Septuagesima Sunday
January 31, 1858
“But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore he saith, Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”—Ephesians V. 13, 14.
The passage: Everything that is exposed is made visible by light, for whatever makes things visible is itself light. That is why it is said: Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
In the Gospels appointed for the Sundays between Epiphany and this Septuagesima, the Church sets before us various acts by which our Lord manifested His glory to the minds of His own countrymen.
They saw nothing but a poor Man, outwardly unmarked. The halo painters put round His head has a true meaning — that perfect inward beauty must somehow make itself felt through every obstruction — but no one thinks it more than a symbol, made necessary by the limits of art. We may believe His face was beautiful and harmonious, undistorted by any restless appetite, and that sorrow deepened rather than impaired its trust and submission. Still, the expression of His face, like every other manifestation of His character and power, demanded a mind, not merely an eye, to recognize it. The principle is universal: every revelation of Christ, even when He stood visibly present, was addressed to something more than sight.
If so, we naturally wonder how few could have felt any real effect from the acts of grace and power they witnessed. We believe the acts were real — lepers were actually cleansed, the lame actually walked. But considered as discoveries of divine power and goodness, not merely as producing sensible effects, we are tempted to ask: to whom were the discoveries actually made? Were not ninety-nine in a hundred of those who benefited, and of the onlookers too, exactly what they would have been had nothing of the kind occurred? A light was there — but was there any illumination in them answering to it, proving that it was there?
St. Paul’s words in the text, taken plainly, seem to affirm that there must have been. He states generally that all things, being exposed, are made manifest by light — wherever light is, it makes its power felt, discovering what was hidden. In the next clause he asserts the converse: wherever there is manifestation, wherever something hidden comes to light, light must be present. In the third clause he assumes something that might seem to conflict with this but really explains and confirms it: that a man can be asleep, even dead, while the light shines on him — though the light is in One, and comes from One, who bids him wake and rise, and can enable him to do so.
These words were addressed not to Jews who witnessed Christ’s signs, but to Gentiles in a distant city, hearing the news of His resurrection preached. Yet they must be as true of the Jews of Palestine as of the Gentiles of Ephesus; we will not understand their bearing on the latter unless we understand them of the former. I venture to say, of everyone who witnessed Christ’s works at Nazareth or Capernaum, who sat with Him in the boat, who met Him at the Jerusalem feasts — Scribes, Pharisees, publicans, sinners, the eleven disciples, and the one who betrayed Him — that the light did make itself manifest, not merely to their eyes but to the mind within; that it discovered and exposed what was there; that they felt and knew with certainty that a light had come into the world, and had come to them.
I. Take these in the order named. We might suppose that whoever else felt this divine power manifesting itself, the Pharisees at least were entirely without such consciousness, their pride smothering it — that on them the signs and wonders were utterly wasted. But a closer reading of the Evangelists suggests the opposite: no one gave more unmistakable proof that every word and act had gone home to them with the force of light, uncovering secrets in them they had not known were there. Their anger and bitterness were that proof. There was little in His outward acts, even by their own standards, to object to; He did not openly denounce them as hypocrites until late in His ministry. It was something in Him, something coming through His acts that eye and ear could not account for, that tormented them to madness. He exposed them to themselves before He exposed them to anyone who had thought them models of righteousness. They felt an actual Righteousness before them, embodied in a Person, not merely higher than theirs but the very reverse of it, springing from an utterly different root. So their objections to Him rarely touched mere accidents of His position — “no prophet comes out of Galilee” — but struck at the essence of His life: “This man blasphemes.” “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” “He makes himself equal with God.” “He casts out devils by Beelzebub.” These were not doubts about the genuineness of His powers; they were complaints against Him, revealing hatred of His character — not words against the Son of Man, as He said, but against the Holy Spirit in Him: “they have seen and hated both me and my Father.” Theirs was that actual hatred of goodness as goodness which is scarcely found except in men hardened by religious profession, breaking out only when light has entered their hearts and laid bare the habitual falsehoods they had mistaken for sacred qualities — falsehoods only One who reads and rules the heart can expose. The sense of One near them who wished to set them right, whom they would not let set them right, whose voice carried an authority they could not deny yet wished to silence — this was the provocation for all their enmity and their crimes.
