Bible Commentaries
Luke 2

Verse 7

No Room

And she brought forth her firstborn son; and she wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.— Luke 2:7.

There are not many texts in the Bible with which Christians, from the highest to the lowest, from the very aged to the young child who can but just speak, are more familiar than they are with this. We learn more or less about our Lord’s cradle almost as soon as we are out of our own cradles. That one part of the gospel history we know, even when the rest has quite slipped out of our minds.

Christ’s mother and Joseph had been living at their home at Nazareth when, according to St. Luke’s Gospel, orders were given for one of those censuses, or enrolments of the people, which were sometimes used in ancient days as a basis for the imposition of a poll-tax. In such cases, people were enrolled according to their ancestry and the region from which they originally came; and thus it was that “Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judæa, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David; to enrol himself with Mary who was betrothed to him, being great with child.”

The little town—it was no more than what we should call a village—was crowded with people, many of whom had come for the same purpose and claimed the same exalted lineage; the inn or guest-chamber—there was rarely more than one in such small places—was already crowded; this carpenter and his young bride were people of no particular importance and needed no special consideration, still less did the unborn Child; and so, as there was no room for them among the human guests, they had to find shelter in the stable hard by, among the beasts.

It used to be brought as an objection against the trustworthiness of St. Luke’s Gospel that there was no evidence other than his that such an enrolment was known at that time or in that region. Why the evidence of this ancient document should be regarded as less valuable than that of another on such a point did not appear; but at any rate it no longer matters. Within the last few years records have been discovered, on fragments of papyrus found in the rubbish-heaps of old Egyptian towns, which prove conclusively that such enrolments did take place in that time and region; and of this objection we shall doubtless hear no more. 1 [Note: 1 Bishop W. E. Collins, Hours of Insight, 112.]

I

No Room in the Inn

1. The story of the Nativity is not only very beautiful, as surely all will be willing to confess; it is historically true, a thing that some, even quite recently, have shown themselves eager to deny. Of course, to the faithful soul the whole story is convincing. The man who has seen the heavens opening in mercy and hope above his dark and sin-bound life finds no difficulty in believing that the glory of the Lord broke forth before men’s very eyes what time the Saviour of the world began His earthly life. The man who year after year has been led by the Light of the World across the wastes and through the dark places of life does not ask the astronomers to give him permission to believe in the Star of Bethlehem. But apart from such a gracious predisposition to receive this lovely story, we find touches in it that a master of fiction, much less a simple, plain-minded man, could surely never have given to it. There are points in the story that would never have occurred to the weaver of a tale. And notable amongst them is St. Luke’s simple statement that Mary in the hour of her need was shut out from such comfort and shelter as the inn at Bethlehem might have afforded. The Gospels were written by those who believed in Jesus as the Son of God. St. Luke was writing of the Nativity of his Lord, the birthday of the King of kings. And he pictures Him in that hour at the mercy of untoward circumstance. He is born in a stable and cradled in a manger. He could not have had a lowlier, a less kingly entrance into the world than that. There seems to be but one explanation of these apparently unpropitious details of the story, and that is that they are true.

One of the most absent-minded people I ever knew was a more or less distinguished ecclesiastic at whose house I used to visit as a child. He had won some fame in his youth as a poet, and he was, when I remember him, a preacher of some force; but he could not be depended upon in that capacity. Whatever he was interested in at the moment he preached about, and he had the power of being interested in very dreary things. His sermons were like reveries; indeed, his whole rendering of the service was that of a man who was reading a book to himself and often finding it unexpectedly beautiful and interesting. The result was sometimes startling, because one felt as if one had never heard the familiar words before. I remember his reading the account of the Nativity in a wonderfully feeling manner, “because there was no room for them in the inn.” I do not know how the effect was communicated; it was delivered with a half-mournful, half-incredulous smile. If those who refused them admittance had only known what they were doing. 1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Along the Road, 286.]

2. To us, the first thought that would be suggested by being relegated to the stable would be that of humiliation: it would be degrading to be sent out amongst the beasts; and the second thought would be that of privation: it would be hard to be condemned to no better accommodation than that. But that idea would scarcely have occurred to travellers in those lands. In those lands, the inn or guest-chamber will be a large room or shed built of rough stones and mud, or a cave partly dug out of the earth, with an earthen floor, more like an English cow-house than anything else; and the stable may either be actually a part of the same cave or building, or a similar one close at hand. Anyhow, the accommodation is much the same, and you camp on the cleanest spot you can find of the earthen or stony floor, and make yourself comfortable as best you can; so that—and this is the important point to keep in mind—the real difference between the inn and the stable was rather in the company than in the accommodation. In some ways the stable had its advantages. It was perhaps quieter, it was certainly more secluded; possibly it was not less comfortable with the oxen and the asses than it would have been in the inn; certainly the manger—a mere recess about half-way up the wall, where the fodder was stored—made a safer crib for the Holy Babe than the crowded floor of the guest-chamber, with hardly an inch to spare anywhere. Yes, nature did its best for Him, and He found a shelter amongst the beasts when men cast Him out; but that does not alter the fact that when the Lord of Glory came to be born on this earth, not even a common guest-chamber could find room for Him. He was born in the stable and cradled in a manger, “because there was no room for him in the inn.”

When I was travelling in Armenia and Kurdistan some three years ago, it befell me more than once or twice to have to spend the night in the stable, “because there was no room in the inn”; and the difference in actual accommodation was not so great as you might have supposed. The East Syrian people amongst whom I was travelling part of the time are very closely allied in race to the inhabitants of Palestine in the time of our Lord, and the customs are much the same still. 1 [Note: Bishop W. E. Collins, Hours of Insight, 114.]

I never felt the full pathos of the scene of the birth of Jesus till, standing one day in a room of an old inn in the market-town of Eisleben, in Central Germany, I was told that on that very spot, four centuries ago, amidst the noise of a market-day and the bustle of a public-house, the wife of the poor miner, Hans Luther, who happened to be there on business, being surprised like Mary with sudden distress, brought forth in sorrow and poverty the child who was to become Martin Luther, the hero of the Reformation, and the maker of modern Europe. 2 [Note: J. Stalker, The Life of Jesus Christ, 12.]

3. The birth in the manger because there was no room in the inn was natural. The fact that the child who was born was He whom Christendom celebrates does not make the indifference of Bethlehem a peculiar crime. The men of that time were not different from us all. They did not know. God, who taught through this His Son that, when we give alms, we should not sound a trumpet before us, gave His great gift with the like simplicity. When He gave His Son, He sent no heralds. The men to whom He came were busy with the cares which have always busied men. They were like ourselves, eager over what have always been recognized as great questions—questions about taxation, national independence, a world empire, and singularly careless as to where the children are born.

We need to make room amid the crowding thoughts for the coming of the Lord of life and light. And some day, when we have done it, there will be a country which has a national religion, because there will be a country which believes in the Incarnation. It will realize something more of the mighty mystery that flesh and blood are the temple of the Holy Spirit. It will realize how our souls, which come hither to tabernacle in flesh a little time, give us kindred with the Christ who was born among us. And we shall make room amid our crowding and eager thoughts for Him to come in us. 1 [Note: A. C. Welch.]

4. The birth in the manger was of His own ordering. It was the Divine Babe’s will to be born in such a place as that, and therefore He so ordered matters that His parents should not come to the inn till it was full, and that there should be no other place but that stable where they should lodge. It was not chance, God forbid! It was the will of the unborn Infant Himself. For He it is who ordereth all things in heaven and earth. He would be born in the city of David, because He was the Son of David, the King of Israel, and was to fulfil all the prophecies; He would not be born in royal state or comfort as the Son of David might be expected to be, because He was to save us by suffering and humility.

Whilst our Lord Jesus Christ was yet in the bosom of the Father, before He took our nature, He was free from all liability of suffering, and was under no call to suffer for men, except the importunate call of His own everlasting love; yet after He took our nature, and became the man Jesus Christ, He actually stood Himself within the righteous liability of suffering, not indeed on account of any flaw in His spotless holiness, but as a participator of that flesh which lay under the sentence of sorrow and death; and being now engulfed in the horrible pit along with all the others, He could only deliver them by being first delivered Himself, and thus opening a passage for them to follow Him by; as a man who casts himself into an enclosed dungeon which has no outlet in order to save a number of others whom he sees immured there, and when he is in, forces a passage through the wall, by dashing himself against it, to the great injury of his person. His coming into the dungeon is a voluntary act, but after he is there, he is liable to the discomforts of the dungeon by necessity, until he breaks through. 1 [Note: Thomas Erskine, The Brazen Serpent, 263.]

II

No Room in the World

1. What was true of the Lord’s entrance upon life was true of all His later life also. There never was one amongst the sons of men who was so truly human as He; for in us humanity is marred and blurred by so much that is weak and low and base, and not truly human at all; but He who was the most truly Man of all men was all His life a stranger among men: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” It was not that He was in any sense a recluse, or that He shrank from human society; indeed, it was all the other way—He yearned for companionship. The very first act of His public life was to draw to His side a little company of friends who were like-minded with Himself, and they were His companions ever after. Within this circle there were some who were specially dear to Him; and when He was about to face the darker agony of life He always invited them to accompany Him, and threw Himself on their sympathy. He was at home at the wedding feast and in the house of Simon the Pharisee and at the table of Levi the publican, and many another; indeed, when His enemies were casting about for some accusation against Him, they did not accuse Him of being inhuman like the ascetic John the Baptist, but called Him rather “a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” And yet, all His life He was alone; He was despised and rejected of men. He was occupied in “business” that—so men chose to think—they had no interest in; and so—they had no room for Him. When He had preached at Nazareth, where He was brought up, they arose and thrust Him out of the city. At Capernaum, when they saw the mighty works that He did on them that were diseased, they came and besought Him to depart out of their coasts. He passed through Samaria, and the Samaritans would not receive Him. Wherever He went He was a homeless wanderer. “The foxes have holes,” He said, “and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” And the solitude was all the greater as the end drew near. Jerusalem would have none of Him; one of His own little company covenanted to betray Him. He went into the Garden that He might face all that was coming and be ready for it, taking the three to watch and pray with Him; but in the last resort not even they could help Him: He must needs tread the winepress alone. And so the rulers compassed His destruction, and the Romans scourged Him and delivered Him to be crucified, and at length He hung there upon the cross, isolated between heaven and earth, naked, forsaken and alone. Truly, while He was on earth there was no room for Him.

A marvellous great world it is, and there is room in it for many things; room for wealth, ambition, pride, show, pleasure; room for trade, society, dissipation; room for powers, kingdoms, armies, and their wars; but for Him there is the smallest room possible; room in the stable but not in the inn. There He begins to breathe, and at that point introduces Himself into His human life as a resident of our world—the greatest and most blessed event, humble as the guise of it may be, that has ever transpired among mortals. If it be a wonder to men’s eyes and ears, a wonder even to science itself, when the naming air-stone pitches into our world, as a stranger newly arrived out of parts unknown in the sky, what shall we think of the more transcendent fact, that the Eternal Son of God is born into the world; that, proceeding forth from the Father, not being of our system or sphere, not of the world, He has come as a Holy Thing into it—God manifest in the flesh, the Word made flesh, a new Divine Man, closeted in humanity, there to abide and work until He has restored the race itself to God? Nor is this wonderful annunciation any the less welcome, or any the less worthy to be celebrated by the hallelujahs of angels and men, that the glorious visitant begins to breathe in a stall. Was there not a certain propriety in such a beginning, considered as the first chapter and symbol of His whole history, as the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind? 1 [Note: H. Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation, 2.]

2. What does the world offer in place of a room in the inn?

(1) We build Him stately material temples.—We expend boundless treasure in their erection. Art joins hands with architecture, and the structure becomes a poem. Lily-work crowns the majestic pillar. Subdued light, and exquisite line, and tender colour add their riches to the finished pile. And the soul cries out, “Here is a house for Thee, O Man of Nazareth, Lord of glory! Here is the home I have built for Thee.” And if the soul would only listen there comes back the pained response, “Where is the place of My rest? saith the Lord.” “The Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands,” “I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.” The Lord of glory seeks the warm inn of the soul, and we offer Him a manger of stone.

(2) Or, in place of the home which He seeks, we build Him a fane of stately ritual.—We spend infinite pains in designing dainty and picturesque ceremonials. We devise reverent and dignified movements. We invent an elaborate and impressive symbolism. We engage the ministry of noble music for the expression of our praise, and we swing the fragrant censer for the expression of our prayer. Or perhaps we discard the colour and the glow. We banish everything that is elaborate and ornate. We use no flowers, either in reality or in symbol. We reduce our ritualism to a simple posture. Our music is rendered without pride or ostentation. Everything is plain, prosaic and unadorned. We have a ritual without glitter, and we have movements without romance. But whether our ceremony be one or the other, the soul virtually says, “Here is a ritualistic house I have built for Thee, O Christ! Take up Thine abode in the dwelling which I have provided.” And if the soul would only listen it would hear the Lord’s reply, “My son, give me thine heart.” He seeks the inn of the soul; we offer Him a ritualistic manger.

(3) Or again, we build Him the massive house of a stately creed.—The building is solid and comprehensive. All its parts are firm and well defined, and they are mortised with passionate zeal and devotion. We are proud of its constitution. The creed is all the more beautiful that it is now so venerable and hoary. The weather-stains of centuries only add to its significance and glory. There it stands, venerable, majestic, apparently indestructible, “Here is a credal home for Thee, O Lord! I am jealous for the honour of Thy house. I will contend earnestly for every stone in the holy fabric! Here is a home for Thee, O King.” And if the soul would reverently and quietly listen this would be the response it would hear, “When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” That is what the Lord is seeking. He seeks not my credal statements but my personal faith. He solicits not my creed but my person, not my words but my heart. And so do we offer Him all these substitutes in the place of the dwelling He seeks. And if these are all we have to offer, “the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” We offer Him the hospitality of a big outer creed, but “there is no room in the inn.” 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

Creed is the railway carriage; it won’t take you on your journey unless you have the engine, which is active religion. 2 [Note: George Frederic Watts, iii. 326.]

Some people seem to think that if they can pack the gospel away into a sound and orthodox creed it is perfectly safe. It is a sort of canned fruit of Christianity, hermetically sealed and correctly labelled which will keep for years without decay. An extravagant reliance has been placed, therefore, on confessions of faith as the preservatives of a pure gospel. But the heart is greater than the creed; and if the heart is wrong it will very soon corrupt the creed and interline it with its own heresies. Hence the wise injunction of the Apostle, “Holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience.” 3 [Note: A. J. Gordon: A Biography, 289.]

3. How may the world find room for Him?

(1) By finding room for His truth and the love of it. The world’s attitude towards the birth of every great truth is focused in a single phrase in the simple story of the first Christmas, the greatest birthday since time began. Mary laid the infant Christ in a manger—“because there was no room for them in the inn.” Right must ever fight its way against the world. Truth must ever walk alone in its Gethsemane. Justice must bravely face its Calvary if it would still live in triumph after all efforts to slay it. Love must ever, in the end, burst forth in its splendour from the dark clouds of hate and discord that seek to obscure it. These great truths must be born in the manger of poverty, or pain, or trial, or suffering, finding no room in the inn until at last by entering it in triumph they honour the inn that never honoured them in their hours of need, of struggle or of darkness. It requires sterling courage to live on the uplands of truth, battling bravely for the right, undismayed by coldness, undaunted by contempt, unmoved by criticism, serenely confident even in the darkest hours, that right, justice and truth must win in the end.

Every great truth in all the ages has had to battle for recognition. If it be real it is worth the struggle. Out of the struggle comes new strength for the victor. Trampled grass grows the greenest. Hardship and trial and restriction and opposition mean new vitality to character. In potting plants, it is well not to have the pot too large, for the more crowded the roots the more the plant will bloom. It is true, in a larger sense, of life. The world has ever misunderstood and battled against its thinkers, its leaders, its reformers, its heroes. 1 [Note: W. G. Jordan, The Crown of Individuality, 33.]

A happy man seems to be a solecism; it is a man’s business to suffer, to battle, and to work. 2 [Note: Carlyle, in Life of Lord Houghton, ii. 478.]

Even the spectacle of man’s repeated and pathetic failure to live up to his own ideal is “inspiring and consoling” to this onlooker, since, in spite of long ages of ill-success, the race is not discouraged, but continues to strive as if for assured victory, rendering obedience, however imperfect, to the inner voice that speaks of duty owed to ourselves, to our neighbour, to our God; and it is “inspiring and consoling” that traces of the same struggle can be discerned in the poor sentient beings, our inferiors. “Let it be enough for faith that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy: Surely not all in vain.” 3 [Note: J. A. Hammerton, Stevensoniana, 215.]

(2) We find room for Him when we find room for His little ones.

A few days ago there was performed in the hall of Lincoln’s Inn, London, a mystery play called “Eager Heart.” The story is briefly this. Eager Heart is a poor maiden living in a wayside cottage, who has heard that the king is going to pass that way, and that he will take up his quarters for a night somewhere in the neighbourhood. With all diligence she prepares the best room in her cottage for his reception, hoping that she may be the favoured one whom he will honour with a visit. Her two sisters, Eager Fame and Eager Sense, deride her expectations, and assure her that the king would never condescend to enter so humble an abode, and that he will, as a matter of course, seek hospitality with some of the great folk in that part of the country. She, however, has a strong premonition that her hopes are not ill-founded, and goes on with her preparations. When all is ready, a knock is heard at the door, and a poor woman with an infant at her breast begs the charity of a night’s lodging. Eager Heart, sad and disappointed, yet feeling that she cannot refuse such a request, gives up to the distressed wayfarers the room which she had prepared for the king; and then goes forth into the night in the hopes of meeting him and at least expressing her goodwill to have entertained him had it been possible. On her way she meets a company of shepherds, who tell her they have seen a vision of angels, who have assured them that the king has already come, and is in the village. And as they return, they are joined by another pilgrim band, of eastern princes, who are making their way, guided by a heavenly light, to pay their homage to their sovereign lord. Needless to say, it is to the cottage of Eager Heart herself that they are guided. The infant is Himself the King, and the homeless woman is the Queen Mother. 1 [Note: H. Lucas, At the Parting of the Ways, 79.]

4. The world will find room for Him at last. Has it not found room for Him already? Has He not made room for Himself—He for whom the inn of Bethlehem had none? Through half the world men remember continually that coming. Amid the trivial associations of each Christmas, amid the kindlier thoughts which are native to the time, there is not wholly lost the sense of Him who in His greatness made these days solemn and sweet and grand, who made their kindlier thoughts become more natural. God, they remember, bowed Himself to become man for man’s redemption. And He who dwelt among them in more than common lowliness now fills the thoughts and inspires the hopes of thousands who find through Him surer foothold for life, and through Him can face death.

Little Hettie had a model village, and she never tired of, setting it up.

“What kind of a town is that, Hettie?” asked her father.

“O, a Christian town,” Hettie answered, quickly.

“Suppose we make it a heathen town,” her father suggested.

“What must we take out?”

“The church,” said Hettie, taking it to one side.

“Is that all?”

“I suppose so.”

“No, indeed,” her father said. “The public school must go. Take the public library out also.”

“Anything else?” Hettie asked, sadly,

“Isn’t that a hospital over there?”

“But, father, don’t they have hospitals?”

“Not in heathen countries. It was Christ who taught us to care for the sick and the old.”

“Then I must take out the Old Ladies’ Home,” said Hettie, very soberly.

“Yes, and that Orphans’ Home at the other end of the town.”

“Why, father,” Hettie exclaimed, “then there’s not one good thing left! I would not live in such a town for anything.”

Does having room for Jesus make so much difference? 1 [Note: A. P. Hodgson, Thoughts for the King’s Children, 220.]

III

No Room in our Lives

The difficulty with us to-day is just what it was when Christ trod this earth; and the real reason why He means so little to many of us is that there is no room for Him in our lives.

The only place in which He can make His home to-day is the inn of the soul, the secret rooms of the personal life. We sometimes sing, in one of the most tender and gracious of our hymns, “O make our hearts Thy dwelling-place,” and that is just what the Lord is willing and waiting to do. “O make our hearts Thine inn!” But when He moves towards us He finds the inn already thronged.

You may talk as you please about the things that have “put you off,” as we say, and made you less keen about religion and its claims than you once were—the tendency of the Higher Criticism, or the results of the comparative study of religions, or the New Theology, or the Athanasian Creed, or the futility of our ordinary church-life, or the worldliness of professing Christians, or the divisions of Christendom. All these things have some importance; but you know perfectly well, and it has recently been set before us with extraordinary force and vigour, that if the Lord Jesus Christ were but to appear in the smoking-room one day when religious questions were being discussed so freely, all these things would dwindle into absolute insignificance, and the one vital question for you and for me would be whether we really loved Him enough to take up His cross and live out our lives manfully for His sake. Well, you may not interview Him in the smoking-room, but you can see Him just as clearly as ever you could if you will only give yourself a chance. He is as near as ever He was, as dear as ever He was, and the one question is whether we will give ourselves the chance of seeing Him. 1 [Note: Bishop W. E. Collins, Hours of Insight, 117.]

Yea, in the night, my soul, my daughter,

Cry,—clinging Heaven by the hems;

And lo! Christ walking on the water

Not of Gennesareth, but Thames.

1. “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?” This is the house our Redeemer seeks, the wonderful inn of the soul. Let us go and look inside that inn, for it has many rooms, housing many varied interests, and we may exclude the Lord from them all. Let us walk through a few of the rooms.

(1) There is first of all the room of the mind, the busy realm of the understanding. Try to imagine the multitude of thoughts that throng that room in a single day. From waking moment to the return of sleep they crowd its busy floors. There they are, thoughts innumerable, hurrying, jostling, coming, going! And yet in all the restless, tumultuous assembly, with the floor never empty, the Lord may have no place. “God is not in all his thoughts.” There is no room in the inn.

One forenoon a stranger entered a publishing establishment in a Russian city—I think in Moscow. He was dressed in very plain, homely garb. He quietly drew a manuscript out of his pocket, and requested that it be published. But the publisher, taking in his homely appearance with a quick glance of his shrewd, practised eye, answered him very curtly, refusing his request He said, “It’s no use looking at your sketch. I really cannot be bothered. We have hundreds of such things in hand, and have really not time to deal with yours, even though you were in a position to guarantee the cost—which I very much doubt.”

The stranger rolled up his manuscript, saying he must have been labouring under some misapprehension, as he had been told that the public liked to read what he wrote.

“ The public like to read what you write?” repeated the publisher, eyeing the rugged figure before him. “Who are you? What is your name?” The stranger quietly said, “My name is Leo Tolstoi,” as he buttoned his coat over the rejected manuscript. Instantly the astonished publisher was on the other side of the counter, with most humble apology, begging the privilege of publishing the manuscript. But the famous, eccentric genius quietly withdrew, with the coveted paper in his inner pocket.

There standeth One in your midst whom ye acknowledge not. And He does not tell us who He is, in the manner of the offended Russian Count. He tells us plainly that He is here, looking keenly, listening alertly, noting all. The Christ of the manger is in our midst. Even though not acknowledged perhaps, yet He is not unknown; He is not unrecognized. No one ever yet refused Christ admittance in ignorance of what he was doing, not really knowing whom he was crowding out. He may have failed to realize the seriousness of what he was doing, and the wonder of Him who was knocking; quite likely. But he knew that he was refusing entrance to Him who should be admitted. There is always a quiet, inner messenger making that unmistakably clear. 1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, The Crowded Inn, 25.]

