Thus the Cross of Jesus Christ is the crowning revelation of man, as well as of God. There, side by side with humanity marred and wrecked and spoilt by sin, which is selfishness, we see man as God made him, as God meant him to be, clothed with the Divine beauty and glory of self-sacrifice.
In the Cross we see ourselves, our true selves, not as we have made ourselves, but our real and genuine selves, as we exist in the Mind of God.
In the light of that wonderful revelation, we can recognise that which is Divine and Christ-like in us, that spirit which bids us seek not the things of self, but the things of others, “even as Christ pleased not Himself.”
All this may be summed up in one short phrase, which goes near, I believe, to express the innermost reality of the Christian religion. Christ, the Son of man, is the true self of every man. To follow Him, to be His disciple, in thought, and word, and deed, is to be oneself, to realise one’s own personality. In no other way can I attain to be myself.
Thus the Cross is the supreme revelation of the Divine Life in man. And now we shall go on to see how it brings to us, not merely the knowledge ofthe Ideal, but also, what is far more, the very means whereby the Ideal may be realised in and by each one of us.
We have dealt with the Cross as illumination; we now approach its consideration as redemptive power.
“God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” 2Cor.v.19.
“God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” 2Cor.v.19.
Such considerations as we have had before us, are of far more than theoretical interest. They are of all questions the most practical. Sin is not a curious object which we examine from an aloof and external standpoint. However we regard it, to whatever view of its nature we are led, it is, alas, a fact within and not merely outside our experience.
And so we are at length brought to this most personal and most urgent inquiry, What has been the resultto meof my past acts of sin? I have sinned; what have been, what are, what will be the consequences?
The most hopelessly unintelligent answer is, that there are no results, no consequences. It behoves us to remember that we can never sin with impunity. This is true, even in the apparent absence of all punishment. Every act of sin is followed by two results, though probably a profounder analysis would show them to be in reality one.
(i) Whenever I sin I inflict a definite injury on myself, varying with the sinfulness of the sin; that is, with its nature and the degree of deliberation it involved. I am become a worse man; I have, in some degree, rejected and done to death the Divine in me, my true self. Every sin, in its own proper measure, is both a rejection of the Christ within, and also an act of spiritual suicide.
Again (ii), each sin, once more according to the degree of its guilt, involves separation from God. And, as union with God is life, it follows that sin is, and not merely brings death. That is the death of which the outward, physical death is the mere symbol. It is death of that which makes me man—the weakening of my will, the dulling of my conscience, the loss of spiritual vision. Hereafter, it may be, all this will be recognised by me as being death indeed, when I see how much I have missed, by my own fault, of the life and happiness which might have been mine in virtue of that unbroken communion with God, for which I was made.
These two results may be regarded as the penalties of sinning; more truly, they are aspects of sin itself. We can hardly be reminded too often that the worst punishment of sin is sin itself. The external results of sin, where such occur, are not evil, but good; for the object for which they are sent is the cure of sin. “To me no harder hell was shown than sin.” If hell is this separation from God, this veritable and onlyreal death, then hell is not an external penalty inflicted upon sin, but is involved in the very nature of sin itself. Or, it would be still more accurate to say, the constitution of the universe (including ourselves) being what it is, and the nature of sin being what it is, these results necessarily follow.
Now, the universe is not something which God has created and then, as it were, flung off from Himself, standing for ever outside it, as it is for ever outside Him. The universe, at each moment of its existence, is the expression, in time and space, of the Divine Mind. What we call its “laws,” whether in the physical or the spiritual sphere, are the thoughts of the Mind of God: its “forces” are the operations of the Will of God, acting in accordance with His thoughts: material “things” are His thoughts embodied, that is, Divine thoughts rendered, by an act of the Divine Will, accessible to our senses.
Now we are in a position to understand both what is meant by the Wrath of God, and the manner in which it acts.
By the expression, “the Wrath of God,” we are to understand the hostility of the Divine Mind to moral evil: the eternal antagonism of the Divine righteousness to its opposite. We are not now dealing with the question of the real or substantive existence of evil. But revelation amply confirms and enforces the conviction of our moral consciousness that, with a hatred beyond all human measures of hatred, Godhates sin. It is hardly necessary to add, that that eternal and immeasurable hatred and hostility of the Divine Mind towards sin is compatible with infinite love towards His children, in whose minds and lives sin is elaborated and manifested. In fact, all attempts to reconcile the Wrath of God with His love seem to be utterly beside the mark. They only serve to obscure the truth that the Divine Wrath is itself a manifestation of the Divine Love. For if sin is, as we have already seen, in its very essence, selfishness, and if Love is the very Being of God—if He is not merely loving, but Love itself—then the Wrath of God, His hostility to sin, is His Love viewed in one particular aspect, in its outlook on moral evil, in its relation to that which is its very opposite and antithesis. Hell and Heaven, separation from God and union with Him, are alike expressions of the Eternal Love, which, because it is love, burns with unquenchable fire against all forms of selfishness and lovelessness.
This is the true, the ultimate reason why, in a universe which is the expression of the Mind of God, we cannot sin, and never have sinned, with impunity.
From these two fundamental truths—
(a) The universe is the expression of the Mind of God;
(b) God is love,
There follow, by a natural and inevitable law, the two results which accompany every act of sin.
(a) The destruction of the true self, the Christ, the Divine Life within man.
(b) Separation from God, which is death. We separate these results in thought; but it will now be sufficiently obvious that they are, in fact, one.
Is this taking too serious a view of sin? I do not think that this can be maintained in view of our whole preceding argument.
But are we taking too serious a view of little sins, of sins which spring from ignorance, of the sins of children?
We have already seen that knowledge and freedom are both necessary to constitute an act of sin. If ignorance is complete, then complete also is the absence of sin. For sin lies not in any material act, but in consciousness and will. The will alone can be sinful, as the will alone can be good. And it is entirely consistent with our standpoint, to admit the existence of an almost infinite number of degrees of sinfulness.
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Now we reach this immensely important result. We having sinned, our supreme need is forgiveness. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel for this precise reason, that it meets, as it claimed from the beginning to meet, this uttermost need of men. Its offer is, always and everywhere, the forgiveness, the remission of sins.
