PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, EASTER DAY, 1916.
“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth, for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, Who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory.”—Col. iii. 1-4.
“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth, for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, Who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory.”—Col. iii. 1-4.
Easter Day brings us the most blessed message that could possibly be proclaimed at any time; but at present it is perhaps more blessed and more appropriate than at any other time in our experience. It tells us, in the first place, that Christ was raised from the dead after His crucifixion, and now sits at the right hand of God, Who has highly exalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name. But it tells us, also, that the blessedness of that resurrection is open to all of us, and that we are admitted to share in the glory which Christ won for Himself; so that when Christ, Who is our life, shallappear we also shall appear with Him in glory. If we appreciate what these assurances mean, we shall be lifted up by them into the apprehension of realities which transform our whole life in this world, and enable us to look beyond it, to an eternal existence of the highest spiritual bliss hereafter.
There are two ways in which men may think of their position in life. The realities of this life may be predominant in their thoughts, so as almost to absorb their whole minds. That, I fear, is the natural tendency of most of us. The claim which the things of this world make upon us is so incessant, and often so intense, that we have too often neither the energy nor the inclination to look beyond it. There have, indeed, been good and brave men, who have said that we should not look beyond it; that we should concentrate all our energies on the work and the duties imposed upon us, and leave the future to take care of itself, even though it be that vast, and, as we believe, eternal future, on which we shall enter at death. That was necessarily the attitude of good men before the revelation of the Gospel. There havebeen, unhappily, some good men among us in recent times who practically live a similar life, not realizing or believing the truths that are opened to them by the Gospel, but content to do their duty to the best of their power. I fear a similar life is practically lived by too many Christians. Their interest and their thoughts are mainly absorbed in this present visible world, in their duties, their pleasures, and their worldly happiness; and they do not, for the most part, think of much beyond. One consequence of this attitude of mind is that they judge of all occurrences by their effect on this life; and particularly they are apt to consider all the dispensations of God’s providence, all His judgments and all His mercies, with reference to their effect on this world. How is it possible, for instance, they ask, that a God of perfect goodness and love can permit such an awful dispensation to fall upon men as a great war like the present, that He can allow the sufferings, and the bereavements, and the miseries which such a war involves? I think, if we are candid with ourselves, we shall find that when that question is acutely felt, it is practicallywith reference to this life that it is urged. Why should there be all this suffering in the world in which we are now living? Why should so many young and precious lives be sacrificed? Why should so many homes be darkened, and so many hearts all but broken, in this present time? It is the present suffering and the present time that are uppermost in our thoughts. We are apt to speak and think as if the life in the present world of those who are lost had been the matter of greatest consequence for them, and as if we were without any positive compensation, to them and to ourselves, except the victory of the cause for which they laid down their lives.
Now the great blessing of the Easter message is that it entirely reverses this aspect of life. It reveals to us, on the assurance of Christ and His Apostles, that this world and this life are a very small thing indeed compared with the realities which Christ has revealed to us by His resurrection. He has revealed to us, first for Himself and in His own person, and secondly for ourselves, that the world in which we really live is an eternal and spiritual realm, in which we are privilegedto be in the company of Christ Himself, and of all the souls who, from the commencement of the world, have lived and died in harmony with the spirit of Christ and the will of God. That is the real life into which every one in this congregation is admitted, if he will. One of those great men in the past, to whom I have referred, imagined the case of men having lived all their lives in a cave to which only broken beams of sunlight penetrated, and who had no idea of the splendid vision of the sun, and of the earth with all its beauties, which would burst upon their vision the moment they stepped outside their cave. That, as his marvellous wisdom perceived, is the case of too many among us, even among Christians. We have our caves, created by the temporal interests and obligations around us; and broken gleams, from the truths of the Gospel which we imperfectly realize, afford a dim religious light to our condition. But, in reality, there is a spiritual, a glorious, and an eternal world around us, which will burst upon us with overpowering splendour when, after death, we step out of the cave of this flesh. The problems of God’s dispensations, both tothe world at large and to ourselves, are beyond our comprehension and solution, because they have reference not merely to this world, in which most of us live for no more than three score years and ten, but to that eternal and infinite world of spirits, which will endure for ever, and which is beyond our ken. To each individual soul, young or old, the question of chief importance is not what happens to them in this world, whether their life be short or long, whether it be a happy life or a sad one, but what happens to them afterwards, in that eternal career, which opens to them all at death. The only true Christian attitude, as the Apostle says elsewhere, is to “look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
But what are these things that are eternal? That is one of the most precious parts of the Christian revelation. In some respects, of course, they must remain unknown to us while we are in the flesh, for “eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man,the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” But though we do not know what the external circumstances of that life will be, we do know, because Christ Himself, and His Apostles on His authority, have revealed it to us, what the essential part of them will be so far as our spiritual nature is concerned. They will be simply and precisely the spiritual things which are the highest and best in this world. They will be perfect truth, and peace, and love, and, in a word, all those graces and perfections which were manifested in Christ Himself. The Apostle bids us “seek those things that are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God”; and then he proceeds to explain what those things are. “Put on,” he says, a few verses further, “as the elect of God a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, long suffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving one another; ... even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye; and above all these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfectness ... and whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.” That isthe character of the future world, the future society, to which we have the privilege of being admitted at death: a world in which all the graces and glories of the Christian character exist, without any of the imperfections by which even the holiest lives are clouded here; a world of perpetual thanksgiving to God the Father for the love with which He has loved us; a world in short which is ablaze with the light and warmth of all love and truth.
