Advent Sunday
November 28, 1858
“Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.”—James v. 7, 8.
The passage: Be patient, brethren, until the Lord comes. The farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth and is long patient for it, until it has received the early and the latter rain. Be patient too, and strengthen your hearts, because the Lord’s coming is near.
These words show that St. James, like the other Apostles, expected the coming of the Lord in his own day. I have often tried to show you that their expectation was not false. A greater change did come over the world than they looked for. It may not have been in every particular what they supposed, since they may have been given different degrees of light about how it would work. Their very hope shows confusions in their minds that clearer light must scatter. For it was light they desired, light to shine into their hearts and out upon the whole Church. But they were certain of the kind of blessing coming. It would be the same in kind as the older prophets had expected: a day of clearness and revelation, fearful to those who loved darkness and awful even to those who longed to be delivered from it. Every signal judgment on Israel had been described as such a day, and the event matched the description. It did uncover what was hidden. Fearfulness surprised the hypocrites, while trusting hearts found a refuge for the needy in distress, when the blast of the terrible ones was like a storm against a wall. They said, “This is our God, we have waited for Him; He is come, and He will save us.”
The Apostles expected a day that would surpass all earlier ones. It would wind up the history of the old world. It would announce that the King who entered Jerusalem meek, on a donkey, was King of the whole earth. And it would bring down the city that refused to have Him reign and cast Him out as a criminal. The New Testament writers show no timidity or hesitation here. They speak of Christ’s speedy coming as confidently as of a past event. While on earth He had spoken of it with great definiteness, and He sealed His words with the declaration that heaven and earth may pass away but His words will not. His appearance in the flesh makes no sense unless it was soon to be followed by a showing of the power that was His in heaven and earth. Of course none of the Apostles knew whether he would live to see that day. The saying about St. John, “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?”, might seem to suggest that he alone would. But a day that revealed Christ as Lord of both worlds, and declared that by dying, rising and ascending He had united them for ever, could not be less glorious wherever they were. On this side of death they would understand in part, and on the other far more perfectly, what the crisis meant and what victory over the enemies of God and man it signified.
In this sense the Apostles could look to the day of their death as itself a day of revelation, and no men had more reason to look to it as a day of rest. But if “The time of your death draws near” had been put in place of “The coming of the Lord draws near,” the Apostle’s argument for patience and steadiness of heart would be worthless. A man in physical pain may possibly be helped by the thought “It will soon be over,” though I think he gains little from it by itself. So much agony is packed into a moment, and pain feels so lasting, that it outruns the mere reasoning that it will pass. But a student who has laboured for years on a hard problem can get no comfort from being told that this trouble will soon end along with all others. He had looked for a joyful “Eureka!” as the reward of his search. He learns only that it was all wasted. Add the thought of a future for him, and you may fill him with fear of what is so vague and unknown. Or you may encourage him to think his tasks will not be interrupted, and that his calling will go on under better conditions and with more success. Mix with this future the thought of Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension, and you have changed a great deal, because you have almost turned the day of death into a day of the Lord. But even a hope so full of immortality is unsatisfying. If we narrow our Lord’s death to ourselves, we destroy its meaning for ourselves. If it does not take away the sin of the world, it does not take away ours, and if it does not reconcile men to God, it reconciles no man. This conviction grows stronger the more a man feels the links that bind him to his fellow-creatures, and sees that his union with them depends entirely on his union with Christ and on Christ’s relation to the Father. He feels that redemption from selfishness is the great redemption of all. He has tasted a little of its blessedness and hopes to enter into its fulness. How can that hope be realised? How can he help losing all he has won and sinking back into the state he feels to be both natural and accursed, if in his visions of the future he sees only a comfortable escape for himself from the troubles of the present? He may stretch that escape into expectations of positive happiness, but they must melt into thin air, or harden into a sensual paradise, if he remains the centre of them. And how little such visions fit the business of life! How much of life, with its hopes and fears, concerns kinsfolk, neighbours, your country, the universe! Tell me to work patiently because soon my task will be over and I shall enter rest or enjoyment, and you imply that my work is for myself, and that if this one thread of my destiny is fully spun I shall have gained all I aimed at. That is not true in any sense unless I have lived an utterly unchristian and detestable life. It is not true even then, since I cannot by my will cut myself off from those whose life, by God’s eternal law, is intertwined with mine. So it was reasonable, even inevitable, that for self-denying and loving men like St. James and his fellow-Apostles, the hope of the Lord’s coming overshadowed every hope that merely pointed to the end of their own pilgrimage. And it was not reasonable for them only. They looked for this manifestation because they were men and felt as men. In every age since, the simplest and most genuine human feelings have turned the same way. Thoughts of a grave where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest have not been enough for those who were persecuted by the wicked and most weary and most needed rest. Thoughts of their own forgiveness, the deliverance of their own souls and the glorifying of their own bodies have not satisfied those who prized forgiveness most, valued the soul most highly, and saw most clearly the change of the earthly body into the heavenly. Beneath all these expectations, sustaining them, lay a strong inward conviction that there must be a Revelation of the Divine excellence and beauty in which the lowliest sufferer and saddest outcast could share. It would be for each because it was for all. It would truly fulfil all that ancient prophecies had shadowed in the hearts of those who uttered them. And it would be the real warrant for patience, because it would bring every work to its issue and every problem to its solution.
