Sixth Sunday after Trinity
July 11, 1858
“Then said Jesus unto His disciples, If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and then He shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in His kingdom.”—Matthew xvi. 24-28.
The passage: Jesus told his disciples that anyone who wants to follow him must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow. Whoever tries to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for Jesus’ sake will find it. What good is it to gain the whole world and lose one’s own soul, or what could a man give in exchange for it? The Son of Man will come in his Father’s glory with his angels and reward everyone according to his works. Some standing there would not die before they saw the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.
Last Sunday I tried to show that we reach a true idea of the purpose and effects of the Lord’s Supper if we begin by seeing that it shows or declares the Lord’s death until he comes. I foresaw a very practical objection, one many would feel without being able to state it. “Do we not come to Christ’s Table for the sake of our own souls? Does it not say, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you? Does not the minister, as he gives the elements, speak to each man of his body and soul, and of Christ having died for him? Even if it is a duty to declare Christ to men, does this language not point to a different duty, to our own personal salvation? Does it not suggest that Christ’s death, though in some sense for all, is in its highest and only important sense for the person who can appropriate it, who can say, ‘I have signs within me which most people lack that I belong to Christ’?”
There is so much in the thoughts behind these questions that I think profoundly Christian and true, and so much that I think anti-Christian and false, that I dare not try to separate them by any skill of my own. But they have been separated by the divinest skill. Our Lord has himself undertaken his proper office of dividing the wheat from the chaff in them. Some of the words I read set out as strongly as words can the preciousness of the soul and the worthlessness of the whole world beside it. Every preacher who wants to press that point turns to them. But he must not, to strengthen an argument or find a handy motto, divide sentences that Christ has joined and that illuminate each other. He must be especially wary if he is tempted to do so out of a notion that he might weaken his own exhortations by letting another part of his Master’s exhortation be heard. The least suspicion of such a motive should make him tremble for his honesty and lead him to meditate on the whole discourse.
None of us can boast that he will not yield to this temptation, since our translators, excellent men as they were, certainly yielded to it here. They knew that the word they rendered “life” in the 25th verse is the same word they rendered “soul” in the 26th. They were afraid to say that if a man loses his soul he shall save it, which sounded dangerous. They were afraid to weaken the tremendous question “What is a man profited if he gain the whole world?” by turning “soul” into “life.” So they took a course that, considering whose words these were, must be called not cowardly compromise but desperate hardihood. They destroyed the coherence of the passage and made Him who spoke as never man spoke play with words as the juggling rhetoricians of the earth do. It is a solemn warning of a peril we all share: thinking ourselves wiser than God and better able to guard his truth than he is.
I. The first verse contains the subject of the whole passage. Peter had confessed, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and that confession drew a divine blessing and promise on him and on the Church. From then on Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer many things from the elders, priests and scribes, be killed, and be raised on the third day. Those who knew he was the Son of the living God were also to know by what acts he would establish his Sonship. But Peter, to whom the one truth had been revealed by the Father and not by flesh and blood, was trusting flesh and blood about the other. He rebuked Jesus: this shall not happen to you. Jesus answered, “Get thee behind me, Satan; thou art an offence to me, for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.” No soft language was possible. He who was to open the kingdom of heaven could not do so without understanding that the King must endure the sharpness of death. The second speech annulled the first, and a glorious witness became an adversary. It is a notable foreshadowing of equally sudden changes in later ages of the Church, from the same causes. Later ministers, like Peter, would be puffed up by a divine testimony to words they had spoken under divine conviction. They would trust their intellects to conclude what must be from what had been shown them of what is. So they too would rebuke Christ for his own words, and receive a withering rebuke in their consciences.