(2) And here is another room, the room of personal affection and desire. It is the room where love lives and sings. And it is the room where love droops and sickens and dies. It is the room where impulse is born and where it grows or faints. It is the room where secret longing moves shyly about, and only occasionally shows itself at the window. It is the busy chamber of the emotions. And the Lord yearns to enter this carefully guarded room to make His home in the realm of waking and brooding affection. Is there any room for Him?

That wondrous Christ is standing to-day at some heart-door pleading for entrance. Is it yours? You attend the church service, and give a tacit acknowledgment to the claims of Christianity, and prefer life in a land that owes its prosperity and safety to this pleading One. Yet He is standing outside of the door of your heart. Is he? He is, if He has not been let inside. The talented Holman Hunt, in his famous picture of Christ knocking at the door, reminds us that that door opens only from within. If you have not opened it, it is shut; and He without, knocking! strange! 2 [Note: Ibid., 27.]

Strangely the wondrous story doth begin

Of that which came to pass on Christmas Day—

“The new-born babe within a manger lay

Because there was no room inside the inn.”

No room for Him who came to conquer sin

And bid distress and mourning flee away!

So in the stable He was fain to stay

Whilst revelry and riot reigned within.

And still the same old tale is told again:

The world is full of greed and gain and glee,

And has no room for God because of them.

Lord, though my heart be filled with joy and pain,

Grant that it ne’er may find no room for Thee,

Like that benighted inn at Bethlehem! 1 [Note: Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Verses, Wise or Otherwise, 196.]

(3) Let us pass into another room in the inn—the room of the imagination. It is the radiant chamber of ideals and fancies and visions and dreams. In this room we may find Prospect Window and the Window of Hope. It is here that we look out upon the morrow. And it is here that life’s wishes and plans may be found. The Lord delights to abide in that bright chamber of purpose and dream. Is there any room?

It is a popular impression of Bushnell that he was the subject of his imagination, and that it ran away with him in the treatment of themes which required only severe thought. The impression is a double mistake; theology does not call for severe thought alone, but for the imagination also and the seeing and interpreting eye that usually goes with it. It is not a vagrant and irresponsible faculty, but an inner eye, whose vision is to be trusted like that of the outer; it has in itself the quality of thought, and is not a mere picture-making gift. Bushnell trained his imagination to work on certain definite lines, and for a definite end; namely, to bring out the spiritual meaning hidden within the external form. 2 [Note: T. T. Munger, Horace Bushnell, 383.]

(4) Not far from this room there is another— the chamber of mirth. It is here that the genius of merriment dwells, and here you may find the sunny presences of wit and humour. Here are quip and jest and jollity. Here is where bridal joy is found, and where the song of the vineyard is born. Will the Master turn into this room or will He avoid it? No; He even longs for a place in the happy crowd! Is there any room for Him in this hall of mirth, or is He crowded out?

I remember that Charles Kingsley used to say, “I wonder if there is a family in all England where there is more laughter than there is in mine.” And the Lord was an abiding guest at Charles Kingsley’s table. Take Him into your conversation. He will come in like sunshine. There are some things that will just disappear at His coming as owls and bats vanish at the dawn. Our conversation will lose its meanness, and its suspicions, and its jealousies, and all uncharitableness. Our Christmas speech will itself be a home of light. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

2. Why is it that we keep Him out of our lives?

(1) We are too much occupied with our ordinary affairs. There are men upon whom work has grown by little and little, so slowly that they hardly realize how; perhaps it has not all been of their own seeking; certainly it has not all been the result of selfish ambition; sometimes it seems to be the result of a tendency which they could hardly resist. Anyhow, there can be no question as to the result of it all; little by little devotion, meditation and prayer seem not so much to have been given up as to have dried up of themselves out of the life. And the worst of it is that the occupations do not seem to have gained in the process. Like Pharaoh’s lean kine, they have swallowed up everything else, but instead of being better, they are worse; the work is done more mechanically, and less freshly; more severely, but less wholeheartedly.

One feels how natural it was that the small, weary company which crept in footsore by the north gate should have been ignored. They were quite humble people; they did not even belong to the village; they were among the last comers, for they have travelled from the distant north, and Mary in these days is not the swiftest of travellers. The village is crowded, for all have come to be enrolled. The interest is keen, for the matter involves questions of taxation, questions of national independence, questions of a world empire. It is not to be wondered at that none notices the group which creeps in when the sun is nigh setting, and, because the inn is full, finds what poor shelter it can. The world lost the honour of providing a place where its Redeemer might be born, because it was very busy over important things. 2 [Note: A. C. Welch.]

An inn—what an appropriate figure of the soul of man as it is by nature! What a multiplicity and what a prodigious variety of thoughts are always coming and going in the soul—the passengers these which throng the inn, and some of whom are so fugitive that they do not even take up their abode there for the night! And what distraction, discomposure, and noise do these outgoing and incoming thoughts produce, so that perhaps scarcely ever in the day is our mind collected and calm, except just for the few moments spent in private prayer before we lie down and when we rise—the hurry and confusion this, produced by the constant arrivals at, and departures from, an inn. 1 [Note: E. M. Goulburn, The Pursuit of Holiness, 281.]

(2) Our life is sometimes already filled with the thronging multitude of our cares. We can be so full of care as to be quite careless about Him. We can have so much to worry about that we have no time to think about Christ. “The cares of this world choke the word,” and the Speaker of the word is forgotten. Yes, we may entertain so many cares that the Lord cannot get in at the door. And yet all the time the gracious promise is waiting: Cast all your care on Him, for He careth for you.

And what, then, is the cure for worry? Can you ask? If you will but make room for Him in your heart and keep Him there, your worry will vanish, even as in the Pilgrim’s Progress Christian’s load fell off when he lifted his eyes to the Cross of Christ. With Him there to share every thought, you will find that many of the difficulties will smooth themselves out forthwith; and as you learn to leave in His hands the things which are His business, not yours, so will all worry become by His grace a thing of the past.

Doubtless your cross was chosen for you by our Lord and Master just for its weight. To me there is always a wonderful beauty and consolation in the fact, so simply told in the narrative of the Passion, that His cross proved too heavy for Him. He has never since that hour suffered any one of His own to bear a cross unaided, nor yet too heavy. 2 [Note: Archbishop Magee, in Life by J. C. Macdonnell, i. 268.]

(3) Our pleasures keep Christ out of our lives. A merely sensational life can make us numb to all that is spiritual; and the unseen world becomes non-existent to our souls. That is an awful law of life. We may so dwell in the pleasures of the senses that all the deeper things are as though they were dead, and buried in forgotten graves.

One would certainly think that the Lord of glory could not be crowded out of a wedding, that solemn and sacred experience in human life. But He can! Of course we may mention His name, but the naming is too often only a conventional courtesy, while the Lord Himself is relegated to the yard. We may be engrossed with the sensations of the event, with the glittering externals, with the dresses and the orange-blossoms, while the holy Christ, upon whom the lasting joy and peace and blessedness of the wedded pair will utterly depend, is absolutely forgotten.

(4) And again, there are those who have no room for Him because of their sin: and this is the most real and all-pervading obstacle of all. A sinful habit, using the word in its largest sense, of pride or envy, covetousness or gluttony, and not only of particular sinful acts, is by far the worst obstacle to keep the Saviour out, and that because it at once deadens and deceives us. Far be it from me, for instance, to deny that doubts are sometimes purely intellectual; but I say deliberately that I have rarely talked with a man, or a woman either, about religious doubts without finding, when they come to speak quite freely, that the difficulty was, in part at any rate, a moral one. When I look into my own heart, I see the same thing; my own doubts have been based on moral difficulties far more largely than I was willing to admit to myself at the time, or even than I knew at the time; and I believe that most of us would have to make the same confession. 1 [Note: W. E. Collins, Hours of Insight, 121.]

Christ’s crowding-out power is tremendous. That explains why He is so crowded out. When allowed freely in He crowds everything out that would crowd Him out. He crowds out sin. By the blood drawn from His own side He washes it out. By the soft-burning but intense fire of His heart He burns it out. By the purity of His own wondrous presence, recognized as Lord, He reveals its horrid ugliness, and compels us, by the holy compulsion of love, to keep it out. 2 [Note: S. D. Gordon, The Crowded Inn, 58.]

There fared a mother driven forth

Out of an inn to roam;

In the place where she was homeless

All men are at home.

The crazy stable close at hand,

With shaking timber and shifting sand,

Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand

Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,

And strangers under the sun,

And they lay their heads in a foreign land

Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,

And chance and honour and high surprise,

But our homes are under miraculous skies

Where the Yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,

Where the beasts feed and foam,

Only where He was homeless

Are you and I at home:

We have hands that fashion and heads that know,

But our hearts we lost—how long ago!

In a place no chart nor ship can show

Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,

And strange the plain things are,

The earth is enough and the air is enough

For our wonder and our war;

But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings

And our peace is put in impossible things

Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings

Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening

Home shall all men come,

To an older place than the Eden

And a taller town than Rome.

To the end of the way of the wandering star,

To the things that cannot be and that are,

To the place where God was homeless

And all men are at home. 1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, The House of Christmas.]

No Room

Literature

Askew (E. A.), The Service of Perfect Freedom, 37.

Bourdillon (F.), Short Sermons, 139.

Brooke (S. A.), The Early Life of Jesus, 12.

Bushnell (H.), Christ and His Salvation, 1.

Butler (W. A.), Sermons Doctrinal and Practical, 254.

Carter (T. T.), Meditations on the Hidden Life of our Lord, i. 39.

Clayton (J. W.), The Genius of God, 136.

Collins (W. E.), Hours of Insight, 112.

Goulburn (E. M.), The Pursuit of Holiness, 279.

Gregory (J. R.), Scripture Truths made Simple, 53.

Hart (H. M.), A Preacher’s Legacy, 1.

Hiley (R. W.), A Year’s Sermons, ii. 360.

Hodgson (A. P.), Thoughts for the King’s Children, 215.

Jordan (W. G.), The Crown of Individuality, 24.

Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year; Christmas and Epiphany, 97.

Low (G. D.), The New Heart, 67.

Lucas (H.), At the Parting of the Ways, 79.

Nicoll (W. R.), Sunday Evening, 401.

Norton (J. N.), Old Paths, 54.

Oosterzee (J. J. van), The Year of Salvation, i. 62.

Paget (F. E.), Plain Village Sermons, i. 30.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, viii. (1862), No. 485.

British Congregationalist, Dec. 5, 1912 (J. H. Jowett).

Christian World Pulpit, lxxiv. 412 (J. E. Rankin).

Church Pulpit Year Book, 1905, p. 315.

Churchman’s Pulpit: Christmas Day, ii. 103 (C. P. Eden); First Sunday after Christmas, iii. 76 (J. W. Burgon).

Clerical Library: Outlines for Special Occasions, 16 (J. G. Rogers).

Homiletic Review, xlviii. 454 (J. E. Rankin); lxiv. 478 (A. C. Welch).

Literary Churchman, xxviii. (1882) 516 (E. C. Lefroy); xxxiii. (1887) 530 (J. B. C. Murphy); xxxiv. (1888) 529 (H. J. Wilmot-Buxton).

Methodist Times, Dec. 21, 1908 (P. C. Ainsworth).

Verses 10-11

Good Tidings of Great Joy

And the angel said unto them, Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.— Luke 2:10-11.

1. To the evangelist and to Christian faith the coming of Jesus into the world is the great event in its history. We divide time into the Christian era and the era before Christ. Yet we cannot be sure of the very year when Christ was born, any more than of the very year when He died; and though St. Luke was anxious to date the birth precisely, as we see from Luke 2:1-2, there are unsolved difficulties connected with the census which we have simply to acknowledge. That the Day-spring from on high visited the world to give light to them that sit in darkness is undoubted, though we may not be able to tell the hour of its rising.

The narrative of St. Luke is the most wonderful and beautiful in Holy Scripture, and has always touched the hearts of men. Not that Christmas, as we call it, was from the beginning the great festival of believers. On the contrary, the great festival of the early Church was Easter, the day of the resurrection. It was not till the thirteenth century that the infant Christ and the manger came to have the place they now hold in the thoughts and affections of Christians, and this was greatly due to the influence of Francis of Assisi, who visited Bethlehem and wept with holy joy over the lowly birth of the Saviour. He diffused his own devotion when he returned to Italy, and great artists found in the stable and the manger, the ox and the ass (borrowed from Isaiah 1:3), the mother and the Child, the shepherds and the angels, the highest inspirations of their genius.

2. It is long since the shepherds near Bethlehem beheld in the clear eastern sky the glory of the Lord, and heard the voice of the heavenly messenger proclaiming, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” Centuries have rolled by, but the lustre of that night has not passed away. The tones of that message have been caught and repeated by an increasing number of God-sent messengers. They swell in volume and majesty and power until now from all parts of the world the grand chorus resounds, filling the air with its message of joy and hope and faith and love, “Joy to the world, the Lord has come!”

I

The Circumstances

1. The Shepherds

There were many great men and many wealthy men in Palestine. There were scholars of the most profound and various learning. There were lean ascetics who had left the joys of home, and gone away to pray and fast in deserts. But it was not to any of these that the angels came, and it was not in their ears that the music sounded; the greatest news that the world ever heard was given to a group of humble shepherds. Few sounds from the mighty world ever disturbed them. They were not vexed by any ambition to be famous. They passed their days amid the silence of nature; and to the Jew nature was the veil of God. They were men of a devout and reverent spirit, touched with a sense of the mystery of things, as shepherds are so often to this day. Is it not to such simple and reverent spirits that God still reveals Himself in amplest measure? How fitting it was, too, that shepherds should be chosen, when we remember how the Twenty-third Psalm begins, and when we reflect that the Babe born in Bethlehem was to be the Good Shepherd giving His life for the sheep.

The Lord manifested to the sage, the sovereign, is now manifest to the shepherd. This last was peculiarly significant of the genius of Christianity. The people need Christ. They have their share of sin, suffering, sorrow. They deeply need the grace, consolations, and strengthening of the Gospel. The people are capable of Christ. Without the intellectual distinction of the Magi, or the social eminence of Herod, they have the essential greatness of soul which renders them capable of Christ and of His greatest gifts. The people rejoice in Christ. “The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen.” From that day to this a new glory has shone on all common scenes, a new joy has filled the common heart that has been opened to the Prince of Peace, the Saviour of the World. 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Gates of Dawn, 357.]

2. The Place

It is generally supposed that these anonymous shepherds were residents of Bethlehem; and tradition has fixed the exact spot where they were favoured with this Advent Apocalypse—about a thousand paces from the modern village. It is a historic fact that there was a tower near that site, called Eder, or “the Tower of the Flock,” around which were pastured the flocks destined for the Temple sacrifice; but the topography of Luke 2:8 is purposely vague. The expression, “in that same country,” would describe any circle within the radius of a few miles from Bethlehem as its centre, and the very vagueness of the expression seems to push back the scene of the Advent music to a farther distance than a thousand paces. And this view is confirmed by the language of the shepherds themselves, who, when the vision has faded, say one to another, “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing that is come to pass”; for they scarcely would have needed, or used, the adverbial “even” were they keeping their flocks so close up to the walls of the city. We may therefore infer, with some amount of probability, that, whether the shepherds were residents of Bethlehem or not, when they kept watch over their flocks, it was not on the traditional site, but farther away over the hills.

It is difficult, and very often impossible, for us to fix the precise locality of these sacred scenes, these bright points of intersection, where Heaven’s glories flash out against the dull carbon-points of earth; and the voices of tradition are at best but doubtful guesses. It would almost seem as if God Himself had wiped out these memories, hiding them away, as He hid the sepulchre of Moses, lest the world should pay them too great a homage, and lest we might think that one place lay nearer to Heaven than another, when all places are equally distant, or rather equally near. It is enough to know that somewhere on these lonely hills came the vision of the angels, perhaps on the very spot where David was minding his sheep when Heaven summoned him to a higher task, passing him up among the kings. 1 [Note: Henry Burton.]

3. The Time

The time is significant. Night is the parent of holy thought,—the nurse of devout aspiration. Its darkness is often the chosen time for heavenly illumination. When earth is dark, heaven glows. The world was shrouded in night when Christ came, and into the thickest of its “gross darkness” His light burst. Yet the unobtrusiveness of His appearance, and the blending of secrecy with the manifestation of His power, are well typified by that glory which shone in the night, and was seen only by two or three poor men. The Highest came to His own in quietness, and almost stole into the world, and the whole life was of a piece with the birth and its announcement. There was the “hiding of His power.”

Christmas hath a darkness

Brighter than the blazing noon,

Christmas hath a dullness

Warmer than the heat of June,

Christmas hath a beauty

Lovelier than the world can show:

For Christmas bringeth Jesus,

Brought for us so low.

Earth, strike up your music,

Birds that sing and bells that ring;

Heaven hath answering music

For all Angels soon to sing:

Earth, put on your whitest

Bridal robe of spotless snow:

For Christmas bringeth Jesus,

Brought for us so low. 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Verses, 54.]

4. How simply the appearance of the single angel and the glory of the Lord is told! The evangelist thinks it the most natural thing in the world that heaven should send out its inhabitant on such an errand, and that the symbol of the Divine presence should fill the night with sudden splendour, which paled the bright Syrian stars. So it was, if that birth were what he tells us it was—the coming into human life of the manifest Deity. If we think of what he is telling, his quiet tone is profoundly impressive. The Incarnation is the great central miracle, the object of devout wonder to “principalities … in heavenly places.” And not only do angels come to herald and to adore, but “the glory of the Lord,” that visible brightness which was the token of God’s presence between the cherubim and had been hid in the secret of the sanctuary while it shone, but which had for centuries been absent from the Temple, now blazes with undestructive light on the open hillside, and encircles them and the friendly angel by their side. What did that mean but that the birth of Jesus was the highest revelation of God, henceforth not to be shut within the sanctuary, but to be the companion of common lives, and to make all sacred by its presence? The glory of God shines where Christ is, and where it shines is the temple.

And now the day draws nigh when Christ was born;

The day that showed how like to God Himself

Man had been made, since God could be revealed

By one that was a man with men, and still

Was one with God the Father; that men might

By drawing nigh to Him draw nigh to God,

Who had come near to them in tenderness. 1 [Note: G. MacDonald, “Within and Without” (Poetical Works, i. 52).]

II

The Preface to the Message

1. Reassurance

“Be not afraid.” This was the first bidding sent from heaven to men when Jesus Christ was born. It was no new message of reassurance; again and again in a like need a like encouragement had been vouchsafed: to Abraham, to Isaac, to Gideon, to Daniel, to Zacharias, the same tranquillizing, helpful words had come from the considerateness and gentleness that are on high. But to the shepherds of Bethlehem they came with a new power and significance. For now they had their final warrant upon earth; those attributes of God, those truths of the Divine Nature upon which the bidding rested, had their perfect expression now in a plain fact of human history. The birth of Jesus Christ was the answer, the solvent for such fears as rushed upon the shepherds when “the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them.” They feared, as the mystery and stillness of the night were broken by that strange invasion, what might follow it. “And the angel said unto them, Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.” Within that glory was the love of God; and all that it might disclose must come from Him who so loved the world that He had sent His Son to be born, to suffer, and to die for men. There must, indeed, be awe in coming near to God, in realizing how near He comes to us: but it is like the awe with which even earthly goodness, greatness, wisdom at their highest touch us; it is not like our terror of that which is arbitrary and unaccountable. God dwells in depths of burning light, such as the eyes of sinful men can never bear: but the light itself, with all it holds, streams forth from love, and is instinct, informed, aglow with love.

These words which the angel spoke were but anticipations of the words with which Jesus Himself has made us familiar. They were His favourite words. He might have borrowed them from the angel, or more likely given them to the angel in advance. We hear from His own lips continually—“Fear not.” He meets us at every turn of life with that cheery invocation. He passed through His ministry day by day repeating it. It was the watchword of His journey and warfare. The disciples heard it every time they were troubled, cast down, and afraid. When they fell at His feet trembling, He lifted them up with the words “Fear not!” When their ship was sinking in the storm, they heard the cry “Fear not!” When they shivered at the thought of all the foes and dangers which awaited them, there came reassurance with the voice, “Fear not, little flock.” When He was leaving them, one of His last words was: “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

Christ has been speaking that word ever since. He came to speak it. He came to deliver man from those fears. He smiles upon our fears to-day. He almost laughs them away in the sunshine of His power and confidence. The Incarnation is God’s answer to human gloom, despondency, and pessimism. What are you afraid of? it says. Am I not with you always to the end? And all power is given unto Me in heaven and on earth. You are afraid of your sins? Fear not! I am able to save to the uttermost. You are afraid of the world, the flesh, and the devil? Fear not! I have overcome the world, and cast out the prince of the world. You are afraid of your own weakness? Fear not! All things are possible to him that believeth. You are afraid of life’s changes and uncertainties? Fear not! The Father hath given all things into My hands. You are afraid of death and bereavement? Fear not! I have conquered and abolished death. You are afraid of all the ominous signs of the times, the perils of religion and the shakings of the Church? Fear not! I am the first, the last, the Almighty, and the rock against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. 1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough, Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 207.]

Thought could not go on much longer with its over-emphasis of the Atonement and its under-emphasis of the Incarnation without losing its relation to human society. The Atonement, as something done for and upon man, leaving him not an actor but a receiver, threw him out of gear with the modern idea of personality. This idea was rather to be found in the Incarnation, the inmost meaning of which is Divine Fatherhood and obedient Sonship. It means Christ, not dying for man to fill out some demand of government, but living in man in order to develop his Divineness, or, as Bushnell phrased it, that he might become “Christed.” It was getting to be seen that whatever Christianity is to do for man must be done through the Incarnation; that is, through the oneness of God and humanity, the perfect realization of which is to be found in the Christ. 2 [Note: T. T. Munger, Horace Bushnell, 399.]

2. Universal joy

The angel’s message matches with the Jewish minds he addresses. The great joy he proclaims is to be, not for all people, but for all the people—that is, Israel; the Saviour who has been born in David’s city is the Messianic King for whom Israel was waiting. This was not all the truth, but it was as much as the shepherds could take in.

The Jews said, There is a Gospel—to the Jews. And when the Gospel went out beyond the Jews the Roman Catholic Church said, There is a Gospel—to the baptized. And they collected them together by the thousand in India, and sprinkled water on them, so as to give them a chance to be saved. Calvin, who has been condemned for his doctrine of election, by it broadened out the Church idea of salvation. When men said, Only Jews can be saved, when men said, Only the baptized can be saved, Calvin said, Anyone can be saved. It is for those who have been baptized, and for those who have not been baptized; it is for those who are Jews, and for those who are Gentiles; it is for those who are old enough to accept the Gospel, and it is for the little children not old enough to accept the Gospel. God can save anyone He will. That is the doctrine of election. And now we are growing to a broader view than this. It is not for the Jew only, but for the Gentile; not for the baptized only, but also for the unbaptized; not for the elect only, but for the non-elect, if there could be any non-elect; not only for those who have heard it, but for those who have not heard it. This is the message of glad tidings and joy which shall be for all people. It is salvation for “ all people.” 1 [Note: L. Abbott, in Christian Age, xli. (1892) 84.]

