Quinquagesima Sunday
March 6, 1859
“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”—1 Corinthians iii. 11.
In the chapter from which my text is taken, St. Paul describes himself as a Master-builder. He considers the office of a Master-builder to be the laying of foundations. The Corinthians to whom he wrote were generally of a different opinion. They thought any man could lay a foundation; the skill of the architect was shown in the building he raised upon it. A teacher who was fit for them could not be a mere teacher of elements. Those who only spoke of Jesus Christ and Him crucified might be very useful amongst Boeotians,—might do good service amongst barbarians. Men who dwelt in such a city as theirs, who had been used to hear the most various wisdom from Pagan professors, were prepared for the most advanced Christian instruction. They were not to be treated as children; they demanded the refined culture of men.
This opinion probably was not confined to one of the sects into which their Church was divided; it will have exhibited itself in all under different forms. Those who called themselves after Apollos supposed that he had brought a lore with him from Alexandria which would fill up the imperfect outline that St. Paul had drawn. Those who used the name of Cephas thought that circumcision would initiate into the highest privileges those who had been made novices by the rite of Baptism. And the Pauline school will have indignantly disclaimed the notion as quite derogatory to their master’s dignity, that he merely preached a simple Gospel. Had not he as much Rabbinical knowledge as Peter? Was not he better acquainted with Greek poets and philosophers than Apollos? Did he not make light of ceremonies to which they, in their infantine faith, still clung? Had he not been seeking for deep principles, while they were reverencing forms?
The praise of seeking for principles, if it had been accompanied with no disparagement of his fellow-labourers, St. Paul would not have disclaimed. That was his aim; and therefore he was as much offended with the conceit of his admirers as of those who despised him. They, as well as the disciples of the other schools, were glorifying peculiarities of manner and education and spiritual insight which belonged to their different teachers; so they were missing that which was dearest to all three,—that which they most cared to make the Church aware of, at least so long as their minds were sane, and they were submitting to the Spirit of love and of truth. The common principle, the common ground, that on which they stood together, that on which all men could stand as well as they,—this was what they wished those who heard them everywhere to feel after and to find. There were different hearts and heads to which they addressed themselves. God had educated their own by different methods. It would have been an affectation, it would have been a sin, it would have been a proof that they had merely learnt their doctrines by rote from some mortal teacher, if they had thrown aside their habits of thought and modes of speech, and assumed those of the brother or father whom they loved and honoured most. But by a different mode of instruction and discipline each had been led to a Foundation lying far beneath Paul and Cephas and Apollos, to a Rock against which the gates of hell could not prevail.
St. Paul therefore vindicates this to himself as the occupation of his life. He did not come to introduce among them some new order of architecture, or to devise some ornaments in those which they had already. He had a much homelier, and yet perhaps a somewhat harder and less popular task; he had to persuade these wise Corinthians that they, their own very selves, were the stones of a glorious and divine Temple; that God was hewing and shaping them into their fit places in that Temple; that there was not one of them who could say he had not a place in it, or that his neighbour had not a place in it; but that, if they would know whereabouts they stood, if they would not be always interfering with each other, if each man would not be destroying every other, and so destroying himself, they must give up disputing about the theories and opinions of this doctor or of that; they must care for something else than opinions, theories, and doctors; they must ask, “What holds us together? what severs us, one and all, from the bottomless abyss?”
This being the case, it was necessary for St. Paul to define more carefully than he did, when he was merely speaking of his relation to other teachers, in what sense he called himself a Master-builder. The text limits that statement, and yet expands it. He half retracts the former expression, as if it did not fully convey his meaning. He could not lay the Foundation. It is laid, as our translators have it. It is lying, as St. Paul says himself; intimating that he did not put it there; that no man put it there; that the beliefs of no body of men put it there; that all which teachers can do is to say, “There it is;” that all which believers can do is to recognize it. But this apparent narrowing of his own office makes us understand, far more clearly than before, its nature and its grandeur. To argue for a set of opinions, to prove that he was right and others wrong, this was the business of the Sophist with whom Corinthians had been familiar in bygone times. The Apostle, according to St. Paul, differed from the Sophist in his primary design. He was conversant with men, not with notions; with the grounds of human life and human society, not with the vindication of certain dogmas about human life or human society. He came to declare that the foundation of the human Temple was not abstract, but living; not an opinion, or a collection of opinions, but a Person; not a man, but the Man. That foundation is lying for you and for all; for you, who are naturally discordant, impatient of fellowship, eager to assert your independence; for all whom you look upon as ignorant or as irreligious. That Christ, the Son of the Living God, of whom Cephas spoke in his great confession; that Word of God, whom Apollos and the Alexandrians declare to be the Teacher of all; that Jesus, the crucified, whom I have set forth in weakness and death; He it is on whom the social edifice rests, by whom alone it consists. Other foundation beside that can no man lay; that, God Himself has laid.