But what are we to understand by forgiveness?The forgiveness which is offered to us in the name of Jesus Christ is not, and our own moral sense ought to assure us that it could not be, the being let off punishment. “Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins,” not from any external pains or penalties of their sins. To be saved from sin, is to have sin brought to an end, abolished within us. It is the recovery of the true self, the restoration of that union with God which is, here and now, eternal life. In other words, understanding the Divine Wrath as we have seen reason to understand it, forgiveness must mean to cease to be, or to cease to identify ourselves with, that in us which is the object of the Divine Wrath. In short, forgiveness is, in the great phrase of St. Paul, reconciliation with God.
How, then, is forgiveness or reconciliation to be obtained? The answer which the apostle gives is this: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” Let us try to see what this means.
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There can only be one way of ceasing to be the object of the Divine Wrath, and that is by identifying oneself with it; if we may use the catch-phrase, by becoming its subject instead of its object. This means that, so far as is in our power, we must enter into the Divine Mind in regard to sin, and our own sins in particular. Up to the limit of our power, we must make that Mind our ownmind, we must hate sin, and our sins, as God hates them.
There is one word in the New Testament which expresses all this, and that is the word only partially and inadequately translated “repentance.” The word thus represented is μετανοια, and μετανοια is exactly “a change of mind.” It really means the coming over to God’s side, the entire revolution of our mental attitude and outlook with regard to sin. The word stands for self-identification with the Wrath of God, with the Divine Mind in its outlook upon sin. That change of mind is itself reconciliation, forgiveness, remission of sins. And that which alone makes μετανοια and, therefore, forgiveness, possible, is the Death of Jesus Christ upon the Cross.
For that Death is the perfect revelation, in the only way in which it could be interpreted to us, that is, in terms of our common human life, of the Wrath of God, the Divine hostility to, and repudiation of sin. For the Death of Christ was the complete repudiation of sin, by God Himself, in our manhood. The Incarnate Son laid down His life in the perfect fulfilment of the mission received from the Father. “He became obedient unto death.” He died, rather than, by the slightest concession to that which was opposed to the Divine Will, be unfaithful or disobedient to that mission. “He died to sin once for all.” His Death was His final, complete repudiation of sin. And thus it was the absolutelyperfect revelation of the Divine Mind in regard to sin.
This is the truth which underlies all the utterly misleading language about Christ’s Death as a penalty, or about Christ Himself as the Ideal Penitent. Both penalty and penitence imply personal guilt and the personal consciousness of guilt. Both conceptions destroy the significance of the Cross. Only the Sinless One could die to sin, could perfectly repudiate sin, could perfectly disclose the Mind of God in relation to sin.
The Death of Christ was indeed, as we have seen, the result of His perfect obedience in a world of sin, of disobedience. The historical conditions under which He fulfilled His Mission, necessitated that His repudiation of sin should take the form which it did actually take. We may be sure, too, that He felt, as only the Sinless Son of God could feel, the injury, the affront, the malignity, the degradation of sin. It is the sense of this which has given rise to the modern idea of Christ as the Penitent for the world’s sin. But if we are to understand the word in this sense, then we are entirely changing its meaning and connotation. And we cannot do this, in regard to words like penitent and penitence, without producing confusion of thought. It is time, surely, that this misleading and mischievous fallacy of the penitence of Christ should be finally abandoned by writers on the Atonement.
But, so far, we have only seen that the Death of Christ to sin, His repudiation of sin to the point of death, is the complete revelation of the Divine Wrath, the Divine Mind in regard to sin. If we could only make all this our own, then we should have actually attained to the changed mind, the μετανοια, which is reconciliation with God.
Now, it is a most significant fact that, in the New Testament, repentance is ever closely coupled with faith. Faith, in its highest, its most Christian application, is not faithinChrist, in the sense of believing that the revelation made by Christ is true, but in the strange and pregnant phrase of St. Paul and St. John, faithintoChrist. And by this is meant entire self-abandonment, the utter giving up of ourselves to Christ. To have faith into Christ is the perfect expression of discipleship. It is the supreme act of self-surrender by which a man takes Christ henceforth to be the Lord and Master of his life. It implies, no doubt, the existence of certain intellectual convictions; but the faith which rests there is, as St. James tells us, the faith of the demons “who also tremble.” In the full sense, faith is an act of the whole personal being. And as the will is our personality in action, we may say that faith into Christ is, above all, an affair of the will.
But thus to surrender oneself to Christ, to make Him, and not self, the centre and governing principle of our life is, in other words, to make His Will ourwill, His Mind our mind. St. Paul is exactly describing the full fruition and final issue of faith when he says of himself, “I live, yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.”
Faithisself-identification with the Mind of Christ. And that Mind is the Mind of Him Who died to sin, Who by dying repudiated sin, and revealed His implacable hatred of and hostility to it, which is the hatred and hostility of God, in our manhood, to the moral evil which destroys it.
Thus the man, who, by the supreme act of faith into Christ, has made Christ’s Mind his own mind, has thereby gained the changed mind, the μετανοια, in regard to sin, which is the ceasing to be the object of God’s wrath, because it is the being identified with it. He is, henceforth, reconciled to God. The state of alienation and death is over. In Christ he, too, has died to sin. The false self, in him, has been put to death. With Christ he has been crucified. With Christ he lives henceforth to God, in that union and fellowship with Him, which is the life eternal, the life which is life indeed. His true self, the Christ in him, is alive for evermore in the power of the Resurrection.
That is the final issue, the glorious consummation, of faith. But so far as faith is in us at all, so far as daily with more complete surrender we give ourselves to Christ, and take Him for our Lord and Master, the process, of which the fulfilment, the perfect end, isreconciliation, union, resurrection, eternal life, has begun in us. And He Who has, visibly and manifestly, “begun in us” that “good work,” will assuredly “accomplish it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
But something more yet remains to be said. Every theory of the Atonement in the end must come to grief, which is based upon the assumption that Christ is separate from the race which He came to redeem, or the Church, which is the part of humanity in actual process of redemption. Professor Inge, in his work onMysticism and Personal Idealism, has justly denounced the miserable theory which regards human personalities as so many impervious atoms, as self-contained and isolated units. This popular view is theologically disastrous when the Atonement is interpreted in the light, or rather the darkness of it.
As the Son of man He is the Head of the human race, “the last Adam” in the language of St. Paul. No mere sovereignty over mankind is denoted by that title. He is that living, personal Thought of God which each man, as man, embodies and, with more or less distortion, represents. He Who became Incarnate is, as He ever was, the Light which lighteneth every man coming into the world.