How could I tell my joy to my brother if it were not a universal joy? I can tell my grief to the glad, but not my gladness to the grieving. I dare not spread my banquet at the open window, where the hungry are passing by. Therefore, oh! my Father, I rejoice that Thou hast sent into my heart a ray of glory which is not alone for me. I rejoice that Thou hast given me a treasure which I need not hide from my brother. I rejoice that the light which sparkles in my pool is not from the candle, but from the moon. The candle is for me, but the moon is for all. Put out my candle, oh! my Father. Extinguish the joy that is proud of being unshared. Lower the lamp which shines only on my own mirror. Let down the lights that make a wall between myself and the weary. And over the darkness let there rise the star—Bethlehem’s star, humanity’s star, the star that shines for one because it shines for all. 2 [Note: G. Matheson, Searchings in the Silence, 52.]

III

The Message

1. “There is born … a Saviour.” A Saviour! What a thrill of joy must have shot through the hearts of these astonished men as they listened to the word of wondrous import. A Saviour! Then indeed man is to be saved! Through the long, dark, weary ages man had been groaning in miserable captivity to the tyrant powers of sin, and nothing was more evident than this, that he had lost all power of saving himself. Now, at last, another is going to undertake his helpless cause. He who of old heard the cry of the Israelites in Egypt under the taskmaster’s whip, and saw the anguish of their heart while they toiled under the cruel bondage of Pharaoh—He who sent them a saviour in the person of Moses, and who subsequently again and again delivered them from their enemies by raising up a Saviour for them, He had at length undertaken the cause of ruined humanity, and was about to deliver a sin-bound world. A Saviour, and the champion of our race, was actually born and in their midst, ready soon to enter on His mysterious conflict, and to work out a complete deliverance, a full salvation. This was indeed glad tidings of great joy. This was the dawning of a new epoch. The Day-spring from on high was surely visiting a darkened, sin-shadowed world.

The birth of any man child is an interesting event—another added to the many million lives, to the multitude which none can number, who are to stand before the judgment-seat of God; another life from the birth-source, which shall flow on through the channel of mortal life, the gulf of death, and the underground channel of the grave, to the boundless ocean of eternity:—for, once born, one must hold on to think, and live, and feel for ever. Such is the birth of every one who has his time to be born behind him, and his time to die before him still. But how intensely interesting the birth of that child whose name is called “Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,” but for whose birth we all must have died eternally, and but for whose birth, it would have been better none of us had been born. 1 [Note: Life of Robertson of Irvine (by A. Guthrie), 256.]

Christ goes out into the world. He heals the sick, He feeds the hungry, He comforts the afflicted. But in all the healing and helping this one message He repeats, in different forms, over and over again: “Thy sins be forgiven thee.” They let down a paralytic through the roof of a house before Him, and this is His message: “Thy sins be forgiven thee.” A woman kneels before Him and washes His feet with her tears and wipes them with the hairs of her head, and this is His message: “Go in peace, and sin no more.” They nail Him to the cross, and His prayer breathes the same message: “Father, forgive them.” There hangs by the side of Him a brigand who has gone through sins of murder and robbery. He looks upon him with compassion, and says: “This day thou shalt be with me in paradise.” He is indeed the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. This is more than healing the sick, more than feeding the hungry, more than clothing the naked, more than educating the ignorant; this is taking off the great burden under which humanity has been crushed. 1 [Note: Lyman Abbott.]

2. “There is born … Christ.” He was born the Messiah, the Anointed One of Israel. To Israel He came fulfilling all the ancient covenant promises, and bringing with Him the “tender mercies of our God.” He is that Seed of the woman announced and promised to Adam and Eve in the garden, whose mission it was to bruise the serpent’s head. He was and is that Seed of Abraham “in whom all the nations of the earth are blessed”, of whom Balaam prophesied and said, “I shall see him, but not now; I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel.” He was and is the One whose day Abraham saw afar off and was glad. He was and is that Wonderful Counsellor of whom Isaiah prophesied, the root out of a dry ground, whose “visage was so marred more than any man”; who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, on whom the Lord caused all our iniquities to meet; the “prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren” whom Moses foresaw and whom he bade all Israel hear; the Stem of Jesse; the Branch of Zechariah; the Messenger of the Covenant and the Sun of Righteousness, arising with healing in His wings, whom Malachi foretold as being nigh. He is the sum and substance of all the ceremonial sacrifices and feasts of the Jews; in a word, He is that One of whom Moses in the Law and all the prophets did speak and all the Psalmists sang.

He might have come in regal pomp,

With pealing of Archangel trump—

An angel blast as loud and dread

As that which shall awake the dead …

He came not thus; no earthquake shock

Shiver’d the everlasting rock;

No trumpet blast nor thunder peal

Made earth through all her regions reel;

And but for the mysterious voicing

Of that unearthly choir rejoicing;

And but for that strange herald gem,

The star which burned o’er Bethlehem,

The shepherds, on His natal morn,

Had known not that the God was born.

There were no terrors, for the song

Of peace rose from the seraph throng;

On wings of love He came—to save,

To pluck pale terror from the grave,

And on the blood-stain’d Calvary

He won for man the victory. 1 [Note: N. T. Carrington.]

3. “There is born … the Lord.”

(1) In the Child born at Bethlehem we find God.—How steadily do the angel’s words climb upwards, as it were, from the cradle to the throne. He begins with the lowly birth, and then rises, step by step, each word opening a wider and more wonderful prospect, to “that climax beyond which there is nothing—that this infant is “the Lord.” The full joy and tremendous wonder of the first word are not felt till we read the last. The birth is the birth of “the Lord.” We cannot give any but the highest meaning to that sacred name, which could have but one meaning to a Jew. It was much that there was born a Saviour—much that there was born a Messiah. Men need a deliverer, and the proclamation here is best kept in its widest meaning—as of one who sets free from all ills outward and inward, and brings all outward and inward good. The Saviour of men must be a man, and therefore it is good news that He is born. It was much that Messiah should be born. The fulfilment of the wistful hopes of many generations, the accomplishment of prophecy, the Divine communication of the Spirit which fitted kings and priests of old for their work, the succession to David’s throne, were all declared in that one announcement that the Christ was born in David’s city. But that last word, “the Lord,” crowns the wonder and the blessing, while it lays the only possible foundation for the other two names.

If, on the one hand, man’s Saviour must be man, on the other, He must be more than man; and nothing short of a Divine man can heal the wounds of mankind, or open a fountain of blessing sufficient for their needs. Unless God become man, there can be no Saviour; nor can there be any Christ. For no mere humanity can bear the full gift of the Divine Spirit, which is Messiah’s anointing for His office, nor discharge that office in all its depth and breadth. Many in this day try to repeat the angel’s message, and leave out the last word, and then they wonder that it stirs little gladness and works no salvation. Let us be sure that, unless the birth at Bethlehem was the Incarnation of Deity, it would have called forth no angel songs, nor will it work any deliverance or bring any joy to men.

A God in the sky will never satisfy men and women upon earth. God on the mountain will never suffice man on the plain. True, it is much, very much, to know that God is in heaven, “The high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity,” above earth’s petty discords and changing views and selfish passions. But this falls short, pitiably short, of man’s demands. It is, at best, an icy creed, and not, by itself, the warm, loving creed of the Christian. For it leaves a gulf between God and man, with no bridge to pass over. It is the difference between Olympus and Olivet. What—so the heart will ask—is the good of a God “above the bright blue sky,” when I am down here upon earth? What intimatcy can there be between “the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity” and an earth-born being such as I am? How could the missionaries persuade men that such a God loved them, cared for them, felt with them? How, indeed, could God Himself so persuade men, save by coming and living among them, sharing their lives, experiencing their temptations, drinking the “vinegar and gall” which they drank, suffering in the flesh as they suffered? There was no other way. Hence the Incarnation. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

It is related of a celebrated musician that, when asked to compose a National Anthem for the people of another country, he went and lived with them, studied them from within, shared their poverty, became one with them that he might become one of them, and was thus, and only thus, enabled to express their feelings in his music. This is what God did at the Incarnation. 1 [Note: E. E. Holmes, The Days of the Week, 42.]

When the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the finite met the Infinite—the temporal, the Eternal. Heaven and earth coalesced, not in semblance, but in reality; not by proxy, but in the wonderful Person that combined the highest characteristics of both. In Him all fulness—the fulness of the Creator and the fulness of the creature—dwelt bodily. All things were gathered together in one in Him—both those which are in the heavens and those which are in the earth—even in Him. His Incarnation was the crowning miracle of grace, as the creation of man was the crowning miracle of nature. 1 [Note: H. Macmillan, The Garden and the City, 32.]

“If Moslems,” Lull argued, “according to their law affirm that God loved man because He created him, endowed him with noble faculties, and pours His benefits upon him, then the Christians according to their law affirm the same. But inasmuch as the Christians believe more than this, and affirm that God so loved man that He was willing to become man, to endure poverty, ignominy, torture, and death for his sake, which the Jews and Saracens do not teach concerning Him, therefore is the religion of the Christians, which thus reveals a Love beyond all other love, superior to that of those which reveals it only in an inferior degree.” Islam is a loveless religion. Raymund Lull believed and proved that Love could conquer it. The Koran denies the Incarnation, and so remains ignorant of the true character not only of the Godhead but of God. 2 [Note: S. M. Zwemer, Raymund Lull, 140.]

We make far too little of the Incarnation; the Fathers knew much more of the incarnate God. Some of them were oftener at Bethlehem than at Calvary; they had too little of Calvary, but they knew Bethlehem well. They took up the Holy Babe in their arms; they loved Immanuel, God with us. We are not too often at the cross; but we are too seldom at the cradle; and we know too little of the Word made flesh, of the Holy Child Jesus. 3 [Note: “Rabbi” Duncan, in Recollections by A. Moody Stuart, 167.]

(2) Though Divine yet is He human.—Behold what manner of love God hath bestowed upon us that He should espouse our nature! For God had never so united Himself with any creature before. His tender mercy had ever been over all His works; but they were still so distinct from Himself that a great gulf was fixed between the Creator and the created, so far as existence and relationship are concerned. The Lord had made many noble intelligences, principalities, and powers of whom we know little; we do not even know what those four living creatures may be who are nearest the Eternal Presence; but God had never taken up the nature of any of them, nor allied Himself with them by any actual union with His Person. He has, however, allied Himself with man: He has come into union with man, and therefore He loves him unutterably well and has great thoughts of good towards him.

The fact that such intimate union of the Divine with the human is possible unveils the essential Godlikeness of man. His nature is capable of receiving Divine indwelling. There is such affinity between God and him that the fulness of the Godhead can dwell bodily in a man. Christianity has often been accused of gloomy, depressing views of human nature; but where, in all the dreams of superficial exalters of manhood, is there anything so radiant with hope as the solid fact that the eternal Son of God has said of it, “Here will I dwell, for I have desired it”? Christianity has no temptation to varnish over the dark realities of man as he is, for it knows its power to make him what he was meant to be.

So we have to look on the child Christ as born “to give the world assurance of a man,” or, in modern phraseology, to realize the ideal of human nature. That birth in the manger was the first appearance of the shoot from the dry stump of the Davidic house, which was to flower into “a plant of renown,” and fill the world with its beauty and fragrance. One thinks of the “loveliness of perfect deeds,” the continual submission to the loved will of the Father, the tranquillity unbroken, the uninterrupted self-suppression, the gentle immobility of resolve, the gracious words, bright with heavenly wisdom, warm with pure love, throbbing with quick pity, as one gazes on the “young child,” and would, with the strangers from the East, bring homage and offerings thither. There is the dawn of a sun without a spot; the headwaters of a mighty stream without stain or perturbation in all its course.

The story tells us that Christ Himself was as poor and as unfamed as the shepherds—yet all Heaven was with Him. No trumpet-flourish told His coming, no posts rode swift from town to town to announce His Kingship. Earth and its glory took no notice of One who was laid in a manger. But far above in the world beyond, where earthly glory hath no praise, and earth no power, and rank no dignity, the Child who lived to love and die for men, was celebrated among the heavenly host. All the courts of Heaven began to praise God for the little Child for whom there was no shelter on earth but a cave in the rocks, Christianity has restored humanity to Man_1:1 [Note: Stopford A. Brooke, Sunshine and Shadow, 191.]

“What means that star,” the Shepherds said,

“That brightens through the rocky glen?”

And angels, answering overhead,

Sang, “Peace on earth, good-will to men!”

’Tis eighteen hundred years and more

Since those sweet oracles were dumb;

We wait for Him, like them of yore;

Alas, He seems so slow to come!

But it was said, in words of gold

No time or sorrow e’er shall dim,

That little children might be bold

In perfect trust to come to Him.

All round about our feet shall shine

A light like that the wise men saw,

If we our loving wills incline

To that sweet Life which is the Law.

So shall we learn to understand

The simple faith of shepherds then,

And, clasping kindly hand in hand,

Sing, “Peace on earth, good-will to men!”

And they who do their souls no wrong,

But keep at eve the faith of morn,

Shall daily hear the angel-song,

“To-day the Prince of Peace is born!” 2 [Note: J. R. Lowell, A Christmas Carol.]

Good Tidings of Great Joy

Literature

Aitken (W. H. M. H.), The Revealer Revealed, 1.

Alexander (W.), Leading Ideas of the Gospels, 148.

Askew (E. A.), The Service of Perfect Freedom, 32.

Austin (G. B.), The Beauty of Goodness, 202.

Blake (R. E.), Good News from Heaven, 1.

Brooke (S. A.), The Kingship of Love, 215.

Carter (T. T.), Meditations on the Hidden Life of our Lord, i. 44.

Channing (W. E.), The Perfect Life, 215.

Collins (W.E.), Hours of Insight, 124.

Craigie (J. A.), The Country Pulpit, 49.

Doney (C. G.), The Throne-Room of the Soul, 95.

Ellicott (C. J.), Sermons at Gloucester, 11.

Greenhough (J. G.), Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 204.

Hancock (T.), The Pulpit and the Press, 41.

Hare (J. C.), Sermons Preacht in Herstmonceux Church, ii. 167.

Harper (F.), A Year with Christ, 14.

Leathes (A. S.), The Kingdom Within, 1, 15.

Macmillan (H.), The Garden and the City, 31.

Marjoribanks (T.), The Fulness of the Godhead, 44.

Massillon (J. B.), Sermons, 407.

Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, i. 211.

Moody (A.), “ Buy the Truth!” 29.

Morrison (G. H.), The Footsteps of the Flock, 385.

Murray (W. H.), The Fruits of the Spirit, 201, 485.

Parker (J.), The City Temple, iii. 307.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, i. 76.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xii. (1866), No. 727; xvii. (1871), No. 1026; xxii. (1876), No. 1330.

Thorne (H.), Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 250.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xix. (1881), No. 1171; xxi. (1882), No. 1204; xxvi. (1886), No. 1309.

Watkinson (W. L.), The Education of the Heart, 247.

Christian Age, xli. 83 (Lyman Abbott).

Christian World Pulpit, xliv. 161 (J. O. Dykes); lxxiv. 409 (W. D. Lukens).

Homiletic Review, xxxiv. 43 (E. D. Guerrant); xlviii. 459 (W. D. Lukens); liv. 461 (W. A. Quayle); lxiii. 51 (J. Denney).

Verses 13-14

The Song of the Heavenly Host

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men in whom he is well pleased.— Luke 2:13-14.

1. In all the Christian year, in all the secular year, there is not a day that has gained the same heartiness of universal welcome as the kindly Christmas. Though Easter-day is chief in the Church’s Calendar, and though it comes in the hopeful spring with the first green leaves, when the most care-worn know some fitful waking-up of the old light-heartedness, it has never taken such hold of the common mind of our race as has the Sacred Festival that comes in the deadest days of the drear December, when in the wild winter-time “the heaven-born Child lay meanly-wrapt in the rude manger”; when those linked by blood, and early remembrances of the same fireside, but parted the long year through by the estranging necessities of life, strive to meet again, as in childhood, together; and all the innocent mirth, the revived associations, the kindly affection, are hallowed by the environing presence of the Birth-day of the Blessed Redeemer.

Like small curled feathers, white and soft,

The little clouds went by

Across the moon, and past the stars,

And down the western sky:

In upland pastures, where the grass

With frosted dew was white,

Like snowy clouds the young sheep lay

That first best Christmas night.

With finger on her solemn lip,

Night hushed the shadowy earth,

And only stars and angels saw

The little Saviour’s birth;

Then came such flash of silver light

Across the bending skies,

The wondering shepherds woke and hid

Their frightened, dazzled eyes!

And all their gentle sleepy flock

Looked up, then slept again,

Nor knew the light that dimmed the stars

Brought endless peace to men,—

Nor even heard the gracious words

That down the ages ring—

“The Christ is born! The Lord has come,

Goodwill on earth to bring!”

Then o’er the misty moonlit fields,

Dumb with the world’s great joy,

The shepherds sought the white-walled town

Where lay the baby boy—

And oh, the gladness of the world,

The glory of the skies,

Because the longed-for Christ looked up

In Mary’s happy eyes! 1 [Note: Margaret Deland.]

In an Oxford College Chapel is a famous Nativity window. From the Infant, lying in the midst, light is made to stream on all around. So, through the Christmas chapter, ending with our text, light streams from the manger on the Christmas feast; tingeing alike its festivity and fun, its tender memories and associations, making it the Child’s Festival of all the year. Children understand it best, with a fulness of feeling and an implicitness of faith they lose in after years; but still to us older ones each Christmas freshens and recaptures something of our childish feelings—in hymn and carol, in family and neighbour greetings, in fireside merriment and kindliness, we feel again the tender softening emotion which was our childish tribute to the day. With shepherds, angels, kings, we once more go even unto Bethlehem, content if only, after failures and shortcomings past, chances missed, friends lost, aims unperformed, we may win and make our own the Christmas prize which the angels glorified and the Infant taught, anchoring our souls at last upon the steadfast dominating Peace which waits on gentle will.

The sacred chorus first was made

Upon the first of Christmas days.

The shepherds heard it overhead,

The joyful angels raised it then:

Glory to heaven on high it said,

And peace on earth to gentle men.

My song, save this, is little worth,

I lay my simple note aside,

And wish you health and love and mirth,

As fits the solemn Christmas tide,

As fits the holy Christmas birth;

Be this, good friends, our carol still,

Be peace on earth, be peace on earth,

To men of gentle will. 1 [Note: W. Tuckwell, Nuggets from the Bible Mine, 144.]

2. In its liturgical use the “Gloria in Excelsis” contributed a precious element to the devotions of the Church, as was natural from its heavenly origin and its tone of glory and gladness. It was known as the “Angelic Hymn” (the “Sanctus” being in later time distinguished as the “Seraphic Hymn”). The name in course of time signified not only the words of the angels as used alone, but also the full form of praise and prayer and creed, of which those words became the opening and the groundwork. There are traces of this noble hymn as used in the Church from the most ancient times; and the Alexandrine Codex (close of fifth century) gives it at length at the end of the thirteenth Canticle of the Greek Church, entitling it a “Morning Hymn.” Early Latin translations with differences are found in various quarters, and it seems clear that when the well-known Latin form of the hymn was inserted in the Latin Psalters it was used in the daily or weekly hour services of the clergy.

The introduction of the hymn into the Eucharistic Office of the Western Church has been traditionally assigned to different popes, but it was certainly a part of that Office in the fifth and sixth centuries, and directions are given in the Sacramentaries as to occasions for its use. At times and in places it exhibited doctrinal variations, as in the form given in the Apostolical Constitutions, where it has received a shape possible for Arian use. On account probably of doctrinal diversities the fourth Council of Toledo, a.d. 633, directed that in churches only the primitive angelic words should be sung, without the additions composed, as they said, “by the doctors of the Church.” But this was a local and temporary restriction. The hymn, or “greater doxology,” as it was sometimes called, had its place at the opening of the service as it now has with us at the close. There is a fitness in either position. 1 [Note: T. D. Bernard, Songs of the Holy Nativity, 116.]

3. This is not the earliest angelic hymn that is recorded or alluded to in Scripture. At the first creation, too, “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” Whatever doubt there may be in respect of those “sons of God” mentioned in Genesis whose apostasy from Him did so much to hasten the flood, there can be no doubt or difficulty in regard of these. The “sons of God” here can be only the angels of heaven, the heavenly host; for there as yet existed no other who could claim, or be competitors with them for, this name. So was it at the first creation; and it might almost seem on this night of the Nativity as if a new creation had taken place, for now again we hear of “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.” Nor, if we thus judged, should we prove very wide of the truth. There is indeed now a new creation, and a new which is more glorious than the old. In the creation of the world God showed forth His power, His wisdom, His love; but in the foundation of the Church all these His attributes shine far more gloriously forth; and that Church was founded, the corner-stone of it, elect, precious, was securely laid, on that day when the Son of God, having taken upon Him our flesh, was born of a pure Virgin, and was laid in the manger at Bethlehem. Most fitly therefore was that day of the New Creation, which should repair and restore the breaches of the old, ushered in with hymns of gladness; most fitly did “the sons of God” once again shout for joy, and welcome, with that first Christmas carol which this dull earth ever heard, the birth of a Saviour and Restorer into the world.

Handel, entering fully into the spirit of this narrative, represents the angel as singing this announcement; and there can be no doubt that he is right. This was a grand solo sung by one of the leading choristers of heaven. But when the angel had sung his solo, his companions joined in the chorus—“Suddenly there was with him a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men of good will.” 1 [Note: D. Davies, Talks with Men, Women and Children, v. 385.]

4. This song of the angels, as we have been used to reading it, was a threefold message—of glory to God, peace on earth, and good will among men; but the better scholarship of the Revised Version now reads in the verse a twofold message. First, there is glory to God, and then there is peace on earth to the men of good will. Those, that is to say, who have the good will in themselves are the ones who will find peace on earth. Their unselfishness brings them their personal happiness. They give themselves in good will, and so they obtain peace. That is the true spirit of the Christmas season. It is the good will that brings the peace. Over and over again in these months of feverish scrambling for personal gain men have sought for peace and have not found it; and now, when they turn to this generous good will, the peace they sought comes of itself. Many a man in the past year has been robbed of his own peace by his misunderstandings or grudges or quarrels; but now, as he puts away these differences as unfit for the season of good will, the peace arrives. That is the paradox of Christianity. He who seeks peace does not find it. He who gives peace finds it returning to him again. He who hoards his life loses it, and he who spends it finds it:—

Not what we give, but what we share,

For the gift without the giver is bare;

Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,

Himself, his hungering neighbour, and Me.

That is the sweet and lingering echo of the angel’s song.

The second member of the hymn celebrates the blessing to mankind, according to the A.V., in the familiar words, “On earth peace, good will toward men”; or, according to the R.V., in the less graceful English, “Peace on earth among men in whom he is well pleased.” The literal renderings would be, in the first case, “On earth peace, in men good pleasure”; in the second, “On earth peace, in men of good pleasure.” Two different readings are thus represented, each of them supported by large authority. The difference is only in the presence or absence of a final letter. 1 [Note: T. D. Bernard, Songs of the Holy Nativity, 162.]

