Bible Commentaries
Mark 16

Verse 15

Christ’s Commission to His Church

Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation.— Mark 16:15.

These are the last words recorded of all Christ’s communications to His apostles. Let us think what would be the effect on those who heard it of such a parting charge. It made all the difference to the apostles, whether they should simply be holders and possessors of truth and blessings, teachers and ministers in their own place and among their own people of the grace in which they believed, or whether they should be missionaries of it—messengers running to and fro, and never pausing, never resting in their ceaseless and unwearied wanderings, to carry the news onward and onward, farther and farther on, to ever new hearers and more and more unknown lands. So St. Paul understood it: “From Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum”—the type of all that was barbarous and uncouth—“I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.”

Those parting words of Christ put the stamp on Christianity that it was to be a universal religion; a religion, not merely universal in the sense that it should be freely open to all who came to seek for it, but universal in the sense that it should go out and seek for men in their own homes; a religion of conquest and progress in all directions; a religion which should be satisfied with nothing short of having won over “the whole creation,” the tribes of men of every language and colour, from north to south, on whom the sun rises and on whom it sets, to the obedience of Christ, and to the Kingdom of His Father.

The subject therefore is a missionary topic in its widest sense. We may study it under three main headings:—

I. The Responsibility of the Church

II. The Preparation of the Missionary

III. The Scope of the Commission

I

The Responsibility of the Church

This is Christ’s last great Easter command.

1. The first thought which suggests itself is the practical duty. “Go ye and preach.” The matter was literally left in the apostles’ hands, it is literally left in ours. Jesus has returned to the throne; ere departing He announced the distinct command. There it is, and it is age-long in its application,—“Preach,” tell of the name and the work of “God manifest in the flesh.” First “evangelise,” then “disciple the nations.” Bring to Christ, then build up in Christ. There are no other orders; we must think imperially of Christ and the Church, and our anticipations of success must be world-wide in their sweep.

It used to be the fashion to laugh at Missions. You know how they are represented and talked about in the pages of Dickens and Thackeray. That time has passed away. It is no longer possible to laugh at them. The serious statesman feels that, if not the missionary, then he knows not who is to create the bond of spiritual fellowship between East and West, Africa and Europe. And he looks eagerly towards this missionary effort. People can no longer laugh. It is the biggest thing in the world that has to be done, and a great and consuming desire has seized the souls of people of all sorts and kinds. The mingling of the nations gives us our great opportunity, our great responsibility. It becomes a watchword—the evangelisation of the world in this generation. These are great desires, ideal desires. Remote, you say. You know not how they are to be realised. What is the use of bothering ourselves with things that seem so far off and unpractical? That feeling is the contrary of the Bible. The Bible always busies itself with things that are unpractical. The mark of a Saint is that he busies himself with things that are remote and unattainable. 1 [Note: Bishop Gore.]

The Duke of Wellington was once asked, “Is it any use to preach the Gospel to the Hindu?” The Duke said, “What are your marching orders?” “Oh!” was the reply, “our marching orders undoubtedly are to ‘preach the gospel to every creature.’ ” “Very well,” was the withering answer, “You must obey the command. You have nothing to do with results.” 2 [Note: T. Lloyd Williams.]

2. The command is accompanied with a reproof.—He upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen ( Mark 16:14). Remembering that there are still millions of the human race who have never heard the Gospel, despite the fact that nineteen centuries have rolled away since the command was first given—if the Lord Jesus Christ appeared among us some happy Easter Day, should we wonder if He would upbraid us for our unbelief and the hardness of our hearts?

3. The command is addressed to all classes—to women as well as to men. It is given first in another form to Mary Magdalene: “Go unto my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and unto my God and your God” (St. John 20:17). It is repeated to the other women who had come to anoint the body of Jesus, as they were wending their way back sadly to their homes. We feel at once there is a difference between them and the Magdalene; she affords us the highest example of sorrow and love, and she is therefore first to seek Him; when she sees the angels she shows no fear, so absorbed is she in the one thought about her Lord whom she had lost. But not so the other women. True, their love was deep, their sorrow was keen; but they came more calmly, debating, “Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?” Jesus Christ would send forth as His messengers, not only those who are filled with impulsive love to Him, but the calm, the calculating, and the prudent. You who see the stone and know the difficulties in the way, you who feel the awe and sacredness of the holy message; there is need for you to go and tell; there are some who will believe your story, while they will account a Magdalene with her ecstatic love as but an enthusiastic fanatic.

II

The Preparation of the Missionary

In the context of the following verse, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that disbelieveth shall be condemned,” we find the fundamental principles on which the equipment of the missionary for his work is based. “Believe and be baptized,” is the watchword of New Testament teaching. What do these words mean to us?— Belief and Baptism.

1. Baptism.—Take the second first. The Catechism bids the catechist ask his pupil what it means. And the pupil is to reply: “I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given unto us, ordained by Christ Himself, as a means whereby we receive the same and a pledge to assure us thereof.” Here the thoughts specially enforced are that the Sacrament, the Baptismal rite, the Eucharistic rite, is outward and visible, a thing which touches and affects the common senses, and can serve therefore as a “sign” recognisable by them; and then that it stands related to something “inward and spiritual,” belonging to the region of the “inner man” and to the unseen and eternal life, which something is the grace of God, His free saving action and virtue for us and in us.

Further, this “sign” is what it is by virtue of the direct institution of our Lord, by whom it was “given,” “ordained” as nothing else of the outward and visible order was expressly sanctioned by Him.

Lastly, His sacred purpose in such gift and command is intimated. The “sign” is a means for the reception of the “grace,” a channel by which our being finds contact with the spiritual action and virtue of God for our salvation. It is also “a pledge to assure us thereof,” a token tangible and visible whereby we are to grasp with new certainty the fact of our possession, to be filled, as we contemplate the sign, with the animating conviction that this wonderful gift, the grace of God, is, for our future as well as for our present, “a sober certainty of waking bliss.” 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, Faith: Its Nature and Its Work, 190.]

2. Belief.—What is belief in the Christian sense of the term? Is it not a reliance upon the intuitions rather than upon the reason? “With the heart man believes unto righteousness.” Look at the whole method of Christ’s teaching and you will see at once what this definition means. Has it ever struck you that the silences and the omissions in the teaching of Christ are remarkable? He does not attempt to prove the existence of God; He takes it for granted. He does not offer a single argument for the existence of the soul, or the prolongation of human destiny beyond the earth, or the certainty of an unseen spiritual world. He shows us a publican at prayer—that is His way of proving the existence of a soul. He shows us Dives and Lazarus—that is His way of making us aware of the immortal destinies of man, and of his relation to an unseen world. Why is Christ silent upon the arguments which make for these great convictions? Because He knows that no argument can give them cogency. They lie outside the reason. They are witnessed to by the intuitions of mankind. It is to these intuitions that Christ appeals, and His appeal was justified by the astonishing fact that while men eagerly disputed His teaching upon conduct, the worst man never disputed His fundamental assumptions of the existence of God, of the soul, and of an unseen place of judgment behind the veils of time. Christ, in His own perfection and purity of life, suggests God; the publican at prayer vindicates the soul, for mankind from the beginning of the ages has been a creature conscious of a need for prayer; the inequalities of life displayed in Dives and Lazarus suggest a spiritual universe where wrong is righted, and final justice done to mankind.