It was because of this, His vital and organic connexion with the race, and with every member of it, that He could become Incarnate, and that His sufferings and triumph could have more than a pictorial,or representative, or vicarious efficacy. His work of redemption was rendered possible by His relation, as the Word, to the whole universe, and to mankind.
It was because of this, that He could become “the Head of the Body, the Church.” Former ages interpreted the Atonement in the terms of Roman law. It is the mission of our age to learn to interpret it in terms of biology. We are only just beginning, by the aid of modern thought, to discover the true, profound meaning of the biological language of the New Testament. “As the body is one, and has many members, so also is the Christ.” Not, let us mark, the Head only, but the Body. The Church is “the fulness of Him Who at all points, in all men, is being fulfilled.” The words tell us of an organic growth. “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” Can any terms express organic connexion more clearly than these?
It is our Head, to Whom we are bound by vital ties, in the mysterious unity of a common life, Who has repudiated sin by dying to it. By personal surrender to Christ we make His Mind our own; but we are enabled to do so, because, in so doing, we are attaining to our own true mind, we are entering into the possession of our own true selves, we are “winning our souls,” realising the Christ-nature within us. By faith and sacraments, that which is potentially ours becomes our own in actual fact.
In simpler language, and in more familiar but notless true words, we who are members of Christ’s Body, in all our weak attempts after repentance and faith, are not left to our own unaided resources, but are at every point aided and enabled to advance to final, complete reconciliation and union by the Spirit of the Christ working in us.
He is no merely external reconciler. He reconciles us from within, working along with our own wills, to create that changed mind which is His own Mind revealed upon the Cross for no other reason than that it might become our mind, the most real and fundamental thing in us, that “new man, which is being renewed after the image of Him Who created him.”
“Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”—Matt.v.48.“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver from the body of this death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”—Rom.vii.24, 25.
“Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”—Matt.v.48.
“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver from the body of this death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”—Rom.vii.24, 25.
We have studied the meaning of reconciliation through the Cross. We have said that to be reconciled to God means to cease to be the object of the Wrath of God, that is, His hostility to sin. We can only cease to be the objects of this Divine Wrath by identifying ourselves with it, by making God’s Mind in regard to sin, and our sins, our own mind. The Cross gives us power to do this. For it reveals to us in the terms of humanity, that is, in the only way in which it could be made intelligible to us, the Divine Mind in its relation to sin. By faith, which is personal surrender to Christ, His mind thus revealed becomes our mind. Thus we attain to “repentance,” in the New Testament sense of the changed mind and outlook upon sin. And the motive power to faith and repentance is supplied by our union with Christ.
But all this is not yet enough. We have not exhaustedthe glory, the full meaning of the Cross. If this were indeed all, the work of our salvation would be incomplete. For I may indeed have, in Christ, died to sin; in Him I may have repudiated it; but the task of life still lies before me to be fulfilled, and that task is nothing short of this: the complete putting off of sin, the complete putting on of holiness, the final achievement of that union with God which is life eternal.
For this I was made. “Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Our Lord is not, in these words, enunciating a rule of perfection for a few saintly souls. He is laying down the law, the standard of all human lives. To fall short of this, is to fall short of what it means to be a man.
The proof that this is so, is to be found in our own consciousness, bearing its witness to these words of Jesus Christ. The one most constant feature in human life is its restlessness, the feeling of dissatisfaction which broods over its best achievements, the attainment of all its desires. That very restlessness and dissatisfaction is the witness to the dignity of our nature, the grandeur of our destiny. We were made for God, for the attainment of eternal life through union with Him. No being who was merely finite, could be conscious of its finitude.
Spite of yourselves ye witness this,Who blindly self or sense adore.Else, wherefore, leaving your true bliss,Still restless, ask ye more?
Spite of yourselves ye witness this,Who blindly self or sense adore.Else, wherefore, leaving your true bliss,Still restless, ask ye more?
“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart knoweth no rest, till it find rest in Thee.”
Then look at the other picture. Side by side with the glory of our calling, place the shame and the misery of what we are. My desires, my passions are ever at war with the true self, and too often overcome it. “I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin and death which is in my members.” And so there goes up the bitter cry, “Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”
Now the Cross of Jesus Christ is the Divine answer to this great and exceeding bitter cry of our suffering, struggling, sinful humanity. For the Cross is not merely an altar, but a battlefield, by far the greatest battlefield in all human history. That was the crisis of the conflict between good and evil which gives endless interest to the most insignificant human life, which is the source of the pathos and the tragedy, the degradation and the glory, of the long history of our race. It is the human struggle which we watch upon the Cross: the human victory there won which we acclaim with endless joy and exultation. Man faced the fiercest assault of the foe, and man conquered.
O loving wisdom of our God!When all was sin and shame,A second Adam to the fightAnd to the rescue came.O wisest love! that flesh and blood,Which did in Adam fail,Should strive afresh against the foe,Should strive, and should prevail.
O loving wisdom of our God!When all was sin and shame,A second Adam to the fightAnd to the rescue came.
O wisest love! that flesh and blood,Which did in Adam fail,Should strive afresh against the foe,Should strive, and should prevail.
Man conquered man’s foe, and in the only way in which that foe could be conquered, the way of obedience. “He became obedient unto death.” The Death was in a real sense the victory, for its only meaning and value consisted in its being the crown and culmination of His life-long obedience. The Resurrection itself, in one aspect of it, was but the symbol, the “sign,” of that victory which was already achieved upon the Cross.
But what has this to do with us? It cannot be too often repeated, that it has nothing to do with us, if Christ be merely “Another,” separate from us as we are, or imagine ourselves to be, separate from each other. That which He took of the Virgin Mary, and took in the only way in which it could have been taken, by the Virgin Birth, was not a separate human individuality, but human nature; that nature which we all share. It was in that nature that He faced and overcame our enemy.
Here we pause to note a difficulty based on a misunderstanding. If Christ were a Divine Person, working in and through human nature, if that humanity which He assumed were itself impersonal, then how could He have had a human will? And, after all, is an impersonal human nature really human? That is the difficulty, and the very factthat we feel it as a difficulty, is a proof that we have not yet grasped that conception of the Divine Nature which underlies the belief in the Incarnation. God and man are not beings of a different order. The humanity of every man is the indwelling in him of the Word Who became flesh. Each one of us is a shadow, a reflection of the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ God came; and, it would be equally true to say, in Him first, man came. All human nature, I believe it would be true to say all organic nature, pointed forward to the Incarnation as its fulfilment, as the justification for its existence.
