The Christmas Gathering

“Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto Him.”—2 Thessalonians ii. 1.

This verse, you will perceive, is not a complete sentence. It is the ground of an exhortation, the substance of which is contained in the verses that follow. I should very seldom venture thus to dislocate a passage of Scripture. We have no right, for the sake of a convenient phrase, of a useful moral, to pervert the sense of an Apostle. It should be rebuked if we compelled the words of a profane author to receive a meaning which we had put into them. Are we to follow a less severe rule when we are dealing with sacred authors?

But I have no wish to overlook the teaching of St. Paul in the rest of this chapter, while I am examining the language which introduces it. I do not think we can understand one without the other; when we have considered both, we shall see that the former clause suggests and recalls the latter. The Thessalonians had been troubled by some words which St. Paul had dropped while he was with them, which he had emphatically repeated in his first letter, respecting a day of the Lord which was approaching them. A portion of them, it would seem, had abstained from their ordinary work, had thought it unnecessary or irreligious to provide for the wants of their families since Christ was at hand.

He denounces this method of preparing for the Lord, in no soft phrases. Those who would not work were not to eat, those who would not provide for their own were worse than infidels. But this was not enough. Before that day came which he had so distinctly announced, he believed that there would be a sifting of all the Churches; that many members in each, perhaps many societies, would fall away from the faith. Before that day of Christ’s revelation, he believed there would be the revelation of an Anti-Christ, of one in all respects the opposite of the Deliverer; of one who would nevertheless attract Jews, Gentiles, baptized men into his circle, and receive their homage. The Thessalonians might be involved in this Apostasy as much as any of those who had put on Christ. The very habits which they were cultivating, for the purpose of recommending themselves to the true King, might prepare them for the work and the service of His enemy. The “Man of Sin” might be embodied in the person of some emperor, some Jewish enchanter, some pseudo-Apostle. But he would collect into himself all the evils which were floating among heathens, among Hebrews, and among those who were sealed with the name of the Father, of the Son, and the Holy Ghost. All would worship him who saw in him the complete representative of that which they were aspiring to be. To warn them, therefore, that they would be exposed to this temptation; that it was not safe to anticipate the coming of One in Whom all good would be gathered up, without anticipating the coming of one in whom all evil would be gathered up; to warn them that the evil would claim their allegiance as well as the good, was to give them the most practical lesson which their spiritual father could give. It was not a too fervent or passionate adjuration to “beseech them, by the coming of Christ and the gathering together in Him,” that they would remember what He was saying to them.

I do not, however, look upon the words merely or chiefly as an adjuration. The preposition ὑπέρ is more naturally and commonly rendered “for the sake of,” than “by.” If we substitute that rendering we shall perhaps make his meaning clearer. “Let me beseech you for the sake of that appearing of Christ which I have bidden you expect and desire continually—for the sake of that gathering together of all the limbs of the spiritual body in the One Head—not to let any expressions of mine about that appearing and that gathering together make you forget that there will be another appearing, the appearing of one who will scatter, not gather,—and that you, children of God as you are, claimed as such by baptism, sealed as such by the Spirit, may reject the Son of Man, and ask for the Man of Sin to reign over you.” He does not merely appeal to them by the most sacred and dear of all names, by the highest of all expectations. He makes use of that name and that expectation as a charm and a power to preserve them from the Apostasy, to prevent them from becoming the legemen of the Destroyer—from swelling his triumph and partaking his doom.

There are passages in this discourse, about the meaning of which we may guess, without arriving at any satisfactory conclusion. St. Paul speaks of a certain hindrance to the full revelation of the Antichrist, which he had told the Thessalonians of when he was with them. That hindrance, he says, still existed: in due time it would be taken out of the way; then the Man of Sin would come forth in his complete proportions; then would follow the hour of his defeat and downfall. It was of great practical importance to the Thessalonians, that they should know what this hindrance was; and the Apostle says that they did know. To us the question is one of historical curiosity. It may be worthy of investigation, but we may lose ourselves in the inquiry, and so forget that in our day too there is a Mystery of Iniquity working; that in our age that mystery may at last have some visible embodiment; that in our age there may be some outward impediment which is preventing it from being fully displayed; that, so far as that is a merely outward impediment,—be it law, be it an ecclesiastical system, be it what it may,—we cannot trust to it. When the internal evil, the poison which has infected society, has reached the heart—when it has overcome the good which is fighting with it there, the restraints of tradition, custom, fear, which hold in the giant of malevolence, will be rent asunder by him like tow. He must encounter some mightier foe than these; all who know of no other, and depend upon them, will believe him to be omnipotent.

