessness of the lies they cherish, must also declare that vanity and vexation come from forgetting the Lord God of their fathers—that He is unchanged from days of old, that His counsel stands and He will do all His pleasure, and that though darkness covers the earth, He will arise and shine and fill the universe with His light.
Those who today would follow this example must understand it is not their business to deepen men’s sense that the years only bring fresh cause for despair, nor to give atheistic experience the authority of God’s word. They must not tell young men that their youth, strength, and joyous hopes are devil’s delusions, when they are God’s precious gifts. They must not call any pursuit vain, since God has appointed it and we must answer to Him for the spirit in which we take it up—not tell lawyers that law is vanity, or politicians that politics is vanity, but tell them their offices are awful, even divine; that whoever handles such mighty trusts lightly, pleading some religious interest he cannot neglect for “merely secular” duties, may satisfy men who judge by appearances, but will shrink before Him who searches the heart. Lawyers and politicians need Sundays, prayers, and communion to give them strength for their tasks—not to make them indifferent to those tasks; services of that indifferent kind were exactly what the Prophets said wearied God to receive.
The Old Testament preacher was, as I tried to show you lately, in the strictest sense a preacher of Hope—hope awakened by the very sorrows and punishments that seemed to warrant absolute despair. He was this precisely because he was preparing the way for the herald of a completed Redemption, a Gospel in its fullest sense. A Gospel that began with “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” would be the greatest contradiction imaginable. It must either directly and decisively refute that conclusion drawn from mere experience, or its name is a delusion.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, professes to show both why man’s life is not vanity, and how it becomes vanity. It is not vanity, because it is derived from the life of the Son of God, Lord of every man, in whom is life, and whose life is the light of men. It becomes a vain show only because a man will not confess his relation to this Fountain of Life, wants a life of his own, and seeks that life in the things he is meant to rule rather than in the Lord who rules him. From this vanity Christ redeems him. He need not be slave to the creature; he may act as child of the Creator. Doing so, he takes his place as citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven; every year gives him fresh tokens of this, shows him how fair and rich the earth is, and prepares him for the Kingdom’s full manifestation and the earth’s full deliverance. If he refuses, outward things become curses to him—not because they are vain, but because he has chosen to make them so.
Today’s Lesson shows that St. Paul, the preacher of a Gospel to the world, spoke no smoother words than the old prophets, and was just as stern against hypocrisy and self-delusion. He addresses countrymen who judged the Heathen as outcasts from God while causing God’s name to be blasphemed among them. God’s judgments, he tells them, are not partial as they supposed, but according to truth: no circumstance excludes anyone from life and immortality, none secures it either. The Law was good for those who kept it, condemning those who broke it. Circumcision meant something if it signified trust in the God of the Covenant and rejection of one’s own evil nature; it meant nothing if merely outward. Those who were contentious, disobeying truth and obeying unrighteousness, would meet tribulation and wrath—that narrowness, that inability to breathe, which they brought on themselves by shutting themselves up in their own privileges and refusing to let their light shine on all men.
I bring in these passages to show how little the one I have chosen—found in their midst—was picked for its gentleness. Judged even apart from context, it reads more as admonition and reproof than as comfort. I take it as such. I find in it the sharpest rebuke of the distrust and despondency with which we tend to enter a new year. It teaches that we deny the plainest facts of our lives if we conclude there is no Power near us able to make us all we wish to be, all we accuse ourselves of failing to be.
I. The Jews supposed that Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, was urging them to despise the privileges of their birth. He turns the charge back: how dare they despise the riches God had given them? What were these riches? The Law and Covenant were pledges and witnesses of their wealth, convertible into wealth, but not the wealth itself. They spoke of a living God near to Israel, a God of goodness, forbearance, longsuffering—names given Him throughout the Scriptures and illustrated by a whole history: the nation’s story is the story of a God showing kindness to an indifferent people, forbearance to a provoking one, longsuffering to an obstinate one. Other books record a religion—how a people introduced this rite or that ceremony, how soothsayers pointed out neglected duties, how priests demanded new propitiations. Here is nothing of the kind: the religion the people themselves introduced—hilltop worship, groves, calves, altars to Baal—is denounced, and a righteous King proves His righteousness by sweeping it all away. The subject of these records is not men’s feelings toward a higher Being, or duties rendered to Him, but God’s feeling toward them, His acts on their behalf. This was the nation’s peculiar treasure—not a treasure given once and then withdrawn, but testimony to a Being the Same from generation to generation, one that could not be locked away in statutes, in the Book, in the forms of Tabernacle or Temple. Those forms had no worth at all unless the One they spoke of was alive, living with men, and men living by Him. To boast of Law, Covenant, and Scripture as though they were not revelations of Him was to deny and despise them. To accept them as revelations of Him, yet not believe He was good and forbearing and longsuffering, was to deny and despise both them and Him. To grant that He was good and forbearing and longsuffering at all, without believing He was so at every moment, to themselves and to all men, was to play with words—to despise their meaning, their power, their blessing.
