The Uniting Name

“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”—Matthew xxviii. 19, 20.

The passage: Jesus tells his disciples to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and teaching them to observe everything he has commanded. He promises to be with them always, to the end of the world.

“Why,” it has often been asked by able, benevolent and reverent men, “did the Early Church dwell so much on mysteries concerning the Name and Nature of God? Why, above all, did it make these mysteries the bonds of communion between its members? Was it not a strange departure from the natural order of Christian education to begin with problems that only a few of the most initiated ever really master? Was it not uncharitable to make shibboleths for the Church in all nations out of expressions that hardly anyone can pronounce without some inaccuracy or stammering? Would not the Sermon on the Mount and the life of Jesus Christ have been an easier yoke for disciples young or old, and the links of a far more comprehensive fellowship?”

Many take the answer almost for granted. They suppose the old Church never thought of charity or comprehension, and aimed only at making its corporation as close and exclusive as possible. Since that ought not to be our aim, and perhaps cannot be, they conclude that the ancient methods are unsuitable for us. The defenders of our creeds mostly accept these premises and dispute only the inference. The early Christians, they say, were zealous above all for Truth, and contended earnestly for the Faith once delivered to the saints. So they could tolerate none of the compromises we justify in the name of concord. Their wisdom was “first pure,” and only then “peaceable.” If those old men could have used a little of our charity, we need all the more their unflinching determination and logical severity to correct our tenderness and looseness. I ask both parties to consider the passage the Church appoints for its Epistle next Sunday before they conclude they have reached the bottom of this question. It would appear that the compilers of the ancient Services, from which ours derive, naturally associated with today’s mystery the lessons “God is Love, and he that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God” and “Whosoever saith that he loveth God and hateth his brother, is a liar.” That is so however much they forgot those lessons when they had power to enforce the doctrine of the Trinity by decrees and excommunications. Even this evidence alone I could not count slight. An act of worship expresses a man’s inmost mind far more than his utterances in passion and controversy. When it belongs to a scheme of devotion, it means more. When a whole society adopts it as its united utterance, regularly and repeatedly, that society gives as distinct a pledge of its convictions as we can imagine. So this cannot be a solitary instance. Remember that the New Testament writer to whom all believers in the Trinity look as its unfolder is the writer these passages come from, and they are felt to reveal the character and purpose of his life. Neither in the early nor, I believe, in the middle ages were these two aspects of St. John’s writings considered apart. Churchmen might persecute cruelly, but they never doubted that he was declaring the name of the God of Infinite Charity when he declared the name into which we are baptized.

There is another way to examine the subject. Leaving St. John and what is called his transcendental lore, we may turn to the earlier Evangelists, from whom some modern authorities say the fourth Gospel departs so widely. We may ask what St. Matthew says of the message entrusted to the Apostles. That message is closely tied to belief in the Trinity. If it is a narrow message, the belief may fairly be charged with drawing lines that shut out different forms of thought, and with them many true and earnest spirits, from the fold of Christ.

I. St. Matthew tells us that after his resurrection Jesus stood on a mountain in Galilee and told his disciples to go, make disciples of all nations, baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and remember that he is with them always. I leave out for now the sentence that introduces this command. I only want you to remember that Galilean fishermen were told to make disciples of all nations. In some way they did make disciples among Jews, the worshippers of the I Am, the Jehovah, and among Greeks, the worshippers of human heroes and the forms of nature. I will go no further and say nothing of traditions about their journeys into more distant lands. Only consider what was needed to bring these two portions of the world into a common fellowship.

Christians today sometimes undertake to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was a far more perfect and Divine Teacher than Socrates, Confucius or Zoroaster. If they succeed, they think they are making disciples of those who revere these reformers. The Galilean fishermen could not possibly have attempted this. They knew nothing of Greek, Chinese or Persian wisdom and could make no comparisons. Had they been able to, what would it have achieved? The nations believed in certain gods. They credited these with any blessings and civilization they had received, and dreaded the punishments and curses these gods could inflict. What was there in announcing a great, benevolent, supernaturally illustrious teacher to displace those convictions or abate those fears? Add what miraculous powers you please, speaking in many tongues and working marvellous cures: if these only demonstrated the greatness of a Man born and dead in Judæa, how could they supplant faith in Divine beings? How could they bring the fragments of faith into a whole?

