Sexagesima Sunday, February 27, 1848
Matthew VI. 10.
We have reached this petition of the Lord’s Prayer at a time which would seem to give it special emphasis and significancy. I suppose few have repeated it this week without a kind of impression, however vague, that it bore upon events which were occupying themselves and the world. The words, ‘Thy Kingdom,’ must have suggested to most a contrast between a Kingdom which cannot be moved, and kingdoms which appeared firm one day, and have been shaken to the ground the next.
But this general reflection will have taken different forms according to the previous habits, convictions, associations, of those who entertained it. The first and most natural form is surely an expectation that there will be some time or other a better order in all our relations to each other, and in all the circumstances which affect us here on this planet. Upon what ground soever this expectation rests, it lasts with wonderful vitality through fair and foul weather, through killing-heats and frosts. No one who has once cherished it entirely loses it; or if he loses it, he loses himself with it. Disappointments, desertions, mockeries, may change its shape, or drive it further within, but they do not destroy it. If it fades away for a while, it bursts out more vigorously when you least look for it. Many who have expected from one civil movement after another that which they have not found, believe that a better ecclesiastical organization, or a freer working of that which exists, would remedy all confusions; others find refuge in the promise of a universal education; not a few, who have convinced themselves that no human rulers of one kind or another, in Church or State, no systems of government or instruction, will avail for the removal of evil and the establishment of good, cling more strongly to the belief that One who is above all human rulers and systems will soon claim the earth as His rightful possession; that all convulsions in the existing order of things are the trumpets by which He announces that the city He has accursed is about to fall down. All these convictions, different as they are, belong to the same habit of mind. Those who entertain them mean when they pray, ‘Thy Kingdom come,’ ‘Let the earth be governed wisely and truly, not as it has been, by the help of folly, insincerity, crime.’
Such a prayer will call up some echo in the hearts of all. But in many good men only a feeble echo; for the wish which it expresses is, in them, swallowed up by a stronger one. They never knew where to find or how to make for themselves a position upon earth; it never cheered them or soothed them. Now and then they have had sudden revelations of beauty in hill or valley, at sunrise or sunset, but these spoke, as they appeared and vanished, of some region to which the eye could not reach. Now and then they have met faces which smiled on them, but they seemed to have descended from a distant home to which they soon returned. Even the narrow circle in which these pilgrims dwell confuses them by the various interests and opposing sentiments of those who belong to it; the larger circles of society, with their manifold complications, altogether bewilder them. It seems to them a weary maze, without a plan; men are running a race with each other, of which a few withered leaves are the prize; they are beginning a tale which must be broken off in the middle; death makes all plots imperfect; only that state to which he introduces us can unravel them. There in that state must lie all that we dream of and hope for. Their vision of the land that is very far off may be not as clear as they wish, but it is more clear than their vision of anything which lies about them; without it all would be shadow and darkness. When such persons think of tumults and revolutions, they feel more keenly what it is they would escape from. When they pray, ‘Thy Kingdom come,’ they ask that the Great Shepherd will lead them and their brethren out of a land of pits, a thirsty wilderness, a valley of the shadow of death, to a peaceable habitation, and a sure dwelling-place.
But there are also men who feel strongly that the kingdoms of this world are of a weak and perishable material, and yet who cannot be satisfied with the mere anticipation of a better inheritance after death. They require what is different in kind from anything which their eyes see, not merely that in an improved and perfected form. They desire a blessing which by its very nature cannot be more for one time than another, cannot be less needful for men here than hereafter. They have spirits which are haunted with the sense of a beauty and righteousness and truth which may be imaged in the world around them, but of which the source must lie much nearer to themselves. Some of them would say that it is in themselves: if men were but great and noble, and disengaged from the impressions of sense and the notions of society, they would perceive it. Others affirm, that when they exalt themselves this secret is hidden from them; that they enter into it only when they are humbled.