You will perhaps say that this is to beg the entire case; and so it would be, if man were no more than a rational creature. But man is an irrational as well as a rational creature, and all that is noblest in him springs from a kind of redeeming irrationality. Love, heroism, martyrdom, are all acts of sublime irrationality. Put to the test, we refuse to be governed wholly by our reason, and we refuse every day. A man who never thought or acted, save upon the full consent of his reason, would be a sorry creature, and his life would be a dismal spectacle. There is a logic of the heart which is stronger than the logic of the reason.

Harriet Martineau speaks of the real joy she found in deliverance from what she called the “decaying mythology” of the Christian religion. She took positive pleasure in the thought of its approaching annihilation. She, and those who thought with her, announced as a sort of gospel to mankind struggling in the wilderness, that the promised land was a mirage, and they expected mankind to welcome the intelligence. That was the spirit of the old materialism; the later materialism is full of incurable despair and sadness. It is no longer sure that it is right. It is no longer able to disguise the truth that there are a hundred things in heaven and earth which were not dreamed of in its philosophy. It has fired its last shot, it has announced the promised land a mirage; and yet mankind follows the pillar of cloud and fire. In the heart of the materialist of to-day there is a new yearning toward faith, an ardent wish to believe more than his reason will permit him to believe. 1 [Note: W. J. Dawson.]

No logic or reason would justify George Eliot, who had repudiated Christianity as vigorously as had Harriet Martineau, in reading Thomas à Kempis all her life, and having the immortal meditations of the old monk at her bedside as she died; but the logic of the heart justified her, and we love her for submitting to it. What had she, a woman who thrust aside all the theologies as incredible, to do with a Dinah Morris preaching Christ crucified, upon a village green? Yet she does paint Dinah Morris, and through the lips of the Methodist evangelist she lets her own soul utter a message which her intellect rejected. 2 [Note: Ibid.]

3. There must be a readiness to obey on the part of the missionary. “Begin at home” is an axiom of Christianity, but as an excuse for not taking part in missionary work it is futile. Begin at home means begin at your own character, for what you are will determine what you do; but beginning is not the whole. If you are resolved, in this supreme work of character-building, in this supreme work of self-conquest, to cultivate or concentrate every phase of your energy upon yourself until your individual victory is complete, then it will mean only the utterest woe of self-defeat. If we say we will not stretch out a hand to help others until there is nothing in us to prevent the question, “What lack I yet?” it will be simply that we lack the one thing without which is the lack of all.

When the proposal to evangelise the heathen was brought before the Assembly of the Scotch Church in 1796, it was met by a resolution, that “to spread abroad the knowledge of the gospel amongst barbarous and heathen nations seems to be highly preposterous, in so far as philosophy and learning must in the nature of things take the precedence, and that while there remains at home a single individual every year without the means of religious knowledge, to propagate it abroad would be improper and absurd.” And then Dr. Erskine called to the Moderator, “Rax me that Bible,” and he read the words of the great commission, which burst upon them like a clap of thunder. 1 [Note: R. F. Horton.]

4. A Desire to spread the Light.—When the Christian faith, having begun its life, almost immediately began to spread itself abroad, it was doing two things. It was justifying its Lord’s prophecy, and it was realising its own nature. At the very beginning there came a moment’s pause and hesitation. We can see in those chapters of the Book of Acts how for a few years the faith could not quite believe the story of itself which was speaking at its heart. It heard the ends of the earth calling it, but it could not see beyond the narrow coasts of Judæa. But the beauty of those early days is the way in which it could not be content with that. It is not the ends of the earth calling in desperation for something which was not made to help them, which had no vast vocation, which at last started out desperately to do a work which must be done, but for which it felt no fitness in itself. The heart of the Church feels the need of going as much as the ends of the world desire that it should come. It is “deep answering to deep.” 2 [Note: Phillips Brooks.]

Do we claim with a passion of desire to see the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ? When John the Baptist came, he came to create an Israel of expectation. It was of that Israel of expectation that our Lord said, “From the days of John the Baptist till now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and men of violence take it by force.” By the cryings of their desire they have forced the hand of God and brought the Kingdom of God near. So it is. God will not save us without our own correspondence. If He delays long, if we do not see so much as a glimpse of one of the days of the Son of Man, it is because we desire it so little, because we find so much acquiescence in things as they are, so much miserable contentment, so little eagerness of desire. “God gave them their desire, and sent leanness withal into their soul.” If you want little, or, rather, if your wants are small and selfish, if the things you really care about are the things that touch yourself, your own personal religion, to get a church you like and comfortable things,—things that touch your own family, your own interests, your own circle,—if your desires are narrow, and selfish and small, then, lo! God will give you your desire, and send leanness withal into your soul. You have none of the eagerness and generosity of desire which belong to the really blessed. “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” 1 [Note: Bishop Gore.]

The old historian, Diodorus, tells of a fire in the Pyrenees which burned off the forests and penetrated the soil until a stream of pure silver gushed forth and ran down the mountain-side. This is manifest fable. But there will be a more marvellous story to tell when the fire of God’s Spirit begins to burn in the hearts of His people. 2 [Note: D. J. Burrell.]

A missionary explained how he came to enter the missionary field: “In coming home one night, driving across the west prairie, I saw my little boy hurrying to meet me; the grass was high on the prairie, and suddenly he dropped out of sight. I thought he was playing, and was simply hiding from me; but he did not appear as I expected he would. Then the thought flashed upon my mind, ‘There’s an old well there, and he has fallen in.’ I hurried up to him, reached down into the well and lifted him out; and as he looked up in my face, what do you think he said? ‘O, papa, why didn’t you hurry?’ Those words never left me, they kept ringing in my ears until God put a new and deeper meaning into them, and bade me think of others who are lost, of souls without God and without hope in this world; and the message came to me as a message from the heavenly Father: ‘Go, and work in my name’; and then from that vast throng, a pitiful, despairing cry rolled into my soul as I accepted God’s call: ‘O, why don’t you hurry?’ ” 3 [Note: A. P. Hodgson.]

Time greatly short,

O time so briefly long,

Yea, time sole battleground of right and wrong:

Art thou a time for sport

And for a ?Song of Solomon 4 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]

5. A Work of Patience.—“To preach the gospel to the whole creation.” This is a work of patience. We need the patience which dominated the spirit of St. Paul so that he could write: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church” ( Colossians 1:24). And we can find a still greater example of patience—the patience of Jesus, portrayed by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “Now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour, that by the grace of God he should taste death for every man. For it became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings” ( Hebrews 2:8-10).

When they kindle the festival lamps round the dome of St. Peter’s at Rome, there is first a twinkling spot here and there, and gradually they multiply till they outline the whole in an unbroken ring of light. So “one by one” men will enter the Kingdom, till at last “every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

So mine are these new fruitings rich,

The simple to the common brings;

I keep the youth of souls who pitch

Their joy in this old heart of things;

Who feel the Coming young as aye,

Thrice hopeful on the ground we plough;

Alive for life, awake to die;

One voice to cheer the seedling Now.

Full lasting is the song, though he,

The singer passes; lasting too,

For souls not lent in usury,

The rapture of the forward view. 2 [Note: George Meredith.]