Thus, when it is said that the human nature of Christ was impersonal, what is meant is, impersonal in the modern and restricted sense of personality. The phrase is useful, when explained, to guard against the idea, which is contrary to the very principle of the Atonement, that the Son of man was just one more human soul added to the myriads of human souls who have appeared on this planet. He Who became Incarnate is the true self of every man, the very Light of true personality in all men. As a matter of fact, He was more truly humanly Personal than any of the sons of men, and all the more truly humanly Personal, because He was Divinely Personal, the Word in the image of Whom man was made.
The immense significance of these truths in regard to our redemption is this, that a separate individualitycannot be imparted to us, but a common nature can. And that nature which the Eternal Word assumed of the Virgin Mary, and in which He conquered sin and death, is communicated to us by His Spirit, above all, in the sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion. Here is the heart of the Atonement.
That victory over sin and death is mine, and yet not mine. That is the splendid paradox which lies at the very root of Christianity. It is mine, because I share in that Human Nature, which by its perfect obedience, the obedience unto death, “triumphed gloriously” upon the Cross. It is not mine until, by a deliberate act of my will, in self-surrender to Christ, I have made it my own. By grace and by faith, not by one of these without the other, we become one with Him Who died and rose again. It is faith, the hand of the soul stretched out to receive, which accepts and welcomes grace, the Hand of God stretched out to give.
These great thoughts we will pursue in our next address. But meanwhile, we have at least seen that the Cross is both victory and attainment: victory over the sin by which I have been so long held in bondage; attainment of all I can be, all I long to be, all I was made by God to be. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal.”—Johnvi.54.
“He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal.”—Johnvi.54.
We were made for holiness, union with God, eternal life. These are but different expressions for one and the same thing. For holiness is the realisation of our manhood, of that Divine Image which is the true self, expressing itself and acting, as it does in us, through the highest of animal forms. That perfect self-realisation is not merely dependent upon, but is union with God, at its beginning, throughout its course, and in its final consummation. And the life of self-realisation or holiness, which is the life of union with God, is eternal. Eternal life is not, as in the popular idea of it, an endless and wearisome prolongation of mere existence. Primarily, the idea is of the quality, not the duration of life. In the teaching of the New Testament, eternal life is a present possession of Christians. “These things I write to you, who believe on the Name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life.” Being as it is a moral and spiritualreality, it is outside time and space. It is unaffected by “changes and chances.” It is for ever beyond the reach of the temporal processes of decay, corruption, death. Here it manifests itself in service, that service of our fellows which is the service of God. Hereafter, it will be manifested in higher and more exalted forms of service. “Have thou authority over ten, over five, cities.”
Now all this, the consummation and glorious fruit of our humanity, holiness, union with God, life eternal, we see already realised in Jesus Christ, the Son of man. We see it realised, as we have learnt, not in a separate, solitary, individual, isolated life, but in that common nature which “for us men and for our salvation” He assumed of the Virgin Mary.
All that is in Him was in Him first, in order that it might be in us. And this is the important point: it can only be in us by virtue of our union with Him. That union He describes under the vivid and forcible metaphor of eating His flesh, and drinking His blood. “He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal.” His flesh and blood—a common Jewish phrase for human nature—is precisely that common nature which He assumed, in which He died to sin, which He raised from the dead and exalted to the Right Hand of God, and which He imparts to us, by His Spirit given to dwell in us for evermore.
The doctrine of the Atonement is incomplete, it is irrational, until it is completed by the doctrine of the Spirit, the Giver of Life. As He is the source of life in all living organisms, so He is in Christians the source of the Christ-life. He comes to dwell in us, not simply as the Spirit, but as the Spirit of Christ—the Spirit Who first created, and then “descended” to abide in the Perfect Manhood. That gift of the Spirit of Christ as the indwelling source of the life of Christ, and the means of the Presence of Christ in us, is the characteristic gift of the New Dispensation. It is His work to make us ever more and more partakers of Christ, to be perpetually feeding us with His flesh and blood.
And, as we are about to speak of the Holy Communion, it is well to insist first on this, that the work of the Spirit in there feeding us with the flesh and blood of the Son of man is a continuous process. It is of the very essence of what is meant by being a Christian. “If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.” The sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel is not a mere prediction of the Eucharist. It is the revelation of that principle of which the Eucharist is an illustration. Our Communions are the supreme moments, the crises, in a process which is for ever going on, the feeding of us, by the Spirit, with the flesh and blood, the holy and victorious manhood, of the Redeemer.
What relation, then, can this spiritual process have to the material substances, to the bread and wine which are used in the Eucharist? This question at once opens out into the larger one, as to the relation between matter and spirit. Now, that question could not be dealt with at all satisfactorily without undertaking a vastly larger task than we are prepared for at the present moment. We should have to ask, What is, after all, meant by “matter,” and what by “spirit”?
But something may be achieved on a much humbler scale. It will suffice for our present purpose to concentrate our attention on a remarkable fact which seems to underlie all our experience. And we will approach the statement of this fact by first recalling the familiar definition of a sacrament, which fastens upon the union of the outward and visible with the inward and invisible as being the essence of what is meant by a sacrament. Now, the fact we have in view is this:everyoutward object in the world is, in this respect, a sacrament. What we seem to see is everywhere spirit working through what we call “material” objects. That sacramental principle of the universe is the very principle which underlies our Lord’s parables of Nature. Speaking more accurately, we see in “matter” (1) the means of the self-revelation of spirit; (2) the instrument by which spirit acts.
The human organism may serve as a type of this.Here is a spiritual being, the Ego, in its will, its thoughts, its affections, invisible, and it makes its presence manifest, and it acts, through the material manifestation and instrument of itself, the body. To believers in God, nature itself, in its deepest reality, is the revelation of the Divine Presence, and the instrument of the Divine action. A beautiful sunset is a veritable and genuine sacrament. In the light of this profound truth, of matter as the manifestation and instrument of spirit, we are enabled to see how futile was the ancient dispute concerning the number of the Sacraments. In view of the fuller and larger knowledge which has come to us, this, like so many other objects of theological strife, ought before this to have been consigned to the limbo of forgotten controversies.