The first would say, not indeed in a prayer, but in their professions, their daily acts, their processes of self-discipline, ‘My Kingdom come;’ let my spirit be lightened of the outward impediments which prevent it from being right, wise, free; let it be lifted to its proper throne, from which it may look upon all beneath and around it, and if there be aught above it, as its own possession. The other says, ‘Thy Kingdom come;’ let the eyes of my understanding be cleared of their native mists, that they may see Thy wisdom; let me be purged of my inward pride and self-seeking, that I may know Thy truth; let me be set free from my exceeding sinfulness, that I may confess Thy righteousness, and be clothed with it. And that this may come to pass, do Thou take the government of all that is within me, of conscience, affection, reason, will, that they may do Thy work and not their own, and be directed to the great ends for which Thou hast designed them, not to those meaner ends which they would invent for themselves.
We have found then, at least, three distinct interpretations of this prayer, leading to practical conclusions, apparently very remote from each other. It is surely important to know whether they are incompatible; if they are, which is the right one; if they are not, how they are reconciled. I think you will agree with me that there is but one authority which can decide these questions. He who taught His disciples the prayer, can alone tell them what the nature of that Kingdom is, which He bids them desire.
I. You will remember, that when our Lord began to preach, saying, Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, the expectation of a coming kingdom was strong in the minds of at least a large body of the Jewish people. Those who felt the Herodian family to be cruel oppressors and foreigners likewise, those who were tormented by the recollection of a still more shameful servitude, which the sight of every Roman soldier, of every taxgatherer, brought before them, believed that the divine Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, was to be the deliverance from these. Have you not sometimes wondered that we are not told of any direct words in which our Lord combatted this impression? He might have said at once to the people of Galilee, or Judea, The Kingdom I speak of has nothing whatever to do with those to which you compare it; you only confuse yourselves by thinking of them together. But He did not say so. He used the phrases, ‘Thy Kingdom,’ ‘The Kingdom of God,’ ‘The Kingdom of Heaven,’ on every possible occasion, though He knew that this association was present to the minds of those who heard Him. It is true, that those who had come before Him appealing to the desire for liberty in their countrymen, and holding out the hope of a divine interference to satisfy it, had led their followers into the wilderness to insurrection and to murder. There was that difference, amidst a multitude of others as wonderful, between His method and theirs. What I am observing is, that there was not this difference. The Jews generally, the Galileans more than the rest of their countrymen, looked upon themselves as in an oppressed, anomalous condition, such as the chosen people of God ought not to be in. He did not tell them that they were mistaken. They believed that God meant to deliver them out of this condition. His words and His acts confirmed them in the hope. They thought that they must be brought into a different social position before they could attain freedom. He admitted the necessity. Many public acts, besides His last entry into Jerusalem as the Son of David, proved that He claimed to be what Nathanael declared Him to be, “The King of Israel.” His parables, so far from setting aside common language, from disconnecting His Kingdom with the common relations and feelings of men, affirmed that all facts in nature and social life were testifying of it; His miracles, so far from diminishing the impression that He came to set men free from a galling yoke, were one and all acts of deliverance; of deliverance, not from some bondage of which the sufferers were not conscious, but from the most visible, obvious, bodily torments. These are sufficient proofs, I think, that our Lord did not intend us, when we prayed His prayer, to shut our eyes against the actual confusions and oppressions under which men are suffering, or to think that His Kingdom is of too transcendent a character to take account of them. Assuredly when we do, we depart from His teaching and example; we bring ourselves into a very artificial, visionary state of feeling; we set aside the great truth, that as nothing human should be foreign from those who are partakers of humanity, nothing human can be foreign from Him who is the Head of it. The lofty expressions of contempt for the littleness of mere earthly transactions, and the vicissitudes of human governments, which some divines affect, are not learnt in His school, or in the schools of His prophets. They rather teach us to be ashamed of the cold indifference with which we trace His footsteps and listen to His voice, in the present and past history of mankind. Surely, then, we are not to condemn those who hope for the cure of the ills which they know to exist, through a larger and wider sympathy in civil governors, through a deeper