III

The Scope of the Commission

Its scope will depend upon the meaning we put into the word “gospel.” “Go ye and preach the gospel.”

i. The Gospel

1. What is this “Gospel” of “Good News” which we are to preach to the whole creation? We may find the answer in the word “Atonement.” The Atonement of Christ culminated in His Resurrection and Ascension. The whole teaching of St. Paul turned round “Christ crucified, and the power of his resurrection.” “He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things” ( Ephesians 4:10). It is this “power” that is able to transform men’s lives—this is the Gospel which the Church is still called upon to preach to the heathen.

2. Perhaps our age unduly magnifies—and yet is it possible to magnify?—the love of God manifested in the great propitiation of Christ’s death. We must hold both, God’s righteousness—for what is God without righteousness?—and His love—for what is God without love for a world of sinners? There is the propitiation which sets forth hope. We cannot reconcile them, we often say; we cannot see how the same act of the Saviour can exhibit both sides of the Divine character. Perhaps we cannot. St. Paul and St. John could; they could see no inconsistency. There is no opposition; they are two sides of the same shield; we can do without neither, we need both equally, for God must be to us the supreme name for righteousness, just as He must be the supreme name for the love without which there would have been no redemption, no atonement for a lost world. We know it is sometimes said that the Eastern branch of the Church dwelt rather upon the Incarnation, and the Western upon the Redemption. But that may be pushed too far. The fact is, and we rejoice to think that it is a fact, that the whole Church, in every age, has been substantially one in the way in which it has held the central doctrine of the faith. On that doctrine there is no division; there is perfect unity in the Church.

We have an example in the hymns of the universal Church. What do they say?

Now I have found the ground wherein

Sure my soul’s anchor may remain;

The wounds of Jesus for my sin,

Before the world’s foundation slain.

When I survey the wondrous cross

On which the Prince of Glory died.

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in Thee.

And perhaps all the doctrine of the Cross was never more simply or more perfectly stated than in Mrs. Alexander’s children’s hymn:

There is a green hill far away. 1 [Note: J. S. Banks.]

3. But is there not a reactionary tendency in our immediate times,—not so much to magnify the love of God in the Atonement, as to drift away from a simple trust in the saving value of Christ’s sacrifice? Are we not now, if we may so speak, impatient of the word Atonement? It shocks our sense of justice; we want to set our lives on a moral basis for ourselves. This may be very well as a theory, the desire which prompts it may be worthy, but will it work in practice? Which of us does not say in his heart, “Oh, if I had not sinned before, I could now go on all right.” No, sin needs its remedy, as much now as it did in Christ’s day. And we can find that remedy, now as then, only at the Cross. All sacrifice is beautiful if offered in a right spirit, and Christ will not despise our poor offerings; but our greatest sacrifices can express their fullest meaning to the heart of the Eternal Father only when they are offered up in union with the Great Sacrifice of His Son.

Look, Father, look on His anointed Face,

And only look on us as found in Him:

Look not on our misusings of Thy grace,

Our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim;

For lo! between our sins and their reward

We set the Passion of Thy Son our Lord.

ii. The Words of the Commission

The universality of the commission is found in the meaning of the Gospel. But we have also the express words of Christ: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” These words unfold the whole plan of the Universality of the Kingdom—what Maclaren calls “the Divine audacity of Christianity.” Take the scene. A mere handful of men, how they must have recoiled when they heard the sweeping command, “Go ye into all the world”! It is like the apparent absurdity of Christ’s quiet word: “They need not depart; give ye them to eat,” when the only visible stock of food was “five loaves and two small fishes.” As on that occasion, so in this final command, they had to take Christ’s presence into account. “I am with you alway.” So note the obviously world-wide extent of Christ’s dominion. He had come into the world, to begin with, that “the world through him might be saved.” “If any man thirst, let him come.” The parables of the Kingdom of heaven are planned on the same grand scale—“I will draw all men unto me.” It cannot be disputed that Jesus lived in this vision of universal dominion. Here emerges the great contrast of Christianity with Judaism. Judaism was intolerant, as all merely monotheistic faiths must be—and sure of future universality, but it was not a proselytising—not a missionary faith. Nor is it so to-day. It is exclusive and unprogressive still. Muhammadanism in its fiery youth, because monotheistic, was aggressive, but it enforced outward profession only, and left the inner life untouched. So it did not scruple to persecute as well as to proselytise. Christianity is alone in calmly setting forth a universal dominion, and in seeking it by the Word alone. “Put up thy sword into its sheath.”

The missionary battle-cry of the Moravian Brotherhood is “To win for the Lamb that was slain the reward of His suffering.” They are a humble people, smallest of all in figures, but a mighty host in the word’s redemption. They have one missionary for every fifty-eight members at home. They are careful in the observance of memorial days. One of these is the Day of Prayer. On August 26, 1727, they set their great vigil going. Twenty-four brethren and twenty-four sisters decided that they would keep up a continuous circle of prayer through the twenty-four hours of the day, each brother, each sister, in their own apartments accepting by lot the hour when they would pray. 1 [Note: A. P. Hodgson.] They have put their sword in its sheath, and their weapon is prayer.

1. The word “Universality” gives rise to two thoughts.

(1) It finds in the Gospel a Father for everybody. In all the world it finds not a single orphan. The sorrowing are everywhere; the thoughtless, depraved, debauched, ignorant, wretched, the sinful are everywhere. But nowhere an orphan. Whether in the jungles of Africa, the plains of Syria, the crowded cities of China, or amid the civilisations of Europe and America, the great Infinite Father Spirit broods over the spirits of men. Men may forget the Father, but He does not forget them. Into whatever desert, across whatever valley of sin, whatever slough of despond, whatever depths of despair, He follows them, wraps them about as with a garment, and whispers into their timid ears the sweet assurance, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

There came to my office one day an old lady with white hair, starved features, and tottering steps, leaning upon a cane. There was a scared, timid look on her careworn face as she sank heavily into a chair and told me her pathetic story. It was very simple. An utterly debauched and worthless son, who for thirty years had brought nothing but sorrow to the heart of his mother, had been arrested for an assault from which his victim had died. He was lying in jail awaiting trial. The bruised heart of the aged mother yearned for her boy, for he was still a boy to her. In a moment of indignation at what seemed to me outraged affection, I asked, “Why do you not leave him alone? He does not care for you.” Her eyes filled afresh with tears, her head sank lower, as she answered with infinite tenderness, “No, I know he does not care for me, but I care for him, and he cannot have a mother long.” 1 [Note: G. L. Perin in Good Tidings, 139.]

(2) Universality means a cure for every form of sin, and for all the sin of the world. It does not believe in a defeated God. It is a victorious Gospel. One cannot help feeling sorry for the God whom some people believe in. He is a kind-hearted, benevolent God, who means well, but His world is too big. It has slipped away from His control and it is going to ruin at breakneck speed.

Christ, when He died,

Deceived the cross,

And on death’s side

Threw all the loss:

The captive world awaked and found

The prisoners loose, the jailor bound.

O dear and sweet dispute

’Twixt death’s and love’s far different fruit,

Different as far

As antidotes and poisons are:

By the first fatal tree

Both life and liberty

Were sold and slain;

By this they both look up and live again.

O strange mysterious strife,

Of open death and hidden life!

When on the cross my King did bleed,

Life seemed to die, death died indeed. 1 [Note: Richard Crashaw.]