Such was the text of the angels on the night of our Saviour’s birth; and to that text our Saviour’s life furnished the sermon. For it was a life of holiness and devotion to His Father’s service, a life spent in doing good to the bodies and souls of all around Him; and it was ended by a death undergone on purpose to reconcile man with God, and to set earth at peace with heaven. Here is a practical sermon on the angel’s text, the best of all sermons, a sermon not of words, but of deeds. Whoever will duly study that practical sermon, whoever with a teachable, inquiring heart will study the accounts of our Saviour’s words and actions handed down in the four Gospels, will need little else to enlighten him in the way of godliness. 2 [Note: A. W. Hare, The Alton Sermons, 80.]

I

Glory to God

1. “Glory to God in the highest.” It is the first doxology of the gospel—brief words, yet bearing up the soul into illimitable regions of thought! Is it a proclamation—“There is glory to God in the highest”? or is it an ascription—“Glory be to God in the highest”? It is both; for ascriptions of praise are also proclamations of fact. Glory given to God is only some manifestation and effluence of His own glory, recognized by created intelligences, and reflected back in adoration and joy. So it is here. In the birth of a Saviour which is Christ the Lord, the mystery of the Kingdom has begun, and the glory of God has appeared. It is a glory of mercy to repair spiritual ruin, of wisdom to solve problems of sin and righteousness, of judgment to convict and condemn the powers of evil, of faithfulness to fulfil promises to prisoners of hope, of grace to conduct a history of salvation, of love to be manifested in the ages to come. This is the glory recognized by the heavenly host in the holy Nativity and celebrated in their responsive praise.

The first words of it are, Glory to God! and a most weighty lesson may we draw for ourselves, from finding the angels put that first. A world is redeemed. Millions on millions of human beings are rescued from everlasting death. Is not this the thing uppermost in the angels’ thoughts? Is not this mighty blessing bestowed on man the first thing that they proclaim? No, it is only the second thing: the first thing is, Glory to God! Why so? Because God is the Giver of this salvation; nay, is Himself the Saviour, in the person of the only-begotten Son. Moreover, because in heavenly minds God always holds the first place, and they look at everything with a view to Him. But if this was the feeling of the angels, it is clear we cannot be like angels until the same feeling is uppermost with us also. Would we become like them, we must strive to do God’s will as it is done in heaven; that is, because it is God’s will and because we are fully persuaded that whatever He wills must needs be the wisest and best thing to do, whether we can see the reasons of it or not. 1 [Note: A. W. Hare, The Alton Sermons, 80.]

The religious faith on which my own art teaching is based never has been farther defined, nor have I wished to define it farther, than in the sentence beginning the theoretical part of Modern Painters: “Man’s use and purpose—and let the reader who will not grant me this, follow me no farther, for this I purpose always to assume—is to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness.” 2 [Note: Ruskin, Epilogue to Modern Painters (Works, vii. 462).]

2. How does the coming of Christ bring glory to God? It displays all the attributes of God to advantage. The general arranges his forces to display his wisdom; the orator arranges his arguments to display his power; the philanthropist arranges his gifts and so displays his mercy. In the coming of Christ we see wisdom and power and mercy displayed in their fullest and sublimest manner. The whole character of God stands out resplendent in faithfulness and love. How many promises were fulfilled, how many obligations discharged by the coming of Jesus! By setting forth God in His highest glory it brings glory to Him.

The glory which lay hidden from eternity in the creative Mind began to disclose itself in the myriad forms of beauty abounding in the inorganic kingdom, in crystals of snow and ice, in sparkle of jewels, in the exquisite hues of precious stones, in splendour of sunrise and sunset, in glint of moonbeam and gleam of star, in cloud, wave and sky—then continued to unfold with ever-increasing beauty and wonder as Life, that great magician appeared, the waving of whose wand inaugurated the organic kingdom, and changed the face of all things into a new Creation. Thus the unveiling of the sublime purpose continued, till through rudimentary forms of sensations, intelligence, and love, in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, it blossomed into completer form in Man, and finally broke into all fruition in Christ the glory of Eternal Love unveiled. 1 [Note: L. W. Caws, The Unveiled Glory, 64.]

3. But can God receive increase of glory, more than He has already? Is it not the very idea of God that He is infinitely glorious, and that this He always has been and ever will be? Assuredly so: in Himself He is as incapable of increase as of diminution of glory. But we may ascribe more glory to Him, more, that is, of the honour due unto His name, as we know Him more, as the infinite perfection of His being—His power, His wisdom, His love—is gradually revealed to us. So too may angels; and the heavenly host declare in this voice of theirs that the Incarnation of the Son of God was a new revelation, a new outcoming to them of the unsearchable riches of the wisdom, the power, the love, that are in God; that in that Church of the redeemed which now had become possible would be displayed mysteries of grace and goodness which transcended and surpassed all God’s past dealings with men or with angels.

We have St. Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians declaring the same thing; that heaven was taught by what was done upon earth; that angels, as they stooped from the shining battlements on high and looked toward this dim speck of earth and on one obscure province of it, and at a little village, and to one lowliest household there, learned about the mind of God things which they had not learned standing upon the steps of the throne and beholding the unapproachable brightness of Him who sat thereon. Can we doubt this? Does not St. Paul declare that he was himself set to proclaim the mystery which from the beginning of the world had been hid in God, more or less concealed therefore from men and angels alike? And why to proclaim it? He proceeds to give the answer: “to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places”—in other words, to the angelic host—“might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God.” Here then is the explanation of the angels’ song, of this “Glory to God in the highest,” this melody of heaven, to bear a part in which they invite and challenge the listening children of men upon earth.

Of God’s goodwill to men, and to all creatures, for ever, there needed no proclamation by angels. But that men should be able to please Him,—that their wills should be made holy, and they should not only possess peace in themselves, but be able to give joy to their God, in the sense in which He afterwards is pleased with His own baptized Son;—this was a new thing for angels to declare, and for shepherds to believe. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Val d’Arno, § 253 (Works, xxiii. 148).]

4. The glory thus manifested, apprehended, and given back, is “glory in the highest.” What is intended by this superlative? What noun shall we read into this adjective? Things, places, beings, realms of space, regions of thought, worlds of life? The unexplained word embraces and exceeds all these. At least the angels knew their meaning, cognizant as they are of the gradations and levels of creation, the lower and the higher, the higher and the highest. Men may employ such a word with vague and partial intention; but angels know whereof they affirm, and the single word declares the glory of God in this Nativity to be no secondary manifestation in the common level of human history, but a fresh effulgence of His highest attributes to which the highest heavens respond.

There are some who take the word “highest” to mean that there is glory to God in the highest degree by the coming of Christ. God is glorified in nature—“the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” He is glorified in every dew-drop that sparkles in the morning sun, and, in every tiny wood-flower that blossoms in the copse. Every bird that warbles on the spray, every lamb that skips the mead, glorifies God. All creation glorifies God. Do not the stars write His name in golden letters across the midnight sky? Are not the lightnings His sword flashing from His scabbard? Are not the thunders the roll-drums of His armies? From least to greatest the whole of creation tells forth His glory. But the majestic organ of creation cannot reach the compass of the organ of redemption. There is more melody in Christ than in all worlds. He brings glory to God in the very highest degree.

An Indian rajah has built over the grave of his favourite wife a mausoleum which is one of the wonders of the world. So perfectly and wonderfully is this built that a word spoken at the entrance proceeds from point to point and is distinctly re-echoed until it reaches the very topmost height. So would the angels have it to be in living glory to God. They would have all men praise God for His great love-gift, the praise proceeding higher and higher, gathering in volume as it proceeds, until it surges up against the throne of God, and bursts into the spray of ten thousand songs. Oh, let us praise Him! If angels did who were spectators, surely we ought who are recipients of such blessings. Let us say, “Highest! highest!”

Remember the words of Edward Perronet when dying, and try to catch his spirit:—

Glory to God in the height of His Divinity:

Glory to God in the depth of His Humanity:

Glory to God in His All-sufficiency.

Glory to God in the Highest! 1 [Note: W. L. Mackenzie, Pure Religion, 105.]

II

Peace to Men

“Peace” how precious is the word! There is warmth in it. There is music in it. There is Heaven in it. What pictures it paints! We can see in this mirror-like word a hundred dear delights. A sky without a cloud. A sun whose rays are benignant. Fields rich in harvests, white-washed farmsteads looking cosy and clean on the hills and in the dales, cattle browsing in sweet content, workmen plying their common tasks in undisturbed serenity, no war or battle’s sound creating feelings of dread apprehension in human breasts anywhere. Oh, lovely peace! But other and sweeter images are in that word: men and women find reflexion therein, with happy faces aglow with innocent pleasure, no strife in their hearts, their passions orderly and under correct government, their feelings pure, their emotions, all noble, their aspirations all heavenly, their consciences tranquil at peace with themselves, their neighbours, with nature, and with God. This is the peace that Jesus brings. The angels’ song has set men dreaming, and the dreams are not unworthy; they have dreamt of peace in the workshop, the ending of the unhappy misunderstandings between master and man; peace in the home, the ending of all domestic disquietude; peace in the State, rival parties in unholy rivalry no longer, but all men’s good each man’s rule; peace betwixt the nations, the sword no longer to do its inhuman butchery, and the cannon no longer to be the cause of unspeakable horrors; but, beautiful as are all these dreams, and compassed as they are by the angels’ words, they fall far short of what Christ’s gift involves. The peace He gives is not superficial, but radical: it means, first of all, peace in man, peace at the centre of things. He does not make the profound mistake of beginning at the circumference; He works at the centre. He puts His peace into men, and the charm of it is sighted, and the power of it is felt, and the contagion of it is diffused. He influences the world within, and in that way the world without.

Placed in the midst of Europe, the Emperor was to bind its races into one body, reminding them of their common faith, their common blood, their common interest in each other’s welfare. And he was therefore, above all things, claiming indeed to be upon earth the representative of the Prince of Peace, bound to listen to complaints, and to redress the injuries inflicted by sovereigns or peoples upon each other; to punish offenders against the public order of Christendom; to maintain through the world, looking down as from a serene height upon the schemes and quarrels of meaner potentates, that supreme good without which neither arts nor letters, nor the gentler virtues of life, can rise and flourish. The mediæval Empire was in its essence what its modern imitators have sometimes professed themselves: the Empire was Peace: the oldest and noblest title of its head was “Imperator Pacificus.” 1 [Note: J. Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 254.]

1. What then is this peace? Let us understand it as a fourfold personal peace.

(1) The peace of an illumined life.—No one can canvass the world’s literature, listen to his fellows, or interrogate his own heart, and be unaware how chafed and bewildered men are apart from Christ. We are capable of thought, but our reflexions are at times of a mutinous and melancholy order. We appeal to what we call the master-minds of the world, but as we note the earnest, far-away look in their eyes, the pallor on their countenances, the grave lines which thought has carved on their foreheads, and the note of interrogation which is ever and anon upon their lips, we are distressed to find that the secret of peace is not in dreaming, inquiring, speculating. We listen to science, and it seems to clash with all our best thoughts and feelings. We feel that there is a God, and it smiles at our weakness and whispers, No, only a Force; we feel that we are greater than we seem, and it talks seriously of matter as though we were only that; we feel we ought to pray, and it laughs at our credulity; we feel that our life is unending, and it points with cruel finger to the grave. Science does not calm us; it chafes us. Where, then, can peace be found? Not in ignorance, for darkness evermore distresses; not in superstition, for error is disquieting; not in unbelief, for men have flung away rare and long-cherished beliefs for the incertitudes of intellectual charlatans, only to find that peace has deserted them; not in literature, for many a book is only the foam of a storm-lashed mind, and not a few are the progeny of a diseased pessimism; not in the voices of the world, for strife of tongues is sadly discomposing. Then where? Thank Heaven, fooled though we be everywhere else, and disappointed with the pretty lanterns which men have hung out to lighten the gloom, we hear the voice of Jesus say, “Come unto me and rest,” and peace steals over us as He gives His gracious and sufficing answers to our sundry questions.

I had a deep peace which seemed to pervade the whole soul, and resulted from the fact that all my desires were fulfilled in God. I feared nothing; that is, considered in its ultimate results and relations, because my strong faith placed God at the head of all perplexities and events. I desired nothing but what I now had, because I had a full belief that, in my present state of mind, the results of each moment constituted the fulfilment of the Divine purposes. I do not mean to say that I was in a state in which I could not be afflicted. My physical system, my senses, had not lost the power of suffering. My natural sensibilities were susceptible of being pained. Oftentimes I suffered much. But in the centre of the soul, if I may so express it, there was Divine and supreme peace. The soul, considered in its connexion with the objects immediately around it, might at times be troubled and afflicted; but the soul, considered in its relation to God and the Divine will, was entirely calm, trustful and happy. The trouble at the circumference, originating in part from a disordered physical constitution, did not affect and disturb the Divine peace of the centre. 1 [Note: Madame Guyon, in Life by T. C. Upham, 130.]

At the close of a sermon on the words, “The peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep (Gr. shall keep as by soldiers in a fortress) your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus,” Dr. Duncan came up to the preacher with his own summary of the text, clinching it with his sharp incisive “What?”—his constant mode of eliciting assent to a sentence which in his own judgment was both justly conceived and rightly worded. His beautiful paraphrase of the text was this: “Christ Jesus is the garrison, and Peace is the sentinel.” 2 [Note: A. Moody Stuart, Recollections of John Duncan, 218.]

(2) The peace of a purified life.—We have had fair dreams of a peace which passeth all understanding. We have looked on the sea when it has been beautifully placid: of thunder there was none, but the waters made a murmuring music as they broke in cresting waves upon the beach. Can my life be like that? This imagination, can it be saved from the base dreams which are fatal to its pleasure? This memory, digging open long-closed graves and giving a resurrection to painful and hideous incidents, can it ever be satisfied? This conscience, may I ever hope for the silencing of its accusatory voices, the stilling of this inward thunder? This soul, which has so sadly damaged and deranged itself, can its equilibrium and equanimity ever be restored? Thank God, yes; in Jesus Christ we may find life and peace. Too impotent to emancipate ourselves from our bitter past, to free ourselves from, the burden of our sin, to rectify our self-inflicted wrongs, to dispose of the disabilities which are the fruit of our unrighteousness, He comes to our conscience, to pardon our iniquity, to change our nature, to renew our hearts. “Peace on earth”; yes, that is the meaning of Bethlehem and the story of the great humiliation; that is the teaching of Calvary, with its all-sufficient sacrifice; we have peace through the blood of the Cross, and only through that blood.

The Christian may have, must have, an outer life in the world, of training, toning, educating—in fact of “tribulation”; but with equal certainty he has a true life, an inner life, “in Christ.” The character of the inner life—as of the majestic life of the Eternal even in His Passion—is this, “in Me ye may have peace.” Examine, then, some of the conditions of the Mystery of Peace. And think, I have called it (and rightly, have I not?) a mystery. It is no mere acquiring the right of rest by the sacrifice of principle, it is no mere buying of freedom from disturbance at any price, it is no mere “making a solitude” and calling it “Peace.” No, it is an inner condition of soul realized, and blessed; and that it may be ours some conditions must be fulfilled. What are they? Sin must be forgiven, its weight removed, its tormenting sense of ever-reviving power attenuated, the wear and tear of its memories softened and relieved by penitential tears. This is a possibility of supernatural life; this is a result, a blessed outcome of life “in Christ.” 1 [Note: W. J. Knox Little, The Mystery of the Passion, 168.]

(3) The peace of a harmonized life.—Not a little of our acutest misery is due to an internecine war which rages in man, and which makes itself felt subsequent to our forgiveness and renewal. The Apostle paints an elaborate picture of it in the seventh chapter of Romans, and calls our attention to that dual self of which every nature consists: the flesh and the spirit, the law of the members and the law of the mind. Both strive for the ascendancy, and full often the battle waxes hot. Virtue contends with vice, pure instincts with unholy tendencies, aspirations of the heavenliest with desires’ the most hellish. Assuredly this is never the life of peace our God intends us to find. The human soul was never meant to be the scene of conflict so terrible. Can it end? Is there a deliverer? Thank Heaven, the Apostle found an answer to his question. With unmistakable clearness his voice proclaims that the strife can end, the discord can cease “the life-long bleeding of the soul be o’er.” Listen to him: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”

Christ comes to restore our whole nature. As the able physician searches into the out-of-the-way places of our body, and shows no mercy to the microbes which would lay waste our earthly house, but drives them thence, so Jesus has no pity for our carnal self. He tears it out root and branch, destroying the works of the devil, and making man at one with Himself and at one with his God. And this is the way of peace: peace at any price is not the will of our Father. We are not to be content with the peace that comes from making concessions to the carnal nature, or with sundry respites from the more serious strife, but only with the peace that comes from the complete rout of the foe, deliverance from bondage to the flesh, the elimination of the law of antagonism, the restoration of our inner life to its original homogeneity. To be spiritually minded is life and peace. And this, too, is peace on earth.

Steep Cliff Bay is now a Christian village. A dramatic incident took place not long ago in the middle of a great native feast in North Raga. The biggest chief of the whole district was present—one of the few then still heathen. He stepped forward, and handing his war-club to the giver of the feast, announced that it was to be chopped up and distributed among the other chiefs as a declaration of peace and good-will. 1 [Note: Florence Coombe, Islands of Enchantment, 10.]

I heard the bells on Christmas day

Their old familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet

The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,

The belfries of all Christendom

Had rolled along

The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till, ringing, singing on its way,

The world revolved from night to day,

A voice, a chime,

A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South,

And with the sound

The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent

The hearth-stones of a continent,

And made forlorn

The household born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said;

“For hate is strong

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead; nor doth He sleep!

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men!” 1 [Note: H. W. Longfellow, Christmas Bells.]

(4) The peace of a solaced life.—We are not allowed to live our life untempted, untroubled. There are stern factors in human experience. There was a shadow even on the cradle of the World’s Redeemer, and the shadows are thick on the lives of many. We are mariners, and while sometimes it is fair sailing, at others fierce euroclydons threaten us with wholesale wreckage. There are times when life seems almost unendurable. The troubles of our hearts are enlarged, hell attacks us with unwonted ferocity, the world seems cold and callous, sorrow grips us like a tiger as if it would draw our last drop of blood. Bereavement sucks all the sunshine out of our landscape, tramples on our sweetest flowers, silences voices which gave us cheer. Alas! alas! for the riddles of this painful earth. Well, blessed be God, here again Christ is more than precious. He understands us perfectly. Has He not been in the thickest shadows? Has He not braved the dreadest storms? Has He not fought the gravest battles? He brings peace to the earth. Wet eyes He touches with kindly hand, broken hearts He comforts and heals, desolat homes He cheers by His presence, reeling lives He steadies and supports by His grace, and in life’s gravest vicissitudes He afford us the secret of tranquillity.

Peace is more than joy: it is love’s latest boon, and her fairest. I hesitate to speak of it: I know so little what it is One may have love in a measure, and joy many times, and yet be but a raw scholar in this art of peace. The speaker here, methinks, should be one far on in pilgrimage; or, if young in years, old and well-stricken in grace. “Well-stricken,” whether the rod have been heavy or light; weaned and quieted, like a child, from a child; or, though it “have burned the hair and bent the shoulders,” still weaned and quieted. “Peace,” what is it? It is what remains in the new heart when joy has subsided. Love, that is the new heart’s action, its beat; joy its counter-beat; peace is the balance, the equilibrium of the heart, its even posture, its settled attitude. It is neither the tide going, nor the tide flowing, but the placid calm when the tide is full, and the soft sea-levels poise themselves and shine—poise themselves because there is such fulness within them; shine because there is so much serenity above them. 1 [Note: R. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 2.]

2. Have we any proper sense and feeling of this good-will? If we have, we shall be humble, inasmuch as we are saved, not by our merits, but by the love of God, in spite of our manifold demerits. We shall be thankful; for surely kindness like this ought to fill our hearts with gratitude. God’s love toward us should beget in us love toward Him. Above all, we should be full of faith, trusting that He who has begun so excellent a work will bring the same to good effect; that He who for our sakes gave His only Son to live a poor and humble life, and to die a painful and shameful death, will together with that Son freely give us all things. We cannot suppose it was a pleasure to the Son of God to suffer the pains of infancy, the labours and mortifications and trials of manhood, the pangs of a cruel death. It was no pleasure to Him to quit the glories of heaven, in order so dwell in lowliness and contempt. Why then did He undergo all this? From good-will, to save man. And think you He will leave this salvation imperfect, and so render His incarnation, and birth, and human life and death, of no avail? O no! He must desire to finish His work; He must be anxious to make up the known He has toiled and bled for, by placing in it all the jewels, all the souls, He can gather. He will never be wanting to us, if we are not wanting to ourselves.

Think of it—The love of God! We use those words very ten, and get no comfort from them, but think what human love means,—a perfect oneness of sympathy and will with any near friends, and imagine that purified and intensified to Infinitude! The depth of our misery now is to me a witness of the immensity of the blessing that makes all this worth while. 1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ii. 163.]

3. If we look closely at the expression “men in whom he is well pleased,” we shall observe that this striking and remarkable description of men is parallel with the words used by the Father at the baptism of Jesus Christ. As Christ rose from the Jordan the voice of the Eternal said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” ( Matthew 3:17). In the text exactly the same phrase is used of men. God is “well pleased in” men as He is “well pleased in” His beloved Son.

But in what sense can God be well pleased with men? He cannot be well pleased with their sins, or even with their folly. No! He is well pleased with men in so far as they are capable of salvation in Christ, are capable, that is to say, of being made Christlike. On the other hand, as He declared at the baptism of Christ in the Jordan, He is well pleased with Christ as being actually and already all that He intended every man to be when He declared, on the sixth day of the creation, that man, the final outcome and masterpiece of the evolution of the world, was “very good” ( Genesis 1:31). In a word, Christ is actually what every man is potentially. Christ is the new Head of humanity, “the last Adam” ( 1 Corinthians 15:45). Christ realizes the Divine ideal of man. He is the proof and pledge of what every man may yet become. When the sculptor sees the rough, unhewn marble, he is “well pleased” with it, not because it is shapeless and rough and ugly, and for immediate purposes useless, but because it is capable of being chiselled into forms of enduring beauty and service. The incarnation of the Eternal Word is the definite, concrete, decisive evidence of what human nature can become when sin is eliminated.

Jesus of Nazareth was God and man, not because His physical birth and death took place under conditions impossible to the normal human organization, but on the contrary because having the normal human organization, in its entirety, He realized in and through it His absolute union with God, and became actual fact what all men have it in them potentially to become This divinization of humanity, this “incarnation,” took place in Him at a certain time and place, under special historical conditions, which the gospel narrative enables us partially, but only partially, to reconstruct. The incarnation is not completed, the truth which Jesus proclaimed is not fully revealed, until the whole of mankind and the whole of nature become a perfect vehicle for the life which lived in Him. 1 [Note: R. L. Nettleship, Memoir of Thomas Hill Green, 48.]