I think that we may enter most fully and practically into the whole lesson which the Apostle is imparting to the Thessalonians, if we dwell on his first words, and consider how these words bear upon our own lives. I see in them a meaning that I think belongs specially to Christmas Day—to this Christmas even more than to most others; that connects together those Advents of Christ which, as I said three Sundays ago, we are so apt to separate from each other, and even to contrast with each other; finally, that tells us what is the internal relation between the Festival of Christ’s Birth and that Feast, in which we show forth His Death till He come.

I. Severe Protestants in former times, especially the Puritans of England and Scotland, spoke many hard words about Christmas Day. It had a heathenish origin, they said; it was a modern adaptation of the old Saturnalia; it did not commemorate the real day of the Nativity; Popery was lurking in the very name; we had got rid of the Mass, but here the remembrance of it survived; the most popular of all our holidays bound us to the nations, from the idolatries of which we had separated. It is very likely that the answers which were made to these specious arguments were little understood, and only affected a few. Nevertheless, in Protestant Germany, even in Presbyterian Scotland, even among the descendants of those who called the day accursed, it has maintained its ground; has preserved its social character; has been able to assert that character as somehow involved in its spiritual meaning. There is that here which is too strong for preaching, nay, even for the swords and clubs of iconoclasts. These have been able to hinder the introduction of many foreign practices, to destroy much of mere ceremonial. But they were as little able to shake the observance of Christmas Day as the French Directory were to substitute decades for weeks. The reasons alleged against it have fallen very dead. What if there was a heathen festival which testified that slaves for one day in the year were men? Was not that a natural and reasonable anticipation of a day which was to speak of liberty to captives? Ought not heathens to have shown that they looked for a Deliverer, that they believed there was a deliverer? The chronological pedantry was as little regarded De minimis non curat the Gospel any more than the Law. The birthday of ordinary heroes is often unknown, yet men have been sure that they had a birth, and have chosen some day for remembering it. If the Incarnation is a fact at all, what a fact it must be for mankind! What a trifle it must be, whether the Babe was laid in the manger in September or December! As little could the conscience of Protestant England be disturbed in its observance by shrieks about a Popish name. What the name signified, the people might not well know; but it seemed to signify something about a bond of union between human beings of all classes and opinions, in all times and places. They knew that they had fellowship with Papists in buying and selling; that they had a flesh and blood essentially like those which Papists have. Their hearts said, “If we disclaim communion with them, in this name on this day, we are committing the sin which we charge upon them.”

These were broad, simple conclusions of plain people, arrived at by no processes of logic, far firmer than any logic. And why? The text tells us. It has not been a false instinct, but a profoundly true instinct, which connected the coming of Christ with gatherings together, with associations of kinsfolk and friends, with the most genial human fellowship. God must have put these thoughts into the hearts of men. He must have kept them alive. And those who can see in them only vulgar perversions of a divine mystery,—who do not hail them as the acknowledgment, half unconscious possibly, but deserving to be brought into the fullest and clearest consciousness, that our race can only be united in a Living Head, are in danger of dwarfing Christ to the limits of their individual wants and experiences, of regarding Him as their servant rather than their Lord.

But the more we honour this idea of Christmas, the more we endeavour to seize it ourselves,—feeling that so we are likely to keep the day as God would have us keep it, the more must we lay our account with finding a deep sorrow in the midst of its gladness.