But in all this we have been, in fact, interpreting the whole universe in the light of the Incarnation. For that is the supreme sacrament of all, the very type and complete embodiment of the sacramental principle. There we see the Divine manifesting Itself through, and using as the instrument of its action, a Human, a “material” Body.
The Eucharist thus for the first time becomes intelligible. It is only one particular illustration, although a most momentous one, of the universal sacramental principle, of which all things else in the world are also illustrations. There we have the Spirit manifesting itself and acting,as always and everywhere, wherever “matter” is found; but in a particular way, and for a particular purpose.
The bread and the wine are the material substances which He uses at the critical moments in His perpetual action of feeding us with the flesh and blood of the Son of man. And these elements were obviously chosen, “ordained by Christ Himself,” for their most significant symbolism. There is no truer philosophy of the Eucharist than that which is contained in the familiar words of the Church Catechism, which speak of “the strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the Body and Blood of Christ, as our bodies are by the bread and wine.” That wonderful, and in itself essentially sacramental process, by which the organism lives by the incorporation and assimilation into its own substance of other substances which we call foods, is the exact analogue of the way in which our true, spiritual manhood lives by the incorporation and assimilation of the manhood of Christ, that manhood which is holy, which exists in the Divine Union, which has perfectly realised eternal life in the complete dying to sin, and the complete putting on of holiness.
The Eucharist is, in the broadest sense, the final act in the drama of our salvation. It is the means by which, by His own appointment, all that Christ achievedforus upon the Cross, the repudiation of, or dying to sin, the realisation of perfect obedience,obedience unto death, comes to beinus, is made all our own.
But it is most important that we should ever remember that this truth has two sides.
(i) It is Christ Who saves us; that is, Who is the actually putting away of sin, attainment of holiness, union with God, eternal life, by what He does in us. “Christforus” finds its perfect fulfilment and end in “Christinus.”
(ii) Yet, Christ does not save us apart from ourselves. Else the Eucharist would be degraded to the level of some heathen, magical charm. We must will and intend the putting off of sin, and the putting on of holiness. We must recognise, and this is a truth of experience, our complete inability to attain this without Him. That will, and that recognition, are the repentance and faith which constitute the necessary contribution on our part to the work of Christ for our salvation.
Our Communions are the most important moments in our lives. Each marks a distinct and definite stage in the fulfilment of the purpose of God for us, the fulfilment in us of all that is meant by the Death and Resurrection of the Lord. We ought to come, therefore, not only after due preparation, with repentance and faith, but also with hope and joy; not to perform a duty, but to receive the best gift which God Himself can bestow upon us—that gift which is the perfect conquest of sin, the complete realisationof holiness, union with God, eternal life; the fulfilment of every aspiration, the accomplishment of every dream, the achievement of every glory, the crown, the consummation, the attainment of our manhood in union with Jesus Christ the Son of man.
“For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”—Heb.ix.13, 14.
“For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”—Heb.ix.13, 14.
No Christian doctrine is more commonly misunderstood than that of the sacrifice of Christ. This misunderstanding arises from ignorance as to the meaning of sacrifices in the ancient world.
Sacrifice is one of the earliest and most widely spread of all human institutions. Behind the laws regulating sacrifice in the Old Testament there lies the long history of Shemitic ritual and religion. These sacrificial rites were not then introduced for the first time. They formed part of the inheritance of the Israelites from their far-off ancestors; an inheritance shared by them with the Ammonites and Edomites, and other kindred and neighbouring nations. They differed from these not in matter or form, but in the loftier moral and spiritual tone which formed the peculiar and distinguishing mark of the Hebrew religion, and in which we to-day canclearly trace the actions in the minds of men of the Spirit of God.
It follows that it is hopeless to attempt to understand the sacrificial teaching of the Old Testament without some grasp of the meaning of sacrifice in the ancient world. Failure to attain this has led to the idea that the sacrifice of Christ must mean the appeasing of an offended Deity by blood and death. But this view of sacrifice is not merely a heathen, but a late and debased heathen conception. “Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of the soul?” was the cry of the King of Moab, and it marks the lowest depth into which the pagan idea of sacrifice had sunk. It is a genuine instance of deterioration in ethnic religion. The primitive view was far loftier and more spiritual than this.
Recent researches, dependent on the comparative method, into the earliest forms of religion have brought to light two principles which underlay the conception of sacrifice, and which to a great extent can be discerned more clearly in the most ancient period than in later times. Now these two principles which, taken together, constitute the primitive theory of sacrifice, which make up the fundamental idea of it, however little prehistoric man may have been capable of giving distinct and logical expression to them, were these:
1. Death is necessary to the attainment of the fulness of life.
2. Man is, by his very nature, capable of sharing in, becoming a partaker of, the Divine life.
The earliest known form of sacrifice is the killing of the sacred animal of the tribe, the animal which was held to be the representative of the tribal god, followed by the sacred tribal meal upon the victim. There, in this earliesttotemrite, we have already implicit the two great ideas of sacrifice, the communion of man with God by actual participation in the Divine life (the feast on the sacrifice), and that this communion is rendered possible by the death of the sacred victim.
These ideas were very largely obscured in ancient times by the conception of sacrifice as a gift, a tribute, or a propitiation. But these ideas, though they bulk largely in modern minds unacquainted with the recent researches of specialists in comparative religion, were, in fact, of later growth. They are accretions which, by a very natural and intelligible process, have overlain the oldest and really fundamental ideas which lie at the root and origin of sacrifice.
These two ideas were, however, present all through, in what we might perhaps call (without committing ourselves to any psychological theories) the racial subconsciousness. They were always there, ready to be evoked by the appropriate stimulus, whenever applied. They constituted the real essence and meaning of the ancient mysteries, which from800b.c.downwards formed so important a part of the real religion of the ancient world, and which have left their mark on the language of St. Paul and other early Christian teachers. These mysteries, roughly and broadly speaking, were of the nature of a religious reformation. They represented the discarding of the propitiatory idea in favour of the original meaning of sacrifice as communion.