Such hopes, in whatever age they have been held, have proved no more false than they did in the first. The great critical periods that good men thought were at hand did come. If those who lived through them scarcely noticed, history confesses their reality. If our vision were brighter, and we saw things less through the mists of the present, we should feel their significance more, not less. Those who foresaw them vaguely, and wrongly as to particular incidents, will have learnt on leaving the earth that they underrated their importance rather than exaggerated it. They dwelt too much on trifles concerning themselves, and too little acknowledged the Divine hand stretched out and the Divine voice speaking in them. We may be sure it is now their delight, wherever they are, to learn how that hand is stretched out to deliver men when they perceive it least, and how that voice speaks to men in the loudest clamour and the deepest silence. So they know that their hope did not make them ashamed, and will not shame anyone who holds it in the Church below. What warrants this hope and grounds this patience belongs to us as much as to any earlier generation. Advent Sunday bids us keep it in mind, and the text expresses it: “Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and the latter rain.”
Not long ago I considered how the image of a farmer sowing seed and waiting for harvest illustrated the kind of diligence St. Paul asked of his Corinthian disciples, and the reward they were to expect. The tiller of the ground is no speculator. He obeys natural laws, sows his seed, and leaves its ripening to no chance or skill of his own. He waits for a harvest, and it is a harvest for others as well as himself. The Apostle dwells on the fruits as the reward, not on the price they fetch at market. If St. James merely taught us this same lesson, we might be very thankful, for our attention cannot be too often fixed on such natural analogies. None do more to withdraw us from vulgar mercantile notions, or give us such a sense of a Divine and human order, and of the likeness and the difference between creatures of a Lord and children of a Father of spirits. But I think that is not all that is meant here, nor the most important part. The Spiritual Husbandman is not, first of all, man but God. The resemblance is to His dealings with us and with His universe. It applies to us because we are made in His image and have nothing good in us but the reflection of His perfect goodness. St. James would have us meditate on His patience: His longsuffering with individuals, families, nations and Churches, and His watchfulness until the seeds He has planted really drink in the gracious nourishment He pours on them. The language is familiar. Longsuffering is the word the Bible writers most often attach to God’s character, and I am certain our hearts and consciences respond to their use of it. We are sure it must characterise an all-loving Being who looks out on a world like ours. We are sure the word does not deceive us, however far short it falls of what it labours to express. For we are sure it characterised Him who fully expressed the Divine substance and was the perfect image of the Father.
