Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 13, 1848.
Matthew VI. 9.
After this manner therefore pray ye: ‘Our Father which art in heaven.’
‘After this manner,’ and therefore any manner but this is a wrong manner; a prayer which has any other principle or method than this, is not the Lord’s Prayer.
The remark may seem superfluous, but it is not so. The Paternoster is not, as some fancy, the easiest, most natural, of all devout utterances. It may be committed to memory quickly, but it is slowly learnt by heart. Men may repeat it over ten times in an hour, but to use it when it is most needed, to know what it means, to believe it, yea, not to contradict it in the very act of praying it, not to construct our prayers upon a model the most unlike it possible, this is hard; this is one of the highest gifts which God can bestow upon us; nor can we look to receive it without others that we may wish for less; sharp suffering, a sense of wanting a home, a despair of ourselves.
At certain periods in the history of the Church, especially when some reformation was at hand, men have exhibited a weariness of their ordinary theological teaching. It seemed to them that they needed something less common, more refined than that which they possessed. As the light broke in upon them, they perceived that they needed what was less refined, more common. The Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, were found to contain the treasures for which they were seeking. The signs of such a period are surely to be seen in our day. We can scarcely think that we require reformation less than our fathers. I believe, if we are to obtain it, we too must turn to these simple documents; we must enquire whether there is not a wisdom hidden in them which we do not meet with elsewhere; whether they cannot interpret the dream of our lives better than all the soothsayers whom we have consulted about it hitherto.
I. Much of the practical difficulty of the prayer lies assuredly in the first word of it. How can we look round upon the people whom we habitually feel to be separated from us by almost impassable barriers; who are above us, so that we cannot reach them, or so far beneath us, that the slightest recognition of them is an act of gracious condescension; upon the people of an opposite faction to our own, whom we denounce as utterly evil; upon men whom we have reason to despise; upon the actual wrong-doers of society, those who have made themselves vile, and are helping to make it vile: and then teach ourselves to think that in the very highest exercise of our lives, these are associated with us; that when we pray, we are praying for them and with them; that we cannot speak for ourselves without speaking for them; that if we do not carry their sins to the throne of God’s grace, we do not carry our own; that all the good we hope to obtain there, belongs to them just as much as to us, and that our claim to it is sure of being rejected, if it is not one which is valid for them also? Yet all this is included in the word ‘Our;’ till we have learnt so much, we are but spelling at it; we have not learnt to pronounce it. And what man of us—the aptest scholar of all—will venture to say that he has yet truly pronounced it; that his clearest utterance of it has not been broken and stammering? Think how many causes are at work every hour of our lives to make this opening word of the prayer a nullity and a falsehood. How many petty disagreements are there between friends and kinsfolk, people dwelling in the same house—so petty that there is no fear of giving way to them, and yet great enough to cause bitterness and estrangement, great enough to make this ‘Our Father’ a contradiction. How often does my vanity come into collision with another man’s vanity, and then, though there be no palpable opposition of interests between us, though we do not stand in the way of each other’s advancement, what a sense of separation, of inward hostility, follows! As the mere legal, formal, distinctions of caste become less marked, how apt are men to indemnify themselves for that loss by drawing lines of their own as deep, and more arbitrary! As persecution in its ruder shapes becomes impossible, what revenge does the disputatious heart take under this deprivation, by bitter manifestations of contempt for an adversary, by identifying him more completely with his opinions, by condemning him, if not for them, then for the vehemence and bigotry with which he supports them! How many pretexts have the most tolerant amongst us for intolerance! How skilful are the most religious in finding ways for explaining away the awful command, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged!’