But our Lord did more than announce that his own sacrifice was necessary to his character as a son. He had come to be the first-born of many brethren, adopted into his family and bearing its tokens. So he told the disciples, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.” The force of deny himself can be learnt only from him. In every word and act he had said, “I can do nothing of my own self. The Son doeth what he seeth the Father do. The words that I speak are not of myself.” From the day of his temptation, when he refused to prove himself the Son of God by working to feed himself, to display his power, or to take possession of his kingdom, until his death, he practised this self-denial and so revealed the Father. The Cross gathered up all that earlier sacrifice. It was the complete surrender of himself to his Father’s will, and it expressed the meaning of his life. Having proved this to be the true life of man, the law of human life, he called men to enter into it with him. No one could follow him on other terms, and anyone might follow and claim his place as a son of God on these terms. Self-denial is not an occasional act. It is the ground of man’s existence because it is the ground of his, and the Cross is to be taken up daily, not as a meritorious service but as submission to a law that it would be monstrous to violate.
II. Taking this as the starting-point, we are ready for the next verse: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” I admit there is a difficulty in the word ψυχή that even the most accomplished philosophers might not remove, and the study of the New Testament might not fully remove it either. Even if the translators had mastered the Greek speculations, they might still doubt whether it means the life animals share with men, or the intellectual life as opposed to the animal, or the consciousness of personal identity which, being simple and indivisible, cannot (the sages say) dissolve as composite things do. They might also recall that the word is not a favourite in the Gospels or Epistles, and that St. Paul uses the cognate adjective somewhat disparagingly, as opposed to spiritual. Had they kept consistently to “life” or to “soul,” I could not fault them. But they could not read the previous verse, or the parallel in St. Luke, without seeing that whatever the technical sense of ψυχή elsewhere, our Lord uses it as equivalent to Self. Whatever Self includes, it denotes here. Call it Life if you like, but then it must be the entire life of the man as an individual, whatever distinguishes him from his fellows. This is what those who would save it will lose, and what those who are content to lose it will find.
Some think the words “for my sake” qualify the sentence: give up your life for Christ and he will save your soul. We are sometimes told the early martyrs acted on this calculation, abandoning what would last only a few years to gain a future, permanent treasure. Some of their letters and exhortations may suggest such a thought, and they may have used language at the scaffold or stake to which we can put this interpretation. But take their acts as the commentary on their words, count their devotions as the most authoritative part of their words, and allow for the false colouring a cold spectator who has caught none of their inspiration may add. Then I think it is evident enough that they gave their bodies to be burnt or crucified because they had first given their whole selves to Christ. If they were not ready, like the Master, to pour out their souls as well as their bodies, they confessed this as a weakness and sin, a lack of full participation in his sacrifice. Until that reluctance was removed there would still be a shrinking from the Cross, and perhaps this more than anything explains the recantations and compromises of those who failed in the last hour.
I am also less willing than some to think that the eagerness of men in the Middle Ages to become soldiers of the Cross came chiefly from the notion that present risk of death for Christ could avert future punishment for their crimes. I admit that motive intruded, and priests and popes turned it to shameful account, supposing sinful men capable of no other. I beg those who today would call on the same selfish instincts to rouse men to acts they deem religious to consider whether they are abetting the very immorality that, with the best evidence, they say the priestly artifices of those days promoted. But the brave and true deeds mixed with that immorality cannot have had the same origin as the evil that defiled them. They came, I think, from a sense in men’s hearts that a common Saviour and Lord, to whom they might give body and soul, in whose purity they might hide their dark selves, and who had gone into death and the grave for saints and sinners, would not refuse anyone who wanted a share in his Cross and Sepulchre. Such a belief, amid whatever confusions and sensual forms, lay deep in the hearts of many whom we pity and scorn from our serene heights. Would to God it might take possession of us! Would to God we might learn, by any discipline, the right, the privilege and the necessity of losing ourselves, not a part but the whole, for Christ’s sake, so that his human sympathies might drive out our self-seeking and the Divine nature of the second Adam destroy in us the sordid nature of the first!