2. “Preach the gospel to the whole creation.” The commission according to St. Mark is all too superficially read by Christian people. “Go ye into all the world,” does not merely mean, Travel over the surface of the earth and speak to men; the term “world” ( kosmos) includes man and everything beneath him. The preaching of the Gospel to individual men is the beginning of the work, but the Gospel is to be proclaimed to the whole creation. We can reach the kosmos and the whole creation with the evangel only through men. In the proportion in which men hear the evangel, and, yielding to it, are remade by the healing ministry of the Servant of God, they become instruments through which He is able to reconstruct the order of the whole creation.

Chaos created the agony of the Cross. Wherever Christ came into the midst of disorder, He suffered. He, before whose vision there flamed perpetually the glory of the Divine ideal, felt the anguish of God in the presence of the degradation of that ideal. All wounds and weariness, all sin and sorrow, not only of man, but through man in creation, surged upon His heart in waves of anguish. He called His disciples into fellowship with Himself in this suffering. The suffering of the flowers can never be cured if we do not touch them. The agony of the birds can never be ended save as we care for them. The earth can never be lifted from its dulness and deadness, and made to blossom into glorious harvest, save as it is touched by the life of renewed humanity. That is the story of the sufferings of Christ. He came into the world, Himself of the eternal Order, full of grace and truth, and in the consciousness of chaos and disorder He suffered. 2 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]

The garden of a truly Christian man ought to be the most beautiful in the whole district. When it is not so, it is because he is not living in the full power of the risen Christ. I sometimes think that if I am to judge the Christianity of London by looking at its gardens, it is an extremely poor thing. Let us keep hold of the philosophy of the simple illustration. That conception of Christian responsibility which aims at the saving of individual men, while it is utterly careless of the groaning of creation, is entirely out of harmony with the meaning of this commission. The home of the Christian man ought to be a microcosm of the Millennial Kingdom; and all the things of God’s dear world—and how He loves it, flowers, and birds, and forces—ought to feel the touch of redeemed humanity, and be lifted into fuller life thereby. 1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]

There was a Power in this sweet place,

An Eve in this Eden; a ruling Grace

Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,

Was as God is to the starry scheme.

I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet

Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;

I doubt not they felt the spirit that came

From her glowing fingers through all their frame.

She lifted their heads with her tender hands,

And sustained them with rods and osier-bands;

If the flowers had been her own infants, she

Could never have nursed them more tenderly.

And all killing insects and gnawing worms,

And things of obscene and unlovely forms,

She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,

Into the rough woods far aloof,—

In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full,

The freshest her gentle hands could pull

For the poor banished insects, whose intent,

Although they did ill, was innocent. 2 [Note: Shelley, “The Sensitive Plant.”]

3. Man in the economy of God is king of the world, but he has lost his sceptre, has lost the key of the mysteries of the world in which he lives, and cannot govern it as he ought to govern, is unable to realise the creation that lies beneath him. Therefore the kingdom of man is a devastated kingdom, because he is a discrowned king; or in the language of Isaiah, “the earth also is polluted under the inhabitants thereof.” Man’s moral disease has permeated the material universe; or as St. Paul says, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now … waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.” Man’s moral regeneration will permeate the material universe, and issue in its remaking.

Turning to the Book of Psalms, that wonderful literature of Hebrew expectation and hope and confidence, we hear one of the singers of Israel as he first inquires—

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

And then, as in harmony with the original story of creation, he declares—

Thou hast put all things under his feet:

All sheep and oxen,

Yea, and the beasts of the field;

The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea,

Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

We pass to the New Testament, and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, a logician as well as a poet, declares, after quoting from the singer of Israel, that all the Divine intention is seen realised in Christ as representative Man. “Now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus.” He thus affirms that while all things are not yet seen under the perfect dominion of man, Jesus is seen, the risen Christ, and the vision of Him is the assurance that the whole creation will yet be redeemed from its groaning and travailing in pain, and realise the fulness of its beauty and glory.

Perfect I call Thy plan:

Thanks that I was a man!

Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do! 1 [Note: R. Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra.”]

Christ’s Commission to His Church

Literature

Bramston (J. T.), Fratribus, 200.

Brooks (Phillips), The Mystery of Iniquity, 346.

Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, 3rd Ser., 194.

Dawson (W. J.), The Evangelistic Note, 273.

Hodgson (A. P.), Thoughts for the King’s Children, 199.

Jefferson (C. E.), The Character of Jesus, 121.

Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., v. 451.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions, St. Mark ix.–xvi., 308.

Martin (S.), Rain upon the Mown Grass, 126.

Morgan (G. C.), The Missionary Manifesto, 1, 55.

Stuart (E. A.), Children of God, 45.

Williams (T. Lloyd), Thy Kingdom Come, 9.

Christian World Pulpit, lxiii. 346 (Banks); lxvii. 297 (Shepherd); lxxiii. 284 (Atkin).

Contemporary Pulpit, vii. 203 (Hardy).

Verse 19

The Crowned Saviour

So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken unto them, was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God.— Mark 16:19.

How strangely calm and brief is this record of so stupendous an event! Do these sparing and reverent words sound like the product of devout imagination, embellishing with legend the facts of history? Their very restrainedness, calmness, matter-of-factness, if we may so call it, is a strong guarantee that they are the utterance of an eye-witness, who verily saw what he tells so simply. There is something sublime in the contrast between the magnificence and almost inconceivable grandeur of the thing communicated, and the quiet words, so few, so sober, so wanting in all detail, in which it is told. That stupendous fact of Christ sitting at the right hand of God is the one which should fill the present for us all. Even as the Cross should fill the past, and the coming for Judgment should fill the future, so for us the one central thought about the present, in its loftiest relations, should be the throned Christ at God’s right hand. It is that thought of the session of Jesus by the side of the Majesty of the Heavens that brings out the profound teaching of the Ascension, and the practical lessons which it suggests.

The story of the Ascension of Jesus is given three times in the New Testament. It is given in the verse of the text (if the last eleven verses formed no part of the original Gospel by St. Mark, they still contain a very early testimony to the current belief of the primitive Church); it is given very briefly in the concluding verses of St. Luke’s Gospel; and it is given once again by St. Luke with more circumstantiality and detail in the opening chapter of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. All three accounts are marked by a certain reticence and reverent brevity. The sacred writer is content to mention the event in the simplest language and with a complete absence of detail.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that our belief in the Ascension rests upon such a slender foundation as a twofold mention by St. Luke (who was probably not a personal disciple of Christ, and therefore not an eye-witness) and an anonymous paragraph appended to the Gospel of St. Mark. The Ascension of Christ occupies an important place in the apostolic testimony. It is quite true it is not emphasised as is the fact of the Resurrection. But it is presupposed and taken for granted. The Resurrection, as the Apostles thought of it, involved the Ascension. The one, so to speak, was necessitated by the other. Christ to them was not risen simply, but also exalted and glorified.

The Ascension of Jesus occupies much the same place in the apostolic testimony as does the doctrine of the Incarnation. It cannot be said that the doctrine of the Incarnation is anywhere formally stated and logically proved. It is taken for granted. It is the background of all the apostolic thinking. The story of our Lord’s sinless life, His death and resurrection, seemed to the Apostles to involve the doctrine of the Incarnation, and so it is presupposed, it is treated as an axiom, and the references to it are incidental merely. And it is much the same with the Ascension. It is never formally stated and proved. It is taken for granted. It is regarded as axiomatic. It is a corollary of the Resurrection. Hence the references to it in the Epistles are casual and incidental only.

