Second Sunday in Lent
February 28, 1858
“For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again.”—2 Corinthians v. 14, 15.
The passage: The love of Christ compels us, since we have concluded that if one died for all, then all died — and that he died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again.
Either there is a contradiction here, or Paul’s idea of love differs from the one most common among us. “The love of Christ constrains us; because we judge” seems to mix a process of reasoning with a compulsion of feeling. If Paul had to argue himself into the conclusion that Christ died for all because all were dead, how can he also say that mere devotion to his Master drove him to act and suffer? If he were under such a passion, what need or room would there be for thinking, deliberating, concluding?
This puzzle isn’t due to mistranslation. Paul actually uses a participle where we use “because”: “the love of Christ constrains us—having judged” or “concluded.” This change doesn’t affect the real question. Paul’s language assumes the love constrains those who reach this conclusion; he assumes some close connection between the conclusion and the love and its effects.
I wouldn’t raise this if I weren’t sure it troubles many in practice, whether or not they connect it with this text. No difficulty is more serious and tormenting, especially now, than the question of how the heart and the intellect relate — the claims of duty against the claims of affection. These questions take many complicated forms; unless we’ve tried to untangle the threads beforehand, they seem hopelessly knotted when we meet them in real events, yet meddling with them beforehand feels like a schoolroom exercise. I believe the Apostle’s words are the best solution. Let us try to understand what they meant to him, and what they mean to us.
I’d note first that “the love of Christ” can hardly mean the love the Apostle, or any man, has for Christ. It’s natural to read it that way, since love shown to us aims to produce love in us, and we easily suppose the reflection, being nearer ourselves, matters more than what it reflects. So many take “the love of Christ” or “of God” in the New Testament to mean some feeling in the creature toward the Creator. Sermons and devotional books encourage this: they grant that our love has its ground in God’s nature and acts, but their real business becomes dwelling on the results in us — testing whether the feeling is present or absent, pointing to blessing if it is awakened and misery if not. Such appeals sometimes kindle what was dormant. But as often they breed hypocrisy, dishonest efforts to manufacture the required signs, sharpness in detecting our neighbors’ faults, and a habit of offering our own feelings as compensation for wrongs our conscience condemns. Once we believe that all God’s acts are a revelation of Himself, that knowing Him is eternal life, this method becomes impossible. Then presenting His acts and character to men must be the only right way of producing the like in them. Idolatry, unbelief, despair are what come of trying to form images of excellence for ourselves. So Scripture — the great protest against idolatry, the great warrant of faith, the cure for despair — must be understood as speaking first of the love Christ shows, not the love shown to Him.
The word “constrains” itself suggests an atmosphere surrounding and pressing on us, a power bearing down upon us — not something rising up from ourselves like incense to Heaven. Given this meaning, most of our difficulty disappears. A feeling of ours must be carefully distinguished from an exercise of judgment, even though the two are related. But a love descending upon us from a superior Being is not so confined. The sunlight of a parent’s or teacher’s countenance doesn’t act only on a child’s affections; it acts on his intellect too, giving him courage to think, power to perceive, vigor through his whole being. So the love of Christ might well constrain the judgment to a right conclusion just as it constrains the hands to right acts. If the Divine Love is at work on any creature, we’d expect it to act diffusively, leaving no faculty untouched, bringing into clearness whatever faculty is most ready for it — sometimes kindling the passive feelings, sometimes stirring the active powers, sometimes reaching the heart directly, sometimes through the winding passages of the understanding.
This, I think, is the general conclusion — but it’s clearer set beside Paul’s own application of it. His judgment is that if Christ died for all, all were dead. A child or pupil whose spirit has been awakened by a friend’s encouragement first thinks, “What would I be without this? How cold and hard I was before!” That impression is only partly true — if that influence had been absent, another might have supplied it; when withdrawn, a further one suited to a new stage might follow. But Paul’s inference is absolute and universal, not partial like this. Confessing that Christ’s love is acting on his will, he concludes that apart from that love there would be no life in him at all — and what he says of himself he says of everyone. Without this primary love, no creature would have any life. He goes further, connecting this with the truth that Christ died for our sins, seeing into its hidden meaning: He died for all because all were dead — the creature had no life of its own, only what it received. He gave up His own life to the Father because this was so; He claimed nothing as His own — refusing to turn stones to bread by His own power for His own use, receiving everything from the Father, and saying at the end, “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” By this perfect filial dependence He upheld the dependence, on God, of all whose nature He had taken. Their death can only be understood through His death, their life through His life.
This same love let Paul see the ultimate purpose of that death: that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again. The Death was the great witness that all men were, in themselves, dead; taken together with the Resurrection, it witnessed that God’s design was to give new life to all who would receive it — not a separate, selfish life such as men make for themselves, each pursuing his own ends and rewards, impatient of others’ success, jostling them aside, but the life that was first in Him who gave Himself up for all: a life proceeding from Him, continually referred back to Him, of which He is the Author and Finisher, the Spring from which all its streams descend, the Ocean in which they all meet.