II. The same truth holds, differently, for the Publicans to whom Christ preached and with whom He ate. Some may have preferred His poverty to the wealth of the Pharisees and Herod’s courtiers; but many publicans were themselves rich, perhaps courtiers as well as extortioners, and such would regard the Carpenter’s Son with more contempt than those born to wealth. Ordinarily they would have counted His company no honor to themselves, even a condescension on their part. Instead they felt that He was stooping to them — because kingly dignity and glory showed through His acts, because the same power that drew Levi from the tax office was working on them, because there was an awfulness in His goodness that familiarity could not diminish. Yet it seemed altogether natural that He should come among them. Through this they understood His kingly authority and grace as they never could have otherwise: that the Highest of all must, by the very law He obeys, be the servant of all; that the Most Righteous must sympathize most with the unrighteous, wanting to make them like Himself, hating evil precisely in order to free them from it. These were manifestations reaching the inmost heart and conscience — deep in some, only playing on the surface of others — but in all producing some effect: bringing out crushed desires and hopes, showing them how these had been crushed, how they had held down the truth in unrighteousness, and showing them that the light which reproved them was not dead letters and a condemning law, but a Person who could raise them from death to life.
III. So too with the Apostles. St. John, describing the miracle at Cana, says Christ “manifested forth his glory, and his disciples believed on him” — recording an impression made on his own mind and his companions’, an impression having nothing to do with the senses, since this miracle appealed to sense less than most. Likewise when Christ said, “I do always such things as please my Father,” many believed on Him, though nothing in those particular words was more striking than thousands of others He spoke daily. Both instances show, more than any scholastic definition, how a sudden conviction flashed into their hearts that they stood in the presence of Creative Power. This is exactly how belief of any kind comes to us, whether the preparation is quick or slow, whether we pass from denial, indifference, or anxious hesitation: whenever faith arrives, it arrives as a manifestation we bow to, not an opinion we adopt. The Gospels show how hard the disciples found it to confess the power around and upon them, how puzzled, how burdened by old notions, how ready to explain everything by some outward or sensible cause — with great swings between doubt and conviction. But whenever conviction of their Master’s divine nature truly took hold, so that one could say, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” it was plain that flesh and blood had not revealed it to him, but that the truth had been manifested to his spirit — not reached through outward authority or logical inference. The very light that had exposed the Pharisee’s falsehood, that had awakened truth and hope in the sinful woman, enabled the Apostle to preach the Kingdom of God to others by showing him it was within himself.
IV. But one Apostle who preached the Kingdom to others is called the son of perdition. Was there no such revelation in him — did the light merely play around him, never felt or acknowledged by his conscience? To think so is a shallow view of his guilt and our own danger. Throughout his history and preaching the light must have been exposing him, showing him true righteousness, showing him his own sin. At the hour he received the sop, there must have been a manifestation of divine Love to his conscience such as he had never known. But he had invited in the opposing spirit of self-seeking, malice, and treachery, and surrendered to it; and having taken the sop, he went out, and it was night in him as in the world.
V. Given all this, we can better feel the force of St. Paul’s words to those who had never known Christ in the flesh but had heard His Gospel. He could tell them boldly: there is no one walking your streets claiming to be Lord of nature and man, commanding wind and sea, whom evil spirits call the Son of God; no such person sits bodily in your harbor preaching to worshippers of your goddess. But there are thoughts within all of you — Jews, heathens, baptized alike — accusing or excusing one another. You are all reproved — not by magistrate, synagogue ruler, or church officer, who cannot know your secret acts, words, thoughts, and states of mind, and would understand them only imperfectly even if you tried to confess them. Another eye than theirs is looking into these; another light than theirs manifests them to yourselves. For whatever makes manifest is light. Whenever you are thus reproved and judged, be sure a Light is with you and near you — the very Light that stirred the Pharisee’s fury, that led the Samaritan woman to say “he told me all things that ever I did,” that scattered confusion and unbelief in His chosen followers, that drove Judas, when he could bear it no longer, to kill himself. It is not some other light. It is the same Light that lightens every man who comes into the world.
