Seventh Sunday after Trinity
July 18, 1858
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all.”—2 Corinthians xiii. 14.
With these words we conclude our daily prayer, morning and evening. Doubtless the compilers of our Service thought that they expressed the deepest ground of Prayer, its inmost meaning, its most perfect result. I have chosen them to-day, because I hope we may find in them the solution of a difficulty concerning the relation of Prayer to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, which is besetting some very earnest minds, not wont to occupy themselves with mere trifles of controversy. “Can we say,” it has been asked, “that the presence of our Lord, which is promised in the Eucharist, is a presence of a different kind from that which a faithful Christian may expect in ordinary prayer?” The negative answer is given very decidedly by some who have no dream of disparaging the Sacrament, but who are greatly afraid of converting it into a charm; who are sure that they shall lower its power and dignity if they diminish its truth. Possibly their proposition, as they state it, seems to them almost incontrovertible. But it does encounter a strong opposition, one, I think, which is entitled to the highest possible respect, one which involves and asserts a truth that cannot safely be set aside or tampered with. What I mean may be more intelligible, and the whole subject relieved of some of its embarrassment, if we consider, not what is demanded for the honour of the Eucharist, but what is demanded that prayer may be Christian and effectual.
I. When I speak of Christian prayer as different from other prayer, what do I intend? Are we to count all the cries that have been ascending from the multitude of sorrowing creatures in all parts of the world as nothing? Are we to suppose that they have not entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, the true Lord, because they may have been addressed in blindness and ignorance to the gods many and lords many who are His servants and creatures? If St. Paul speaks of the travailing groans of unconscious nature as prophetic of a Divine birth, of a glorious manifestation, can we suppose that the most confused, bewildered utterance of one of those whom God has made in His own image is unheeded by Him? If in this sense we oppose Christian prayer to Hindoo prayer, to Mahometan prayer, to the prayer of the darkest savage, I must hold that we set aside the express declarations of Scripture, the essential doctrine and glad tidings of the New Testament.
Yes! for the New Testament teaches me that I do not pray by virtue of any excellence that is in me,—that I am not listened to because I am better than others in my belief or conduct,—but that I pray by “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” My nature struggles hard to win certain blessings for itself. Whence or from whom I procure them I care not. I suppose they are conferred by some of the objects which my eye sees, or by some unseen Power that thinks as I think, acts as I act. I measure that Power by the dimensions of my own intellect. I judge him by the qualities of my own heart. I divide Him according to my apprehensions. His mind and mine are evidently at discord on many points; else why do not things turn out as I would have them turn out? I must move Him by some means—by hard entreaty, by bribes that He will probably approve—to take my view of things, to overlook my disagreement with Him. This is the prayer of the selfish nature; the prayer of Jew, Turk, Hindoo, Christian, just so far as he yields to that nature.
We have all yielded to this nature. At times it has made us thoroughly torpid; it has taught us to look upon prayer as ridiculous and impossible; it has mocked all aspirations; it has been merely a gravitation towards death. At times it has been full of restless wishes and restless fears. It would listen to the priest of any faith; it would adopt any suggestion about the method of penetrating the iron or brass of which the heavens seemed to be composed; it would urge any sacrifices if it could but escape some threatened calamity.
Should not this experience of prayer as the greatest of all contradictions, as the greatest of all necessities, lead us to understand that there is a power which is seeking to rouse us out of the sleep of Nature, to deliver us from its fever; a power gentle and penetrating,—of which the dew is the Scriptural and the most suitable emblem;—a power acting upon our wills,—a power which is continually stimulating them to claim their place among their kindred spirits, among the sons of God? Such a power all men have felt. It has come to them in hours of shameful degradation, when they were stooping to the state of animals, reminding them of another destiny, speaking to them in another language from that of their enchanter, bidding them leave the sty in which so many of their companions have been transformed. It has come to them in hours of sorrow, consoling them for trials, bracing them to effort and hope. It has taught them to receive from earth and sky, which had once looked on them with leaden indifference, messages of sympathy and friendship. It has given them glimpses of a world of order and peace which they might inhabit. It has taught them to murmur the words, “Our Father which art in Heaven,” when they felt most tied and bound to earth, most tempted to think of themselves only as children of earth.