If I spoke rightly some time ago of St. Paul’s conversion, we cannot describe it more accurately than by saying that it consisted in his awaking from ignorance of this foundation to a full, clear apprehension of it. He had thought that there was something of his own which he could stand upon; some wisdom, or righteousness, or exclusive privilege, appertaining to him, the individual Saul of Tarsus, or to him as the Hebrew of the Hebrews. That belief made him hard, narrow, savage. He had to prove to himself as well as to others that he possessed this righteousness, this wisdom, this exclusive privilege. He had to prove it to himself in spite of evidence, very appalling evidence, presented to his inmost conscience and heart, that he was not wise, that he was not righteous, that God did not favour him. How that evidence forced itself upon him through the very words which supplied him with his only warrant for self-confidence, how he was drawn to faith in a Righteousness and Wisdom that were not his own, because his own had proved so unreal and despicable, I have often pointed out to you from his confessions. But this Righteousness and Wisdom in which he could trust so entirely, which became so truly his own when he had renounced his own, this was the foundation which he could tell the Corinthians was lying for them as much as for him, the foundation which they were denying and setting at nought by their Greek factions, as he had denied it through his Jewish pride.
My brethren, in this coming season of Lent we shall hear much of repentance and conversion, and some will be asking themselves of what it is that we have generally or specially to repent? What conversion is it that we are to desire for ourselves or for our brethren? I doubt not that the Epistle which we have read to-day has suggested to one here and there an answer to the first of these questions. The Apostle tells us that we are nothing without charity. Have we that in the sense which he seems to give the word? If not, that want must be some reason for repentance. To be converted from uncharitableness must be a great conversion. But there is much to interfere with any practical result from this discovery. Charity, we see, does not mean, in his dialect, giving all our goods to feed the poor. It can hardly have meant mere tolerance for each other’s opinions. The conscience of many may reproach them for a defect in that disposition; some may fear that they have it in excess. Surely repentance, if it is such a serious duty, must be directed against some very serious and radical evil. Conversion, if it has such an import as it had in the history of St. Paul, must be a change from some more fixed and definable wrong, than that of not being sufficiently tender to the acts or conclusions of our neighbours.
Yes, brethren, we may be inwardly rebuked for over-severity yesterday, for over-indulgence to-day, and we may console ourselves with the thought that there is no strict rule about the degree in which we are to maintain our own positions or to concede them. But if we have been troubling ourselves about opinions our own or our neighbours—if we have been occupied with comparing theirs and ours, when we wanted an actual foundation to rest our lives upon, is not this something to be repented of? If we have been making ourselves the rule and measure of other men when we were professing that we knew of a common ground for them and us, is not this something to be repented of? For what has come of this? Onlookers say that we are always debating upon this or that dogma, and that so the practical duty, the ordinary morality, is forgotten. Have not they a warrant for that charge, so far as we are concerned? But when they go on to say that this temper of ours may be traced to our faith in Christ, and that if we cared less for that faith our works would be better, do we not know in our hearts that they are imputing to our faith what is really owing to our unbelief? We have had opinions about Him, we have made much of those opinions, we have judged other men for wanting them. But we have not been resting on that foundation which is laid for us; our judgment, our conclusion respecting the superiority of our religion to other religions has been the rock upon which we have been building what we call our Christianity. It may be our judgement about the credibility of one set of traditions, it may be our judgment about the credibility of the Bible and its superiority to the Koran, or to any idolatrous Shasters. But if there is nothing deeper than this judgment,—no one whom it owns as its support,—no one whom it owns as bearing up the pillars of the Universe,—surely we have not yet accepted the doctrine of the Apostle, we have not yet confessed Jesus Christ as the Apostle confessed Him.