VI. And so he could say with confidence: “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” Such words he addressed continually to unbelievers of the synagogue and worshippers of Diana — he could have preached no Gospel to either without telling them that the divine Light had been manifested, that the Word in whom it dwelt had been made flesh, claiming all nations as children of Light, with power to turn them from darkness and the Prince of Darkness to the God in whom is no darkness at all. But now Paul speaks to those already baptized into Christ’s name, who claimed to be illuminated, children of Light, admitted into the family named in the only-begotten Son. What was true for all men in general was true in the highest sense for them; they were meant to witness to all men how true it was. Their profession declared that there is no light in any human being except what comes from Christ, the Head of Man, who has brought His Light near to every heart and conscience, to be received or shut out. If they supposed their profession excused them from coming to the Light and walking in it, if they supposed there was no darkness in them and no danger of being lost in it, the Light would soon reprove them, revealing evils they never suspected, or thought long dead, and showing how those evils infected their daily words and acts. And how good it was for them that these painful discoveries should be made! It proved they had not extinguished the light, though they had forgotten it — that Christ was indeed present and manifesting Himself, however little they heeded or wanted His presence. Their lazy trust in a mere name, in belonging to the Church, might well draw them into a sleep so deep that every spiritual faculty grew numb — a sleep akin to death, perhaps its beginning. But there was a voice the dead in their graves would hear, saying always, “Awake, arise!” The moment that voice woke even the faintest response, it would be felt to come from One to whom they could confess their dullness, their incapacity for good, their bent toward evil, and who could bring them back into fellowship with the Light they had fled.
And, brethren, if these words are not as true for the nineteenth century as the first, for Englishmen as for Ephesians, applicable without the slightest change of meaning, I do not see what a minister of Christ has to do, or how he dares speak to any congregation, rich or poor, learned or unlearned. He may say to every human being: whatever reproves you for any evil act, thought, or habit is Light. It is not the light of your fellow-creatures’ opinions — that opinion itself is often what it reproves you for following. It is not the light of maxims picked up from schools or the world — it often exposes the feebleness and falsehood of such maxims. It is Light from God Himself, who knows the secrets of your spirit and can converse directly with you. It is the Light of which the sun’s light is only the outward, imperfect image — the Light that dwelt in Him who is the brightness of the Father’s glory and the image of His Person; the Light that shone in Christ’s acts of power, shone brightest in His humiliation, weakness, and agony, came forth when the powers of Darkness seemed almighty, and proved victorious over grave and hell. It is the Light gathered up in Him who ascended to fill all things, manifesting itself ever since through men, to men, in men — without which there would be no Church, nation, family, or order among men, no evil detected or mischief redressed; which has been to the fertility of human lives and societies what visible light is to the fertility of the earth. Yes, this Light and no other causes the smart and sting of conscience, recalls old bad deeds, shows us what degrades and defiles us now. It makes each of us ashamed of the fraud, the equivocation, the acted lie we once were proud of and thought had deceived our neighbor rather than destroyed ourselves. It makes us cry out against the world’s corruptions until we suspect those very corruptions are in ourselves — a suspicion that leads most of us to a shameful tolerance of what we secretly wish indulged in ourselves, but leads a few to greater indignation against wrong and greater earnestness in rooting it out, because they know what it is and where it comes from. And if this is the light within you, awake, arise! For what makes manifest is Light, and Christ will give you Light. Do not merely speak of the light in your conscience — it is there, no doubt, but believing in a conscience will not reform you or free you from your confusions. Believe instead that the light is Christ’s, that it has come from Him into your heart, that He can give you power to follow it, walk in it, and love it. Believe that the light visiting you in your most secret hours is the very Light that will one day shine on the whole universe. The Christ manifested in Galilee and Jerusalem, to Pharisees, publicans, and disciples; manifested to Ephesians, Corinthians, and Romans, preached by Paul, believed in and confessed in baptism by Gauls and Britons, manifested since to every suppliant sinner, every self-righteous man, every hypocrite in every age — is the Christ who will be revealed on the day of God’s final victory over all His enemies.