These earliest notions of sacrifice really underlay the sacrifices of the Old Testament, especially in the case of the peace offerings. But, in these, we become conscious of a third element, the conviction that sin is a barrier to the Divine Communion. When the worshipper, in the sin-offering, laid his hands upon the head of the victim, he was, by a significant action, repudiating his sin, and presenting the spotlessness of the victim as his own, his own in will and intention henceforth. The blood was sprinkled upon the altar as the symbol of the life offered to and accepted by God; it was sprinkled upon the worshipper as the sign of the communication to him of that pure Divine life, by virtue of his participation in which man can alone approach God.
All this can be summed up in one word, “symbolism.” All the value of ancient sacrifices, including those of the Old Testament, lay wholly in the moral and spiritual truths which, in a series of outward and significant actions, they stood for and symbolised.To attach objective value to that which was external in the Old Testament sacrifices, or even to the outward accompaniments of the Supreme Sacrifice, the Death of Jesus Christ upon the Cross, is to be guilty of a relapse from the Christian, or even the prophetic spirit, into the late and debased pagan idea of sacrifice, from which the ancient mysteries of the Eastern and Greek world were a reaction. Certainly, the outward sufferings of our Lord should sometimes form the subject of our thoughts as a motive, and one of the strongest motives, to penitence and love. But to lay such stress on these as to exalt them into the real meaning of the sacrifice of Christ, as constituting its value as a sacrifice, to regard them as in some way changing the Mind of God towards us, is contrary to the whole spirit of the New Testament. What the real teaching of the gospels is in the matter, is made plain by two significant facts.
(i) While it is quite clear that the inspired writers regard the Death of Christ, and the Christian life, as being, each of them, in a real sense, a sacrifice, direct sacrificial language is applied sparingly to the former, but without stint or hesitation to the latter. This is a point which has been strikingly brought out by Professor Loftus in his recent work onThe Ethics of the Atonement.
(ii) While devoting a large portion of their narrative to the account of the Death of Christ, they exercised a very great and marked reserve as regardsthe physical details of the Crucifixion. In this respect the gospels are in harmony with the earliest Christian representations, as distinguished from the repulsive realism in which the medieval artists revelled.
To ask, then, in what sense the Death of Christ was a sacrifice, is to ask how far that Death realised the moral and spiritual truths which underlay the ancient institution of sacrifice, and to which all sacrifices ultimately pointed.
1. The first of these ideas, as we have seen, is that death is necessary to the fulness of life, that life can only be won by the surrender of life. That ancient conception constitutes the fundamental teaching of Christ: “He that willeth to save his life, shall lose it, and he who willeth to lose his life . . . shall save it unto life eternal.” And of that great truth, which is nothing less than the formative principle of the Christian life, the Cross was the supreme expression “Herein have we come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”
The laying down of life, self-sacrifice, of which the Cross is the highest manifestation, alone brings life, alone is fruitful. “Except a grain of corn fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Selfishness, whether as self-assertion or self-seeking, is essentially barren and unproductive, both inregard to the lives of others and our own lives. Only so far as we are, in some real sense, laying down our lives for others, denying (not that which belongs to us, but) ourselves, for their sake, can we hope to influence other persons for good, to be the cause of moral fruitfulness, of spiritual life in them. And for ourselves, we only win the fulness of our own lives, so far as we lose them in the lives of others, so far as we identify ourselves with their joys, sufferings, interests, pursuits, well-being; for our lives are real, and rich, and full exactly in proportion to the extent to which they include the lives of others.
And the Death of Christ ceases to be an unintelligible mystery, when it is regarded as the consummation of His Life of self-sacrifice. “Christ also pleased not Himself.” “He went about doing good.” And at last, in the fulfilment of a mission received of the Father for the good of men, His brethren, He crowned the Life, in which self-pleasing was not, by His Death, the necessary result, as we have seen, of His carrying out that mission in a world of sinful men. For Himself, that Death was, so He willed, the portal to the glory of the Resurrection. And the fruits of His uttermost self-sacrifice are still, after all these centuries, being gathered in, as in innumerable souls brought back from the darkness of sin into the light of the Divine Life, “He sees of the travail of His soul, and is satisfied.”
2. But what answers, in the Death of Christ, tothat in regard to which the death of the victim served but as a means to an end, the sacred meal of communion? The sacrificial principle has been laid down by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, “without shedding of blood, there is no remission.” Blood to the modern mind speaks of death, and usually of a violent and painful death. To the ancient mind, heathen or Israelite, blood stood for and symbolised life. “The Blood makes atonement by the Life that is in it.” Man can only be made at one with God, can only have “remission of sins”—the barrier which sin interposes to communion with God can only be removed, he can only be restored to that Divine fellowship for which he was made—by actual reception into himself of the Divine life, of the life of Him Who, being God, became man, in order to impart His own Divine Life to our humanity which He assumed. And Christ’s Life only then became available for men, capable of being imparted to each man, when it had passed through Death to Resurrection. If the grain die—only if it die first—“it bringeth forth much fruit.” “If I go not away, the Comforter, the Paraclete, will not come unto you.” Only by virtue of that “going away” of Christ, which includes His Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, could the Spirit which indwells His glorified manhood, come to impart the life of Christ to the members of the Body of Christ. Pentecost is the final consummation of man’s atonement and redemption.
We may still more briefly summarise these two fundamental principles which constitute the sacrificial aspect of the Death of Christ.
1. Christ died, not that we should be excused from offering, but that we might be enabled to offer the one acceptable sacrifice to God, that is, the sacrifice of ourselves in that service of God which is the service of our fellow-men.
2. Christ died, in order that we might receive His Divine Life into ourselves, through the indwelling Spirit of Christ bestowed by the Ascended Lord.
Thus the Death of Christ is not merely a sacrifice, one out of many, or (as has been so mistakenly taught) simply the last of a series. It is rather the one sacrifice which alone realises the ideas of which all other so-called sacrifices were but the faint adumbrations. As the one true sacrifice it stands at the end of an age-long spiritual evolution. In the physical evolution, the first protoplasmic cell was not man, though it pointed forward to man, and implied man. So thetotemfeast and the old Jewish rites, were not truly and genuinely sacrifices, though both pointed forward to and implied the realisation of sacrifice in the Death of Christ. That Death was the fulfilment of the universal human aspiration, the assurance of the truth of that ancient dream of mankind, that man was capable of being, and might attain to be “partaker of the Divine nature.”