And yet no one can read the Epistles without seeing that the Ascension coloured all the Apostles’ thought of Jesus. When they speak of Him, they speak of Him as One who has passed out of the region of the seen and natural into the region of the unseen and the supernatural. They think of Him not as risen simply, but as ascended also. It was from heaven Christ appeared to Paul on the way to Damascus. Paul speaks of Christ as seated on the right hand of God. It is from heaven, according to Paul, that Christ will come to judge the quick and the dead. Peter speaks of Christ as having gone into heaven and being on the right hand of God, angels and authorities and powers being made subject to Him. John, when unveiling the splendours of the new Jerusalem, says that in the city, in the midst of it, he saw one like unto the Son of Man whose eyes were as a flame of fire and His voice as the voice of many waters, and His countenance as the sun shining in his strength, and He said, “I am the First and the Last and the Living One, and I was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.” The picture of Jesus which the Apostles give us is that of One who lived a sinless life, died an atoning death, rose on the third day, and who then ascended far above all the heavens that He might fill all things.

The text falls into three natural divisions:—

I. The Parting Words of Jesus—“After he had spoken unto them”

II. His Ascension—“He was received up into heaven”

III. His Session in Heaven—“He sat down at the right hand of God”

I

The Parting Words of Jesus

1. As the fact of Christ’s resurrection is so important we may expect to find it well established. It is so. He made many appearances. There are at least ten or eleven. There is one noteworthy fact about these manifestations. He appeared only to His friends.

To see Jesus you must be in sympathy with Jesus. The stained-glass window gives no sign of its beauty as you look at it from without. It is from within the building that you are able to enjoy the fulness and richness of the colour. It is not until you enter into the Christian temper that you can receive the Christian revelations. To the unspiritual, manifestations of the Spirit are but foolishness.

2. Now in the appearances of Jesus He spoke to His disciples. “After he had spoken unto them” He ascended. He might have appeared without speaking. He might have shown them His hands, His feet, His side, and so proved His identity; and He might have done this without uttering a syllable. He spoke to them. What did He say? He knew He was soon to depart unto the Father. If the “tongues of dying men enforce attention,” we may conclude that the words of the risen Christ must be of paramount importance. Let us listen to the great resurrection words.

(1) Mary!—“Now when he was risen he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils” ( Mark 16:9). She had been to the sepulchre and found it empty. She was sorrowfully departing when she met her Lord. “Supposing him to be the gardener, she saith unto him, Tell me where thou hast laid him and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary! She saith unto him, Rabboni.” The first resurrection word was a personal word; it was a woman’s name addressed to the woman herself.

What power Christ put into one word! The human voice is wonderfully musical. God has filled creation with music. The birds carol, the brooks murmur, the trees sing in the breeze. The ocean is always in tune. When the storm whips the billow into foam, or when the waves ripple idly on the sand, the voice of the ocean is always full of music. But nothing in creation can really rival the human voice. There are instruments of music which are pleasant to the ear; but for pathos, for power, for compass, for sweetness, the organ of human speech is above all.

(2) All hail!—This was the second word of the risen Lord. It was spoken to a company of sorrowing women. They had been to the sepulchre, carrying spices to embalm His body. There they had seen a vision of angels, and had been instructed by one of them to bear the intelligence of Christ’s resurrection to the disciples. While they were hastening to fulfil this commission, Jesus Himself met them, saying, “All hail!” Jesus always meets His people in the path of obedience. Now the Greek word for “All hail” means simply “Rejoice.” The second great resurrection word is a word of joy.

Rejoice because I live.—They thought Him dead. They had no expectation of His resurrection. They came to anoint a dead body and met a living Saviour. The cross had been the grave of their expectations. He whom they expected to reign had died a felon’s death. But now Jesus meets them. A living Lord bids them rejoice—rejoice that He is alive.

He lives, the friend of sinners lives,

What joy this blest assurance gives.

Rejoice because I show you what death is.—He was “first-born from the dead.” He was the “first-fruits” of the resurrection. His was the first real resurrection. We do not forget those raised by Elijah and Elisha, and the three whom Jesus Himself raised from the dead. But they were not instances of resurrection but of resuscitation. Each of them had to die again. Christ, raised from the dead, “dieth no more.” “He is alive for evermore.” By His resurrection “he brought life and immortality to light.”

Rejoice because I have triumphed.—“He was manifested to destroy the works of the devil.” One work of the devil was death. St. Paul tells us “Christ hath abolished death.” How did He accomplish this, but by His resurrection from the dead? He was not imprisoned for long. Like a mighty Samson He bore the gates away, and now the gates of death shall not prevail against us.

(3) Peace!—This is one of the most prominent of the resurrection words. It was spoken to the disciples in the upper room at Jerusalem. It was the very word they needed, for they were full of distress and fear. The peace He gave was a peace well based. He was Himself not only their source of peace, He was their peace.

Peace is always based on a feeling of safety. The boy who feels safe because he trusts the wisdom of his father, does not grow uneasy though the way be unknown and the night dark. He feels safe with his father and has peace. The old man who rides in his carriage has peace, because he trusts his coachman who has driven him for years. His sense of security gives him peace. The captain has no fear for his vessel though the fog is dense. The pilot who stands on the bridge has brought his boat to port so often that he can trust him and so has peace. It was so with the disciples. The knowledge that they were not alone, that He upon whose guidance they had depended was still with them, and was to be ever with them, this was the ground of their peace.

(4) Go!—“Go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me.” The meeting in Galilee was always thrown into prominence. Galilee is the appointed meeting-place for the great revelation Jesus gave of Himself. What shall the great word be for this occasion? He has spoken a personal word, a word of joy, a word of peace; now He gives the word of command. “Go!” “Then they went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them.… And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations.”

A living Christ means a going Church. And so we leave these four great resurrection words. Christ is risen! The risen Christ speaks! He speaks to call us, to cheer us, to comfort us, to command us. “After he had spoken to them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.” And now from the throne He speaks similar words to us. Let us listen to the living Christ. 1 [Note: W. L. Mackenzie.]

3. These treasured words, which may be called the “resurrection words,” remind us of the great truth which we are taught in this verse,—which means so much to us, that Jesus spoke to His disciples, before He left them. And on the day of His Ascension they would remember above all the promise which He gave them before His death: “If I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am ye may be also” ( John 14:3).

The world has not seen the last of Jesus Christ. Such an Ascension, after such a life, cannot be the end of Him. “As it is appointed unto men once to die, and after death the judgment, so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear the second time, without sin unto salvation.” As inevitably as for sinful human nature follows death, so inevitably for the sinless Man, who is the sacrifice for the world’s sins, will His judicial return follow His atoning work; He will come again, having received the Kingdom, to take account of His servants, and to perfect their possession of the salvation which by His Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, He wrought for the world. Therefore, one sweet face, and one great fact—the face of the Christ, the fact of the Cross—should fill the past. One sweet face, one great fact—the face of the Christ, the fact of His presence with us all the days—should fill the present. One regal face, one great hope, should fill the future; the face of the King that sitteth upon the throne, the hope that He will come again, and “so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

The Apostles were bidden by angels to turn their gaze from heaven to earth,—and wait. “And they returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” Yes, Jesus will come again, there is joy in that thought. He hath passed from us into that invisible world, and left an ever-widening circle on the surface of the deep, which extends ever more and more around where He has passed, till it hath filled all time and space, and hath come even to us, and taken us into its hallowed circumference. 1 [Note: Isaac Williams.]