Imagine for a moment, brethren, that we believed this. What would follow? All history would become a record of the processes of this husbandry: the means a Creator uses so that His creation may be very good, and a Father uses to bring His children into His will. Despair of our race and of ourselves would then seem the most unreasonable and wicked of things, and hope would be the sober fulfilment of a duty, a submission to irresistible evidence. Every theory that any thoughtful student has defended, about races, conquests, natural influences, religious influences, the power of law, the authority of great men, would be carefully and honestly weighed. We would not be eager to embrace one or reject another. The facts they rest on would be recognised as Divine facts, referred to one first principle, and treated as the tools and processes of the Husbandman bringing His fruit to ripeness. Whatever another class of teachers have said, learnedly or by experiment, about conscience and reflection, active and passive powers, the faculties of reasoning and induction, of affection and will, would be most interesting, provided the analysis did not destroy the life of what it examined. For we would feel that we cannot look at anything human without being led to a Divine Archetype, and that all is fragmentary and confused until seen in its relation and dependence to Him. And when we are forced, not by what we read of others but by what we feel in ourselves, to dwell on what has broken this relation and marred this dependence, when Sin stands out before each man as what has again and again turned aside the spade of the great Husbandman, who would have prepared his heart to receive seed and rain and bear fruit for harvest, let us not forget that the Word was made flesh to cast every plague, sickness and evil spirit out of our sin-stricken humanity. Let us not forget that He bore what we are tempted to call helpless and incurable, that He claimed it as His Father’s possession, and that He has redeemed it by unspeakable agony and quickened it with a Divine life.
I repeat, brethren: if St. James’s doctrine is true, then hope, in its highest, most vigorous and most sustained form, is the godly and true state of our being, and any tempers we admit that are foreign to hope and contradict it are so far immoral and anti-Christian. But it would be the cruellest mockery to say this, and a man would prove himself unfit to preach to others, being unaware of what passes in himself, if he did not confess how much within us and around us is continually at war with this hope, threatening its existence and seeming to prove it monstrous and ridiculous. Turn anywhere in the world and you find facts that laugh at you for entertaining it, and each of them has something in our own hearts that corresponds to it and explains it. Where are the signs and pledges of Peace, Freedom and Order among the nations? How much of that Peace, Freedom and Order have we established in our own bosoms? If you see encouragement in one direction, degeneracy and darkness are growing in another, and today’s clouds belie yesterday’s bright promise. Is it not so in the world, and in ourselves? There is a calm, a Sabbath serenity that seems to descend and rest on you on some still evening or by a friend’s sick bed. In a few hours the storms return. A slight accident, a foolish affront, the gossip of idle men, or the noise of parties has shaken to its centre the spirit you thought fixed on a rock. These are ordinary experiences. There are more fearful battles in which some are driven to despair even of life. The arguments for hope seem all answered by the very voice that first brought them. The Bible, prayers and sacraments become themselves the chief sources of despondency and terror. The words of Life remind us of voices that spoke them to us and are now mute, and of how little we profited by their speech or example. Sacraments remind us how little we have believed God’s promises, how little our light has shone before men. Holy seasons, by their recurrence, seem to testify that the world has been moving and we ourselves going backward. He is only a Job’s comforter who merely denounces such a state of feeling, or hopes to cure it with texts and aphorisms. Preaching patience is often the very thing that stirs up all impatience. I think it must always be so unless you believe in a Patience infinitely above ours, from which ours must be derived. When we have learned that faith, even imperfectly, we may make better use of the Scriptures, the ordinances of God and holy seasons than we commonly do. The Scriptures will no longer be a storehouse of sentences to be quoted without regard to the occasions that called them forth or the persons who spoke them, and so usually with even less fitness to the condition of those they are offered to. They will be witnesses of how the God of Patience and Hope led His servants, not over easy slopes and through sunny glades but through the valley of the shadow of death into the clearness and light of His own presence. They will show how He saw signs of life in those who counted themselves dead, or whom their discerning friends counted dead, and kindled that life until all felt it and were warmed by it, until even their failures and evil doings became lessons to distant ages. Divine Sacraments will teach us that we are only receivers of food given hour by hour from above, and partakers of a blood poured out for all as well as for us. So it will be no wonder to us that year after year we are asked to remember that Christ came in great humility, and to expect that He will come in great glory. Each year will assure us more that without His humiliation here we must be lost for ever in our pride, and for ever think falsely of God and falsely of Man. Each year will tell us more that every act of God’s providence is in its measure a manifestation of His Son’s glory, and a witness that He, and no other, is Prince of all the kings of the earth. Every year will tell us that unless these manifestations were to issue in a final and complete manifestation of Him as Judge of the whole earth, every hope He has cherished in us must be crushed and disappointed. Every year, showing more how God has brought His ends to pass in His own good time, and how little our restlessness has hastened the work, will bring new lessons of patience. Every year will say that death is not more certain for each of us, nor the rising of day out of night, than the unveiling of the Sun of Righteousness upon this earth of ours.