Every Christmas gathering reminds those who take part in it, how families once united are scattered over the earth; what havoc death has made in them; how strifes worse than death have invaded them. One scarcely knows how to think of this present week; what a number of English firesides will be darkened by the recollection of faces which shed gladness over them, and which are seen no more; what efforts, noble efforts, will be made by many to hide thoughts which are always present with them, lest they shall cast their own shadows upon the young. If Christmas were only a festival, and we did not know what festival, such thoughts would be simply overwhelming; the gaiety would appear the most unreal mockery,—the dressing of a death’s head. But look at it as an indication, a prophecy; think of the coming of Christ in the flesh as the preparation and foretaste of a glorious coming; consider that as the true gathering in of the children to their Father’s house, as the time when the word home is to find its full signification, when Society shall be a fact, and not a name; look thus upon this Feast of the Nativity, and then all is changed. The face that you have ever known, which expressed the warmest, kindliest greeting, is the herald of a more cordial welcome that is to be; the voice which rings in your ear as fullest of music and joy, was uttering the first notes of a perfect harmony, in which it will one day bear a part. The beautiful things we are conversant with here are not, as dreary moralists sometimes tell us, only delusive phantoms, which are to last for an hour, and leave darkness and death behind them; they are promises and pledges of a light and life that are to survive the darkness and death; they are buds of hope, all the more wonderful for the cold airs which nip them; their feebleness and imperfection, and the cry of bitterness which rises out of our hearts when they vanish, are themselves assurances that they and we have capacities for that which is strong and perfect; they keep alive the sense of immortality in our hearts, when it is most flagging and faint.

Must not this be so, if the Nativity is the warrant for human sympathy and gladness? Did not that speak of feebleness and disappointment? There is a promise from Heaven of Glory to God in the highest. On earth all is inglorious and low. There is a promise of Peace. But the Child comes with a sword; the innocents die for its sake. There is a promise of Goodwill, but factions are raging everywhere; raging most in the holy city. The Birth is the fitting prelude to the life. Thirty years of obscurity and silence; then two or three years in public; still of humiliation, only with flashes of glory between; still of contention, only “Peace I leave with you,” but that Peace to be received into the heart, amidst all outward throes of war; still of bitter factions, centring their hatred upon the Son of Man, bringing Him at last to death; only the “Father forgive them” testifying that there is a good Will which is higher than the will to evil. Can you have a more perfect Image of that which is passing in every region where men are dwelling? All looks like this; glimpses of brightness amidst a general gloom, the glimpses at last going out in death. Nothing achieved; all hopes blighted. All is like this if there is no Resurrection, no appearance in glory. If there is, the bright Apostolical vision of human life and destiny must be the right one; that into which we naturally and habitually fall, the wrong one. We must not talk of any hopes which men have ever cherished in any age—hopes of social amelioration, hopes of spiritual renovation—as abortive. All were inspired by Him, all are gathered up in Him, all are to be fulfilled when He comes forth and is revealed as He is. That must be the revelation of the union of all things and all Persons as they were created in Him; that must be the Manifestation of the Sons of God.

II. And if so, surely the thought of Christ’s full and perfect coming—of our gathering together in Him—must make Christmas, which is the pledge and witness of it, a time of awful warning as well as of blessed hope. Do I mean of hope to one set of people, of warning to another? No; but of hope to all people, of warning to all people. For if the gathering together of all as one family in Christ is the fulfilment of the Mystery of Godliness, the entire separation of the brethren of that family must be the fulfilment of the Mystery of Iniquity. For all men to confess that they have an Elder Brother, a Father to Whom they are united in Him; for none to exalt himself above another, or to think that he has a separate interest from another, this must be the perfection of human and divine Society, this must be the heavenly state. For men to feel that they absolutely know no bonds to each other, that each exists for himself—this must be the destruction of all that has been partially good and blessed here, of all that we have seen the dawn of on our Christmas-day meetings, this must be the state of Hell. And who dares say that this mystery of iniquity is not working in him? What Christian society does not at times exhibit features, which betray a hellish parentage, which might unfold themselves into the full likeness of the spirit from whom they have been derived? Oh! it is not death which is rending families, nations, Churches, asunder. Christ has overcome death. We may claim His Nativity as the witness that Life has come into a world of beings whom death has severed from each other to make them one. It is the dark suspicion of our fellows, the notion that they are thinking evil of us or undervaluing us or plotting against us, it is the secret whisper, or the hidden conceit of our own importance and our own injuries, it is this which creeps so stealthily into us, which gets the dominion over us, and which saps the sympathies of blood, the cordiality of friendship, the recollection of those that are gone. The meanness of party, the class rivalries, the notion that power is good and desirable in itself, apart from its ends, the grovelling morality and the glorification of what is most sordid, which follows when men have lost sight of their common origin and common interests, it is this which undermines a nation, and lays it at the feet of some tyrant who embodies its evils. And the like habits of mind, carried into a more inward region and mixing with the holiest traditions, adopting and degrading the most sacred names—becoming therefore, in a very terrible sense, “spiritual wickedness in high places”—have changed Churches of the living into dens of darkness instead of chambers of Light, till a Voice has been heard out of the midst of them, saying, “Let us depart.”