But, Lord, to-morrow,

What of to-morrow, Lord?

Shall there be rest from toil, be truce from sorrow,

Be living green upon the sward,

Now but a barren grave to me,

Be joy for sorrow?—

“ Did I not die for thee?

Do I not live for thee?—leave Me to-morrow.” 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]

II

His Ascension

1. The Ascension was a natural sequence of the Incarnation and Resurrection.

The Ascension of Jesus of Nazareth was the final crisis in His great work. To omit it would be to omit that which is a necessary link between His resurrection from among the dead and reappearance amid His disciples, and the coming of God, the Holy Spirit, on the Day of Pentecost. It is not easy to follow Him as He passes out of human sight. This difficulty is recognised inferentially in the very brevity of the Gospel narrative. Very little is said, because little can be said which could be understood by those dwelling still within the limitations of the material, and having consciousness of the spiritual world only by faith. Still the positive fact is definitely stated; and, following closely the lines laid down, we may reverently attempt their projection beyond the veil of time and sense. It is almost pathetic that it is necessary to pause one moment to insist upon the actual historic fact of the ascension into the heavenly places of the Man of Nazareth. If the resurrection be denied, then of course there is no room for the ascension. If on the other hand it be established that Jesus of Nazareth did indeed rise from the dead, then it is equally certain that He ascended into heaven. No time need be taken in argument with such as believe in the authenticity of the New Testament story, and with those who question this, argument is useless. That there is an unconscious questioning of the fact of the ascension is evident from the way in which reference is sometimes made to the Lord Jesus. It is by no means uncommon to hear persons speak of what He did or said “in the days of His Incarnation.” Such a phrase, even when not used with such intention, does infer that the days of His Incarnation are over. This, however, is not so. Jesus, through whom, and through whom alone eventually, men as such will be found in the heavens, ascended in bodily form to those heavens, being Himself as to actual victory First-born from the dead. The stoop of God to human form was not for a period merely. That humiliation was a process in the pathway by which God would lift into eternal union with Himself all such as should be redeemed by the victory won through suffering. For evermore in the Person of the Man of Nazareth God is one with men. At this moment the Man of Nazareth, the Son of God, is at the right hand of the Father. Difficulties arising concerning these clear declarations as to the ascension of the Man of Nazareth must not be allowed to create disbelief in them. Any such process of discrediting what is hard to understand issues finally in the abandonment of the whole Christian position and history.

The Ascension of Christ ensues just as necessarily and naturally as the development of the flower when plant, stalk, leaf, and bud are already in existence. Look at the connection of His whole career, how He was sent down from His Father, in order, as God-man, to fulfil His work of mediation and redemption; how He, obeying, suffering, and dying, really did fulfil it, thus perfectly discharging the commission intrusted to Him; and then judge whether it may not be confidently expected that the holy, righteous Father in heaven would set His seal to the finished work of His only-begotten Son, not only by raising Him again from the dead, but by causing Him also to return in visible triumph to heaven, whence He had descended to us. One step in the life of Jesus demanded and required the next. Without the Ascension His life were a torso, a fragment, an inexplicable enigma. For where could the risen Saviour have remained if He had not returned to His Father? He must necessarily have tarried somewhere on earth in His glorified body; or, what is still more inconceivable and contradictory, have died a second time under circumstances that precluded any eye from witnessing it. But, finally, fix your attention upon that which, as being of paramount importance, imperatively challenges it, the authoritative seal of historical truth which He affixed Himself, in the presence of the whole world, upon the fact of His Ascension, by the outpouring, on the tenth day after His return to heaven, of the promised Holy Ghost. If anything be fitted to remove our last doubt, it is the day of Pentecost. 1 [Note: F. W. Krummacher.]

2. The Ascension was expedient for us.

When Christ left the earth He was not bereaving His people. He was depriving them of a lesser good in order to bestow upon them a richer and a nobler. We have that on His own plain and unequivocal assurance. On the night in which He was betrayed, when He was gathered with His disciples in the upper room, and when the shadow of the coming parting lay dark and heavy across His soul and theirs, He sought to cheer His fainting and broken-hearted followers by assuring them that it was for their good that He should leave them. “Nevertheless,” He said, “I tell you the truth, it is expedient for you that I go away.” Now our Lord spoke many a hard saying during the years of His earthly sojourn, but He spoke none harder to believe than that. Those disciples of His that night absolutely and utterly refused to believe it. Yes, Christ spoke that night to deaf ears and incredulous hearts. If He had said, “It is expedient for the angelic host,” who had missed the face of their blessed Lord for three and thirty years, they could have understood that. If he had said, “It is expedient for the saved and redeemed,” whose joy would be increased by their Redeemer’s presence, they could have understood that. If He had said, “It is expedient for Me to go away,” to leave the trials and tears and difficulties and struggles and poverty and pain of earth for the blessedness and glory of heaven, they could have understood that. But that it should be expedient for them to be deprived of their Lord, who had been their joy, their strength, their inspiration, their hope; expedient for them to be deprived of His presence, and to be left friendless and alone in the midst of foes, like sheep in the midst of wolves—no, they could not understand that. Their Lord’s words sounded to them like bitter irony. It was a hard saying, and they could not bear it. And yet we can see to-day, and these very disciples came themselves to see, that when Christ said, “It is expedient for you that I go away,” He spoke the literal truth. For wherein does that expediency consist? It consists in the universal presence of Christ. Christ went away from His disciples in order that—paradoxical as it may sound—He might come nearer to them. He left them in bodily presence, that spiritually He might be present with them everywhere and at all times.

There are times when we wish we had shared in the experience of the first disciples, and had been privileged to hear our Lord’s voice and see His face and feel His touch. The sentiment expressed in our children’s hymn is at one time and another the sentiment of all of us—

I think, when I read that sweet story of old,

When Jesus was here among men,

How He called little children as lambs to His fold,

I should like to have been with them then.

I wish that His hands had been placed on my head,

That His arms had been thrown around me,

And that I might have seen His kind look when He said,

“Let the little ones come unto Me.”

And yet, natural though the sentiment of that hymn is, it is false. Why this pensive longing, this wistful regret for the days of Christ’s earthly sojourn? Is it that Christ is beyond our reach and call and touch to-day? As a matter of fact He has come nearer to us by going away. 1 [Note: J. D. Jones.]

Lo, as some bard on isles of the Ægean,

Lovely and eager when the earth was young,

Burning to hurl his heart into a pæan,

Praise of the hero from whose loins he sprung;—

He, I suppose, with such a care to carry,

Wandered disconsolate and waited long,

Smiting his breast, wherein the notes would tarry,

Chiding the slumber of the seed of song:

Then in the sudden glory of a minute

Airy and excellent the proem came,

Rending his bosom, for a god was in it,

Waking the seed, for it had burst in flame.

So even I athirst for his inspiring,

I who have talked with him forget again;

Yes, many days with sobs and with desiring

Offer to God a patience and a pain;

Then thro’ the mid complaint of my confession,

Then thro’ the pang and passion of my prayer,

Leaps with a start the shock of His possession,

Thrills me and touches, and the Lord is there. 1 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.]