knowledge of the ends for which the Church exists, and a more faithful use of the powers with which she is endowed, or, lastly, from the manifestation of Him to whom State-rulers and Church-rulers alike owe homage. All these expectations are sustained, not crushed, by the Word and Spirit of God. Without divine succour and encouragement they must have perished long ago, to our great misery, under the pressure of selfish feelings and interests, and of the despondency which experience, not penetrated with a higher principle, brings after it. And wherein then do those who have cherished these expectations, to which we owe so much of all that has been best in the world, seem to have wandered from His guidance who justifies their higher aspirations? In this respect, I think, mainly. Our Lord speaks of His Kingdom, or His Father’s Kingdom, not as if it were to set aside that constitution of the universe, of which men had seen the tokens in family and national institutions, of which they had dreamed when they thought of a higher and more general fellowship; but as if it were that very constitution in the fulness of its meaning and power. He who is the ground of the world’s order, He in whom all things consist, reveals Himself that we may know what its order and consistency are, how all disorder and inconsistency have arisen from the discontent and rebellion of our wills. Now an opposite feeling to this seems to characterize those who are noticing the present distractions of the world, and are suggesting how, in this day or hereafter, they may be removed. All seem to assume that the constitution of things is evil; not that we are evil in departing from it. With strange unanimity, eager politicians, restless ecclesiastics, hopeful millenarians, seem to take it for granted that the Devil is lord of the universe: only that by an improvement in the arrangements of civil life, by a stronger assertion of priestly authority, or by the final coming of the Son of Man, the evil power may be weakened or broken. Which sentiment, by whomsoever entertained, is surely unchristian and ungodly. The holiest men protested against it before our Lord’s coming. Though the Kingdom was not yet shewn to be a kingdom for the whole earth, they believed that it was; they declared its laws, testified that heathens were at war with their own proper ruler; told the chosen race that by their evil acts as kings, priests, people, they were breaking the everlasting covenant. Any other language since Christ has come is, practically, a renunciation of His authority, and a denial of His incarnation. Those who use it cannot effectually connect the command ‘Repent’ with the announcement ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand;’ though our Lord’s example forbids us ever to separate them. For they cannot say, “There has been a holy, blessed, order among you, which you have been darkening, confounding, hiding from men, by your sins and selfishness; but which must and will assert itself, in spite of you and of all that resist it.” Were this mode of speaking generally adopted by pastors and preachers, their hearers might be led each to ask himself, What have I done to frustrate the ends for which the Kingdom of Heaven has been established upon earth? how can I cease my strife with it, and become its obedient subject? a question which, instead of destroying their interest in the doings of the world generally, would make that interest practical and personal; instead of lessening their hopes of the time when the darkness shall pass away and the true light shall shine out fully, would make them less earnest in guessing about it, than in preparing for it.
II. But if our Lord spoke thus of His Kingdom, did He frown upon the wishes and longings of those who would cast this world behind them, and project their thoughts wholly into a future state? So far as anything in their anticipations is incompatible with an entire recognition of the sacredness of our life here; so far as they imply the Manichean notion, that the earth, or the flesh, is the devil’s creature and property; so far as they utter a merely selfish cry for escape from toil and warfare; He certainly gives them no encouragement, who hallowed all human life, who overcame the Evil Spirit, whose own garments were dipped in blood. But this, we must all confess, is only the dark and feeble side of a faith which is, in itself, gracious and inspiring. To despair of the present must be bad; to hope for the future must be good. And this hope our Lord cherishes and confirms, as much as he disowns that despair. Think of those words which came with such power to the mind of a scribe who had maintained the doctrine of a resurrection always, but had probably never before felt it to be a reality: “As touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read what was spoken to you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto him.” What are all speculations about separate states and intermediate existences to this celestial sentence? Those whom you read of in ages gone by, who sometimes stand out in such clear individuality, who sometimes melt into shadows, all live; for He lives from whom their life came. Nothing of it is departed, only the death which encompassed it. They have lost no personality. Here, there was but the first dawn of