II. The Galileans could not give “make disciples” this sense, because it was foreign to their own experience. When Jesus said to them “Follow me,” he spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven. He taught them its mysteries and told them to proclaim to their countrymen that it was at hand. Gradually they entered into those words. They found he was revealing a strange world within themselves. He explained by the natural processes they knew best what God was doing in their hearts, and showed through ordinary human relations how they stood to him and to his Father. In every discourse, to them or to the crowd, he spoke of this Father. He said he had come so that they might see the Father’s Image and know his Will, and be formed in that Image and conformed to that Will. They found he meant them to be his ministers in preaching the Father’s Kingdom, in showing its nature, and in proving by healing the sick and casting out devils that it was mightier than all powers of evil and discord. Being Christ’s disciples, how could they suppose they would make all nations his disciples by merely setting him forth as a greater, wiser, holier prophet than any before? How could they do anything to bind the nations into one without a Gospel concerning God? They had to declare plainly and simply Who it was that men had been dreaming of and seeking, in the hope of feeling after him and finding him. He had never been far from any of them. Through all their crude conceptions he had been making himself known in their consciences, and all their idolatries had not hidden or banished him.

III. The words he spoke on the Mount, which I passed over, “All power is given to me in heaven and earth,” were necessary before the disciples could believe that power would descend on them to carry out such a command. Only if he had reconciled earth and heaven, conquered the visible as well as the invisible world, and gathered both up in himself, could they have the credentials or inner might that heralds to the Nations needed. “Go ye therefore” followed naturally from that assurance. But it was not enough. Like Moses, who saw the vision in the burning Mount, they were messengers from God to a sense-bound, earth-bound race, to say that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had seen their affliction and heard their cry and would deliver them. And they had as much need as Moses to ask: When we come and say, The God of your fathers has sent us, and they say, What is his name? what shall we say? The answer was given before the question arose: “Go ye and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

IV. The new and awful Name was proclaimed. But it was not merely proclaimed. The Nations were not just to be told, “This is the Being you must now worship; to this Name the names of the Delphic Apollo and the Jove of the Capitol must bow.” They were told to baptize all nations into this name. Do not speak of it as standing aloof or afar off. This mystery is about them, embracing and sustaining them. This is the Being out of whose presence they cannot go; if they ascend into Heaven he is there, and if they make their bed in Hell he is there. In all their speculations they had beheld, projected at a distance, the vision of an awful Father and a tender Brother. The sense of an Inspirer from whom all their thoughts and desires came had mingled with these visions and disturbed them. Each crossed and obscured the other, and each caught the colours of earth until it seemed only a mist drawn up from earth. Neither could subsist without the other. Neither had any worth except as it was found to be no shadow cast by the worshipper, but the substance from which all the shadows he pursues were cast. Let the Name be heard, but do not bring paltry proofs to prop up the proclamation. It will sustain itself. You can trust God to make his creatures know what he desires them to know. All they have expressed in their mythologies, all they have been unable to express, all the wonders of creation and of their own nature, will be his hornbook. Only let your light shine before those you teach. Show that you come to claim them as your Father’s children, the brethren of his Son, and heirs of the One Spirit. Hold forth the simple sign he has ordained, that he owns and adopts them as sons and seals them with his Spirit. Believe, and tell them to believe, that he writes on them his own Name and the name of the City of their God, and makes them freemen of the New Jerusalem, fellow-heirs with his saints of past and future. Then see whether the idol-thrones do not fall. See whether the Nations can uphold their separate gods any longer, and whether all the pale names do not shrink before the perfect light God has kindled in the dome of this dark world, not for the wise but for the poor, the ignorant, and those who are out of the way.

V. The more we study this history, my brethren, the more convinced we shall be that preaching this Name and baptizing into it were the mighty powers that overthrew the divided, demon-worship of the old world. This was because it was felt that one inclusive Truth had been revealed to mankind. We cannot comprehend it, but it comprehends us. It is a living Truth that speaks itself out in a Person, not in a proposition. We must be received into it, and then it goes with us through life and death. It meets us at every new stage of our education and interprets itself to us by our own trials and by all the trials through which the world or any part of it must pass. Its circle takes in the sage and the little child.

Here is one sign and test of its power. The Church would naturally have restricted Baptism, and we know was disposed to restrict it, to those who could understand the Gospel preached to them: who could intelligently abjure idols, repent consciously of sin, and enter into what the Catechist taught about Christ and the Father. But by a force greater than that of any doctor or all the doctors in Christendom, a force they could not account for but had to yield to, the doctrine established itself everywhere that the infant must also be signed with this Name. I think mankind never won a greater triumph over the prejudices of the appointed heralds of God’s Revelation. If our confession and acceptance of that Revelation is made the first condition of entering God’s Family, the very idea of a Father is lost, and the Son and the Spirit are always in danger of being regarded merely as objects of our reverence. The Name then becomes the one that distinguishes Christians, or certain Christians, from other people, instead of the Name that underlies and bears up the universe.