3. What is the practical bearing of the Ascension on our lives?

Our Lord’s Ascension leads us to think of Him and to follow Him in mind and heart. By His rising from the dead and ascending into heaven He gave us a model to follow no less than by His suffering and death. By His ascension our Lord would show us that although we are in the world we should not be of the world, that our minds and thoughts should be directed heavenward. There lie the vast possibilities, the unthinkable future, for human nature. “To him that over cometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.” Union and communion with God. This is the beginning, the middle, the end of our religion. For this is the purpose of God for each soul in the day when He creates it.

Let us meditate how Christ has gone before us into the glory of His heavenly Father. Therefore, if we desire to follow Him, we must mark the way which He has shown us, and trodden for three and thirty years, in misery, in poverty, in shame, and in bitterness, even unto death. So likewise, to this day, must we follow in the same path, if we would fain enter with Him into the Kingdom of Heaven. For though all our masters were dead, and all our books burned, yet we should ever find instruction enough in His holy life. For He Himself is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and by no other way can we truly and undeviatingly advance towards the same consummation, than in that which He hath walked while He was yet upon earth. Now, as the loadstone draws the iron after itself, so doth Christ draw all hearts after Himself which have once been touched by Him; and as when the iron is impregnated with the energy of the loadstone that has touched it, it follows the stone uphill although that is contrary to its nature, and cannot rest in its own proper place, but strives to rise above itself on high; so all the souls which have been touched by this loadstone, Christ, can be chained down neither by joy nor by grief, but are ever rising up to God out of themselves. They forget their own nature, and follow after the touch of God, and follow it the more easily and directly, the more noble is their nature than that of other men, and the more they are touched by God’s image. 1 [Note: Tauler’s Life and Sermons, 335.]

Since Eden, it keeps the secret!

Not a flower beside it knows

To distil from the day the fragrance

And beauty that flood the Rose.

Silently speeds the secret

From the loving eye of the sun

To the willing heart of the flower:

The life of the twain is one.

Folded within my being,

A wonder to me is taught,

Too deep for curious seeing

Or fathom of sounding thought,

Of all sweet mysteries holiest!

Faded are rose and sun!

The Highest hides in the lowliest;

My Father and I are one. 2 [Note: Charles Gordon Ames.]

III

His Session at God’s Right Hand

1. In that solemn and wondrous fact of Christ’s sitting at the right hand of God we see the exalted Man. We are taught to believe, according to His own words, that in His ascension Christ was but returning whence He came, and entering into the “glory which he had with the Father before the world was.” And that impression of a return to His native and proper abode is strongly conveyed to us by the narrative of His ascension. Contrast it, for instance, with the narrative of Elijah’s rapture, or with the brief reference to Enoch’s translation. The one was taken by God up into a region and a state which he had not formerly traversed; the other was borne by a fiery chariot to the heavens; but Christ slowly sailed upwards, as it were, by His own inherent power, returning to His abode, and ascending up where He was before.

But whilst this is one side of the profound fact, there is another side. What was new in Christ’s return to His Father’s bosom? This, that he took His manhood with Him. It was “the Everlasting Son of the Father,” the Eternal Word, which from the beginning “was with God and was God,” that came down from heaven to earth, to declare the Father; but it was the Incarnate Word, the Man Christ Jesus, that went back again. This most blessed and wonderful truth is taught with emphasis in His own words before the Council, “Ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power.” Christ, then, to-day, bears a human body, not indeed the “body of his humiliation,” but the body of His glory, which is none the less a true corporeal frame, and necessarily requires a locality. His ascension, whithersoever He may have gone, was the true carrying of a real humanity, complete in all its parts, Body, Soul, and Spirit, up to the very throne of God. Where that locality is it is useless to speculate. St. Paul says that He ascended up “far above all heavens”; or, as the Epistle to the Hebrews has it, in the proper translation, the High Priest “is passed through the heavens,” as if all this visible material creation was rent asunder in order that He might soar yet higher beyond its limits wherein reign mutation and decay. But wheresoever that place may be, there is a place in which now, with a human body as well as a human spirit, Jesus is sitting “at the right hand of God.” In the profound language of Scripture, “The Forerunner is for us entered.” In some mysterious manner, of which we can but dimly conceive, that entrance of Jesus in His complete humanity into the highest heavens is the preparation of a place for us. It seems as if, without His presence there, there were no entrance for human nature within that state, and no power in a human foot to tread upon the crystal pavements of the Celestial City. But where He is, there the path is permeable, and the place native, to all who love and trust Him.

The exalted Man, sitting at the right hand of God, is the Pattern of what is possible for humanity, and the prophecy and pledge of what will be actual for all that love Him and bear the image of Him upon earth, that they may be conformed to the image of His glory, and be with Him where He is. What firmness, what reality, what solidity this thought of the exalted bodily Christ gives to the else dim and vague conceptions of a Heaven beyond the stars and beyond our present experience! I believe that no doctrine of a future life has strength and substance enough to survive the agonies of our hearts when we part from our dear ones—the fears of our spirits when we look into the unknown inane future for ourselves—except only this which says Heaven is Christ and Christ is Heaven, and points to Him and says, “Where he is, there also shall his servants be.” 1 [Note: 1 A. Maclaren.]

We know not when, we know not where,

We know not what that world will be;

But this we know—it will be fair

To see.

With hearts athirst and thirsty face,

We know and know not what shall be:

Christ Jesus bring us of His grace

To see.

Christ Jesus bring us of His grace,

Beyond all prayers our hope can pray,

One day to see Him face to Face,

One day. 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]

2. The Ascension of our blessed Lord involves the glorification of the whole human race. In His Incarnation Christ identified Himself once for all with human-kind. He bound us in a close and vital relationship to Himself. He became bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh. He shared our lot and made us partakers of His destiny. The highest interests of humanity became embodied in Him. If the powers of evil could prevail over Him, then they might soon enslave the whole human race. If He should overcome death, and pass through the grave and the gate of death to a joyful resurrection, He would thus open to all mankind the gate of everlasting life. If God should exalt Him with great triumph unto His Kingdom in heaven, He would by that same act exalt all His faithful followers to the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before.

Thou hast raised our human nature

On the clouds to God’s right hand;

There we sit in heavenly places,

There with Thee in glory stand.

Jesus reigns, adored by angels;

Man with God is on the throne;

Mighty Lord, in Thine Ascension

We by faith behold our own. 1 [Note: Chr. Wordsworth.]

3. Christ’s sitting at the right hand of God presents to our view a Saviour at Rest. That session expresses the idea of absolute repose after sore conflict. It is the same thought that is expressed in those solemn Egyptian colossal statues of deified conquerors, elevated to mysterious union with their gods, and yet men still. Sitting before their temples in perfect stillness, with their mighty hands lying quiet on their restful limbs; with calm faces out of which toil and passion and change seem to have melted, they gaze out with open eyes as over a silent, prostrate world. So, with the Cross behind, with all the agony and weariness of the arena, the dust and the blood of the struggle left beneath, Christ “sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” He rests after His Cross, not because He needed repose even after that terrible effort, but in token that His work was finished and perfected, that all which He had come to do was done; and in token that the Father, too, beheld and accepted His finished work. Therefore, the session of Christ at the right hand of God is the proclamation from Heaven of what He cried with His last dying breath upon the Cross: “It is finished!” It is the declaration that the world has had all done for it that Heaven can do for it. It is the declaration that all which is needed for the regeneration of humanity has been lodged in the very heart of the race, and that henceforward all that is required is the evolving and the development of the consequences of that perfect work which Christ offered upon the Cross. So the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews contrasts the priests who stood “daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices” which “can never take away sin,” with “this Man who, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down at the right hand of God”; testifying thereby that His Cross is the complete, sufficient, perpetual atonement and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.