II. But when we say ‘Father,’ are we more in earnest? Do we mean that He whom we call upon is a Father actually, not in some imaginary metaphorical sense? Alas! in stumbling at the first word ‘Our,’ we do, I fear, destroy the next also. For though all countries and nations had a dim vision of this name; though men, in whom the reverence for fathers had any strength, were taught by a higher wisdom than their own, to connect that reverence with their thoughts of the unseen world, and of One who ruled it; though the sense of this connexion was a balance to the tendency which they felt to idolize the powers of Nature, and yet kept them from a mere abstract, formal notion of the Divinity; though by it they learnt to realize, in a measure, their own spiritual existence; yet the revelation which fulfils the heathen expectation, which turns the dream of a Father into substance, is that which is expressed in the words, ‘He hath sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons,’ and in those which are inseparable from them, ‘Because ye are sons, he hath sent the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.’ Now this revelation is grounded upon an act done on behalf of Humanity—an act in which all men have a like interest; for if Christ did not take the nature of every rebel and outcast, he did not take the nature of Paul and John. Therefore the first sign that the Church was established upon earth in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit, was one which shewed that it was to consist of men of every tongue and nation; the baptized community was literally to represent mankind. If it be so, the name Father loses its significance for us individually, when we will not use it as the members of a family. No doubt it is a true name; it expresses an actual relation; and therefore, if we attain by ever so unfair a process, through ever so narrow a chink, to the perception of it, we may be thankful. But the possession is an insecure one: if some feelings or apprehensions give us a title to it, the title will become uncertain with every variety of our feelings and apprehensions. We shall regard the Unchangeable as a Father to-day, and not to-morrow. And then what becomes of the Lord’s Prayer as a fixed manner or model for all prayer? What becomes of it as a resource in times of tribulation, when our feelings and apprehensions are in the lowest, most miserable, state? What is its worth when we are tempted by suggestions addressed to these very feelings and apprehensions—suggestions which overmaster them, and get possession of them? Does any one answer, that God is called the Father of our spirits, that He is said to beget us to a new life, that as natural men we are not His children, though we are His creatures? All this is true and most important; and it is precisely what we assert, when we say that God has redeemed mankind in Christ. We mean that He has not left us to be fleshly creatures, to be animals, as we are naturally inclined to be, and would be altogether, if He were not upholding us; we mean that He has owned us as spiritual creatures, has claimed us in that character to be His servants and children, has given us His Spirit. We say that when a man arises and goes to his Father, he renounces his vile, selfish, exclusive life, and takes up that human privilege which God has given him in Christ; he enters upon his state as a man when he confesses God as his Father. If, instead of doing this, he will stand upon certain feelings and apprehensions of his, which separate him from his kind, he is not a penitent; he is still a self-exalting, self-glorying man; he has not been brought to feel that he is nothing; he has not been forced to cast himself wholly and absolutely upon the love and mercy of God in Christ. And, surely, such dependence, such self-renunciation, such willingness to take up a common position as portions of a family, is very difficult for creatures proud as we are, eager to have something of our own, always hoping to make out for ourselves special pleas of exemption from the laws of the universe. Only by discoveries often forgotten, often repeated, that we cannot establish any such pleas, that they must prove trumpery and preposterous, when they are urged before the Judge of the whole earth, only through the dreary conviction that our faith and hope and love, as well as our deeds, are shallow and insincere, are we drawn to real trust in Him who is faithful and loving, who is the God of all hope; who can impart to us the power of believing, of hoping, of loving, of doing what is right; who is willing to impart it because He is our Father, and has promised all good things to them that ask Him.
III. It might seem till we know a little of ourselves, that the next words, ‘which art,’ had nothing in them to cause us offence or perplexity. But they too are hard words. The greatest temptation, perhaps, of this age, is to think of the Most High rather as one about whom we read in a book, than as the Living God, the name by which the book always speaks of Him. It is a fearful tendency; but if you search your hearts, you will find it there. Nay, there is not need of much searching; the habit is so natural. In all ages, a disposition has been apparent, not in irreligious minds, but in those which are specially serious and reverential, to turn their devotion towards that which has been, rather than to that which is, towards images and relics, towards whatever carries with it the sign and reminiscence of personality, but is not personal. The modern English form of it which makes words rather than visible objects the substitutes for the unseen realities, is externally so unlike the other that we are not easily persuaded of their essential identity. It is the effort of prayer which brings the evil fully before us. What a dim shadow, thrown it would seem from our own minds, has often been before us when we were kneeling to the Majesty of Heaven. What a strange self-congratulation, that we were performing an act of worship, good and desirable, to some Being; but to what Being we hardly dared to ask ourselves! Oh! surely even in such hours there have been flashes upon the conscience, wonderful assurances that the place was a dreadful one; that God was there, though we had not known it. These are admonitions that the Father of all lives, though our spirits be ever so dead. But they are also admonitions that we should stir ourselves to the recollection of Him, who is always near our spirits; who can both restore life to them, and keep them alive. And if, at any time, He has taught us to feel that the universe would be a horrible blank without Him; that His absence would be infinitely more to us than to all creatures beside; that if He is not, or we cannot find Him, consciousness, memory, expectation, existence, must be curses unbearable: but that when the burden of the world and of self is most crushing, we may take refuge from both in Him,—if at any time such convictions have dawned upon us, let us not hope to keep the blessing of them by our own skill and watchfulness. Let us say, ‘Our Father which art, when we least remember Thee, fix the thought of Thy Being deeper than all other thoughts within us; and may we, Thy children, dwell in it, and find our home and rest in it, now and for ever.’