And this whole teaching of ancient ritual as fulfilledand accomplished on the Cross of Jesus Christ, is summed up for us in our Christian Eucharist where on the one hand we, in union with the sacrifice of Christ, “offer and present ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice “to God; and, on the other hand, by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of man, become partakers of Him Who, in the words of St. Athanasius, “was made man, that we might be made God,” became partaker of our human nature, in order that we might realise the end of our manhood, by being made partakers of His Divine Life.
The object with which we meet here can be expressed in a Pauline phrase of three words, it is “to learn Christ.”
But, in those three words, there is contained, in the manner of St. Paul, a wealth of meaning. To learn Christ is clearly an affair of the intellect, in the first place. It quite certainly, in this sense, does not mean merely to accumulate information regarding the words and acts of our Lord. St. Paul himself is singularly sparing of allusions to the history of Christ, if we exclude from that His Death, Burial, and Resurrection. The phrase, in fact, describes that kind of knowledge to which a detailed study of the Saviour’s Life is related as means to an end, the knowledge, namely, of Christ’s character, of His Mind and Will. Such knowledge is not to be acquired in one hour or in three. It is, it ought tobe, the life-long object of a Christian man to gain it in an ever-increasing measure of fulness and accuracy. But the last words of the Lord, the seven sayings from His Cross, constitute a special and in some measure unique disclosure of His Mind and Will. And, therefore, to meditate upon them, as we are now proposing to do, will be to advance one stage further, and a distinct stage, in the process of “learning Christ.”
1. But we do well to remind ourselves, at the very outset, that our aim is not merely intellectual, but also practical. There is no real gain arising from the knowledge of Christ’s Mind and Will, save so far as that knowledge enables us to make that Mind and Will our own mind and our own will.Thatis the very meaning of Christian discipleship. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”
2. The end thus set before us is one capable of attainment by all. The individual, indeed, cannot hope to realise that end completely by himself. The embodiment of Christ’s Mind and Will is the supreme task and the final achievement of the whole Body of Christ. The purpose of the long development of the Church on earth is, that “we shouldall(noteach) arrive at a perfect man, at the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ.” The whole Church, the Body in its completeness, is meant to reflect back in the eyes of the Father, the moral glory of the Son of man. Each individual has beencalled into membership in the Body, in order that he might reflect some one of the scattered rays of that glory; might embody in himself one aspect of the infinite perfection of the Son of man. So would each of us truly “come to himself,” realise all that he is capable of becoming.
That progress of the Body of Christ towards its goal is described by St. Paul as being a growth of the Christ Himself. He is “at all points in all men being fulfilled.” There is a true and important sense in which the Incarnation is as yet incomplete, in which the life-history of the Church is its growing completeness. Our individual task is the realisation in ourselves of that part of the Christ life which we, individually, have been created to embody.
3. It will be useful to sum up the Character, the Mind and Will of Christ, in a single phrase. Consider how He impressed His contemporaries. What was it which they saw in Him, who knew Him best, and had been united to Him by close ties of comradeship and discipleship? In one word, what they saw was Sonship. “We beheld His glory, as of an Only-Begotten from a Father.” The Mind and Will of Christ are the perfect realisation of the Divine Sonship in our humanity.
But what is the meaning of God’s Fatherhood and man’s sonship? The ultimate truth of the relationship, the truth which underlies all such conceptions as care, love, obedience, is community ofnature. Our human nature is really akin to the Divine. We are sons of God because our spiritual life is of one piece with His as derived from it. Baptism introduces no new element into our nature. By sacramental union with the Only Begotten, the Ground and Archetype of all sonship, it enables us to realise that which is in us, to actually become that which, potentially, we are. It gives us “power to become children of God,” to attain the meaning of our manhood, to regain our true selves.
4. Baptism gives power, all sacraments give power, but in such wise that that power is useless, even,in a sense, non-existent, till we make it ours by deliberate exertion, by co-operation of mind and heart and will with the Divine in us.
The end of our living, to become truly and completely the sons of God, is to be attained by the joint action of two factors—
(1) The Spirit of Christ conforming our minds and wills more and more to the likeness of Christ.
(2) The co-operation of our whole personality with the work of the indwelling Spirit.
Our meditations this morning on the Seven Words in which Christ made some partial disclosure of His Mind and Will, will form some part of that co-operation, one little stage in the accomplishment of our life-long task.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”St. Lukexxiii.34.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”St. Lukexxiii.34.
1. Here we are watching the behaviour of the Son of God, the Ideal and Ground of Divine Sonship in humanity.
Is this supreme example of forgiveness an example tous? Is it not something unnatural to humanity as we know it?
We must recall, from a former address, the distinction which we then drew between the animal in us, with its self-assertive instincts, and the Divine in us, that which constitutes us not animal merely, but human, of which the very essence is the self-sacrifice of perfect love. Christ came to reveal God in our manhood. And I need this revelation, just because the animal in me has won so many victories in the past over the Divine, because in me the spiritual fire habitually burns so low and dim.
It is a very different thing to say that forgiveness of all serious injury is a hard thing. It is hard, but not impossible. That which makes it to be possibleis the serious intention of discipleship, co-operating with the indwelling Spirit of Christ transforming us into His likeness.
To assert, on the other hand, that forgiveness of serious wrong is impossible, is to ignore the fact that He Who uttered these wonderful words is the true self of me, and of every man who breathes. He Who hung on the Cross, and spoke these seven words, is the Son of man, the Representative to all ages, to all varieties of human character, of true humanity.
2. Christ-like forgiveness is no weak thing, but the strongest thing in the world.
Yet, for its true effect to be produced, its true character must be recognised. No suspicion of cowardice or impotence must cleave to it. The man who being obviously able to resent an injury, and not lacking in the capacity of resentment, yet for Christ’s sake forgives, exercises on earth no inconsiderable share of the moral power of Christ. God now, as of old, “has made choice of the weak things of the world,” those things which the world accounts weak, “to confound the strong.” “The meek” still “inherit the earth.”
We are dealing, all through, with the injury which is personal, with the resentment which is the reaction of the individual against unprovoked wrong. Personal resentment we are bidden to relentlessly crush out—“to turn the other cheek” is the command of Christ. But the Christian man will recognisethat the interests of the social order are not to be disregarded. These interests, and those of the offender himself, will sometimes demand that the wrong, even if it primarily affects ourselves, shall not go unpunished. Again, no one can be in the full sense a Christian, that is, a fully developed man, or a man on the way to the full development of his nature, who is without the capacity of moral indignation, in whom no flame is kindled by the oppression of the weak.