To be turned round, or converted, from that kind of confession of Him which is only another name for an assertion of our own wisdom and sagacity, and superiority to Jews or Turks or infidels or heretics, —to that confession of Him which is an abdication of all claims to wisdom or sagacity, a solemn assertion that we are in no wise better than Jews or Turks or infidels or heretics,—this would be a conversion such as St. Paul’s was; this might enable us to become in kind such witnesses of Christ as he was. The effect must, I believe, come in all cases as it did in his, through the exposure to our own hearts of the utter fallacy and vanity of the pretences which have led us to dream that we are not as other men are, or that it is possible for us to have any foundation for life or for death which is not a foundation for every human being as well as ourselves.
But these exposures will bring us, as they brought St. Paul, to the acknowledgment that it is a moral foundation which is laid for us all; that the Person on whom we stand, and on whom Society stands, is a Righteous Person, who speaks to a spirit in us, which hungers and thirsts after Righteousness; that not to think certain things, to hold certain opinions, but to be righteous as He is, that we may do righteous acts as He did them, is the demand He makes on us, the demand which He promises by His own divine Spirit to fulfil for us and in us.
And so we may begin to understand how the Epistle for to-day is connected with the call to repent and be converted which is addressed to us throughout Lent. The Charity which is set forth there is the Charity of God Himself, the Charity which was in Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is the one foundation that is laid for human Society and human acts, and there can be no other; then Charity is the one foundation that is laid for human Society and human acts, and there can be no other. It is not Charity that can be limited to care for the poor; ostentatious benevolence to the poor may be a breach of its law; an apparent severity may sometimes be a fulfilment of it. But it involves a care for the poor such as Christ had; such as He was showing forth when for our sakes He became poor. It is not a Charity that can be limited to respect for other men’s thoughts and opinions. What looks like such respect may mean that every one had better keep his own notion, because there is no common truth, no foundation for all. What looks like zeal against opinions, may be a fervent Charity to men. But Charity does involve the observance of Christ’s command not to judge, lest we should be judged. It does involve the kind of sympathy with all men, the endurance of all men’s perplexities and questionings, the sharing in their temptations, the sense of their sins, which reached their perfection in Him. It must enter into all the details of daily life, because it must penetrate the man himself who is conversant with those details. It can never be an ornamental accessory to the existence of a human being. It must be the very law under which God has placed him, obedience to which is the condition of his freedom.
This, brethren, this it is which frightens us, which makes us tremble. The mere belief of a power bent upon our destruction produces certain occasional terrors, hysterical convulsions. But they do not last. The very conscience—to which those who excite such terrors have appealed—rises up and witnesses against them. But the thought of being under a law of love, of having Him as the foundation of our existence who has perfectly fulfilled this law,—here is something which may well appal us, when we think that against this law we have been continual rebels, that it is this foundation upon which we have refused to stand. Once let that terror take possession of a man, and the word Conversion becomes indeed a word of meaning, a word of promise and of power to him. He does not stop to ask whether a converting grace has been exerted upon him in some former day. He wants it now. The sense of resistance to perfect goodness, the certainty that that resistance must be misery, forces him to cry, “Turn me, O almighty Love, and I shall be turned.” The answer to that prayer, which God Himself has inspired, is the Conversion of a man’s heart and spirit from self-willed confidence to the dependence of a child; from the desire to make all men think as he thinks, to the desire that all may stand upon the foundation that is laid for all. And because he is sure that it is laid for all and not for him alone, because the very act of turning to God has been an act of abandoning all selfish rights and privileges, he will pray also, “Oh grant that all men may come to the knowledge of Thy truth and live, for that we know to be Thy Eternal Will, manifested in Thy only Begotten Son, to be fulfilled at last by the power of that Spirit who can subdue all things—even this rebellious unloving heart of mine—to Himself.”