I say all men have been aware of these impulses, and prayer—not a selfish prayer to win certain gifts, to overcome the Divine reluctance, but trusting, humble, confessing prayer—has been the fruit of them. Who have offered such prayers we cannot know, and are not concerned to know. We ought to know—it is our privilege to know—whence the inspiration to utter them proceeds. We ought to know—the name we bear implies the knowledge—that it does not descend upon us casually, from some distant, unknown being, from some benevolent genius; that it is the action upon our spirits, the calm, regular action, of the Son of Man and the Son of God, in Whose likeness we are created, Who has taken our flesh, Who has redeemed us to be partakers of His filial life and His filial throne. When once we have learnt His name, when once we have confessed His authority, and have apprehended the character of it, we cannot confine it by any partial rules of ours. To suppose the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ absent from any age or any set of circumstances becomes difficult, all but impossible, to those who ascribe every good thing to that grace, who cannot conceive how men could exist a day or a moment, if they were left to themselves and the wayward impulses of their own nature. They are sure, therefore, that they are entrusted with a Gospel to all nations concerning this grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are sure that they are to teach all nations what their instinct of prayer means, by teaching them what Christ has done for them, what He is doing with them. But then they must ask themselves, “How are we to teach this lesson? How are we to testify to the everlasting truth of His word, ‘Lo, I am with you’? How are we to assure ourselves that it has not come to naught, since we are continually fancying that it has come to naught?” The answer to these questions, it seems to me, is not Prayer simply, but the Holy Communion. That festival clears the mists from the nature of prayer, by bearing such a witness of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ as prayer alone cannot bear. That gives the Christian significance to prayer, by declaring that the origin of all thoughts which ascend from us to God is in Him Who descended from God to us; by presenting His Divine Sacrifice as the only interpretation of our relations to God, as the only ground of our devotion to God; by setting Him forth as the living bond of all Spirits to the Father of Spirits. I am greatly afraid that if we measure this Sacrament by our prayers, instead of referring our prayers to it as their measure, we shall leave our evil hearts a plea for putting their own efforts and strivings in the place of Christ’s grace, and so shall lose the faith of His presence in one service as much as the other.
II. We sometimes limit the idea of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ to His Forgiveness. And no wonder. For the sense of daily resistance to goodness and gentleness, of indifference to sympathy, of refusal to follow where he would lead us, may well induce us to comprehend all other blessings under this one.
In another and fuller sense He teaches us to connect grace with forgiveness: “If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses.” We are startled at the words. We think that, after all, God’s mercy is not the source of our good deeds, but the consequence of them. But if the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is the continual influence and operation of a forgiving Mind upon ours, cannot we understand, do we not feel, that an unforgiving habit is precisely the thing which opposes itself to that operation, with which that Mind cannot hold intercourse? We stand aloof from the Divine Forgiveness, we will not have it; we prefer a state of alienation from it. Are we not doing better, therefore,—are we not exhibiting greater faith in the power of Christ to remove all obstacles out of His way,—when we ask Him to cast the unforgiving spirit out of us,—than if we asked Him to bestow all possible gifts upon us without that? Does not the apparent condition afford us a brighter glimpse than we had before of the freedom and the fulness of His mercy?
And so we are able to go on to the next clause in St. Paul’s sentence, and to consider what that has to do with our prayers, “The Love of God.” The selfish nature asks for some definite thing with which it dreams that it shall be satisfied. He Who would bestow upon His children the bread which they need, not the stones which they crave for, sends His grace that they may be drawn into an infinite region, that they may aspire after an infinite blessing. This forgiveness which is manifested to me, this human tenderness which meets me and contrasts so strangely with my own dryness and coldness, this just and wise discipline which is not stopped by my crying from doing that which it designs to do on my behalf, whence does it flow? So far as it stirs me to prayer, it stirs me to seek for its own origin. Prayer is the incessant demand. “Source of all life and goodness, where art Thou? It is Thyself and not any of Thy treasures that I need. Take them away if Thou wilt not reveal Thyself while I possess them. Take them away if they hinder me from receiving the revelation of Thyself.” Thus the grace of the Son, the more it works upon men and in men,—the more it urges them to look for something beyond itself, deeper than itself; for that which is not ours; for that which we cannot take in; for that which has been, and is, and is to come. Not as if the fullest discovery of the Love which embraces all things, could ever make the definite personal grace less necessary or less dear. The Son will come out in more distinctness, both as the Man of Sorrows and as the Word by Whom all things were created, as we are taught Whose will He came on earth to do, into Whose glory He entered when He ascended on high. His Cross and Passion will be then more than ever regarded as the Revelation of the Godhead, as that upon which the spirit of man must dwell if it would not lose God, or see Him separated again into idol forms, distorted by its own terrors. The Universe will be welcomed as beautiful and harmonious because it reflects some portions of the Image, which was seen altogether in the weakness of Gethsemane, and the desertion of Calvary. The man will turn from his own lonely experiences to those facts of history, because they declare, not a partial love—a love to him and to a few Christians,—but Love itself, the very Nature of God.