Not long ago a gentle Christian lady went to a house of infamy in London to see a fallen girl whom she hoped to rescue. The door of that house was opened by one of those ferocious bullies who are employed in such establishments to negotiate between the victims and their clients. For a moment she was terrified at the fiendish appearance of this monster of iniquity. It was a low neighbourhood; she was far from home; she was alone. But, inspired of God, she resolved to appeal to the better self even of that foul and savage man. Taking her well-filled purse out of her pocket, she suddenly placed it in his hands and “I do not like to take my purse about here, will you please keep it for me until I return?” The man was speechless with amazement; a tear burst from his eye. She passed on. In that vestibule of hell she found the girl and arranged for her delivery. After some interval the lady returned to the door, and there was the man where she left him, with her well-filled purse in his hand. He stored it to her, not a single penny had been taken from it. For the first time in his life, probably, he found himself trusted by a lady. It appealed to all the courtesy and nobility that was left, or that was undeveloped, in his nature. He responded at once to that appeal, and proved worthy of that confidence. 2 [Note: H. P. Hughes, Essential Christianity, 284.]

Good Tidings of Great Joy

Literature

Aitken (W. H. M. H.), The Revealer Revealed, 1.

Alexander (W.), Leading Ideas of the Gospels, 148.

Askew (E. A.), The Service of Perfect Freedom, 32.

Austin (G. B.), The Beauty of Goodness, 202.

Blake (R. E.), Good News from Heaven, 1.

Brooke (S. A.), The Kingship of Love, 215.

Carter (T. T.), Meditations on the Hidden Life of our Lord, i. 44.

Channing (W. E.), The Perfect Life, 215.

Collins (W.E.), Hours of Insight, 124.

Craigie (J. A.), The Country Pulpit, 49.

Doney (C. G.), The Throne-Room of the Soul, 95.

Ellicott (C. J.), Sermons at Gloucester, 11.

Greenhough (J. G.), Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 204.

Hancock (T.), The Pulpit and the Press, 41.

Hare (J. C.), Sermons Preacht in Herstmonceux Church, ii. 167.

Harper (F.), A Year with Christ, 14.

Leathes (A. S.), The Kingdom Within, 1, 15.

Macmillan (H.), The Garden and the City, 31.

Marjoribanks (T.), The Fulness of the Godhead, 44.

Massillon (J. B.), Sermons, 407.

Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, i. 211.

Moody (A.), “ Buy the Truth!” 29.

Morrison (G. H.), The Footsteps of the Flock, 385.

Murray (W. H.), The Fruits of the Spirit, 201, 485.

Parker (J.), The City Temple, iii. 307.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, i. 76.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xii. (1866), No. 727; xvii. (1871), No. 1026; xxii. (1876), No. 1330.

Thorne (H.), Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 250.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xix. (1881), No. 1171; xxi. (1882), No. 1204; xxvi. (1886), No. 1309.

Watkinson (W. L.), The Education of the Heart, 247.

Christian Age, xli. 83 (Lyman Abbott).

Christian World Pulpit, xliv. 161 (J. O. Dykes); lxxiv. 409 (W. D. Lukens).

Homiletic Review, xxxiv. 43 (E. D. Guerrant); xlviii. 459 (W. D. Lukens); liv. 461 (W. A. Quayle); lxiii. 51 (J. Denney).

Verses 34-35

A Touchstone of Character

Behold, this child is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel; and for a sign which is spoken against; yea and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul; that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.— Luke 2:34-35.

1. There are choice spirits selected by God, when the times are changing, to stand upon the ridge between two worlds, and to unite in themselves, so to speak, the best promise of the age that is passing by and the first gladness of the age that is coming. Now Simeon the Prophet was one of these men. It was his proud privilege to see the ancient prophecies fulfilled. It was his pathetic privilege to bid the new era welcome, and then himself to depart in peace. He saw the morning clouds crimsoning, and he told his generation what he saw. It was not given him to see the glorious noontide. But for one sublime moment he stood upon the mountain top. And it is well for us, even in this wise age, to know something of what he saw.

Simeon, bravely patient, outlasts the time of silence: while the winds of God blow where they list, and gently stir the surface of his soul, breathing deep to sources of emotion, springs of thought, centres of will, and faculties of being, which all receptive and expectant wait for impulses of life, co-operant with the touch of the Divine. Intuition waits on growing consciousness: things seen afar become defined in detail: thought expands, impression greatens into form and shape: the Christ hath come, the morning breathes, the shadows flee away. Thus there comes a day when he is led under the impulse of the Holy Ghost into the Sanctuary of God. There he sees, he feels, he holds the Christ in likeness of an infant come, the Babe of Bethlehem. He bows before the Vision of the Lord: joyous yet awed he sings of Glory and of Light, Salvation for the World and Israel’s Hope enthroned. And so he saw not death but Christ: and holding Him passed into Life, and felt within his soul the waters rise which satisfy, and fail us not but spring eternally. 1 [Note: A. Daintree, Studies in Hope, 76.]

The first pastor of Craigdam—Rev. William Brown, ordained in 1752—was enough to give character to any church.… His grandson, Principal Brown, remembers an old man describing a service conducted by the first minister of Craigdam at Knock, near Portsoy. One thing in the sermon which came to him and was indelibly imprinted upon his memory was the vivid and fervid way in which the preacher used the historical incident of Simeon holding the child Jesus in his arms:—“There did not appear to be much in the old man’s arms, and yet the salvation of the world was dependent upon what was there—all was wrapt up in that Jesus held by Simeon.” Then, holding out his own arms as if embracing that which Simeon esteemed to be so precious, Mr. Brown with tearful urgency of voice cried to the people assembled—“Have you, my freens, taken a grip o’ Jesus?” 1 [Note: J. Stark, The Lights of the North, 288.]

Simeon the just and the devout,

Who frequent in the fane

Had for the Saviour waited long,

But waited still in vain,—

Came Heaven-directed at the hour

When Mary held her Son;

He stretched forth his aged arms,

While tears of gladness run:

With holy joy upon his face

The good old father smiled,

While fondly in his wither’d arms

He clasp’d the promised Child.

And then he lifted up to Heaven

An earnest asking eye;

“My joy is full, my hour is come;

Lord, let Thy servant die.

At last my arms embrace my Lord;

Now let their vigour cease;

At last my eyes my Saviour see,

Now let them close in peace!

The Star and Glory of the land

Hath now begun to shine;

The morning that shall gild the globe

Breaks on these eyes of mine!” 2 [Note: Michael Bruce.]

2. Simeon looked far into the future, and saw the final goal of Christ’s mission. He regarded Christ’s coming as “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” and the consolation and glory of Israel. But he also foresaw its nearer and more immediate effects. This Child, he says, who is to be the light of the Gentiles and the glory of Israel is also to be as a rock over which many will fall and on which many will rise, a signal for strife and gainsaying, a sword piercing and dividing the very soul, even where the soul is purest, and a touchstone revealing the inward thoughts of many hearts and showing how evil they are. Now, large as the contradiction looks between these two conceptions of the immediate and the ultimate results of Christ’s influence on the world, is there any real contradiction between them? For if the Light is to shine into a dark world, or a dark heart, it must struggle with and disperse; the darkness before it can shed order and fruitfulness and gladness into it. In such a world as this there can be no victory without conflict, no achievement without strenuous effort, no joy without pain, no perfection except through suffering.

I

An Appointed Test

“This child is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel.”

The expression is figurative and suggests to our minds a stone or step in a man’s pathway, which becomes to him, according; as he treats it, either a stumbling-block over which he falls, or a means of elevation by which he rises to a higher plane, and which is so placed before him that he cannot avoid it.

1. Jesus Christ is thus inevitable. He is obtrusive. He is there. He forces Himself upon our attention as every universal fact and law must. He is set as fixedly in the firmament of our spiritual and moral life as the sun is set in the heavens. He rides into every world of human interest and concern just as gloriously as the sun comes over the mountains at the break of day. You tell me you know nothing at all about astronomical law. You believe what wise men tell you about the stately march of the seasons and the procession of the planets in regular orbit, and you disavow any knowledge of the inner mysteries of science. In your knowledge or ignorance you accept the fact you cannot alter, the fact that this world owes light and heat and colour and beauty to the sun which God has set to rule our day and night. Jesus Christ is as obtrusive and fixed a fact.

God “prepared” Him: pre-arranged, fore-ordained, and took steps beforehand for His coming; made ready the way before Him by His Law and by His prophets, by a gradual education of the world to desire Him and to find its need of Him; and at last brought Him into it “before the face”—in the sight—“of all the peoples,” of all the races and nations of mankind, so as to be as much “a light to lighten the Gentiles”—a light (more literally) unto the unveiling of the Gentiles; that is, for the purpose of taking off from the Gentiles that “veil” of which Isaiah speaks as “spread over all nations,” the veil of indifference and blindness and hardness of heart—as “the glory of God’s own people Israel.” The eye of the faithful old man was opened to see beyond the confines of his own nation; to embrace in one glance all the kingdoms of the earth in all time and in every place; and to declare that to each and to all Christ comes—comes to take off from them the veil of sin; and to fulfil at last the glorious prediction, “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

Freeman, the historian, in speaking about the fall of the Roman Empire and the overturning of the throne of Cæsar Augustus by the triumph of Christianity, finds in that event something which he calls more miraculous even than the resurrection of Christ. And certainly it was an extraordinary triumph. Within eighty years of the day Jesus was put to death as a common malefactor, a governor of one of the Provinces of the Roman Empire writes to his Imperial master, and asks, “What in the world am I to do? People are deserting the pagan temple, and are gathering in illegal conventicles to worship somebody who, it was always understood, had a name of infamy—one Christus who had been put to an ignominious death years before.” Would you believe that before another three hundred years had passed, sitting in the seat of Cæsar was a Christian Emperor, and surrounding him a body-guard of Christian stalwarts, men bearing the stigma of Jesus, for they had been tortured and mutilated for their faith. Before another hundred years had gone, the throne had vanished altogether, and in the seat of Cæsar there sat one, and there still sits one, whose only right to be there is that he claims to be there as the Vicar and Vicegerent of Jesus Christ. That was the historic triumph in the early ages. It is a triumph that is repeated every day. Through storm and earthquake and eclipse, through the coming and the going of the generations of men, through the founding and the overturning of Empires, through the migrations of the peoples, Jesus Christ moves steadily on. 1 [Note: A. Connell.]

2. Christ’s influence on men corresponds to their attitude towards Him. This is only to say that the spiritual world is not ruled mechanically. If Christ had come from heaven as a resistless influence for good, so that men could not but be bettered by Him, the result would have been mechanical—just as mechanical as anything which is set going by steam-power or by water-power. And yet, even in vegetable or brute nature, some conditions are requisite if physical reinforcements of vital power are to be of real use. The sun and the rain can do little for the sickly or withered tree. The greenest pasturage cannot tempt the dying hind. There must be an existing capacity for being nourished, in the tree and in the animal, if there is to be improvement. Much more does this law obtain in the spiritual world. For, being a spirit, man is free; he can accept or reject even the highest gifts of God. He is never coerced into excellence, any more than he is coerced into wickedness; he is, in the highest sense, master of his destiny. The truth and grace of God act upon him with good results only so far as he is willing that they should do so. God has made man free. He does not withdraw this prerogative of freedom, even when it is used against Himself; and the exercise of this freedom by man to accept or reject even his own highest good, explains the different results of Christ’s coming in different souls.

A departure from the perfect will of God was an absolute necessity if God wished to make a perfect or a good race of men. It is true God could have made men who would have had no choice but to serve Him, whose love would have been the result of law, whose worship a necessity of their condition; but would you care for a man who was made to love you, compelled to serve you? How then could God be satisfied with service that would not even satisfy the wants of our human nature? If love is to be real love, service real service, it must be voluntary and spontaneous; men must be free to give or withhold it. Now even Omnipotence cannot reconcile two absolutely antagonistic thin. It is past even the power of God to let a man have free will and yet not have it, to make men free and yet slaves; and if God gave men free will, then in the long run it was a dead certainty that some one so endowed would put up his own self-will again the will of his Father and exercise the gift which might make him worthy to be a son of God in a way that would drag him down to be impure and evil. 1 [Note: Quintin Hogg: A Biography, 309.]

II

A Signal for Contradiction

“A sign which is spoken against.”

A sign is a signal. In the Scripture use, it denotes something or some one pointing to God; to God’s being, and to God’s working. Thus a miracle is a sign. It points to God. It says, God is at work: this hath God spoken, for this hath God done. And thus Christ Himself is a sign. He came upon earth to point to God. He came to say by His words, and by His works, and by His character, and by His sufferings, “Behold your God!” But the sign, like every other, may be, and commonly is, gainsaid spoken against. For one who accepts it—for one who, because Christ, sees and believes in and lives for God—many cavil; many reject and many neglect the Gospel. This has been so always, by most of all, when He was Himself amongst men. Then indeed gainsaying ran into open violence; and the Son of Man, despise and rejected of men, was at last given up into the hands of wicke men, to suffer death upon a cross of anguish and infamy.

1. Jesus roused the bitterest opposition of those whose falsit He exposed. Do you think it likely that Pharisaism and Jewis intolerance, the pagan gods and the thousands whose living depended on idolatrous worship, or the existing schools of thought the Stoics and Epicureans, liked being pushed out of the way A vast amount of interested selfishness and of honest conservatism necessarily opposed Christ—fought and died to keep Him out Compare Jesus washing His disciples’ feet with the mood Tiberius surrounded by an army of informers and abandoned to vile debauchery, and think what must inevitably happen before Christ is received as the King of Rome. Call to mind the amphitheatres of the Roman Empire, the hosts of slaves, and think what changes must take place before the cross could be elevated as the divinest of symbols. Read the description of the immorality then common, not in the lines of indignant satirists but in the admitted antecedents of the people who formed the first converts to Christianity, and think what changes in public opinion, what open collisions between classes, what terrible inner struggles in the individual soul, must needs occur before one soul could turn to Him who puts duty for pleasure, self-control for indulgence, self-surrender for self-gratification; who tells each one of us that we must die to live, die to our lusts, die to our tempers, die to our self-importance, die to the flattering idea of our own righteousness and goodness.

There came a man, whence, none could tell,

Bearing a touchstone in his hand;

And tested all things in the land,

By its unerring spell.

And lo, what sudden changes smote

The fair to foul, the foul to fair!

Purple nor ermine did he spare

Nor scorn the dusty coat.

Of heirloom jewels prized so much

Many were changed to chips and clods,

And even statues of the gods

Crumbled beneath its touch.

Then angrily the people cried,

“The loss outweighs the profit far,

Our goods suffice us as they are,

We will not have them tried.”

And since they could not so avail

To check his unrelenting quest

They seized him saying, “Let him test

How real is our jail.”

But though they slew him with a sword

And in a fire his touchstone burned,

Its doings could not be o’erturned,

Its undoings restored.

2. He offered Himself as a Saviour under an aspect incredible and offensive. He demanded an utter renunciation of human righteousness; He asked them to give their whole confidence to One who should die in weakness and agony upon the shameful tree.

For nearly three centuries, of course with varying intensity, the name of Jesus of Nazareth and His followers was a name of shame, hateful and despised. Not only among the Roman idolaters was “the Name” spoken against with intense bitterness (see the expressions used by men like Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny), but also among His own nation, the Jews, was Jesus known as “the Deceiver,” “that Man,” “the Hung.” These were common expressions used in the great Rabbinical schools which flourished in the early days of Christianity. How different is it all now!

“Where can we find a name so holy as that we may surrender our whole souls to it, before which obedience, reverence without measure, intense humility, most unreserved adoration may all be fully rendered?” was the earnest inquiry of his whole nature, intellectual and moral no less than religious. And the answer to it in like manner expressed what he endeavoured to make the rule of his own personal conduct, and the centre of all his moral and religious convictions: “One name there is, and one alone, one alone in heaven and earth—not truth, not justice, not benevolence, not Christ’s mother, not His holiest servants, not His blessed sacraments, nor His very mystical body the Church, but Himself only who died for us and rose again, Jesus Christ, both God and man.” 1 [Note: A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, i. 34.]

III

A Sword in the Soul

“Yea and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul.”

1. Simeon saw that the work of salvation would in some mysterious way be the work of a warrior, and that the same sword as wounded Him would pierce the heart of His mother also. This vision of a coming battle did not lessen his faith in victory, but it moved him to speak of things which were not in the salutation of the angel to Mary, or in the song which the shepherds heard by night. Jesus is the prepared Saviour, and will finish the work given Him to do; but He will not be welcomed by all Israel. He will not fail nor be discouraged, but He must first suffer many things and be despised and rejected of men. Mary is highly favoured among women, and all generations will call her blessed, but the highest favour she will receive is to be a partaker in the anguish of her Son. The greatness of her privilege, and the exaltation of her hopes are the measure of her future dismay, while her Son advances to His goal through contradiction and death. “Yea and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul; that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.”

In the huge temple, deck’d by Herod’s pride,

Who fain would bribe a God he ne’er believed,

Kneels a meek woman, that hath once conceived,

Tho’ she was never like an earthly bride.

And yet the stainless would be purified,

And wash away the stain that yet was none,

And for the birth of her immaculate Son

With the stern rigour of the law complied:

The duty paid received its due reward

When Simeon bless’d the Baby on her arm;

And though he plainly told her that a sword

Must pierce her soul, she felt no weak alarm,

For that for which a Prophet thank’d the Lord

Once to have seen, could never end in harm. 1 [Note: Hartley Coleridge.]

2. Must not the prediction that a sword would pierce through her soul also be a reminder that her unique position as the mother of the Saviour did not exempt her from the probation through which all had to pass who listened to the teaching and beheld the mighty works of her Son? But the commentators, with a unanimity which is unusual, resort to another interpretation. From Origen to Sir William Ramsay, they bid us find in the simile of the sword a picture of the sufferings which the career of the Christ would of necessity entail upon His mother. There is more difference of opinion when the attempt is made to determine the special nature of the sufferings which are foretold, the particular incident of her career to which the words apply. Some, with reason, as it would seem, leave the reference vague and undefined. The Christ was a great Reformer. He was the leader of a religious revolution. He was therefore certain to meet with fierce opposition from the votaries of the ancient traditions and the ancient faith. He was a sign which would be spoken against. His life would inevitably be one of sorrow; and, with every anguish of her Son, the mother’s heart would be torn. Others becoming a little more precise, would have us think of some unknown eclipse of faith, by which the Virgin’s confidence in the Divine mission of her Son was clouded. Epiphanius, with no less imagination, will have it that Simeon foresees her martyrdom. But the dominant view, stereotyped in the words of one of the few Sequences which still remain in the Roman Missal, finds in the mention of the sword piercing her soul an allusion to the agony of the Mother as she watched her Divine Son hanging upon the cross, and dying the malefactor’s death—

Stabat Mater dolorosa

Juxta crucem lacrimosa,

Qua pendebat Filius,

Cuius animam gementem

Contristantem et dolentem

Pertransiuit gladius.

3. The higher the privilege, the deeper will be the wound. “The nearer to Christ, the nearer,” from the very first, “to the sword.” The more real her title to be the “Blessed among women,” the more real the anguish which would crush her spirit as she awoke to the cross which was to be the crown of His mission. The more genuine the love which treasured up the angels’ song as she “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart,” the more intense the disappointment which “sought him sorrowing,” not once, but again and again, and failed to find Him in His true being till Calvary and the opened sepulchre have made all things plain.

Those who have seen Holman Hunt’s “Shadow of the Cross,” will remember how Mary is employed when she gets the first awful premonition of what her Child’s fate is to be. She is engaged—so the painter fancies her—looking into a coffer, where the gifts of the wise men are preserved, feasting her eyes on the beautiful crowns and bracelets and jewels, so prophetic, as she thinks, of what her Son’s after-destiny is to be. And then she turns, and what a contrast! There, in shadow on the wall, imprinted by the western light, she sees her Son stretched on a cross! What a sight for a mother to see! As she looks, the solemn, mysterious words of Simeon flash through her heart, “Yea and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul.” Against that awful destiny her mother’s heart rises up in arms, and it was, I believe, this love, this misguided love, that led her to seek to keep back her Child from His mission, and point Him into a path of glory, not of shame; of royalty, not of sacrifice; of a crown, not of a cross. 1 [Note: W. M. Mackay, Bible Types of Modern Women, 325.]

O Holy Mother, pierced with awful grief,

Oppressed with agonizing, nameless fears,

Beyond all human power of relief

Are these thy tears.

Thy tender, spotless, holy Babe lies there—

Is He unconscious of thine agony?

Doth He not even now thy burden share,

Thy sorrow see?

His Body sleeps; but ah! that sacred Heart

Is to His loved one’s anguish still awake;

He only consolation can impart

To hearts that break.

The holy Babe awakes! In mute surprise

(As He would say—“Mine hour is not yet come”);

He gazes in His blessed Mother’s eyes

In pity dumb.

And once again her heart doth magnify

Rejoicingly, her Saviour and her Lord:

Yea! e’en before her tearful cheeks are dry

Is He adored!

Almighty Father, Thou hast veiled our sight,

The future Thou hast hidden from our eyes,

Great is Thy mercy! Lead us in Thy light

To willing sacrifice! 2 [Note: M. Hitchin-Kemp, The Ideal of Sympathy, 19.]

4. The pierced soul is at length healed. That is the thought Titian so beautifully renders in his glorious “Assumption of the Madonna” in the great Venetian Gallery. The framework of the picture is but legend; its truth is eternal. It depicts the soul of Mary as it passes, after life’s sorrows, into the presence of God. The artist has painted her upturned face as it first catches sight of her Lord. It is a face of exquisite sweetness and beauty. And it is the face of the first Mary, the Mary of the Magnificat. Perfect faith is there, perfect joy, unsullied gladness. The piercing of the sword is now for ever past. But what most of all shines out from it is its sweet adoring love—the love no more of a mother for her child, but of a ransomed soul for its Saviour. The lips, as they open in rapture, seem to be framing the words sung long ago, but now uttered with a deeper, richer melody than was possible to her then: “My spirit doth rejoice in God my Saviour.”

O Lady Mary, thy bright crown

Is no mere crown of majesty;

For with the reflex of His own

Resplendent thorns Christ circled thee.

The red rose of this passion tide

Doth take a deeper hue from thee,

In the five Wounds of Jesus dyed,

And in Thy bleeding thoughts, Mary.

The soldier struck a triple stroke

That smote thy Jesus on the tree;

He broke the Heart of hearts, and broke

The Saint’s and Mother’s hearts in thee.

Thy Son went up the Angels’ ways,

His passion ended; but, ah me!

Thou found’st the road of further days

A longer way of Calvary.

On the hard cross of hopes deferred

Thou hung’st in loving agony,

Until the mortal dreaded word,

Which chills our mirth, spake mirth to thee.

The Angel Death from this cold tomb

Of life did roll the stone away;

And He thou barest in thy womb

Caught thee at last into the day—

Before the living throne of whom

The lights of heaven burning pray. 1 [Note: Francis Thompson.]

IV

A Revelation of the Heart

“That thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.”

