Sunday before Easter
March 28, 1858
“For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”—I Corinthians v. 7, 8.
This is one of the texts for Easter Day. It may seem scarcely fit for the beginning of Passion Week. But Passion Week is the preparation for Easter. If we would utter these words aright on the Festival of Christ’s Resurrection, we must have thought on them and learnt to understand them in that time which speaks of His Agony and His Cross. The more simply we take the words, the better; the depth and wonder is not in our way of interpreting them, not even in themselves, but in the fact and in the Person they speak of.
1. It is the Person to Whom St Paul, firstly and chiefly, here and always, directs the minds of his disciples. He does not say, the death of Christ is that which corresponds to the sacrifice of the lamb; or that one sacrifice is the type of the other. But he says broadly, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” The difference may seem a shadowy or unimportant one. I believe we shall find, in our own practice, that there is the distance of a whole Heaven between the one form of speech and the other. There is room for all possible ingenuity and subtlety in detecting resemblances between that which we read in the Old Testament and in the New. But there is infinite danger that the reality of the first as well as of the second may disappear through that very ingenuity. The noble, practical history of the old Fathers may become a visionary picture, a mere likeness, or adumbration of that which we believe to be all-important for ourselves. We may cease to think that the Israelites did actually come out of Egypt,—that they actually slew a lamb,—that they actually ate unleavened bread of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt, because they were thrust out and could not tarry, neither had they prepared themselves any victuals. All this plain, homely narrative may become offensive to our refined tastes, which crave for something that they call spiritual, and that is unsubstantial. And then, by an inevitable and just retribution, the later and deeper truth, for the sake of which we have destroyed the earlier and more obvious one, becomes also impalpable and indefinite. The simple histories of the Passion which we are reading this week cannot be taken just as they are. A refining process must be practised on them too; they must be spiritualized till they become mere mist and vapour,—till they represent only certain feelings and experiences, often very morbid feelings and experiences, of our own minds. Or if we shun this course, which is chiefly attractive to tempers of a fanciful and sentimental cast, we may adopt one which is more hard and quite as unsatisfactory. The history may be turned into a set of dogmas. It is not what our Lord did or spoke that we consider, but what the effects of His doings and His speech were, according to a certain scheme of divinity. It is not He Whom we contemplate, but a theory about Him.
But it is He Whom the Apostle wishes us to contemplate. The Gospel with which he tells the Romans he was entrusted, was a Gospel “concerning Jesus Christ, Who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of Holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.” It is a Gospel concerning a Person, not a Gospel concerning a notion, or consisting of notions. Christ, he tells the same Church, is the end of the Law for righteousness to them that believe. They obtain the righteousness which the Law requires them to obtain,—but which it cannot confer,—by trusting in a Person, in Whom the righteousness dwells livingly, and in Whom it is livingly manifested. Jesus Christ crucified, he tells the Corinthians, is the subject of his preaching, not some fine system of dogmas by which he was distinguished from Cephas or Apollos. Christ was the foundation, he says, on which they were built, not any one of His teachers, not the maxims or doctrines which they taught. Jesus Christ, he tells the Galatians, was revealed in him, that he might preach Him among the Gentiles. He went forth to declare, not some new or higher religion to those Gentiles, but to tell them Who it was that had revealed Himself as the Lord of his spirit, and was the Lord of theirs. In writing to the Ephesians, he blesses the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ, according as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love. A Person, and not a notion, he declares to be the ground of this eternal spiritual constitution; a Person, and not a notion, to be the bond of the spiritual and universal society of Jews and Gentiles, which could only be established when this constitution was manifested by the appearing of Christ in the flesh. The mind which he prays may be in the Philippians, was the mind which was in Jesus Christ,—the mind which actually dwelt in Him Who humbled Himself and took upon Him the form of a servant,—not some ideal mind, some possible or imaginary excellence which had never been embodied. In Christ, he wishes the Colossians to know, dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily; in Him they were complete, Who is the head of all principalities and powers; in Him they were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands; they were buried with Him in baptism, wherein also they had risen with Him, through faith in the operation of God, Who had raised Him from the dead. The relation was a real one, to as real a Being as any with whom they claimed relationship on earth. The simple sign of baptism expressed how living, and actual, and spiritual, and eternal a relation it was. The effect of his preaching to the Thessalonians, he tells them, was, that they turned from idols to serve the living and true God, and waited for His Son from Heaven, Whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come. They received the news of One Who had revealed the living and true Being, His Father and their Father, Who had saved them from wrath. They looked and waited for a revelation of Him as a Person; nothing else would have been any comfort in their sorrows, or satisfaction to the deepest cravings of their hearts.