III. Then we shall feel with quite another force the two awful questions of the next verse: “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? And what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”
Few of us have, or think we have, so high an ambition as this text speaks of. We do not want the whole world, only some little portion of it. We have set our minds on a special end such as money or reputation, or a general one we call success or happiness, and we expect to find ourselves in finding it. The soul that thirsts for these things expects to take its ease and be merry when it has them. But they are hard to get, and much must be given up before the prize is won. What must be given up? Our Lord says it is the very thing we are trying to save or find: the soul. For the sake of money, reputation, success or happiness, the man must part with himself. Does he mean that the soul will be lost hereafter, perish in another world? Oh, brethren, does he not mean something more fearful still, something that makes that fear real and definite, which otherwise would be vague and easily put away? Does he not tell us the soul is lost here, and recall to us what we continually see? Look at the pleasure-hunter, the gold-hunter, the fame-hunter. It is all the same. The thing sought is won, or nearly won, but where is the winner? The price was paid beforehand. The debtor’s own person was the security. The life that was to be enjoyed when all was acquired has gone in the acquiring.
So the first question answers itself: what is the man profited if he gains the world and loses himself? Nothing depends on the quantity of good realized. No addition to the gold, pleasure or fame makes any difference. The man has devoted and sacrificed himself, so what is the world to him? Look at the jaded, hopeless faces in any authentic picture of a great day of self-seeking enjoyment, and the worn, anxious faces in any picture of those who have spent their lives in self-seeking business, and read there the true sermon on our Lord’s words. I do not mean the day after the pleasure, or the failures that cast money-getters from their thrones. I mean the day itself, and the time when the world worships them. Meditate on that, and then on the words, “He that saveth his life shall lose it.”
But there is another question: “What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” We sometimes fancy this is only a repetition of the former, and read it as “What shall a man get in exchange for his soul?” But our Lord does not speak unnecessary words or use words in a perverted sense. I think the question “What can I give in exchange for my soul?” is one we have all asked at times. “I do not wish to give my whole self to pleasure or money. It is my main pursuit, my chief end, but I expect to reserve something from it: some energy, conscience, affection, hope.” It will not do. The divinity I have chosen will not be served on such terms. There can be no bargaining: “Thyself, thyself I must have, nothing less and nothing but that.” So again, when a man perceives that there is another Being to whom he owes homage, whose nature is altogether different from what he has been worshipping in his heart, he reasons: “I must have offended him. How can I pacify him? My soul is another’s, but what can I give in exchange for it? Calves of a year old? Rivers of oil? The first-born of my body?” All experiments are made and none succeed. This God claims thyself. Nothing else will satisfy him: “My son, give me thy heart. If not that, I care for nothing else.”
IV. But what relation is there between this and the next sentence: “For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father, with His Angels, and then shall He reward every man according to his works”?
The relation arises from that between the man spoken of in the first and the Son of Man who is the subject of the other. The self-seeker has been separating himself from his kind, his race, or has only used its members as instruments for his own ends. He has forgotten the Man, the Son of Man, the bond of the whole race, who gave himself a Sacrifice for all its members. The man who has given up himself has done so for Christ’s sake, because he believes in a Son of Man, knows he is not a separate creature, and does not wish in death or life to be divided from him who died for all and lives for all.
Out of these opposite states of mind the most opposite acts must come. I do not mean that either class lays down a scheme of conduct, or that one is deliberately neglectful of all duties and charities while the other observes them scrupulously. But the spirit of self-seeking, once it masters a person, moulds his thoughts and deeds, and the Spirit of the Son of Man moulds the thoughts and acts of each who submits to his government. So when it is said that the Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father and the angels and reward every man according to his works, I understand that one principle, and every act that has issued from it, will be shown to be eternally false, and the other eternally true. Christ will prove before the universe that he counts the lowest of those creatures whom the self-seekers despised or used as tools, and whom the self-deniers honoured, as his brethren, and that whatever was done to any one of them was done to him.