It would seem as though one could hear the antiphonal singing of the heavenly choirs, as this perfect One passes into heaven.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates;

And be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors:

And the King of glory shall come in,

is the exulting challenge of the angels escorting Him. To this comes back the question, inspired by the passion to hear again the story of the victory,

Who is the King of glory?

And yet gathering new music and new meaning the surging anthem rolls,

Jehovah strong and mighty,

Jehovah mighty in battle …

He is the King of glory.

Thus the song is also of One who was mighty in battle. Looking upon Him, the glorified One, and listening to His words, the wonder grows. For in that Form, all filled with exquisite beauty, are yet the signs of suffering and of pain. The marks of wounding are in hands, and feet, and side, and His presence declares in His own words, “I am … the Living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore.” 1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]

Chains of my heart, avaunt I say—

I will arise, and in the strength of love

Pursue the bright track ere it fade away,

My Saviour’s pathway to His home above.

Sure, when I reach the point where earth

Melts into nothing from th’ uncumbered sight,

Heaven will o’ercome th’ attraction of my birth,

And I will sink in yonder sea of light:

Till resting by th’ incarnate Lord,

Once bleeding, now triumphant for my sake,

I mark Him, how by Seraph hosts adored

He to earth’s lowest cares is still awake.

The sun and every vassal star,

All space, beyond the soar of Angel wings,

Wait on His word; and yet He stays His car

For every sigh a contrite suppliant brings.

He listens to the silent tear

’Mid all the anthems of the boundless sky—

And shall our dreams of music bar our ear

To His soul-piercing voice for ever nigh?

Nay, gracious Saviour,—but as now

Our thoughts have traced Thee to Thy glory-throne,

So help us evermore with Thee to bow

Where human sorrow breathes her lowly moan. 1 [Note: J. Keble, The Christian Year, Ascension Day.]

4. The Session involves Intercession.—In the Epistle to the Hebrews is constantly reiterated the thought that we have a Priest who has “passed into the heavens,” there to “appear in the presence of God for us.” And St. Paul says, “It is Christ Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” ( Romans 8:34). There are deep mysteries connected with the thought of the intercession of Christ. It does not mean that the Divine Heart needs to be won to love and pity. It does not mean that in any mere outward and formal fashion Christ pleads with God, and softens and placates the Infinite and Eternal love of the Father in the heavens. It, at least, plainly means this, that He, our Saviour and Sacrifice, is for ever in the presence of God, presenting His own blood as an element in the Divine dealing with us, modifying the incidence of the Divine law, and securing through His own merits and intercession the outflow of blessings upon our heads and hearts. It is not a complete statement of Christ’s work for us that He died for us; He died that He might have somewhat to offer. He lives that He may be our Advocate as well as our propitiation with the Father. The High Priest once a year passed within the curtain, and there in the solemn silence and solitude of the Holy Place, not without trembling, sprinkled the blood that he bore thither; and but for a moment was he permitted to stay in the awful Presence. So, but in reality and for ever, with the joyful gladness of a Son in His “own calm home, His habitation from eternity,” Christ abides in the Holy Place; and, at the right hand of the Majesty of the Heavens, lifts up that prayer, so strangely compact of authority and submission: “Father, I will that those whom thou hast given me be with me where I am.” The Son of Man at the right hand of God is our Intercessor with the Father. “Seeing, then, that we have a great High Priest that is passed through the heavens, let us come boldly to the Throne of Grace.”

Not as one blind and deaf to our beseeching,

Neither forgetful that we are but dust,

Not as from heavens too high for our upreaching,

Coldly sublime, intolerably just:—

Nay but Thou knewest us, Lord Christ Thou knowest,

Well Thou rememberest our feeble frame,

Thou canst conceive our highest and our lowest

Pulses of nobleness and aches of shame.

Therefore have pity!—not that we accuse Thee,

Curse Thee and die and charge Thee with our woe:

Not thro’ Thy fault, O Holy One, we lose Thee,

Nay, but our own,—yet hast Thou made us so!

Then tho’ our foul and limitless transgression

Grows with our growing, with our breath began,

Raise Thou the arms of endless intercession,

Jesus, divinest when Thou most art man! 1 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.]

5. Lastly, the Ascension sets before us the ever-active Helper. The “right hand of God” is the Omnipotent energy of God; and however certainly the language of Scripture requires for its full interpretation that we should firmly hold that Christ’s glorified body dwells in a place, we are not to omit the other thought that to sit at the right hand also means to wield the immortal energy of that Divine nature over all the field of the Creation, and in every province of His dominion. So that the ascended Christ is the ubiquitous Christ; and He who is “at the right hand of God” is wherever the power of God reaches-throughout His whole Universe.

We remember that it was once given to a man to look through the opened heavens (through which Christ had “passed”) and to “see the Son of Man standing”—not sitting—“at the right hand of God.” Why to the dying protomartyr was there granted that vision thus varied? Wherefore was the attitude changed but to express the swiftness, the certainty of His help, and the eager readiness of the Lord, who starts to His feet, as it were, to succour and to sustain His dying servant? And so we may take that great joyful truth that, both as receiving “gifts for men” and bestowing gifts upon them, and as working by His providence in the world, and on the wider scale for the well-being of His children and of the Church, the Christ who sits at the right hand of God wields, ever with eager cheerfulness, all the powers of omnipotence for our well-being, if we love and trust Him. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

And didst Thou love the race that loved not Thee,

And didst Thou take to Heaven a human brow?

Dost plead with man’s voice by the marvellous sea?

Art Thou his kinsman now?

O God, O Kinsman, loved, but not enough!

O man, with eyes majestic after death,

Whose feet have toiled along our pathways rough,

Whose lips drawn human breath!

By that one likeness which is ours and Thine,

By that one nature which doth hold us kin,

By that high heaven where sinless Thou dost shine,

To draw us sinners in,

By Thy last silence in the judgment-hall,

By long foreknowledge of the deadly tree,

By darkness, by the wormwood and the gall,

I pray Thee visit me.

Come, lest this heart should, cold and cast away,

Die ere the guest adored she entertain—

Lest eyes which never saw Thine earthly day

Should miss Thy heavenly reign. 2 [Note: Jean Ingelow.]

The Crowned Saviour

Literature

Aitchison (J.), The Children’s Own, 157.

Arnold (T.), Sermons: Christian Life and Doctrine, 54.

Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, 616.

Chadwick (G. A.), The Gospel of St. Mark, 442.

Gregory (J. Robinson), Scripture Truths made Simple, 113.

Jones (J. D.), The Gospel of Grace, 134.

Krummacher (F. W.), The Risen Redeemer, 212.

Mackenzie (W. Lomax), Pure Religion, 28.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions of Holy Scripture, St. Mark, ix.–xvi., 312.

Morgan (G. Campbell), The Crises of the Christ, 347.

Winkworth (S.), Tauler’s Life and Sermons, 334.

The Churchman’s Pulpit, pt. 17, Ascension Day.

The Church Pulpit Year-Book, 1908, 111.

Five Minute Sermons. Paulist, New Series, i. 264.

Sermons on the Gospels, Advent to Trinity, 259.