1. Men’s inner life cannot be hid in Christ’s presence. By their treatment of Christ Himself, men will show what they are. The veil will be stripped off them—such is the figure—by their own language and their own conduct towards Christ. By their estimate of His character, by their appreciation or disparagement of His holy life and mighty works and Divine doctrine—by their acceptance or rejection of Him whose appeal was ever to the conscience of man, as in the sight of a heart-searching God—men will disclose their true disposition; will show whether they love the world, whether they echo its lying voice, whether they desire darkness lest their deeds should be reproved, or whether, on the, other hand, they are brave to see, and bold to confess the truth, whether they have an ear to hear the voice of God, and a will to follow Him whithersoever He goeth.

The artist Rossetti has a picture in the foreground of which is a modest Oriental house, Jesus sitting in its room, His face just visible through a window. Along the street in which it stands is merrily hurrying that other Mary. I mean the Magdalene. She is arrayed in loosely-flowing garments, and her hair hangs dishevelled about her shoulders. With her is a troop of rollicking and revelling companions. The picture has all the suggestion of complete abandonment. But, just as she is to rush past, the woman’s eye meets—what? Through the window the eye of Christ, clear as crystal, and cutting as any knife. It holds her, and tortures her. On her face is graven blank horror and dismay. The harlot is filled with self-loathing and self-contempt. Through Jesus the thoughts of her heart are revealed in their hideous and revolting shape. “She trembles like a guilty thing surprised.” 1 [Note: F. Y. Leggatt.]

2. Christ comes to heal as well as to reveal. His coming to men in His humanity, as Jesus of Nazareth, or coming to men in a preached Gospel, as the Living Saviour, is the one great test of men’s moral condition, of their attitude towards God. He is the revealer of all hearts; and, for the most part, the revelation is humbling—it would be hopelessly humbling were it not that the revealer is also the Redeemer; and He reveals and humbles only as a necessary preparatory condition to redeeming. The sterner side of Christ’s work is necessary; but the necessity arises from His persistently carrying out the purposes of Divine love. A man must be brought to “know himself,” as only Christ can show him himself, before he will even care to know what Christ can be, and would be, to him. Blessed are all they who have stood in the testing light of Christ and been shown up to themselves. He who falls in presence of Christ is surely raised up by the hand of Christ. He who probes also heals.

Lockwood had a religious mind, and retained through life his faith in the Christianity his parents had taught him. The chatter in the magazines about such matters had never interested him, and not even the symposia of eminent men, paid three guineas a sheet, about immortality had engaged his attention. He knew enough about human nature to know it was deeply wounded somewhere, and sorely stood in need of a healer. 2 [Note: A. Birrell, Sir Frank Lockwood, 192.]

I was reading a while ago a little book in which the author told the story of his own life, and in the preface he had written: “This is a book with but one intention—that in being read, it may read you.” That is what might be said of the influence of the Gospels. They are the story of a life; but, in being read, they read you. They report to you, not only the story of Jesus, but the story of your own experience. It is not only you that find their meaning; but, as Coleridge said, they “find you.” In his letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul tells the same story in a striking figure. It is, he writes, as though the Christian were set before a wonder-working mirror, in which was reflected the glory of God. At first the image of this glory dazzles the beholder, and he puts a veil between it and himself; but gradually, as he looks again into the mirror, he discerns his own features reflected back to him, but touched with something of that glory which was itself too bright to bear, until at last his own image is changed into the image of the Divine likeness, so that the looker-on becomes like that on which he looks. “Beholding,” the Apostle says, “as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image … by the spirit of the Lord.” That, he thinks, is what may happen as one looks steadily into the mirror of God. It is not that he shall be all at once made perfect, but that by degrees the veil shall be drawn away before the magic glass, and he shall see his imperfect thoughts touched with the glory of God’s intention, until that which he is changes before him into that which he prays to be, as by the Spirit of the Lord. 1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel, 28.]

A Touchstone of Character

Literature

Bernard (T. D.), The Songs of the Holy Nativity, 139.

Brooke (S. A.), The Early Life of Jesus, 37.

Carter (T. T.), Meditations on the Hidden Life of our Lord, i. 80.

Cox (S.), Expositions, iv. 16.

Edgar (R. M.), The Philosophy of the Cross, 35.

Griffin (E. D.), Plain Practical Sermons, 449.

Gurney (T. A.), Nunc Dimittis, 132.

Hall (E. H.), Discourses, 213.

Hutchings (W. H.), in Sermons for the People, ii. 131.

Lawlor (H. J.), Thoughts on Belief and Life, 31.

Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul’s, 245.

Mantle (J. G.), The Way of the Cross, 19.

Peabody (F. G.), Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel, 19.

Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 185.

Tholuck (A.), Light from the Cross, 9.

Tymms (T. V.), The Private Relationships of Christ, 12.

Vaughan (C. J.), Christ the Light of the World, 43.

Christian World Pulpit, xlviii. 40 (A. M. Fairbairn); lviii. 5 (A. Connell); lxiv. 413 (S. O. Tattersall); lxv. 154 (F. Y, Leggatt).

Verse 40

The Growth of the Child Jesus

And the child grew, and waxed strong, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.— Luke 2:40.

1. There is great significance in the fact, seldom appreciated by common believers or teachers of Christianity, that Jesus was once a child, with a child’s thoughts, feelings, joys, griefs, and trials. Not only was He a man, and therefore nothing human was alien to Him but sin, but He was also a child, and no childish experience is unknown to Him or removed from His sympathy. He became a child, as Irenæus beautifully observes, that He might be the Saviour of children. He has sanctified childhood, as He has every other age and experience of humanity, by passing through it. And the light and sanctity of this Divine childhood still linger around every human child, as the ideal of the artist hovers over the statue he has wrought, making it beautiful by the reflection of its pure and perfect beauty.

2. The subject of the text is the growth of Jesus. “The child grew.” Many read this statement without perplexity; but in all ages of the Church reflective minds have felt the difficulty of harmonizing the idea of progress with that of Divinity. The difficulty is undeniably a real one and may not be ignored; yet there would surely have been far more difficulty if Luke had said or implied that the Child did not grow. The Incarnation is a mystery which transcends our powers of explanation; but when once we have been told, and have believed, that Jesus was born and that Jesus died, we have left ourselves no excuse for doubting at the interval between these two events must have been filled up with years of normal human life.

3. First of all, then, we have the fact stated. Apocryphal histories of the infancy are full of marvellous tales; but none of these is trustworthy, and nearly all are glaringly false. There are many blanks in the narratives we possess, but it appears that after the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, Joseph and Mary returned to Bethlehem, where, before long, the Magi found them living, not in the village inn where the Child was born, but in a private house, as Matthew incidentally mentions. When the wise men had departed to their unknown country, Jesus was carried into Egypt, whence, after the death of Herod, He was brought back into Palestine, and placed in one of the most beautiful and retired villages of the northern province. In Nazareth the Child grew up in quietude as a healthy, happy child, strong in body and in mind; and men saw that grace, or rather, the beauty of God, the Divine beauty of holiness, was upon Him. This brief, but most significant, memorial contains in outline the story of twelve years, during which “the arm of the Lord” dwelt in the lowly home which His heavenly Father had chosen as the most suitable of all the homes then existent on the, earth.

4. Next, we see that His growth was natural. Think for a moment of the difficulty of conceiving a childhood in which Deity and humanity should be united, with no injustice done to either element. It is one of the evidences of the truthfulness of the Gospel narrative that it presents a perfectly natural and harmonious life, neither impossible to man nor unworthy of God.

The moment we look outside our Gospels we see what havoc the imagination was bound to make in attempting to fill up the outline by the invention of details. The Apocryphal Gospels of the infancy endeavour to assert the union of Divine power with human childhood by a series of grotesque miracles. One day the child Jesus cures a serpent’s bite by blowing on it, and kills the serpent by the same means; another day He tames a whole den of lions, and leads them dry-foot across Jordan; another day He makes birds out of clay and claps His hands and they fly away. St. Luke, on the contrary, while ever ready to record miracle in its proper place, takes pains to describe the holy childhood as a simple and natural growth alike of body and of mind, in due subjection to the restraints of home, free from precocity and yet not without strange intuitions, prophetic intimations of an unusual future, perplexing at the time but full of meaning in the light of later days.

Did angels hover o’er His head

What time, as Holy Scriptures saith,

Subject and dutiful He led

His boyhood’s life at Nazareth?

Was there an aureole round His hair,

A mystic symbol and a sign,

To prove to every dweller there,

Who saw Him, that He was divine?

Did He in childish joyance sweet,

Join other children in their play,

And with soft salutation greet

All who had passed Him in the way?

Did He within the Rabbi’s schools

Say “Aleph,” “Beth,” and “Gimel” mid

The Jewish lads, or use the tools

At Joseph’s bench as Joseph did?

And sometimes would He lay His head,

When tired, on Mary’s tender breast,

And share the meal her hand had spread,

And in her mother-love find rest?

We marvel—but we only know

That holy, harmless, undefiled,

In wisdom, as in stature, so

He grew as any mortal child.

All power, all glory hid away

In depths of such humility,

That thenceforth none might ever say

They had a lowlier lot than He!

And since the child of Nazareth

Set on it thus His seal and sign,

Who—till man’s sin hath marred it—saith

That childhood is not still divine!

The Evangelists record no incidents of the childhood of Jesus which separate it from the childhood of other of the children of men. The flight into Egypt is the flight of parents with a child; the presence of the boy in the Temple is marked by no abnormal sign, for it is a distorted imagination which has given the unbiblical title to the scene—Christ disputing with the Doctors, or Christ teaching in the Temple. But as the narrative of the Saviour’s ministry proceeds, we are reminded again and again of the presence of children in the multitudes that flocked about Him. The signs and wonders which He wrought were more than once through the lives of the young, and the suffering and disease of humanity which form the background in the Gospels upon which we see sketched in lines of light the outline of the redeeming Son of Man are shown in the persons of children, while the deeper life of humanity is disclosed in the tenderness of parents. 1 [Note: H. E. Scudder, Childhood in Literature, 48.]

Luke the Evangelist speaks of the growth of the Son of Mary as he might have done of that of Samuel, the son of Hannah, or as Froude might of Martin Luther, the son of Margaret. It was gradual and natural, in body and mind, in its physical, mental, and spiritual characteristics. Every glimpse we get of the child, the boy, and the man, reveals the same full humanness. Neither boy nor man is abnormal. Nothing is artificial, mechanical, external: all is vital, natural, and inward. The mystery of His Origin and Nature notwithstanding, we must say, with Principal; Fairbairn, “the supernatural in Jesus did not exist for Jesus, but! for the world.” 2 [Note: J. Clifford, The Dawn of Manhood, 35.]

The words recall, and are meant to recall, three others childhoods:

(1) First, the childhood of John the Baptist. Of him too St. Luke has told us that “the child grew and waxed strong in spirit”; and still earlier he has related that many were led to ask, “What manner of child shall this be? And the hand of the Lord was with him.” The parallel between the two children nearly of the same age is purposely worked out—the pious parent’s, the annunciation by the angel, the naming before birth, the prophecies of greatness, the long period of silent preparation for a unique mission. In each case the childhood was natural, the development slow and gradual, not forced and premature. In each case “the child grew and waxed strong in spirit.”

(2) And in drawing these pictures St. Luke had his models in the past. Look at Samson’s birth and childhood. His birth is announced beforehand by an angel, with the promise that “he shall begin to save Israel out of the hands of the Philistines”—words with which we may compare the language of the hymn in St. Luke, “that we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us.” Samson was to be “a Nazirite unto God from the womb,” even as the Baptist was to “drink neither wine nor strong drink,” but was to be “filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother’s womb.” And of Samson too it is written, “The child grew, and the Lord blessed him, and the spirit of the Lord began to move him.” Those were wild times, and it was wild work which Samson had before him, and he was not always faithful in his doing of it. But his childhood was a strong and natural childhood, with its occasional intimations of a destiny.

(3) And if Samson’s childhood is a forecast of St. John’s no less clearly is Samuel’s gentler childhood the prefiguration of our Lord’s. Here, again, we have the child promised beforehand, and dedicated before birth. In each case “the handmaid” of the Lord utters her “Magnificat.” “Hannah prayed and said, My heart rejoiceth in the Lord”; and “Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord.” A difference we find in early training; for the child Samuel is given to the service of the sanctuary as a child. But in similar terms we read of his quiet growth: “The child Samuel grew before the Lord”; and again, “The child Samuel grew on, and was in favour with the Lord and also with men.” Then comes the story of the voice of God in the house of God, itself a notable parallel to the Gospel of to-day; and then the words come once again that tell of holy growth—for this crisis did not suddenly bring the fulness of ripe knowledge of God and of life—“Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him, and did let none of his words fall to the ground.” 1 [Note: J. A. Robinson, Unity in Christ, 157.]

5. We have seen that the growth of Jesus was natural. But the question remains, How could that growth take place without sin? There are two conceivable kinds of development; one development through antagonism, through error, from stage to stage of less and less deficiency. This is our development; but it is such because evil has gained a lodgment in our nature, and we can attain perfection only through contest with it. But there is another kind of development conceivable, the development of a perfect nature limited by time. Such a nature will always be potentially that which it will become; i.e. everything which it will be is already there, but the development of it is successive, according to time; perfect at each several stage, but each stage more finished than the last. The plant is perfect as the green shoot above the earth, it is all it can be then; it is more perfect as the creature adorned with leaves and branches, and it is all it can be then; it reaches its full perfection when the bud breaks into flower. But it has been as perfect as it can be at every stage of its existence; it has had no struggle, no retrogression; it has realized in an entirely normal and natural way, at each successive step of its life, exactly and fully that which a plant should be. Such was the development of Christ. He was the perfect child, the perfect boy, the perfect youth, the perfect flower of manhood. Every stage of human life was lived in finished purity, and yet no stage was abnormally developed; there was nothing out of character in His life. He did not think the thoughts of a youth when a child, or feel the feelings of a man when a youth; but He grew freely, nobly, naturally, unfolding all His powers without a struggle, in a completely healthy progress.

The work of an inferior artist arrives at a certain amount of perfection through a series of failures, which teach him where he is wrong. By slow correction of error he is enabled to produce a tolerable picture. Such is our development. The work of a man of genius is very different. He has seen, before he touches pencil, the finished picture. His first sketch contains the germ of all. The picture is there; but the first sketch is inferior in finish to the next stage, and that to the completed picture. But his work is perfect in its several stages; not a line needs erasure, not a thought correction; it develops into its last and noblest form without a single error. Such was Christ’s development—an orderly, faultless, unbroken development, in which humanity, freed from its unnatural companion, evil, went forward according, to its real nature. It was the restoration of humanity to its original integrity, to itself, as it existed in the idea of God.

6. St. Luke not only says that as a child Jesus grew, developing as other children do, but he also tells us that He grew in every part of His personality. (1) He grew in body: “waxed strong”; (2) He grew in mind: “filled with wisdom”; and (3) He grew in spirit: “the grace of God was upon him.”

Development ought always to take place in all these three ways. Let us take a little baby as our instance. First of all the baby begins to grow in body; it gets bigger, it gets stronger; it has power over its little actions; it begins to walk—it is a great; at time in the house when the baby begins to walk—and everybody says how it is growing. And so it goes on, growing in bulk and in strength. Its clothes become too small for it. It grows on to boyhood or to girlhood; on to manhood, to womanhood; to strength and grace and beauty.

Now that is a marvellous thing—that growth of body. But, by and by, people begin to notice another kind of growth; something else is growing. This little one begins to walk; it also begins to talk, to notice things, to remember, to like and to dislike. Not only is the body growing, the mind is growing too. Presently the little mind will be strong enough to learn the alphabet, to begin to write, to begin to cipher, to begin to play on the piano, later on it will be strong enough to go to school, to college, and will, in time, become a learned man or woman.

Now that is a still more wonderful growth, for it will stop growing as a body, but it will never stop growing as a mind. You may find that child at eighty still growing, still growing, still learning, still advancing in wisdom. But, once more, if you notice the little one very closely, you will see that, not only does it grow in two ways—in body and mind—but it grows also in another way; it grows out of little faults into little virtues; out of little tricks of temper into patience, into power over itself; out of little selfishnesses into noble love. There are dolls and toys of the mind and there are dolls and toys of the soul; and as the body outgrows its clothes, and the mind outgrows its little mistakes, so there is something which is the best thing in man—the soul—which also grows; grows out of little faults and little wickednesses, and the unlovely habits of selfishness, till, by and by, men see before them a grand and splendid character.

i. Bodily Growth

“The child grew and waxed strong.”

The words are used of bodily development in size and strength. The Authorized Version adds “in spirit,” but that addition does not belong to this verse; it has been taken in by some copyist or commentator from the eightieth verse of the first chapter, where it is used of St. John the Baptist.

I think I am safe in saying that this exactest of writers would never have said about the youth of our Lord what he does say, and says over again, unless he had had before his mind’s eye the figure of a young man conspicuous among His fellows for His stateliness and His strength. The sacred writer tells us that he had the most perfect understanding of the very beginnings of our Lord’s life, because he had himself seen, and had interrogated with a view to his gospel, the most trusty eye-witnesses of our Lord’s childhood and boyhood and youth; till in this text we ourselves become as good as eye-witnesses of the laying of the first foundation stones of our Lord’s whole subsequent life and character and work. And the very first foundation-stone of them all was laid in that body which the Holy Ghost prepared for our Lord as the “ instrumentum Deitatis”—the organ and the instrument of His Godhead. You may depend upon it that a writer like Luke would never have repeatedly expressed himself, as he has here repeatedly expressed himself, about the growth and the stature of our Lord’s body, if our Lord’s bodily presence had been weak, as was the case, to some extent, with the Apostle Paul. In his famous essay on “Decision of Character,” John Foster has a most striking passage on the matter in hand. Decision of character, the great essayist argues, beyond all doubt, depends very much on the constitution of the body. There is some quality in the bodily organization of some men which increases, if it does not create, both the stability of their resolutions and the energy of their undertakings and endeavours. There is something in some men’s very bodies, which, like the ligatures that the Olympic wrestlers bound on their hands and on their arms, braces up the very powers of their mind. Men of a strong moral character will, as a rule, be found to possess something correspondingly strong in their very bodies; just as massive engines demand to have their stand taken on a firm foundation. “Accordingly,” says Foster, “it will be found that those men who have been remarkable among their fellows for the decisiveness of their characters, and for the success of their great endeavours, have, as a rule, been the possessors of great constitutional strength, till the body has become the inseparable companion and the fit co-worker with the mind.” It is an ancient proverb—“Mens sana in corpore sano”—a sound mind in a sound body—a stately mind and character in a corresponding bodily stature. 1 [Note: A. Whyte, The Walk, Conversation, and Character of Jesus Christ our Lord, 40.]

The human form is considered to be the highest expression of beauty and perfection for the following reasons. It is adapted to the greatest number of uses, its powers within the limits of its strength being certainly, as far as the hand is concerned, inexhaustible. The erect form rises upwards, indicative of the aspiring mind, a characteristic not shared by any other animal. The beautiful head is poised on a splendid column, the neck, which is elevated from the base line formed by the spread of the shoulders. The balanced rotundity and flatness of the limbs; the lovely movements of the wrist and marvellous structure of the hand, its powers, as has been already said, apparently almost inexhaustible; the general harmony of proportion, several parts of the body being neither too short nor too long for beauty—these compare to advantage with analogous parts of the lower creation. 1 [Note: George Frederic Watts, iii. 8.]

It is a pain to think of children living in conditions where they cannot grow in body as they should. Why are their frames so shrunken, and their little faces so pale and old-looking? Because they have no sufficient breathing-space in life, and no proper food to eat. In one of our seaports a church organized free suppers for poor lads one hard winter. At supper one night a superintendent noticed a boy who was not eating anything, and when he asked him why, the boy said, “I have been boiler-scaling.” The superintendent, though he had lived in the seaport all his life, had never heard of boiler-scaling before. Very small boys are employed to go into the boilers of ships with a hammer to strike down the scales of rust that form there. They come out half-suffocated with rust-dust and with a bronzed appearance. For this work they get a miserable pittance of pay, though it is work that none but very small boys can do. They usually take a candle, but the lad who was ill at supper had been sent into a boiler which was so hot that the candle quickly melted, and he had to have a small oil lamp. The lamp fumes and the boiler-heat and the dust made the supper impossible, as you may well imagine. I daresay it would be true that the other conditions of that boy’s life were not much more favourable to his growth. Thousands of children in this country, it is tragic to think, are doomed not to grow in body as they should. 2 [Note: T. R. Williams, Addresses to Boys, Girls, and Young People, 46.]

ii. Mental Growth

“Filled with wisdom.”

1. Sometimes the body grows and the mind remains a dwarf. After the mind has reached a certain point it may refuse to grow and want to stay where it is. Big men and women sometimes have very small minds. They may be six feet tall and weigh ever so many pounds, and still have a little bit of a mind. Their aims may be low, and their ambitions small, and their sympathies narrow, and their affections stunted, and their ideas puny. They are mental dwarfs. Everybody who comes near them knows they are small. Their conversation is thin, their dealings are petty. They are cross and crabbed, and unreasonable and ugly, and very hard to get along with. They are hard to live with because they are so small. We sometimes call such people childish, and I have heard them called big babies. A little baby a few months old is the sweetest thing in all the world, but a big baby is one of the most terrible of all living creatures.

2. It is not said that Jesus was filled with knowledge, or with learning, or with great talents, or with great promise of great eloquence, though all that would have been true, in the measure of His years. But wisdom is far better than all these things taken together. “Wisdom is the principal thing,” says the wise man, “therefore get wisdom.” Knowledge is good; knowledge is absolutely necessary. Knowledge, however, often puffs up; but never wisdom. Wisdom always edifies. He grew in knowledge, you may be sure, every day. He passed no day without learning something He did not know yesterday. He listened and paid attention when old men spoke. He read every good book He could lay His hands on. He went up as His custom was to the Synagogue every Sabbath day. And then all that was turned on the spot into wisdom to Him, like water turned into wine.

How common a thing is all learning, and all knowledge, and all eloquence; and how rare a thing is a little wisdom to direct them! How few men among our great men are wise men! Really wise men. How few among our own relations and friends are really wise men. If you have one wise man in your family, or in the whole circle of your friendship, grapple that man to your heart with a hook of gold. 1 [Note: A. Whyte, The Walk, Conversation, and Character of Jesus Christ our Lord, 47.]

Let us distinguish wisdom from two things. From information first. It is one thing to be well-informed, it is another thing to be wise. Many books read, innumerable facts hived up in a capacious memory—this does not constitute wisdom. Books give it not; sometimes the bitterest experience gives it not. Many a heart-break may have come as the result of life-errors and life-mistakes; and yet men may be no wiser than before Before the same temptations they fall again in the self-same way they fell before. Where they erred in youth they err still in age. A mournful truth! “Ever learning,” said St. Paul, “and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

Distinguish wisdom again from talent. Brilliancy of powers is not the wisdom for which Solomon prayed. Wisdom is of the heart rather than the intellect: the harvest of moral thoughtfulness, patiently reaped in through years. Two things are required—earnestness and love. First that rare thing earnestness—the earnestness which looks on life practically. Some of the wisest of the race have been men who have scarcely stirred beyond home, read little, felt and thought much. “Give me,” said Solomon, “a wise and understanding heart.” A heart which ponders upon life, trying to understand its mystery, not in order to talk about it like an orator, nor in order to theorize about it like a philosopher; but in order to know how to live and how to die. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Sermons, ii. 182.]