It is the same with each of us. Our New Testament, our Baptism, our Communion testify to a God good, forbearing, and longsuffering—giving these titles an emphasis they lacked of old, and removing some obstacle that hindered the men of old from believing them fully.
Goodness, seen in the deeds of Him who went about doing good, loses none of its awfulness; it stands in sharper contrast to all wickedness. We know it is not abstract but reaches each individual, and yet is without limit.
Hearing of God’s Forbearance, we ask the old, recurring question—whether He can care enough about our doings to feel anything like the “provocation” Scripture speaks of, or whether such language is merely figurative and would otherwise diminish His Holiness and Majesty. Seeking the Father through the Son clothed in our nature, we see how purity and sympathy must daily be provoked by impurity and hardness of heart; and we are sure His perfection would be lessened, not preserved, if He were incapable of pain and sorrow over evil.
The Longsuffering becomes intelligible in the same mirror. Without it, we might ask whether there is some boundary to it we cannot fix but must assume exists. The Cross of Calvary drives our reason from that vain, presumptuous question. It reveals a height and depth of endurance we dare not measure—for if we could, which of us would not have to say, “I have exhausted it”?
If this goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering belong to the very name and character of Him in whom we live and move and have our being, they form a wealth we may always draw upon. The more we recall and believe in them, the more truly they become our own; we may be shaped into their likeness and show them forth—this is the royal inheritance made known to us through Scripture and Sacrament. Every past year speaks, through strange events and ordinary ones, of Divine goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering shown to us, to our country, to the world. The miracle of every morning testifies to it; no child has been born, no parent has died, without traces of it. The new year will be as full of it as the old—with its own thunders to rouse us from sleep, its own quiet, hourly reminders of an unvarying, watchful loving-kindness.
II. But here lies the great excuse for shame and gloom: we have not taken past events as bearing this meaning; the wealth has been ours, but squandered. We have despised the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering. Why should it be different now? What does a new year offer that the old lacked? Why should crossing an imaginary boundary turn death into life? Isn’t the pull toward evil likely to grow stronger, not weaker? Isn’t the indifference that ignores what is good and gracious sure to increase? Isn’t the craving for excitement, which treats daily blessings as worthless, certain to feed on itself? These are all reasonable questions, answerable only one way. But we have left one thing out of account: we have not known that God’s goodness is leading us to repentance. It is not events, sad or joyful, that lead us to it. Our own hearts, left to themselves, will not lead us to it either—and our sense of powerlessness to turn our minds may be entirely true experience. But the goodness of God present with us is not merely something to remember or profit from; it is an active, vital power, the one power able to act upon spirit, and it is acting on our spirits continually. This goodness is the very Spirit of God—being goodness, He grieves at our lack of it; being forbearance, He bears with us; being longsuffering, He will not let us destroy ourselves. He convinces us of Sin, because we have not believed in Him who is sinless and always present to deliver us from sin; of Righteousness, because He has gone to the Father as the righteous Head of our race to justify us; of Judgment, because the prince of this world stands judged, and each year brings nearer the time of his final casting out.
The Church opens the year with two festivals. One is the Feast of the Circumcision. If we grasp its meaning, we will believe that all God’s discipline through past years has aimed at destroying what is selfish and carnal in us, so that the Spirit may graft and renew what is truly human, truly divine.
The other is the Epiphany. If we grasp its meaning, we will believe that Christ’s glory can be shown in the greatest weakness, because it is the glory of goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering. We will ask that this glory humble us and lead us, day by day, to repentance. And we will be certain that at last there will come a full revelation of those riches which eye has not seen nor heart conceived, but which God has prepared for those who love Him.