St. Paul was writing to a Church. He desired that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ might be with them all, with the whole body, with each member of it. But that body was a body of witnesses; each member of it was to be a witness in his own sphere and degree. Of what was the Church at large, of what were those who composed it to bear witness?— Of a God Who so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son for it. Unless they fulfilled this function, they could not overthrow the false gods of the heathens about them, they could not bear any effectual protest against Jewish incredulity and exclusiveness. The Church of Corinth was especially liable to forget this function. St. Paul had written two Epistles to tell them why. They were gathering round special leaders; they were forming sects; they were making Christ Himself the Head of a sect. They were glorifying themselves on their spiritual privileges and gifts; on those which especially belonged to them as Christians, men anointed with the Spirit. They were acting carnally and sensually. They were meeting together for the common Christian Feast; they were turning it into a symbol of their want of fellowship. The Apostle exposes all these symptoms of a deeply-seated disease. But he does not try to extirpate it by telling the patient that he has overrated the greatness of his position. He tells the Corinthians that all things are theirs, Paul, Cephas, Apollos, life, death, because they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. Nothing is too good for them, if they will receive it as a universal, not as a particular or exclusive good. And so, in strict consistency with what has gone before, he concludes with saying, not merely, “The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” but “the Love of God, be with you.” The highest inheritance of angels is for you sinful Corinthians,—that Love which is above all, around all, beneath all. You may ascend into it as Christ has ascended. What arguments against sectarianism and exclusiveness could be such a blow to them as this magnificent invitation?
But if Prayer requires the Love of God as its deepest foundation, as its ultimate end, certainly something is required to show that prayer has this foundation, can attain to this end. It is apt, we see, to take its colour from the mind of him who offers it. It is apt to stop far short of its true goal. The petitioner forgets the common blessing in the special one, the essential glory in the accidental. What is to recall him to the truth? The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper carries with it the assurance that a Love higher than heaven, deeper than hell, has worked, is working, will not cease working, to overcome the schismatical tendencies of human beings; that it will not let them pursue separate objects; that it will not allow them to rest till they have found the one object. Does not the Eucharist, on this ground also, rise above Prayer, inasmuch as it speaks directly of God and what He is, and of men as all miserable alike without Him, all blessed alike in the fruition of Him?
III. St. Paul concludes his benediction with “the Communion of the Holy Ghost.” Whensoever any Apostle spoke of the Christ, he took pains to show that he meant “the Anointed of God,” “He that anoints men with the Holy Spirit.” From the day in which John came preaching in the wilderness, this had been declared to be the sign of the expected Deliverer and King, the power with which He would work, the gift by which He would raise men to another level, to the condition of creatures “born not of flesh or of blood, or of the will of man, but of God.” But was not all that could be said of this power and blessing implied in the previous words, “the Grace of Christ,” “the Love of God”? Implied, surely. Implied it had been in every announcement and discovery of the Old Dispensation; in the song of every Psalmist; in the sympathy of every Ruler and Prophet with the purposes of God, and with the misery of those who resisted Him. A Spirit was in the midst of the nation. A Spirit was speaking in its seers; setting before them visions of sorrow and visions of glory; helping them to struggle on, when all looked darkest, in the certainty of an approaching light. But the Spirit had not been manifested; these men of the old time were waiting for His manifestation. Till the Desire of Nations was manifested in the flesh, this desire could not be accomplished. When it was accomplished,—when the day of Pentecost had declared that there was a communion for all nations, because there was a Spirit to bind all nations into the Name of the Father and the Son, those names could be uttered as they had never been uttered before;—it was possible to speak of the Grace of One Who entered into all the weakness of men without lessening the awe of the Godhead. The Holiest of the Holiest had been opened, and a mystery of Love had been revealed, as that which no loveless creature had been able to look into. This grace and love, then, did not absorb, though they involved, that Communion of the Holy Ghost through which the apprehension of them as eternally distinct, as eternally one, became possible to human beings. If that Communion were lost, the grace and the love would again be hidden; the message to the nations would be set at naught; the world would shrivel again into its old narrowness, would be split into its old divisions.