One of the most pleasing of the poems in Christina Rossetti’s “New Poems” is that addressed “To Lalla,” the favourite name of her cousin Henrietta Polydore. The latter was only three years old when the poem was written. The lines incidentally point the moral that wisdom of the heart is better than knowledge of the head. It is a trite moral, but rarely has it been better expressed than here.

Read on: if you knew it

You have cause to boast:

You are much the wiser

Though I know the most. 2 [Note: Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti, 21.]

3. There is a distinction to be observed between His intellectual development and ours. We, being defective in nature, are developed through error. By slow correction of mistakes, we arrive at intellectual, by slow correction of faults at moral, excellence. But it is quite possible to conceive the entirely natural development of Christ’s perfect nature, limited by time; the development, as it were, of a fountain into a river, perfect as the fountain, but not more than the fountain as a child; perfect as the rivulet, but not more than the rivulet as a boy; perfect as the stream, but not more than the stream as a youth; and perfect as the majestic river as a man. At each stage greater than at the last, more developed, but as perfect as possible to nature at each; and as the water of the fountain, rivulet, stream, and river is the same throughout, self-supplied, perennial in its source and flowing, so was it with the nature of Christ, and with His growth.

A simple-hearted Child was He,

And He was nothing more;

In summer days, like you and me,

He played about the door,

Or gathered, where the father toiled,

The shavings from the floor.

Sometimes He lay upon the grass,

The same as you and I,

And saw the hawks above Him pass

Like specks against the sky;

Or, clinging to the gate, He watched

The stranger passing by.

A simple Child, and yet, I think,

The bird folk must have known,

The sparrow and the bobolink,

And claimed Him for their own,

And gathered round Him fearlessly

When He was all alone.

The lark, the linnet, and the dove,

The chaffinch and the wren,

They must have known His watchful love,

And given their worship then;

They must have known and glorified

The Child who died for men.

And when the sun at break of day

Crept in upon His hair,

I think it must have left a ray

Of unseen glory there—

A kiss of love on that little brow

For the thorns that it must wear.

4. Can we discover any of the means that were used in the development of His mind? We know not if there were schools for children in those days, but the parent, and especially the mother, was the natural instructor of the child in all necessary knowledge, as she is the nurse and provider for its physical wants. What this Divine child learned from His human mother in those years of sweet and loving dependence, what wise questions He asked, or what wonderful sayings He uttered in that humble home, sayings which Mary, His mother, laid up and pondered in her heart, we may never know, at least in this world; for the lips of inspiration are sealed except in a single instance. But there were two oracles of instruction ever open, in which God spake to His Son, and taught Him, preparatory to His speaking through Him to the world He came to save. The first of these was the Scriptures of the Old Testament, that “sincere milk of the word” by which all devout and holy minds have been nourished, and have grown thereby. Jesus’ intimate familiarity with the letter of Scripture, shown by His frequent quotations from it, evince how carefully He had studied the written Word—like the Psalmist, hiding it in His heart. And His profound and sometimes startling penetration into its spirit shows a deeper and more spiritual knowledge of it, such as no Rabbi or mere human expositor could have imparted.

Besides this, there was that other not less sacred book, or revelation, of nature, where God’s thoughts are written and embodied in the things that are made. And of this book the child Jesus was a constant and diligent student. The vale of Nazareth is described by travellers as one of the most beautiful spots to be found in Palestine, or even in the world. St. Jerome rightly calls it “the flower of Galilee,” and compares it to a rose opening its corolla. It does not command a landscape like Bethlehem; the girdle of hills which encloses it makes it a calm retreat, the silence of which is, even in our day, broken by the hammer and chisel of the artisan. The child Jesus grew up in the midst of a thoroughly simple life, in which a soul like His might best develop its harmonies. He had only to climb the surrounding heights to contemplate one of the finest landscapes of the Holy Land. At His feet lay the plain of Jezreel, tapestried with myriad flowers, each one more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory. Its boundaries were Tabor and Carmel, whence echoed the voice of Elijah; Lebanon confronted Carmel, and the chain of Hermon joined its snowy summits to the mountains of Moab; while afar off glimmered the Great Sea, which, outlying all national barriers, seemed to open to Jesus that world which He came to save.

Standing at Fuleh, and looking due north, you can see, some six or seven miles away, the green hills that embosom the village of Nazareth. How often from the hidden village, when the sun was sinking westwards over Carmel, must there have come to the top of the green hill overlooking the great plain the lone figure of a Young Man to look out over the great sea of beauty, and watch the slowly darkening plain, while Tabor, Hermon, Gilboa, Ebal, and the hills of Samaria still glowed in the sunset.

Skylarks to-day sing their sweetest over green Galilee; a thousand wild herbs load the evening airs with perfumes; the golden honeysuckles add their scent to that of the myrtle bushes along the pathways; and a sky of surpassing blue domes the whole wondrous scene. This village of the Nazarene is not even mentioned in the Old Testament. Strange fact! Yet from it was to go forth one still small Voice which was to shake the temples, waken the tombs, and bring the pillars of empire to the ground.

It was here, on these grassy hills, that those wonderful Eyes drank in, through three-and-twenty years, all that imagery of fruit and flower, of seed and harvest time, all the secrets of the trees, which afterwards became the theme of similitudes and parables. It was here the Master prepared to manifest all that infinite knowledge of soul and sense, the pale reflection of which, as it is found in the Evangelists, has come as a moonbeam over the troubled river of the lives of men, silvering the turbid stream, lighting the gloomy headlands, and shedding its benign rays far out upon the endless ocean in which the fevered flood is at last to rest. 1 [Note: Sir William Butler: An Autobiography, 374.]

These are the flowery fields, where first

The wisdom of the Christ was nursed;

Here first the wonder and surprise

Of Nature lit the sacred eyes:

Waters, and winds, and woodlands, here,

With earliest music charmed His ear,

For all His conscious youth drew breath,

Among these hills of Nazareth.

The quiet hills, the skies above,

The faces round were bright with love;

He lost not, in the tranquil place,

One hint of wisdom or of grace;

Not unobserved, nor vague nor dim,

The secret of the world to Him,

The prayer He heard which Nature saith

In the still glades by Nazareth.

Yet graver, with the growth of years,

The step, the face, the heart appears;

The burden of the world He knows,

The unloved Helper’s lonely woes

Till, when the summons bids Him rise

From that still place of placid skies,

Fearless, yet sorrowing unto death,

Jesus goes forth from Nazareth. 1 [Note: G. A. Chadwick.]

iii. Spiritual Growth

“The grace of God was upon him.”

1. This word goes beyond all we have yet considered. It says that in these silent years the boy Jesus lived toward God; that within the life of home and school and play there was another life; that the child looked up to a Father in heaven, and by most simple faith brought Him into the midst of the scenes He saw and the duties He did. That word spoken to earthly parents in the Temple is a mysterious saying, to be laid up with many another in Mary’s heart, to be read in the light of events long afterwards, and perchance to be mysterious even then. To us the most remarkable and revealing thing about it is the simple, devout familiarity with which He uses the Father’s name, His manner of taking God for granted and of assuming His relation to Him. “Wist ye not that I must be in my Father’s house?” This is no strange, sudden break from all His past, no discovery of His mission. His life hitherto has been leading Him to this hour. In the hills of Nazareth He had found a house of God where He held communion with Him; the poor synagogue of Nazareth was to Him His Father’s house before He saw the great Temple at Jerusalem. In the home of Nazareth He found Him near. Every duty of that lowly life bound Him to the Father. Those silent years were doubtless rich in experiences which are not written down, which were not told to any, but which were forming and confirming the faith in which He was to live and work and die.

Christ’s pure quiet life in Nazareth was the greatest fact in His whole great career. It was this life that gave significance to His death.

Nazareth stands for the home life. It contains the greater part of His great career. By far the greater number of years was spent here. Here were more praying for others and over the life plan, more communing with the Father, more battling with temptation and narrow prejudice and ignorance than in the few years of public service.

Nazareth stands for that intensely human life of Jesus lived in dependence upon God’s grace exactly as other men must live. It was lived in a simple home that would seem very narrow and meagre in its appointments and conveniences to most of us. He was one of a large family living in a small house, with the touch of elbows very close, and with all the possible small, half-good-natured frictions that such close, almost crowded, touch is apt to give rise to.

He worked with His hands and bodily strength most of the waking hours, doing carpentering jobs for the small trade of the village, dealing with exacting, whimsical customers, as well as those more easily suited.

He was a son to His mother, an eldest son, too, and may be, rather likely, of a widowed mother, who leaned upon her firstborn in piecing out the small funds, and in the ceaseless care of the younger children. He was brother to His brothers and sisters, a real brother, the big brother of the little group. He was a neighbour to His fellow villagers, and a fellow labourer with the other craftsmen. In the midst of the little but very real and pressing problems of home, the small talk and interests of the village life, He grew up, a perfect bit of His surroundings, and lived during His matured years.

And who can doubt the simplicity and warmth and practicality and unfailingness of His love as it was lived in that great Nazareth life? We will never know the full meaning of Jesus’ word “pure,” and of His word “love,” and of all His teaching, until we know His Nazareth life. The more we can think into what it really was, the better can we grasp the meaning of His public utterances. Nazareth is the double underscoring in red under every sentence He spoke.

Those three years and odd of public life all grew up out of this Nazareth home life. They are the top of the hill; Nazareth is the base and bulk; Calvary the top. Here every victory had already been won. The public life was built upon the home life. Under the ministering to crowds, healing the sick, raising the dead, and patient teaching of the multitudes, lay the great strong home life in its purity. Calvary was built upon Nazareth. 1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Home Ideals, 112.]

2. He grew in spirit by the exercise of His moral powers in resisting the temptations arising from mere natural desire, which needed to be controlled in Him as well as in all men. While the grace of God was upon Him and in Him, to inspire and aid His good endeavours, it did not supersede His own free moral agency. The discipline of life came to Him, as it does to all, and challenged Him to conflict; and He acquired moral strength and wisdom only through experience and trial, by overcoming whatever foe or hindrance lay in His path of holy obedience. And this was not an easy victory, but involved conflict, self-denial, and suffering. For we read that, “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered”; and that “he was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin”; which He could not be, without a real conflict between desire and will, between flesh and spirit. The difference between Him and other men was not in His exemption from trial and moral discipline, or in His impeccability or inability to do wrong, but in the fact that in Him the spirit, or will, never succumbed to temptation, but remained steadfast and sinless though continually solicited; while in others the will is often overcome, and so weakened in its power of resistance. The conflict in Him was to retain His integrity, in others to recover it. And the indispensable help in this conflict, without which no wisdom and no virtue can be established, was to detect the first approaches and manifold disguises of moral evil, and a reinforcement of spiritual strength from the infinite Source of all strength and wisdom. That charge so often made to His disciples afterwards, “Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation,” was drawn from His own deep and life-long experience.

You are not to think of “grace” here in its ordinary evangelical acceptation. But there is no fear, surely, of your making that mistake. You think every day and every hour of God’s grace to you as the chief of sinners. And though our Lord thought without ceasing of the grace of God that had come to Him; it was not the same kind of grace as that is which has come to you. The grace of God has come to you bringing salvation. But the Saviour of men did not for Himself need salvation. More than one kind of grace came to Him, first and last. But not among them all the grace that has come so graciously to you. And it breeds great light on the kind of grace that came to the Holy Child when we turn from the fortieth verse of this chapter to the fifty-second verse, and there read that He increased in favour with God and man. The true sense here is the same as when a voice came from heaven to the Jordan, and elsewhere, and said: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” “The good pleasure of God was upon him,” that would be the best way to render the text. 1 [Note: A. Whyte, The Walk, Conversation, and Character of Jesus Christ our Lord, 47.]

The highest reaches we can attain here are but broken fragments of the full Divine beauty. At the best we can only become dimly transfigured; only faintly does the beauty of the Lord appear in us. The last design made by the great painter, Albert Dürer, was a drawing showing Christ on His Cross. It was all completed, except the face of the Divine Sufferer, when the artist was summoned away by death. At the end of the longest and holiest life we shall have but a part of the picture of Christ wrought upon our soul. Our best striving shall leave but a fragment of the matchless beauty. The glory of that blessed Face we cannot reproduce. But when we go away from our little fragment of transfiguration we shall look a moment afterward upon the Divine features, and, seeing Jesus as He is, shall be like Him. 2 [Note: J. R. Miller.]

3. This spiritual life, essentially in Him from His birth, had been naturally developed in His consciousness by means of external circumstances, and through the growth of His intellect. The first gleams of the consciousness of His spiritual life may have arisen through the influence of His home and of outward nature. A kindling influence then came upon His intellect in the religious journey to Jerusalem and the sights He saw at the Feast, and reached its culminating point in the conversation in the Temple.

Accompanying this dawning consciousness of the spiritual light and life which dwelt within Him, there arose also in His mind the consciousness of His redeeming mission. We seem to trace this in the words “my Father’s business.” It does not appear, however, just to say that this idea was now fully defined and grasped. We should be forced then to attribute more to Him than would agree with perfect childhood; but there is no unnaturalness in holding that it now for the first time became a dim prophecy in His mind. It required for its complete development that the sinfulness of the world should be presented to His growing knowledge as a thing external to Himself. Sin so presented made Him conscious, by the instinctive repulsion which it caused Him, of His own spotless holiness; and, by the infinite pity which He felt for those enslaved by it, of His own infinite love for sinners; and out of these two there rose the consciousness of His mission as the Redeemer of the race from sin. This was the business which His Father had given Him to do. Clearly and more clearly from this day forth, for eighteen years at Nazareth, it grew up into its completed form, till He was ready to carry it out in the action of His ministry.

I instance one single evidence of strength in the early years of Jesus: I find it in that calm long waiting of thirty years before He began His work. And yet all the evils He was to redress were there, provoking indignation, crying for interference—the hollowness of social life, the misinterpretations of Scripture, the forms of worship and phraseology which had hidden moral truth, the injustice, the priestcraft, the cowardice, the hypocrisies: He had long seen them all. All those years His soul burned within Him with a Divine zeal and heavenly indignation. A mere man, a weak emotional man of spasmodic feeling, a hot enthusiast, would have spoken out at once, and at once been crushed. He bided His own time (“Mine hour is not yet come”), matured His energies, condensed them by repression, and then went forth to speak, and do, and suffer. This is strength; the power of a Divine silence; the strong will to keep force till it is wanted; the power to wait God’s time. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Sermons, ii. 182.]

The Growth of the Child Jesus

Literature

Brooke (S. A.), Sermons, i. 108.

Brooke (S.A.), The Fight of Faith, 273.

Campbell (W. M.), Foot-prints of Christ, 11.

Clifford (J.), The Dawn of Manhood, 34.

Crookall (L.), Topics in the Tropics, 21.

Eyton (R.), The True Life, 93.

Gibbon (J. M.), The Children’s Year, 60.

Goodwin (H. M.), Christ and Humanity, 81.

Gray (W. H.), The Children’s Friend, 82.

Jefferson (C. E.), My Father’s Business, 25.

Laing (F. A.), Simple Bible Lessons, 159.

Leathes (A. S.), The Kingdom Within, 217.

Manning (H. E.), Sermons, ii. 17.

Morrison (G. H.), The Footsteps of the Flock, 19.

Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, ii. 175.

Robinson (J. A.), Unity in Christ, 155.

Rutherford (W. G.), The Key of Knowledge, 191.

Sidey (W. W.), The Silent Christ, 13.

Simpson (W. J. S.), Addresses on St. John Baptist, 58.

Stanley (A. P.), Sermons for Children, 1.

Swing (D.), Sermons, 120.

Talmage (T. de W.), Sermons, iv. 354.

Tymms (T. V.), The Private Relationships of Christ, 36.

Whyte (A.), The Walk, Conversation, and Character of Jesus Christ our Lord, 40.

Williams (T. R.), Addresses to Boys, Girls, and Young People, 41.

Children’s Pulpit: First Sunday after the Epiphany, ii. 355.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxv. 8 (Lyman Abbott); lvi. 259 (T. V. Tymms).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Sermons to the Young, xvi. 77 (A. P. Stanley).

Preacher’s Magazine, viii. 555 (J. Feather).

Verse 49

Always at Work

And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?— Luke 2:49 (A.V.).

1. We know how it sometimes happens that a scene which has been for years familiar and beloved suddenly greets us with a new impression. We have caught it from some unexpected angle, or a flying light has shot over it, bringing out some colour or some effect of perspective or of contrast that we never before hit upon. There it is, the old habitual place, which we fancied that we knew by heart, and yet there is a look in it to-day which we had never suspected, which we had always missed. A touch of beauty, a flash of significance, has given it a new consecration. The novelty of the effect is heightened by the very fact that it is brought out of material so intimately known.

Now, is not this often the case with the Four Gospels? Those wonderful books—how well we seem to know them! From our earliest memories the familiar rhythms have sung “the old, old story” in our ears. We turn the pages only to pass the eye along its habitual and anticipated sequences. And then, by a sudden stroke now and again, a fresh gleam of light falls, and some fragment of the gospel story starts into swift and radiant prominence. We had read that bit a thousand times before, yet it lay unmarked; pleasant, indeed, and helpful, one perhaps among many that we liked, yet with no special note. But to-day it stands out as if alone. A peculiar force lies about it. A splendid meaning breaks from it. How is it we can have passed it over so easily? How is it we ever missed its vivid interest?

Some such prominence has fallen in our day on the scene recorded by St. Luke to which the text refers. So strangely alone it is, this tale of the boyhood of Jesus, plucked out of the heart of that silence which broods round the long hours of the Lord’s growth at Nazareth. Ah, how we pine to penetrate within that shrouding silence—the silence during which the blessed Plant sprang up out of the dry ground. Would that we might follow the unrecorded process in the mystery of which He passed from the unconscious impotence of the Babe, passive in the manger, swathed in swaddling-clothes, to that full, ripe, conscious manhood of His ministry—complete, self-mastered, sure-footed; clear in aim, in purpose, in decision; calm, measured, deliberate, and determined. Between the two moments lies the whole story of the upward growth.

2. If the veil of silence has fallen on so much that we cannot but desire to look into, with what an outbreak of relief do we fasten on this solitary story which the diligence of St. Luke has been guided to rescue out of all the hidden mystery of growth, for our loving attention! Here he has been allowed to bring before us, not merely the broad or secret process by which His human nature won its advances, but a most signal moment of its increase, when it arrived at a new level, as it were, at a bound.

Such a moment is never forgotten, the moment at which the boy ceases to see through the eyes of others, ceases to speak, to think, as others do about him; when he sees with his own eyes, and faces his own world, and seeks for his own interpretation of it. Such moments, when they come, are full of a great awe; we are rapt into a solitude of our own, in which we forget our earlier interests, which have become as a very little thing. We are absorbed in the passion of a spiritual discovery; we are caught up, young though we be, into the solemnity of those swift and sudden intuitions which have the

Power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence.

Many a man or woman can recall echoes of such times. Perhaps, long after we have forgotten them, we drop upon some fervid or grave resolution, written with our unformed hand, in a youthful diary, the record of some such momentous awakening. We smile as our eyes fall on that record, yet smile with a sigh of sad regret that, with all wiser intelligence, we have not retained the intense and earnest seriousness which makes sacred that old scrawl.

3. The words of our text, then, are the only words recovered from the childhood of Jesus. All the precious memory that Mary kept in her heart appears to have died with her.

She told it not; or something sealed

The lips of that evangelist.

Legends survive, enough; offspring of crude if devout imaginations, and so obviously spurious that there has never been any serious attempt to include them in sacred writ. In thirty years, one saying, and one only, survives. These are the first recorded words of Jesus, and every syllable is precious. The poet Wordsworth says that the child is father of the man; and surely in these words of Jesus we get a hint of all that the man Jesus is ever to become. As in a mountain lake one sees reflected the mountains and the forests and the procession of the clouds, so in this single sentence of Jesus is mirrored the entire New Testament land and sky.

4. What do these words signify? They claim Sonship—“my Father”; they claim also the necessity of obeying the demands of Sonship—“I must”; and they claim that what the Father demands of the Son is Service—“about my Father’s business.” So we have—

I. Sonship.

II. Surrender.

III. Service.

Sonship

“My Father.”

1. In His first words, Jesus claims Divine Paternity, and for Himself Divine Sonship. When His mother said “Thy father and I have sought thee,” she meant Joseph, but when Jesus said “my Father’s business,” He did not mean Joseph, for He was not about Joseph’s business when in the Temple, questioning, and being questioned by the doctors. We can put no other fair interpretation on the phrase “my Father” than that which makes it refer to God, His Divine Father. It was His business that He was about when in The temple, not Joseph’s.

“My Father.” This was Jesus’ name for God. When He spoke to God He always called Him “Father.” When He was successful in His work, He said, “Father, I thank thee.” When He was overcome with grief, He cried, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass.” When He pleaded for His disciples, He said, “Father, keep through thine own name these whom thou hast given me.” On the cross He prayed, “Father, forgive them,” and with His last breath He said, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” This is the word He wanted all men to use.

The first use of the name “Father” by Jesus was to name God, not a man. Our souls first know an earthly father, then climb up as by a beautiful ladder of the soul to the idea of a heavenly Father. Jesus knew first the Father above. He lived under Him, carried Him in the sweetest centre of His being, had His will shaped by Him, and was inspired by hope and love and submission to Him. Little children grow up to call the man in their house, who gave them their life and provides that life with home and food, “father,” “my father.” But Jesus grew up to think of God as all this. From the first He was inspired by the thoughts of the strength and the love of God, His Father, and was a loyal child of the will of God.

I was telling her how sternly children were brought up fifty or sixty years ago; how they bowed to their father’s empty chair, stood when he entered the room, did not dare speak unless they were spoken to, and always called him “sir.” “Did they never say ‘father’? Did they not say it on Sundays for a treat?” A little while later, after profound reflection, she asked—“God is very old; does Jesus call Him Father?” “Yes, dear; He always called Him Father.” It was only earthly fathers after all who did not suffer their babes to come to them. 1 [Note: W. Canton, W. V.: Her Book, 122.]

2. Christ’s first saying was not a moral precept, but a solemn declaration concerning His relation to God. He breaks forth on the world at the age of twelve, and claims to be the Son of the Eternal Father. Was it now that the consciousness of this great fact dawned upon Him, or was it present with Him during the whole of His early childhood in Nazareth? The confident calmness with which He utters it suggests that He was previously conscious of the relationship. As a Jewish boy, brought up in a devout religious home, He must have been early instructed in the Law and the Prophets. Before He was born, His mother was visited by an angel, who communicated to her a Divine message of marvellous significance. “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.” Would not His mother tell Him, before He reached the age of twelve, of this angelic visit and of the mysterious message? Could she, as a fond mother, well withhold it? While studying the Law and the Prophets, during the early years of childhood in Nazareth, His eye may have fallen on Isaiah’s significant passage, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Would He not at once interpret the meaning and, applying it to Himself, understand that He was the Immanuel who was to be born of a virgin? Had He read, or had there been read to Him, in the secluded home of Nazareth, the passage in Deuteronomy 18:18-19, “I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him”? Had He a glimpse of Himself when the passage was read? In the Temple, what portions of the Hebrew Scriptures were read in the service? Was it Isaiah 53, or Psalms 2, or Psalms 22, or Psalms 72, or Psalms 110? Were these included in the seven days’ service, or in the discussion among the doctors? Did the child of twelve years hear any inward voice, saying, I am He of whom Psalmists and Prophets speak? Was the grandeur of His mission opening out to Him? Was the spirit of His mission possessing Him? Did He now say to Himself, in the mysterious depth of His own consciousness, “For this cause came I unto this hour,” “and how am I straitened until it be accomplished”? When now He made the great announcement to His mother, that God is His Father and that He is the Son of God, did He not set His seal to the angel’s mysterious words, “He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest”?