I give you these examples to prove that St. Paul is not departing from the usual style of his preaching, but is exactly conforming to it, when he says, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,” instead of saying, as we should have perhaps said, “The antitype of the Paschal Lamb has now appeared”; or “that which was denoted and dimly foretold in the outward and temporary arrangements of the Jewish Dispensation,—the remission of sins, and restoration to the Divine favour,—is now perfectly brought out in the Christian scheme.” The awful name, Christ, the Anointed One, supplies the place, in St. Paul’s letters, of all this vague and cumbrous terminology.
2. And yet, surely, he says all that this multitude of words can say; for he adds, Christ “our Passover.” In that one word he gathers up whatever were the meanings and associations of that Festival,—all that the different parts of it expressed to the mind of the Jew,—the whole course of Divine history, from the call of Abraham to the time when the Voice said, “This is He in Whom I am well pleased.” The Passover expressed the deliverance of the first-born of the Israelites, and their consecration to God. It expressed the distinction between them and the Egyptians. It expressed the destruction of oppressors and the redemption of slaves. It expressed the leaving the fleshpots of Egypt for the dreariness of the Wilderness, and the hope of the Promised Land. It expressed humiliation and sorrow. It expressed thankfulness and victory. It expressed the fact that they were under a Divine government, and that they were not under a visible tyrant. As they looked beyond its first institution to the subsequent history, the loss of it was connected with every great relapse into idolatry, and with the divisions and slavery which followed. The restoration of it was connected with every great religious reformation, with the destruction of high places and Moloch feasts, with the recollection that God’s Covenant was with the Land from generation to generation. All these different aspects of the Festival gathered around the one centre of the Lamb. It was his blood which was sprinkled upon the door-posts of the house when the Destroying Angel passed by,—which was the symbol of the entire deliverance. It was the eating of the lamb which was the main business of the Feast: every other command was accessory to this; it was this which reminded them that they formed distinct families and that they formed a whole nation; it was this which brought men from all parts of the earth where they might be scattered, to Jerusalem.
3. “Christ our Passover,” says St. Paul; ours who are of the seed of Abraham according to the flesh, and ours who are grafted into the same stock with them. He signifies all that ever the Passover signified; but the signification is for the whole human family, not for one portion of it. He was the first-born among many brethren. He was devoted, consecrated to God, as the representative of a whole race or family. He declared the true distinction between the flesh in each man, which is devoted to death, and the spirit, which is redeemed and united to God and is quickened with a new life. He claimed for man, in His own Person, deliverance from the oppressor, subjection to the invisible and gracious Ruler. He showed that the fleshly inclinations of man were indeed the prison-house out of which he must be brought, and that his way to liberty and hope lies through a region of darkness and the shadow of death. He showed Himself to be the uniting bond of all creatures, Himself the source of their life, and that apart from Him they must be divided and dead. In all these ways He was their Passover. But every other view of His character was harmonized and concentrated in the view of Him as a Sacrifice. It was the act of giving Himself up which showed what He was; that was the great witness of His filial relation to God, of His entire delight in His Father’s will. That was the witness, at the same time, of His entire identification with those whom He had made His brethren upon earth, of His refusing to be in anywise separate from them in the worst condition into which the worst of them could come, of His refusal to have any life which He would not communicate with them. Above all, it was the witness that everything which He had was His Father’s, that He did nothing but what He saw His Father do, that His love was only the image and reflection of His Father’s love, that the Father was the originator even of that highest and most perfect sacrifice, with which alone He could be satisfied, in which alone He could accept all other sacrifices.