What the Christian moral law does demand of us, is the complete suppression of the merely personal anger which sometimes burns so fiercely in us when we receive unmerited insult or injury. That kind of anger belongs to “the flesh,” is part of the defensive equipment of the animal nature. Before we can in any sense be Christ-like, the spirit must win many hard-won victories over its ancient foe.
To say “I will forgive, but I can never forget,” is only to conceal from ourselves the defeat of the spiritual man, the Christ in us.
3. But carefully note the reason appended to the prayer: “they know not what they do.” That is true, with every variety of degrees and shades of truth, of every sinner. It was true, clearly, of the soldiers then performing their duty: it was less true, but still in a real sense it was true, of the Pharisees, of the High Priests, of the Roman judge. It is true, but to a far less degree, even of us, that when we sin, we “know not what we do.”
Sins are, in the language of St. Paul, works of darkness. That is the element in which alone they can exist. Sin is a huge deception. The very condition of its existence is the concealment of its true character. All this is summed up in that experience which we call “temptation.” We are so familiar with sin, the atmosphere we breathe is so infected with it, we have given way so many times in the past, that it needs the objective revelation of the Cross to bring home to us the real horror and malignity of sin. It has been finely said, “Sin first drugs its victims before it consumes them.” We, too, or some of us, have known the strange petrifying, hardening effect of sin on the conscience.
Great, then, is our need that we should pray that the revelation of the Cross may more and more come home to us; great our need to pray for an ever fuller measure of that Spirit of Christ, Whose first work it is “to convince the world of sin,” to make men realise its true character and its inevitable issue.
“Verily I say unto thee, To-day thou shall be with Me in Paradise.”St. Lukexxiii.43.
“Verily I say unto thee, To-day thou shall be with Me in Paradise.”St. Lukexxiii.43.
We judge of any power by the results which it effects. We gain some knowledge of the power of steam by its capacity to drive a huge mass of steel and wood weighing twenty thousand tons through the water at the rate of twenty knots an hour. There we have some standard by which we can gauge the force which sends our earth round the sun at twenty-five miles a second, or that which propels a whole solar system through space. But we may apply the same method, of estimation by results, to the powers of the moral and spiritual worlds. Judged thus, it was indeed a stupendous power which was exerted by Christ from the Cross. For what result can be more amazing than the reversal, at the last, of the character slowly built up by the habits of a lifetime? It is, of course, useless to speculate on the antecedents of the robber (not “thief”) who turned to our Lord with the words, “Jesus, remember me when Thou shalt come into Thy kingdom.” We know only what is implied bythe word “robber” or “brigand,” and the fact that he had joined, with his fellow-sufferer, in the mockery of our Lord. But the words thus addressed by him to Christ, in their context, represent the most wonderful “phenomenon” of human life, a genuine and thorough-going conversion. And the power which wrought that stupendous result was the patience and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. The weak things had, as so often since, confounded the strong. In His matchless forbearance, in the prayer for His executioners, the royalty of Christ our Lord was disclosed, and the “title” over His head was vindicated.
1. First then, we learn from the Second Word the Mind and Will of God towards penitence. There is no interposing of delay. Forgiveness is instantaneous. No pause intervenes between the prayer for pardon, and the pardon itself. But, that instant response was to genuine “change of mind,” not to the repentance which is merely regret for the past, still less to a cowardly shrinking from a deserved punishment, but to a definite act of the man’s will, repudiating sin, and ranging himself on God’s side. The rejection of sin, the identifying of self with God’s attitude towards it, that, we have seen, is alone, in the New Testament sense of the word, repentance.
2. The penitence of the robber, on analysis, discloses the three familiar elements—
(a) Contrition is obviously implied in the whole action.
(b) Confession—“we receive the due rewards of the things which we wrought.”
(c) Amendment—in the separation of himself from those with whom he had hitherto joined in reviling Christ.
Now it is worth noting, that our Catechism bids us examine ourselves not about our sins, but about our repentance; “whether they truly repent.” We are meant to ask ourselves—
(a) Is our contrition real? And here, for our comfort, we remember that God accepts as contrition the sincere desire to be contrite.
(b) Have we made such a painstaking self-examination as to ensure our making a good confession? “If we confess oursins” (separate, detailed sins, not our sinfulness in general terms), “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.”
Have we used “sacramental” confession, according to the teaching of the Prayer Book, that is, when our conscience told us that we needed it?
(c) Is our resolution of amendment a clear and honest one? What sins are there, some of whose results we are able to modify or in part reverse (false impressions, untruths, acts or words of unkindness)? God is generous in forgiveness. Surely we are bound to be generous in our amendment. There is a sense in which the results of sin abide beyond possibility of recall. Yet I believe that the instinct which bids us “make up for” a hurt inflicted on a beloved person,is a Divine instinct in our nature, and one which we are to carry into the region of our relation to God.
3. We notice another important truth as regards the Divine forgiveness. It has nothing to do with the removal of punishment, the release from penalty or consequence of sin. The forgiveness of the robber was immediate and complete. But he had still to hang in agony, and there awaited him the frightful pain of the crurifragium, the breaking of the legs by beating with clubs.
The sooner we learn the two great truths about the punishment of sin, the better.
(a) Punishment is inevitable. It is a necessary result of the constitution of the physical and moral universe, of the working, in both regions, of those laws which are the expression of the Divine Mind.
(b) Punishment is remedial. Many Christian theologians have fallen far below Plato’s conception of God, as One Who can only punish men with a view of making them better.
Think of one of the punishments of repented sin, the haunting memories of past evil. In this case, both principles are very clearly discernible. Each recollection may be made the means of a renewed act of rejection of sin, and thus become an opportunity for the deepening of repentance.
And what disclosure does this second word contain of the Mind and Will of God in us, as manifested not towards, but by ourselves? Our lesson isthe prompt recognition and welcome of any, even the slightest signs of amendment. It may be our duty to punish. It is always our duty to keep alive, or to kindle, the hope in an offender of becoming better. In that hope, alone, lies the possibility of moral amendment. There is the golden rule, laid down by St. Paul for all who have to exercise discipline over others, in words which ring ever in our ears—“lest they be discouraged.”