We are not warranted in affirming that the child meant all that the man afterwards meant by the claim to be the Son of God; nor are we any more warranted in denying that He did. We know too little about the mysteries of His growth to venture on definite statements of either kind. Our sounding lines are not long enough to touch bottom in this great word from the lips of a boy of twelve; but this is clear, that as He grew into self-consciousness, there came with it the growing consciousness of His Sonship to His Father in Heaven.

3. Jesus never speaks of His holding the same relationship as His disciples to God the Father. He never speaks to His disciples of “our God,” or of “our Father,” but of “your Father,” and “my Father”; of “your God,” and “my God”; implying that His relationship as Son is of a higher, diviner order than the relationship of the disciples as children of God. You may reply, that in the Lord’s Prayer He says “Our Father.” Yes, but He had said before, “When ye pray, say, Our Father.” He puts the words into the mouths of His disciples, and does not intimate that He uses them Himself when He prays, or that He uses them conjointly with His disciples. Although known as the Lord’s Prayer, it is a prayer which He could not offer. It contains a petition for forgiveness of sins, which only sinners could offer; and He, being sinless, could not join in the petition.

4. But Jesus said to the disciples “When ye pray, say, Father.” For to us also there is a better life than the life of nature, and the Fatherhood into which Christ introduces us means that through faith in Him, and the entrance into our spirits of the Spirit of adoption, we receive a life derived from, and kindred with, the life of the Giver, and that we are bound not only to Him by the cords of love, but also to our parents by the ties of family affection. Sonship is the deepest thought about the Christian life. It was an entirely new thought when Jesus spoke to His disciples of their Father in heaven. It was a thrilling novelty when Paul bade servile worshippers realize that they were no longer slaves, but sons, and, as such, heirs of God. It was the rapture of pointing to a new star flaming out, as it were, that swelled in John’s exclamation: “Beloved, now are we the sons of God.”

“When ye pray, say, Father.” When you are worried, remember that God is your Father. When you ask God for blessings, remember how willing parents are to give good things to their children. God is both willing and able to give us every good thing, for everything belongs to God. And because everything belongs to God, Jesus treated everything with reverence. He would not allow men to swear by heaven or the earth or Jerusalem or their own head, for all these belonged to His Heavenly Father. He drove the traders from the Temple because they were desecrating the Temple of His Father. He cheered the hearts of His disciples by reminding them that the house of many mansions belongs to the Heavenly Father. All people were dear to Jesus because all of them were the children of God. Beggars and lepers and blind men and bad men, the most loathsome and forsaken of men were dear to His heart because they belonged to His Father in Heaven. To be worthy of His Father was His constant ambition and unfailing delight. “My meat,” He said, “is to do his will and to finish his work.”

The idea that God is a loving, righteous Father, who has created me to be His child, capable of knowing Him and learning to sympathize with Him in love and goodness, and so to be partaker of His blessedness, and who is educating me for this inwardly and outwardly at every moment, is an idea which commends itself to me as light; and I find also that practically it is fruitful and good. There is no proof of this, except in our own human consciousness; but, also, there is no real proof against it, and I am compelled to regard it as eternal truth. 1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ii. 256.]

God is a kind Father. He sets us all in the places where He wishes us to be employed; and that employment is truly “our Father’s business.” He chooses work for every creature which will be delightful to them, if they do it simply and humbly. He gives us always strength enough, and sense enough, for what He wants us to do; if we either tire ourselves or puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault. And we may always be sure, whatever we are doing, that we cannot be pleasing Him if we are not happy ourselves. 2 [Note: Ruskin, Ethics of the Dust (Works, xvii. 290).]

II

Surrender

“I must.”

1. All through Christ’s life there runs, and occasionally comes into utterance, the sense of a Divine necessity laid upon Him; and here is the beginning, the very first time that the word occurs on His lips, “I must.”

Mark that great word “must.” It was one of Jesus’ earliest words, and He used it to the end. He was not ashamed to say that there were some things which He was obliged to do. Let no boy ever hesitate to say “I must.” Many a man’s life has been wrecked because he never learned, when a boy, to speak the words “I must.” Jesus early learned the lesson, and so at thirty He could say, “I must preach the gospel.” When men stood amazed at His tireless industry He said, “I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day.”

This great word “must” is used about thirty times in the New Testament in relation to the mission of Christ, His work, His sufferings, His death, His resurrection, His ascension, His mediatorial sovereignty, and His final victory over sin and Satan, and the word proceeds mostly from the lips of Christ Himself; in a few instances, it also proceeds from the sacred writers themselves; but even then, they seem only to echo the word which He had so solemnly used, and which, by frequent repetition, He had deeply impressed on their memory. For example take the following—He showed “unto his disciples how that he must go into Jerusalem, and suffer many things”; “the scripture must be fulfilled”; “the Son of man must suffer many things”; “I must preach the kingdom of God”; “I must walk today, and to-morrow, and the day following”; “But first must he suffer many things, and be rejected of this generation”; “the passover must be killed”; “this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors”; “the Son of man must be delivered”; “all things must be fulfilled”; “even so must the Son of man be lifted up”; “he must rise again”; “he must reign.” Sometimes, under the pressure of this awful “must,” although the word itself is not used, He yet employs phrases which are equivalent, and which indicate that He is under solemn necessity. “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.” The word “must” is not there, but the meaning of it is, and the solemn pressure of it is felt. “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour; but for this cause came I unto this hour.” Again the word “must” is not in this passage, but we hear the echo of it, feel the pressure of it, and the meaning of it is significantly emphasized.

2. There is as Divine and as real a necessity shaping our lives, because it lies upon and moulds our wills, if we have the child’s heart, and stand in the child’s position. In Jesus Christ the “must” was not an external one, but He “must be about His Father’s business” because His whole inclination and will was submitted to the Father’s authority. And that is what will make any life sweet, calm, noble. “The love of Christ constraineth us.” There is a necessity which presses upon men like iron fetters; there is a necessity which wells up within a man a fountain of life, and does not so much drive as sweetly incline the will, so that it is impossible for him to be other than a loving, obedient child.

Some very little children sometimes use the word “must” very naughtily. There is an old saying, you know, “Must is for the king and not for his people.” But “must” is sometimes a very nice little word. “I must do.” Why did Jesus say that? “Oh, I so love My Father that I cannot help it. My love to My Father compels Me to do it.” “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” 1 [Note: J. Vaughan, Children’s Sermons, 150.]

3. The words “I must” on the lips of Jesus suggest that the higher freedom implies the higher necessity. If ever any man was free that man was Jesus. He, indeed, achieved that moral and spiritual freedom after which we toil in vain. The bondage of the world, the flesh and the devil was a bondage from which He was absolutely and utterly emancipated. He at least was no slave to the opinion of society, or merely human authorities. In Herod He saw no king, but only a sinful man whose soul was in peril. In Caiaphas He saw no priest but only a fallible mortal, needing to be enlightened by the Spirit of God. He was free from all unworthy motives and inferior ambitions. He was free from the hesitation and timidities inspired by doubt. He was the free child of truth, righteousness, love. And He, the mighty Conqueror and Master of all wrong and error, was so because He was the perfect Servant of truth and right. The higher freedom was the higher necessity.

The law of His childhood was the law of His manhood. Just as one of your little ones floating a walnut-shell upon a bowl of water calls into operation all, or nearly all, the laws that operate when an ocean-liner is launched, so within the utterance of this child-spirit of Jesus there are contained those majestic spiritual revelations which go far to compose the gospel. He called men to love God more perfectly, that they might be subdued more completely to the obedience of God. He knew that when He taught them to say “Our Father,” He taught them to say “We must obey God rather than man.” Surrender was latent in sonship.

Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free. 1 [Note: Carlyle, “Essay on Burns” (Miscellanies, ii.3).]

III

Service

“My Father’s business.”

1. When only twelve Jesus had grasped the great idea that life must be lived for a purpose. There is business to do and the business belongs to God. In the Temple Jesus forgot all about Himself. Some boys study because they are compelled to, or because they want to make a show, or because they expect to use their education in making money later on; but Jesus listened to His teachers and pondered the lessons which they set Him in order to advance the glory of His Father. All kinds of work take on new lustre when we think of it as being given to us by our Father. Men sometimes say, “my business,” “my studies,” “my plans,” forgetting that God has anything to do with them. Everything we do, if we do it rightly, is our Father’s business. It is ours and it is also His. Our life is ours and His, so also is our work. We are interested in our tasks, and so is He. We bead over our studies, and so does He. Everything that touches us also touches Him; and that boys and girls should obey their parents and pay attention to their teachers is not only their business, it is also the business of the Heavenly Father.

Many Christians tell me that they have no vocation to service; that they do not know what to do; that they would be glad to serve God, if only they knew how and where! These are they who were not on the alert, when first they knew the Lord, to set themselves at once about their Father’s business; or who have fallen from their first love and zeal; or have separated service from the consciousness of salvation; and I fear, in many cases, with the abandonment or the neglect of service, have lost the blessed consciousness of sonship. I am more and more satisfied, as I come to know myself and my surroundings better, and those of other Christians as well, that we do not so much need to make opportunities as to embrace them when they are presented to us. The majority of life’s failures, especially in Christian life, grow out of not promptly embracing opportunities for service. Shakespeare tells us that “There is a tide which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” It is equally true that there are spiritual instincts and promptings which, if yielded to, lead on to most blessed and useful Christian life; but which, if neglected, leave the Christian to comparative shipwreck. 1 [Note: G. F. Pentecost, Sermons, 103.]

In matters of business take this as a maxim, that it is not enough to give things their beginning, direction, or impulse; we must also follow them up and never slacken our efforts until they are brought to a conclusion. 2 [Note: Counsels and Reflections of F. Guicciardini.]

I thought of life, the outer and the inner,

As I was walking by the sea,

How vague, unshapen this, and that, though thinner,

Yet hard and clear in its rigidity.

Then took I up the fragment of a shell,

And saw its accurate loveliness,

And searched its filmy lines, its pearly cell,

And all that keen contention to express

A finite thought. And then I recognized

God’s working in the shell from root to rim,

And said—“He works till He has realized—

Oh Heaven! if I could only work like Him!” 3 [Note: T. E. Brown, Old John and other Poems, 128.]

2. “My Father’s business.” What is this business? In one word, it is redemption, to bring lost humanity into a salvable condition; to provide for the restoration of purity, blessedness and immortality, to men who have forfeited all by transgression; to save from sin, its power, pollution, and penalties, all who apply to God for mercy. Or, in other words, to establish in this fallen world a kingdom of grace and salvation, whose gates shall be thrown wide open, and into which all the alienated race of man may enter, on condition of renouncing for ever their allegiance to the Evil One, and consecrating themselves loyally to their Redeeming King.

John Vassar once spoke to a lady about her soul, and the lady told her husband of what he had said. “I should have told him,” said her husband, “to mind his own business.” “If you had been there,” said the lady, “you would have thought it was his business.” 1 [Note: H. Thorne, Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 65.]

(1) One part of that redemption which was the business of Christ was to offer a perfect example. When He sums up His own life, it is at one time, “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do”; “my meat is to do the will of him that sent me”: at another it is, “I am among you as he that serveth”—as the Servant of men; “the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” And we see why the two go together. The true child shares the true parent’s thoughts and purposes, and feels as he feels. And so the child of God, because he knows that He is the Father of His human creatures, and that He is love, and means nothing but love for them, must himself begin to share that love, that care, begin to feel the zeal to help, the wish to serve.

God had written divers books of example in the lives of the saints. One man was noted for one virtue, and another for another. At last, God determined that He would gather all His works into one volume, and give a condensation of all virtues in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now He determined to unite all the parts into one, to string all the pearls on one necklace, and to make them all apparent around the neck of one single person. The sculptor finds here a leg from some eminent master, and there a hand from another mighty sculptor. Here he finds an eye, and there a head full of majesty. He saith, within himself, “I will compound these glories, I will put them all together; then it shall be the model man. I will make the statue par excellence, which shall stand first in beauty, and shall be noted ever afterwards as the model of manhood.” So said God, “There is Job—he hath patience; there is Moses—he hath meekness; there are those mighty ones who all have eminent virtues. I will take these, I will put them into one; and the man Christ Jesus shall be the perfect model of future imitation.” Now, I say that all Christ’s life He was endeavouring to do His Father’s business in this matter. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

It seems as if nothing could be more impossible than to follow our Lord’s example. He was God, and we are but weak and sinful men. How can we follow the Divine example in our small, petty life? How can we follow the Divine example when there is within us so much that is selfish, so much that is hard, so much that is false, and so much that is ungenerous? How can we follow His example? And yet He Himself has told us that even to give a cup of cold water is a thing that He will notice, if it is done in His spirit. In His spirit; and that spirit ought to animate all the actions of every-day life. No doubt it is here, here particularly, that it seems as if our power to obey His precepts must break down. To follow His example—how can it be done? But the Lord Himself, when He calls us to follow His example, knows our weakness and knows what is the nature of the task that is put upon us; He enters into all the folly and all the blindness and all the pains and all the temptations that mark our characters and lower our lives; He enters into it all. Without sin Himself, He nevertheless shared all the troubles of human life, and as if to encourage us these strange and awful words have been written by His direction, that He “learned obedience by the things which he suffered.” He learned obedience because He passed through all that was needed to make obedience perfect. He learned not to obey; but He learned what to obey really meant. His humanity had to pass through what our humanity passes through. He obeyed—He had no need to learn that—but He learned what was the struggle, what was the trouble, that perpetually impeded obedience. He learned to feel it, and still He retains that humanity which felt it, and He sympathizes with every difficulty that besets our endeavours to please Him. He sympathizes, for He knows it all; He sympathizes because He has passed through it all. And if we are to abide in Him, we, too, must learn obedience, not only in the sense in which He learned it; we must not only learn what it is to obey, but we must learn to obey. And the Lord knows us through and through; He sees whether we are following His example, or not, and His loving mercy is with us all the time. 1 [Note: Archbishop Temple.]

(2) Another part was to offer Himself a sacrifice. Twenty-one years from this Passover, He Himself must be the slain Lamb, His must be the blood shed. These shadowy typical ceremonials will then be abolished, and will cease for ever; for He Himself will become the one Priest, the one Sacrifice, the one Mediator at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavenly sanctuary. It is said that He increased in wisdom. During these seven days of the Passover, He must have added immensely to His store of knowledge concerning the work He had to do, and the sacrifice He had to make as the world’s Redeemer. That Passover was an object-lesson, whose typical meaning He would not fail to understand and to apply.

It was His Father’s business made Him sweat great drops of blood; His Father’s business ploughed His back with many gory furrows; His Father’s business pricked His temple with the thorny crown; His Father’s business made Him mocked and spit upon; His Father’s business made Him go about bearing His cross; His Father’s business made Him despise the shame when, naked, He hung upon the tree; His Father’s business made Him yield Himself to death, though He needed not to die if so He had not pleased; His Father’s business made Him tread the gloomy shades of Gehenna, and descend into the abodes of death; His Father’s business made Him preach to the spirits in prison; and His Father’s business took Him up to heaven, where He sitteth on the right hand of God, doing His Father’s business still! 2 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

3. This is the necessity that lies upon every one of the sons of God. In other words, the law of life, as illustrated by the example of our Lord and Master, and iterated and reiterated by all the lessons of human experience, is the law of Divine obedience through human service. The love of God is best shown in the love of men. Those souls are the most reverent, and most completely fulfil the Divine will, that yield the most readily and cheerfully to the pressure of human need.

(1) This business may not be regarded as apart from the ordinary, daily duties of life. What one is called upon to perform day by day, however ordinary and monotonous, may lie directly in the line of Divine appointment. It is hardly fair to assume that Joseph and Mary were not about their Father’s business. Nor is there any reason for supposing that Jesus meant to imply that they were not, although asserting for Himself obedience to the higher mandate. By attending simply and unostentatiously to the chosen or appointed task, we may find the angels of God coming forth to meet us as they met Jacob of old on his way from Syria to Palestine.

It is possible that some of you may be secretly wishing that you could spend all your days in public prayer, in the hallowed engagements of the sanctuary, in preaching the gospel or in teaching the young; let me say to you that there is not an errand-boy in the streets of London who cannot be turning his work into the business of God; all business may be made our Father’s, by doing it in our Father’s spirit, and for our Father’s glory. Do not yield yourselves to the fallacy that religion is separate and distinct from all the common engagements of life. The doorkeeper in the poorest commercial establishment in this city may be doing his Father’s business quite as much as the elders and angels that are around the throne. Everything depends upon your spirit. You may make the commonest duty uncommon by coming to it in a sanctified and heavenly spirit. 1 [Note: Joseph Parker.]

(2) The business of the Father may be performed in the treatment we give to current questions. Every age has its problems. The heart of the Roman Empire in the time of Tiberius and Nero was stirred by great questions, as is shown by the interrogatories of Pilate and Felix and Herod Agrippa. Our own age is no exception in this respect to the ages that have preceded it. Indeed, it would almost seem as if Christianity, in its fearless challenge of every phase of human thought and of every variety of organized life, had created problems which are, and must be for ever, almost the despair of human wisdom and effort. In whatever direction we turn the light of our faith, we seem not only to expose to observation the deep struggles of the individual soul over the mysteries of being, but to bring into view those actions, habits, institutions and relations of men which must be reformed before the Kingdom of God shall come. We cannot shut our eyes to these things; we cannot push them aside as of no consequence; we cannot even fold our arms in indifference before them. They are here; they demand consideration, and must and will have some intelligent treatment from us.

How to get the idle rich to abandon their idleness and help to carry some of the burdens of those who are now too heavy laden; how to equalize to some extent the favours of fortune and, while discouraging an over-accumulation of riches in a few hands, take away at least some of the sharper stings of poverty; how to avert the arrows of misfortune from those who are exposed to the pitiless assault of circumstances which they have done nothing to create and which they are powerless of themselves to change; how to lighten the work of those who have too much of it and give work to those who, without employment, would yet be glad to earn an honest wage; in short, how to exalt the lowly and bring down the proud, and make the pathway of men blossom with comfort and kindliness and goodwill, and thus give us a foretaste of heavenly peace; these are some of the new tasks of this new time. Those who love their fellow-men are summoned to these undertakings. Those who have leisure and intelligence are without excuse if they let the summons go unheeded. The voice that calls is the voice of God, and they who obey the call may be sure that they are about their Father’s business.

Fawcett’s great principle (which, of course, he shared in general with Mill) was one which would only be disputed in general terms by an Egyptian anchorite or an Indian faquir—Live in camel’s-hair raiment, and you may fairly denounce the rich and regard poverty as a blessing. Fawcett, who preferred broadcloth, held that the master evil of the day was the crushing poverty of great masses of the population. To make men better, you must make them richer—that is, less abjectly poor, less stunted and shackled by the ceaseless pressure of hard, material necessities. Religious, moral, and intellectual reforms are urgently needed, but they cannot become fruitful unless the soil be prepared. Apply all your elevating influences, but also drive the wolf from the door or they will never have fair play. Men ought to desire more, or rather ought to have further-reaching desires. They should be more prudent and thoughtful—oftener at the savings-bank and less often at the public-house. That was the pith of Fawcett’s teaching as an economist, and few who call themselves Christians will admit that it is condemned by Christianity. 1 [Note: Leslie Stephen, Life of Henry Fawcett, 140.]

(3) But, however we act and wherever we go, we must not lose sight of the fact that we are all the time in the presence of the living God. We may be dwelling in a world of sense, but we are also in a world of spirit. This universe is God’s universe. His power is manifest in it, and His spirit pervades it. We cannot go where He is not. That is the thought which is given to sober us and to impart steadiness to all our aims. Before it all considerations of the temporal vanish. We are no longer mere denizens of this mortal world. We are spiritual beings, living in a spiritual world, endowed with spiritual attributes, having an immortal destiny, and are indeed the children of the Highest.

When the knowledge of our immortality dawns upon us, how little then our hearts are set upon the pleasant garniture of life, and the riches which it then becomes almost a delight to resign! Our mind is fixed no longer on sweet colours and sounds, because it knows that it is passing through them, and that they are but symbols of the fulness and unity that shall be. Those whom we love are no longer merely those with whom we use delight, and from whom we gather joy, but souls bound to us for ever by a stainless bond, which no lapse of time can hurt or break. And therefore we make haste to cast out of our life all sick and jarring elements, and to agree swiftly while we are in the way together.

The thought of sweet things that must fade is no longer a mere poignant sentiment, but a sign of renewal and freedom. Memories are no longer mere hopeless phantoms, but as the stones of the desolate place out of which the wayfarer piles his pillow. We do not lose the sense that things belong to us, but instead of their being things which we hoard for a little and then reluctantly and pathetically resign, they are ours for ever. The old days of kindness and regret, when we grasped at what seemed so solid, but lapsed like the snow-crystal while we held our breath, are no longer times to muse ruefully over and to forget if we can, but miry ways which led us, how blindly and dully, to the house of life itself; and instead of viewing pain and death as cruel gradations of decay, through which we fall into silence, we know them to be the last high steps of the ascent from which the view of life itself, with all its wide plains and woods, its homesteads and towns, will break upon our delighted eyes.

It may be said, “Can we live life on this level of hope and expectation?” No, we cannot all in a moment. But we can return again and again, in times of grief and pain, to contemplate the truth, and drink fresh draughts of comfort and healing. The one thing that we must determine is not to acquiesce in being entangled in the earthly things that catch and wind, like the grasses and branches of the brake, about our climbing feet. Not to make terms with mortal and material things, not to abide in them, that is our business here and now. To take life as we find it, but never to forget that it is neither the end or the goal, that it is at once the problem and the solution. 1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Thy Rod and Thy Staff, 72.]

Guest from a holier world,

Oh, tell me where the peaceful valleys lie!

Down in the ark of life, when thou shalt fly,

Where will thy wings be furled?

Where is thy native nest?

Where the green pastures that the blessed roam?

Impatient dweller in thy clay-built home,

Where is thy heavenly rest?

On some immortal shore,

Some realm away from earth and time, I know;

A land of bloom, where living waters flow,

And grief comes nevermore.

Faith turns my eyes above;

Day fills with floods of light the boundless skies

Night watches calmly with her starry eyes

All tremulous with love.

And, as entranced I gaze,

Sweet music floats to me from distant lyres:

I see a temple, round whose golden spires

Unearthly glory plays!

Beyond those azure deeps

I fix thy home,—a mansion kept for thee

Within the Father’s house, whose noiseless key

Kind Death, the warder, keeps! 2 [Note: Albert Laighton.]

Always at Work

Literature

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