4. Christ our Passover, therefore, he says, is sacrificed for us. The complete oblation has been made. That which is not only the consummation of all others, but the ground of all others, has now been presented, and acknowledged by Him to Whom it was presented. Nothing more remains to be done. The atonement of God and man, of earth and heaven, has been effected. God has claimed man as His servant and child. Man, in Christ’s person, has recognized God as his ruler and father. The sin of the world, the sin of self-will, of distrust, of disobedience, has been taken away. The Lamb of God has borne it with Him on the Cross, and has put it to death there. There is nothing to separate the children from their Father, seeing that He is the perfect daysman between them, in Whom they can look upon Him, in Whom He can look upon them, through Whom they can receive the Spirit, to direct them in their works upon earth, to bind them together as a family on earth, to the larger family within the veil, to enable them to present sacrifices holy and acceptable to God, which is their reasonable service.
5. St. Paul therefore says boldly, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” No one can suppose that by the word us, he understood the Apostles, or the Corinthians, or the men of that age exclusively. He did understand them; he must have meant to have given as much particularity and definiteness to the expression as possible. If his hearers lost the sense of their own benefit in a general notion of a benefit conferred upon the world, his whole purpose in writing to them would have been lost. But on the other hand, they would have had no apprehension of the benefit conferred upon them, if they did not take their stand upon their general human title, if they did not confess that Christ’s incarnation was His taking the nature of man, that His death was a death for man. If they in anywise confined these acts of redemption, the ground upon which they could say, “He has been sacrificed for us,” would have been taken from them.
6. “Therefore let us keep the Feast,” the Apostle goes on. You will remark the order of his discourse: it is perhaps not what you would have expected. We are wont to speak of the Passover as the Feast, and assuredly we are warranted in doing so. St. Paul does not contradict what must have been the ordinary custom and language of his countrymen, as much as it is ours. But he wishes them to remember that the feast denoted a foregone conclusion. It spoke of a deliverance that had been affected, of the Destroying Angel having passed by, of the tyrant having been overthrown. It did not the less speak of a present Deliverer, of a King reigning over them, in each new generation. It did not the less witness that the loss of faith in that present Deliverer and King would bring discomfiture and bondage. If the Jews fancied, as many of them probably did in the time of our Lord’s Incarnation, that eating the Passover was itself a meritorious act, apart from its connection with the deliverance which had been wrought out for them, and from the state into which they had been brought,—if they fancied that it was a mere ordinance or institution, to the observance of which God had appended certain blessings or rewards,—the real grandeur of the service, which lay in its intimate union with God’s acts, in the relation which it denoted between Him and His people, would certainly disappear. They would regard the Passover as a mere submission to a rule or decree; not a fulfilment of God’s Covenant; not the claiming to be as near to Him as their fathers were, nearer to the accomplishment of His greatest promise. If, on the contrary, they argued, as the Sadducees probably did, that the observance of an outward service carried in it no moral worth, was a mere relic of old times, a formality which might as well be dispensed with, they arrived at the same result by a different process. So too they put God at a distance from His creatures; they set aside the belief of any living, regular, habitual communications from Him; they made morality consist in a mere punctual observance of certain precepts, or in qualities of mind which man obtained for himself, which he could congratulate himself upon, and which might either entitle him to the favour of God, or make him into a god.
St. Paul, distinguishing the Christian Feast from the Christian Sacrifice, and yet blending them so closely together, meets both these dangers. Our Passover, he says, is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the Feast. Do not let us forget that a sacrifice has been offered once for all, else the feast has no meaning. It is not a Eucharist: we have nothing to give thanks for. If we are not in the fullest sense redeemed creatures, if God has not claimed us and adopted us as children, and removed the curse of separation from Him, and reconciled us to Himself and to each other,—if all this is not accomplished, then we cannot say truly that Christ is our Passover, that He is the Lamb of God. But if we forget that He lives as a continual Priest, presenting continually His sacrifice before the Father,—if we think that some one act of faith of ours in His Redemption dispenses with the continual sacrifice and devotion of ourselves to Him,—if we think that this sacrifice and devotion is to be a mere solitary act, or that it can be made in some way that we choose, or in some way that does not recognize it as a gift proceeding from God,—we merely submitting ourselves to Him and receiving His grace that we may do His will,—then we shall mistake our position as creatures, and set at naught the infinite blessings that are intended for us.