IV. Once more: the words ‘In Heaven,’ as they are closely united with those which went before in meaning, so too, like them, come into collision with some of our strongest evil tendencies. The impulse of ordinary polytheists was to bring God down to earth; to make Him like themselves. Against this impulse the philosopher protested, representing the Divine Nature as wholly inactive, self-concentrated, removed from mundane interests. The Gospel justifies the truth which was implied in the error of the first; Christ, taking flesh, and dwelling among men, declares that Heaven has stooped to earth. But here a great many would stop: they would bring back Paganism through Christianity. The Son of God, they say, has become incarnate; now fleshly things are again divine; earth is overshadowed by Heaven; it is no longer sin to worship that which He has glorified. In the manger of Bethlehem they sink the Resurrection and Ascension; they will only look at one part of the great Redemption, not at the whole of it; at the condescension to our vileness, not at the deliverance from that vileness, which the Son accomplished when he sat down at the right hand of the Father. But He does not sanction this partial and grovelling view. ‘After this manner,’ he taught his disciples, even while he was upon earth,— ‘pray ye, Our Father which art in Heaven.’ As if He had said, Do not think that I am come to make your thoughts of God less awful than those of Moses were, when he put his shoes off his feet and durst not behold; than Solomon’s were, when he said, ‘He is in Heaven and thou upon earth, therefore let thy words be few.’ The revelation of the divine mystery in me is not given that you may entertain it better in your low carnal hearts, that you may mingle it more with the things which you see and handle; that each of you may have a warrant for the form of idolatry which is dear to him. This revelation is given that the mystery may be no longer one of darkness, but of perfect light: light which you will enter into more and more as your eyes are purged; but which, if it colour the mists of earth for a moment, will at last scatter them altogether.
‘Our Father:’ there lies the expression of that fixed eternal relation which Christ’s birth and death have established between the littleness of the creature and the Majesty of the Creator; the one great practical answer to the philosopher who would make heaven clear by making it cold; would assert the dignity of the Divine Essence, by emptying it of its love, and reducing it into nothingness. Our Father, which art in Heaven: there lies the answer to all the miserable substitutes for faith, by which the invisible has been lowered to the visible; which have insulted the understanding and cheated the heart; which have made united worship impossible, because that can only be when there is One Being, eternal, immortal, invisible, to whom all may look up together, into whose presence a way is opened for all, whose presence is a refuge from the confusions, perplexities, and divisions of this world; that home which the spirits of men were ever seeking, and could not find, till He, who had borne their sorrows and died their death, entered within the veil, having obtained eternal redemption for them, till He bade them sit with Him in heavenly places.
What I have said may have seemed to prove that this simple prayer is too high and too deep for creatures such as we are. Would you have it otherwise? Would you have a prayer which you can comprehend and fathom? I am sure the conscience and reason would reject such a prayer as a delusion, an evident self-contradiction. I have said nothing to shew that this prayer is unsuitable to the wants and ignorance of any beggar in our streets. I have shown only, that the wisest man, who will not use it as that beggar does, who will try it by his own narrow methods and measures, will find that he has never entered into the sense of it, that he is condemning himself in the repetition of it. And if, brethren, we all know that we have been guilty of this mockery again and again, how clearly do our consciences witness, that it is after this manner, and no other, we must make our confession. What despair we should be in, if our unbelief were indeed truth, and not a lie! If the word ‘Our’ did not express the truth, that we participate in the blessings, as well as the curses, of the whole race; if the word ‘Father’ were a word merely, and not the expression of an eternal truth; if we might think of Him as not nigh, but afar off; in a book, not as one in whom we are living and having our being; if He were subject to the changes of earth, not for ever fixed in Heaven, whither could we turn under the overpowering sense of our own sinfulness and heartlessness? It is the full conviction that our misery has proceeded from ourselves, from our maintaining a resolute war with facts and reality, which can alone give us encouragement. For we know there is One who is willing to teach us how to pray this prayer in spirit and in truth; we know that there is One who is praying it. He who died for us and for all mankind, He who is ascended into Heaven, He, who is true and in whom is no lie, did when He was here clothed with our mortality, does now in his glorified humanity say, in the full meaning of the words, for us and for his whole family above and below, ‘Our Father which art in Heaven.’