In this way the different parts of this sentence unfold out of each other, and illustrate the whole doctrine and Paul’s own acts. He’s so learned a teacher, with so much subtlety in his Epistles, that many suppose he was elaborating a system of theology. But simple readers feel they are with a man of action, not a schoolman — one versed in men and their ways, in the perplexities of society and of individual conflict. Luther held that no one could understand Cicero’s letters without thirty years as a statesman, or Paul’s without forty years in Church affairs. Yet through all this doctrinal wisdom and practical experience runs a vehement, personal passion — no one could say his heart had been crushed by his understanding, or had grown cold from the world’s unkindness. The teacher and ruler is at every point the man; he magnifies his office and counts himself nothing, yet Paul is as distinct a person healing the feuds at Corinth, or reminding the Galatians of the grace they had fallen from, as when insisting the magistrates of Philippi fetch him from prison, or begging Philemon to deal kindly with the slave who had become a brother. Seeking “the pulse of this machine,” we look in vain to any one quality of Paul’s mind — we contradict his own words if we trace his primary impulse to feeling or calculation. There was a power of love urging him on, despite all natural reluctance, to right thought and good deeds, making him, despite his natural selfishness, live as a brother and fellow-worker in Christ’s Church. He yielded to that power and urged others to yield to it, since it was for them as much as for him — since he judged that Christ died for all, that all were dead without Him, that all might live through Him. This was the secret of his theology, his arguments, his passionate appeals, his struggles, his joys and sorrows, his vehemence and weakness, his self-justification and self-contempt, his rejection of the Law and his submission to it, his freedom to do all things and his labor to bring his body into subjection, his fear that he might be a castaway and his confidence that nothing could separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus his Lord.
If it is so, then what applied to Paul applies to us — as a society and as individuals, layman and priest alike. If any of us claimed, “The love of Christ constrains me,” meaning that he consciously acted at every moment from love to his Master and care for His flock, how many of our deeds and words would mock that claim! How the conscience would be tormented by paltry deeds done with a scarcely-hidden purpose of self-glorification — deeds that look worse still, and do more harm, when they wear a seemingly religious face.
But where’s the peril in saying: “I know that the love of Christ has constrained me to do every right act, because there is a death, a lovelessness, in myself which without such a power must have prevented them. I am surrounded by this Divine Love; it strives against my self-seeking temper, thwarts my inclination to be the isolated, self-concentrated creature I keep trying to be, stirs sympathy for my kind, and tells me I was not created to live or die for myself”? A man may confess this constraint even while most conscious of struggling against it, of trying to be independent of it, of fiercely resolving to break its bonds. Still the Love of Christ has been pressing him round, above, beneath, seeking to possess him. If he yields, he won’t boast that his own choice now governs him instead of another guiding him; he will rejoice that his will has been captured by the true Will it was made to obey, and judge that such authority, enforcing such obedience, is the true source of all freedom.
He will judge that if one died for all, then all were dead. This won’t be a hasty, momentary surrender to someone who showed him a peculiar mercy, but a considerate, quiet submission to One who has proved Himself the rightful governor and deliverer of him and of his whole race. He confesses that this One died not for him alone but for all — for him as one member of a body, because all its members were dead in themselves, capable of receiving quickening life from their Head. He submits to this Lord and Giver of life because experience and reason both tell him he cannot work harmoniously with his fellow-men on any other footing, and that he can work with them harmoniously only while inspired by Him “who died for all, that they who live should not live unto themselves, but unto Him.”
The same judgment warrants charity toward the good deeds — and the failures — of others. What excuse have we for undervaluing anyone’s kindness, or for closely questioning their motives? Such acts must proceed from the constraining love of Christ, whether the person acknowledges that love or even knows Christ’s name, for they cannot proceed from mere fallen human nature — apart from Christ, that nature is dead, as Christ’s death itself proclaims. They must be Christ’s own acts, however marred by the flawed instrument performing them. It is blasphemy to call any instance of gentleness or charity in a human being “a splendid sin”; that is calling good evil and evil good, confounding Christ with the Spirit of Darkness.
On the other hand, this same judgment requires us to acknowledge that the darkness we feel in ourselves is at work in others too, always trying to draw the light down and extinguish it. Anyone who knows himself has no difficulty understanding all the strifes, divisions, wars, heresies, and schisms of families, nations, and churches — they are all in him, he feels them, he is tormented by them. He carries within him the witness of death, even of a second death, in which all that is better in him, all that binds him to his fellows and separates him from beasts or devils, might be utterly extinguished. But he carries too the witness of a sustaining love which could not be working on him if it were not also at work on the whole world, on every member of his race.
We do homage to Christ’s love when, however cold our feelings, however barren our hearts, we still hold them as His subjects, capable of being renewed and filled with His Spirit. The understanding, honestly exercised, serves Him as well as the affections do. A man who bows out of duty, conscious he has no worthy offering of gratitude or zeal, may find his lips touched by a coal from the Altar, and that Christ does not send him away empty of gifts he sought in vain within himself. But if we believe in the constraining love of Christ, we must wish it to make every part of us a sacrifice, converting reason, will, affections, and body into instruments of His pleasure. We must wish this love not always to strive against an opposing, seemingly victorious element, but to believe it will knit men’s hearts together, shape society by its own law, and not let men set up in its place a law of selfishness and hatred. In the hard faith that Christ’s constraining love is the mightiest power in the universe, the source of all other powers and that to which all must be subdued, we must live, think, act, and struggle day by day.
Let us not forget that this same love, constraining all the dwellers on earth whether they confess it or not, must be acting still more wonderfully and perfectly on those who have passed out of our world into some higher work and knowledge. How sad it would be to think our relation to them depended on the strength of our affection or memory! We often feel divided from them by the willfulness and falsehood we are conscious of in ourselves. But when we remember that it is Christ’s love, not ours, that binds them to us — that they now know, better and more truly than we do, that in Him they are dead and in Him alone they have life — we may be sure the tie between us is one nothing can sever. As we kneel at Christ’s altar and confess a love shown at the Cross higher than Heaven and deeper than Hell, we may rejoice that in it we have communion with all the spirits before the Throne; we may ask that the sweetness and gentleness Christ enabled them to show here may appear in our own lives; and we may be sure that every hour we will know them better, the more we glorify Him.