And surely, brethren, he meant us, as much as the men of any former age, to feel that we are heirs of these blessings. He did not speak of a relation established between God and man as a temporary relation, which could belong to one period or country and not to another. He did not think that Christ could be their Passover without being ours. He did not think that the feast of which they were to eat in full assurance that the Redemption had been finished, that they were possessors of all the liberty and grace which it had wrought out, could be charged with any less meaning for those who should be passing through the world’s wilderness eighteen hundred years after.
If it be a fact that Christ has died,—if all that Passion Week tells us of be not a cunningly devised fable,—we have a right to keep the great feast of His Sacrifice as a Eucharist,—to receive it as the fixed and eternal pledge of our redemption from the deepest curse, of our admission into the highest state of blessedness; that curse being nothing less than the one of separation from God and our brethren, the curse of selfishness and solitude; that blessedness being nothing less than fellowship with God and our brethren, the right and the power of casting aside all in ourselves and in the world which keeps us at a distance from either; the right and power of rising out of our own self-will, self-pleasing, self-glorification; the right and the power of becoming the witnesses and ministers and channels of God’s free love to our race. Of such a redemption and such gifts, the highest that any archangel can receive, this Feast is the assurance to us. When we eat it, we are not doing a meritorious act, but renouncing all claim of merit for any of our acts; submitting simply to be receivers and entertainers of God’s grace. We come confessing the desire to set up ourselves, and to claim merit for ourselves, and all the pride, selfishness, and godlessness which have flowed from that pretension. We do not eat because we are better than those who will not eat, but because we dare not arrogate to ourselves any better position than that which the lowest of them have, because we cannot fancy that we live except by the common grace which dwells in Christ’s death and life.
Passion Week is the most awful protest which human acts or divine acts can make against the notion so natural to us all, that Sacrifice consists in bringing something to God, not in giving up all to Him, as the source of every right thought and right act. Passion Week is a protest against our tendency to make distinctions between ourselves and others. He Who hung on the Cross identified Himself with the soldier who pierced His side, with the priests who wagged their heads, saying, “He saved others; Himself He cannot save.” He carried their sins; He bore their burdens. And we think that we can come to the Cross pleading that we are holier or better than some other men; that our sect or party is the way to God!
7. And this, this is the unceasing application of the last words, “Let us keep the Feast, not with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” The Passover commemorated an accomplished deliverance, a deliverance of a whole people out of bondage, a deliverance that lasted from generation to generation. The eating of the Lamb denoted the fulness of the Redemption. Did the eating of the unleavened bread denote something over and above this,—something which the man must do, that God’s work might be more perfect? Surely not. It denoted that the man was to abstain from mixing with the reception of God’s ordinance anything of his own. He was simply to receive and give thanks. St. Paul teaches us, Passion Week teaches us, the force and terribleness of the lesson. God’s Sacraments stand not in the clearness or refinement of our thoughts about them, in our correct or incorrect judgments of their nature. They rise above all our thoughts and judgments. They are expressive of His Will. They speak of a Sacrifice offered once for all, of a complete Atonement between heaven and earth. But we would bring to these Sacraments the foul leaven of our plots, and schemes, and calculations. We would be thinking, “May this man come, or this, or this?” We would argue and debate about the quality of that which is freely given us. We would bring the quarrels of the week, the meanness of the week, the pride of the week, to God’s altar, not to confess them there, not to have them killed there but as a very preparation for eating the divine food; as a way to receive better the pledges of the universal love. This is the leaven of malice and wickedness, which makes the Sacraments of God ineffectual for renovating the condition of the Church, yea which turns them into excuses and arguments for all its bitterest divisions and hatreds.
This malice and wickedness God desires to purge out of His Church, out of the hearts of His children. Herein lies our hope. The Sacrifice of Christ is God’s Sacrifice, not our own. The Sacrament which testifies of that Sacrifice is God’s, not ours. The Sacrifice of Christ is mightier than the sins of the world. The Sacrament will yet prove itself to be mightier than the malice and wickedness of the members of the Church. We may come to the Feast confessing the malice and wickedness which has been in us. God will not send us empty away. He Who of His tender love to mankind gave up His Son for us all, will He not with Him freely give us the purity and love which we have not, and never shall have, in ourselves?