it. They were beginning feebly to be conscious of powers; to recognize distinctions; to feel after unity. He was educating their affections through the first stage of infancy; their reason, in its struggles to know its object; their will, in its endeavours to be obedient: who is now bringing them into more wonderful affinities, infinitely deeper apprehensions, a perfect liberty. And what is true of them is true of all who have yielded to the same guidance, who have desired the same light. All live to Him, with not one sympathy impaired or raised too high for human interests. With Him, as the common centre of all their thoughts and adorations, everything which He bestowed specially upon each is, necessarily, quickened and perfected, and finds its relation to the gift of every other. With Him as their centre they must care for all whom He cares for, but still, one would suppose, be knit closest in all bands of attachment and service to those with whom it was His pleasure, by holy pledges imperfectly understood, to unite them below. Such thoughts followed out, not by the fancy, but by the most legitimate reflection upon the state which must remain if the infirmities and sins of earth were purged away, would surely go far to satisfy men who have learnt to mourn over the meanness and incoherency of our earthly existence, considered by itself. And our Lord’s own resurrection, and His appearances to his disciples after he was risen, which were so brief, and yet carried with them such a wonderful witness of a perpetual presence,—these translate His words into life, and declare that our existence is not rounded with a sleep; or that it is asleep in Him at whose voice all creation was first awaked, and will awake again. With such thoughts, brethren, we may comfort ourselves when we pray, “Thy Kingdom come.” But we must not think that we are waiting for death to solve a problem which is not solved yet. The death of Him who took away the sins of the world, solved it at once and for ever; we only die to understand how perfect the solution is.
III. But this we shall not understand if we suppose that while our Lord sanctioned the expectations of those who look for a better government of this world, and of those who look for a world after death, he did not include in His gift and promise the satisfaction of those who feel that they want not a visible kingdom, but a Kingdom of righteousness, truth, love; not a future, but an eternal Kingdom. To them and to their hopes we may say that He spoke first. He awakened their longing, He met them before He could respond to the others. “For now,” said John the Baptist, “the axe is laid to the root of the trees.” He who is at hand is not coming to deal with external circumstances, but first with the being to whom those circumstances belong. Our Lord spoke straight to the conscience, reason, will, in man, which were asking after the Unseen, which were seeking for a Father. Even by his bodily cures He shewed that He was the Lord of the unseen influences which produce the outward signs of disease and decay. When He cast out evil spirits, He bore witness that He was holding converse with the spirit of man, that with the pride, lust, hatred, the powers of spiritual wickedness in high places which have enslaved us, He was carrying on His great controversy. By this victory He accomplished His great work. He manifested forth the true state and glory of man, as the child of God, and the inheritor of truth and righteousness, and built His Church upon that foundation of His own divine Humanity, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. Here, in this inner region, in this root of man’s being, He is still subduing His enemies, He is conducting His mysterious education. To that which He cultivates within us, He promises the great reward, the knowledge of Him who is, and was, and is to come. But be it ever remembered, that while He gives all encouragement to the highest desires of man’s heart and reason, He gives none whatever to any mystical conceits and imaginations. “The axe is laid to the root of the tree; therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.” The Kingdom of God begins within, but it is to make itself manifest without. It is to penetrate the feelings, habits, thoughts, words, acts, of him who is the subject of it. At last it is to penetrate our whole social existence, to mould all things according to its laws.
For this we pray when we say, “Thy Kingdom come.” We desire that the King of kings and Lord of lords will reign over our spirits and souls and bodies, which are His, and which He has redeemed. We pray for the extinction of all tyranny, whether lodged in particular men or in multitudes; for the exposure and destruction of corruptions inward and outward; for truth in all departments of government, art, science; for the true dignity of professions; for right dealings in the commonest transactions of trade; for blessings that shall be felt in every hovel. We pray for these things, knowing that we pray according to God’s will; knowing that He will hear us. If He had not heard this prayer going up from tens of thousands in all ages, the earth would have been a den of robbers. He will so answer it, that all which He has made shall become as it was when He beheld it on the seventh day and, lo, it was very good.