V. I dare not omit the last verse, though it may not seem essential to my purpose, since our Lord introduces it so solemnly: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” I see no other meaning for it than the usual one. There were some, St. John at least, who would stay on earth till the fall of the city and temple over which Jesus had wept, and till those who rejected him were scattered through the earth. But why should these sad and portentous events be signs that the Kingdom of the Son of Man had come? I think it is because the ground on which the Jews opposed our Lord and his Apostles was precisely that he appeared not only as Heir of David but as Son of Man; people of all nations were claimed in him as children of God along with those who boasted of being children of Abraham; and his death was shown forth as a death for mankind. The fall of the exclusive nation was therefore an authentic testimony that a Kingdom was established which, however little earthly rulers might confess it or its own nominal members understand it, could have no meaner title than “the Kingdom of the Son of Man.”
VI. To that Kingdom we belong. When we are received into it by Baptism we renounce our private, selfish life. We claim, as St. Paul says, to die and be buried with Christ. We affirm that there is no life but the life of the Son of Man, and ask for ourselves and our children to be quickened with it. That first Sacrament is framed on our Lord’s universal and everlasting maxim: he that saveth his life, his own separate life, shall lose it, and he that loseth it for Christ’s sake shall find it. In it we declare that there is a common death and a common life for all men, and for ourselves and our households we say we will have no other.
The words “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” repeat and enforce that maxim for those engaged in the hard battle of the world. They remind us of the daily, hourly temptation to seek a life of our own, and to forget that the eternal law of God and the unchangeable conditions of our being bind us to our fellows and to their Father and ours in the Well-beloved Son. They remind us that the selfish life is no life but death, and that to choose it is to choose death. We are not bound to choose it. In doing so we renounce our true human state, try to cast off bonds that actually hold us, and resist God’s Spirit. They remind us that the common life is still with us, that the Son of Man is still the same, that his flesh and blood were really given for the life of the world, and that our spirits groan for that life, to be delivered from the death into which self-pleasing and self-seeking have brought them.
VII. When a man hears the invitation to the Lord’s Supper and is bidden to eat common bread and drink common wine, what should his thoughts be? Should they be: “Here is a way of saving myself, a privilege granted because I am better than others, a chance to put myself in a higher condition”? Or should they be: “I have lost myself by trying to save myself. I have asserted special privileges on the ground of special fortune or merit, and the fortune and merit have vanished, I know not where. I have tried to lift myself above other men. Oh, God, that I might at last be one of them, feel with them, suffer with them! And here is the message that I may have this great gift. Christ bids my spirit partake of the flesh and blood he shed for the world, as my body partakes of bread and wine. It is what I need. It takes away the selfish glory I coveted and clothes me with the human glory I renounced. It bids me cast off the intolerable weight of cares about my body and soul and throw myself on that sacrificing love which provides for all and each, which seeks to make me its minister to others, and which can bless me no more than by forming me after its own likeness.”
Yes, it is about losing ourselves that we are to think, and the finding we leave to Christ. It is necessary, indeed, to remember that what we lose we shall find, lest we fall into pantheistic dreams of all personal life and distinctness being absorbed into the great Whole or the Divine Nature. Such notions will not torment or overcome us while we believe in a Son of Man who gave his soul and body to death, but brought both out of death and ascended with both to his Father’s right hand. While we celebrate the sacrifice of his death and thank him that we are made in the likeness of that death, we may look forward to being made in the likeness of his resurrection. No precious energy or affection he has bestowed can be meant to perish. Our personal being is safe when we entrust it to him. We do not enter into the fulness of his sacrifice if we are considering how to save our bodies or souls. But when we have resigned ourselves to him, his minister may say to us in his name, “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee because thou art a man,—the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee because thou art a man, preserve thy body and soul unto eternal life.”
If there has been a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, we may trust that the Father who accepted it will draw our spirits, however sunken in evil, to his Son, and at last draw all men to him. If there has been no such sacrifice for the world, if men may speak of it as a sacrifice nominally for all and really for very few, then we have nothing to feed upon. Then no Son of Man has come or will come, and no power can raise us out of the pit of selfishness. Prayers, offerings and all the machinery of worship will only plunge us deeper into it. Then there is no Eternal Life, for that is the fruition of the Divine Love, but there is an Eternal Death, for that is communion with the Spirit of Selfishness and subjection to him.