Those conditions of the Church of Corinth to which I have alluded, indicated the possibility of strifes in the Christian Community, the same in fact as those which had torn nations and families in pieces from the beginning, but going nearer to the heart’s core of humanity,—more inward and deadly. Especially the fact that they were quarrelling about the gifts of the Spirit, and the degree in which one or another of their teachers and factions could claim them, was a gloomy prophecy, at the commencement of the new age, of the triumphs which the Evil Spirit would achieve in each period of it. But was it not possible to dive a yard below his mines? Could there be no counterprophecy of his final discomfiture? That deeper mine, that counter-prophecy lies in the words, “Communion of the Holy Ghost.” The gifts of the Holy Ghost were turned into occasions of contention and self-glorification. Who could speak with most tongues? Who could enact most wonders? The graces of the Spirit, though humility and meekness are the most conspicuous of them, could be pleaded as reasons for despising others, as the motives to saintly pride. The divine words of St. Paul, “They that have not the Spirit of Christ are none of His,” might in after-days be turned into an argument for drawing deep lines around those who could say of themselves, “We have the Spirit of Him Who made Himself of no reputation, who was the friend of publicans and sinners; stand by; you have it not.” But if the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Communion, if that is His distinction from the Spirit of Unholiness, the Spirit of hatred and lies, these subtleties of that Spirit are detected and laid bare. It is shown for what end his Divine Adversary has been working from the first, how all efforts to divide have brought out more fully His fusing energy; how men, in spite of themselves, have been held together; how life and unity presume and demand each other; how certainly a living Unity will at last supersede all dead uniformity; how it will confound all experiments to restore vitality to the limbs by rending asunder the body.
That Christ has come for this end, that for this end He was baptized with the Spirit, the Holy Communion testifies by its very title. No prayers, disjoined from this Sacrament, can represent the blessing of communion, the curse of division, as this Sacrament does. Carry the meaning of the Eucharist into your public worship, regard the Eucharist as the centre of it, and worship becomes a reality; it points to self-abnegation, to the united service of the Eternal Father. Carry the meaning of the Sacrament into private worship, and private worship becomes indeed an act of communion with a present Lord. But try this communion by the standard of our public or private worship, and it is in danger of sinking, as they so easily and naturally sink, into mere utterances of our own wishes, or mere repetitions of words which we have received from tradition.
It is a common way of meeting questions of the kind I have considered in this sermon, to say that they are merely questions of words. It seems to me an irritating and not a satisfactory way. If the assertion is well founded, precious realities may lie under questions of words. It is more helpful to try if we cannot bring out the realities, than to assume their absence. But it is not a question of words whether Christ is really present with us at all times, and whether the Lord’s Supper is not a true Sacrament because He has appointed it to remind us of His Presence. Those who hold that conviction are bound to proclaim it, and therefore to vindicate all modes of intercourse with Christ,—in the awfulness of prayer, in the daily charities of life, as well as the intercourse in the Sacrament. I think they fail to defend that noble position, if they refuse to admit the principle for which their opponents are struggling, that this Sacrament transcends the other modes of intercourse. Place it on the same level with them,—forget that it is the specially Christian ordinance,—and they, I think, must become weak, may become false. No! the strife is not a verbal one; but the more each party understands the thing, the substance, for which it is contending, the more justice it will do to the thing, the substance, for which the other is contending. So Unity in the Church, which we sometimes despair of, may come out of the contentions which are rending it. So we may receive those words as addressed to us, the feeble fighters on earth in these latter days, by St. Paul and the triumphant society of which he is a member: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all, Amen.”