Brethren, St. Paul beseeches us—Christ Himself beseeches us,—“by His coming, and by our gathering together in Him,” that we will fight against these tendencies within us, which, if they were to come forth and present themselves to us, would take the form of the Antichrist,—would show us exactly what it is that Christ will at last consume with the Spirit of His mouth, and destroy with the brightness of His coming. We need not fear that or any incarnation of evil, provided we are holding fast by the Incarnate Good. What we have to dread is our own hearts, the possibility of our loving this Monster, of our choosing him to reign over us because we have been moulding ourselves into his likeness, because we wish to be such as he will be. And I know not how we can overcome that dreadful inclination, except it be by setting before ourselves a hope which will not make us ashamed, the hope which Apostles cherished, and which they bade their Churches cherish, not of some blessings which should come to them as the rewards of their faith and obedience, but of the revelation of the Son of God, “Who shall gather together in one all things in Himself, both which are in heaven and which are on earth.”

III. To keep that hope alive, to fight with the enemy that is continually striving to rob us of it, the day of our Lord’s Nativity has become Christ-mas, a day for commemorating the full and perfect Atonement which He has made for mankind by His death as well as His birth.

That word Mass would probably less alarm those who object to it, if they considered its etymology. The Missa Catechumenorum speaks of exclusion rather than of fellowship; it reminds us (like “the fencing” in the Scotch Kirk) of those who are not admitted to the Lord’s Table. But this derivation was soon forgotten in the use of the name; it came to represent the whole worship of God; it conveyed the impression that this worship is essentially the offering of a Sacrifice. As the feeling crept more and more into the Church, that the Sacrifice of Christ was not a complete one, the Mass was more and more regarded as that which did what He had left undone. The idea of his Sacrifice as a common Sacrifice, one for all men, is so inseparably connected with the idea of its perfectness, that one was sure to be weakened if the other was weakened; so the practice of saying private Masses—that practice which called forth the most earnest denunciations of the Reformers—naturally and consistently established itself.

Now, against both these abuses,—against all the abuses which have clustered about the idea of Sacrifice in the Romish Church,—we bear a most effectual witness, when we redeem a name nowise sacred or illustrious in its origin, but widely diffused over the nations of Europe—felt as a symbol of their union for this week’s festival. We ought to let all the people who confess the Roman Pontiff as their spiritual head, understand that we too regard all worship as Sacrifice; that we cannot separate Sacrifice from Christ; that we cannot remember that He was born into the world, without remembering that He gave Himself up to birth and death, that He might take away the sins of the world. We ought to make them understand that we protest against nothing but that which circumscribes this communion, which abridges the fullness of the Sacrifice; that a protest of this kind, so help us God, we will never abandon. And we should beseech them by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together in Him, to consider whether they can safely be less Catholic; whether they can call upon us to fraternize as in a lower and more earthly Name than that of Him who was born of the Virgin, and Who shall be revealed in the glory of His Father.

But, brethren, it is not chiefly for the sake of any impression we may make on those who cast us off (though we should spare no pains to show that our confession involves no intentional separation from any), that I would cling to this recollection of the union between the Nativity and the Sacrifice.

If God, of His tender love to mankind, sent His Son not only to take upon Him our flesh, but to suffer death upon the cross, we may be able to face all those thoughts which this season will call up in so many. As they eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, they will be still one with those whom sickness or violence has torn from them; they can be confident that those most dear to them are keeping a more perfect Christmas, not forgetting any with whom they kept it in other days; they will not doubt that as Jesus died and rose again, those who sleep in Him He will bring with Him. As we eat that flesh and drink that blood, we may feel that Christ is binding us by the mightiest of all Sacraments to Him, and to all from whom our own evil natures and the evil spirit would tempt us to be separate; that Christ has been born into a world of sin and strife, to the end that He might give us a second birth to righteousness and peace; that He has died the victim of sin and strife, to the end that all sin and strife might die in us.