VI. To put the most beautiful precepts or the divinest example in place of such a Name is to deprive the precepts of their living force and their relation to humanity. It makes the example something wholly external, which we may admire but can only attempt to imitate abortively. After telling the disciples to make disciples of all Nations and baptize them into his Name, our Lord added, “Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” The highest and apparently most hopeless commands of the Sermon on the Mount become possible, and its most amazing promises come within reach of the wayfarer and the sinner, once he knows three things. The Father, whom he is to be like, has taken him into fellowship. The Son, in whom dwelt perfect obedience, has made him a partaker of his nature. The Spirit is with him to create the purity of spirit to which the Kingdom of Heaven belongs, the hunger and thirst after righteousness that will certainly be satisfied. The more we know our own selfish instincts and where they would lead us, the more desperate and often scornful we feel about maxims of morality. They are very fine, and we can talk of them and repeat them, but following them is another matter. The assurance, “You are grafted on a new stock; those selfish impulses are not the laws of your life; you are in Christ new creatures; the name of the Trinity is upon you,” restores to morality its proper sense and vital energy. We feel and confess that when we are not observing all that Christ commanded, it is not because we have walked in the track we were put in, but because we have strayed from his ways like lost sheep.

VII. Yes, brethren, for Christ adds, “Lo! I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” What I commanded on the Mount and when I sat with you in the ship is what I command now. I have commanded it since the world began, and will go on commanding it when your work on earth is over and I have called you home. I am with you, as much as ever the Lord and King of your spirits. I am the bond between you and God, and between you and all the men to whom you go preaching and baptizing. You go to claim their homage not for a Prophet, King or Priest who lived once, but for one who was dead and is alive and lives for evermore. You proclaim not a religion of yours or a master of yours, but the Son of Man and the Son of God. You go in the faith that he was manifested to destroy the works of the Devil: all division, strife, hatred and false worship, whatever rends the world apart and makes it unfit for the habitation of the Eternal God. You go among men who each have a Gentile name that unites him to a family on earth and recalls his forefathers. You go to give them a Christian name, to remind them that they are brothers of a whole family in Heaven as well as on earth. So you go to lay the foundation of a city that lies four-square, its length as large as its breadth, a city of pure gold like clear glass.

VIII. The foundation of that city has been laid, brethren. Every nation of baptized men has confessed it and brought its glory and honour into it. But the city has set itself up as a rival to the nations instead of being their teacher and making them disciples of the Son of God. It has glorified his name, not the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. That is why contention, narrowness and hardness of heart have come into the Church, why this Name has been evil spoken of, and why men have wished to cast it off. What is the very expression of unity, which recognises and harmonises all partial conceptions and is the spring of all free and practical life, has been slandered as a cause of separation. It has been called the contradiction of all that men thought before it was revealed to them, and the driest and most contracted of school theories. But Christ is with us always, to the end of the age. However his ministers have misunderstood his commission and turned it into a curse on those they were sent to bless, he has been present in every generation. He has turned the confusions of the world and the sins of the Church into means of manifesting the glory of the Divine Name. The Church would have kept the nations down, making its own universality an excuse for denying their distinct callings, the blessed work he has given them. He has punished it sorely for this oppression, by worse than outward calamities: by leaving it to the pride, sensuality and worldliness into which it must fall when it usurps powers that are not its own and forgets its true Lord in some visible substitute. Christ has called the nations to vindicate the moral and intellectual freedom without which they cannot worship him. The Church in those nations lost sight of the universality that belongs to it, without which it cannot be a herald to all people. He has punished it by letting sectarianism and divisions creep into every corner, so that the unity of the nations is as shaken as its own deeper and more comprehensive unity. At the same time he has awakened sighs and cries for a larger, more embracing fellowship, which men often try to satisfy by taking refuge in a closer atmosphere than the one they find hard to breathe. Only let them believe that he has not broken his promise and is with them still, and he will show them by degrees that the name put on them at the first gives them a catholicity, a freedom of the universe, that they can find in nothing else. They will find that it throws down no national altar on which we have asked strength, freedom and victory for our land, and that it hallows the family altar where we have worshipped the God of our Fathers. The name of the God of Abraham and Isaac, the name of Jehovah, is not lost in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The perfect and universal revelation explains all the gradual discoveries that led to it, and shows how each connected itself with some permanent part of human society and of man’s inner being. At last it will be proved to be what an ecclesiastical system and philosophical liberalism have tried and failed to be: the assertion of a humanity in which all races equally share. The Church that is to be will not be another than the one that grew up under this commission and has stood ever since in different lands, in different degrees of strength and feebleness, sincerity and corruption. She will only have learned, through hard suffering, the foundation she forgot and the work she neglected. She will cast off whatever wood, hay or stubble, even whatever gold or precious stones, have hidden that foundation from us. She will be purged of whatever loveth and maketh a lie, so that she may understand she is the witness of Truth to all nations. In them she may consecrate temples to hallow their civil order and life, and pour her oil on king and priest. But in herself, in that universal city, the New Jerusalem, St. John writes, “I saw no temple, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.”