One blessed consequence from this revelation of the nature of the spiritual world, in which the risen Christ reigns, is that we can enter it, and live for it, even in the present life, without any disregard of the obligatory claims which this world has upon us. However busy a man’s life, however absorbed he may necessarily be in the requirements and duties of his daily occupations, he can also be exerting his energies of thankfulness and prayer to God, of truth and love and compassion and meekness and peace, which make the life of the eternal world. There is no occupation or condition of life in which those blessed graces may not be exerted and cultivated; and men and women maythus live in the spirit and light Of Heaven, even while they are confined within the cave of the flesh. In proportion as they are living in this light even here, they are being prepared for the eternal Heaven of the future; they are fulfilling, all the more completely, their duty to the society and the life of this world because they are guided by the illumination, both of the present Heaven which overshadows their souls, and of the future Heaven, of which the approaching gleams throw flashes of light across their path.
But what I would more particularly ask, at the present moment, amid the strain and distress of these months and years of war, is whether the promise of this eternal blessedness, the vision of this unseen and eternal world, does not justify the Apostle’s description of all the sorrows and sufferings which he and his fellows underwent, as “our light affliction, which is but for a moment.” If this world were the main scene of our life and of our hopes, there would be something appalling in the destruction, or mutilation, of so many of the best lives among us, and the cruel bereavement of those who are left behind.But in the light of this revelation, is it not our privilege to regard it all as “a light affliction, which is but for a moment,” and which is working for us all, for those who are taken and for those who are left, a far more exceeding and eternal glory? What does it matter to a life, however young and bright, that it should be cut short in this world if, through death in the discharge of duty, it passes to the full enjoyment of those “things that are with Christ,” in that world where Christ will welcome it with the greeting: “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?” It is, indeed, a hard fate for those whose life in this world is, for the future, maimed by injuries, or marred by bereavement. But for them, too, there is the assurance of Christ that if they suffer with Him, and in sympathy with Him, they shall also be glorified together, and that all they suffer, in obedience to His will here, will help them forward in the way that leads to everlasting life. These are not mere human hopes and imaginings; they are the express promises and assurances of the Lord, Who suffered and died upon the Cross, and of thoseApostles, whom He commissioned to bring His message to the world. This Heaven, of the present and the future, has been constituted by them the great reality, the greatest of all realities, the supreme reality, of our lives, here and hereafter; and in proportion as we look at everything here in the light of it, the sorrows and sacrifices of this life are reduced to comparatively small proportions, and the hope and the blessings of the eternal life become the great Heaven, the glorious vault of God’s light and love by which we are surrounded.
It is thus that Easter Day brings home to us a message which satisfies the deepest cravings and necessities of life, and affords a practical solution of the difficulties which, without such a revelation, are involved in the miseries of war. War itself, indeed, points to some such solution, and compels men in practice to embrace it. It has been said that war is the greatest of educators, and there are various senses in which this is true. It educates, it exercises, it manifests, as nothing else does, some of the highest excellences of human nature: self-sacrifice, endurance, mutual devotion,faith and loyalty, and, in Tennyson’s pregnant phrase, “all that makes a man.” But perhaps its greatest educative influence consists in the fact that it compels men to act, without hesitation, on the instinct, which God has implanted in their hearts, that nothing in this world is of any importance in comparison with the maintenance and the assertion of righteousness, truth, justice, and mercy. The mass of a people may be living in comfort and luxury, with their minds and affections mainly engaged in the energies, the pleasures, and the interests of this life; but as soon as some great challenge is offered to those supreme principles of righteousness and mercy, on which the whole fabric of true human life depends, their hearts spring up with an instinct that everything they value in this world must be sacrificed in defence of those moral and spiritual causes. The moment the note is struck of a great war for righteousness, like the present, that moment men and women feel compelled, by their very nature, to “set their affection on the things above,” not on the things of this world; they realize, that to this world they must become practically dead, andlive for those high moral and spiritual causes which are the supreme treasures of mankind, and that, in this sense at all events, their “life is hid with Christ in God.” If, as we may confidently say, we are warring for right and truth, and for the maintenance of the will of God among men, we may then apply even to the war itself, and all the national and individual sacrifices it entails, the thankful conviction of the Apostle that “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” It is working out for our nation and Empire, and for the world at large, the establishment on a firmer basis than ever of true Christian civilization. Those whose lives are sacrificed are but brought by death into the nearer presence of Christ, where His love and His mercy, no less than His justice, will be still more to them than in the world they leave; and those who are left behind may learn to prize the privilege of suffering with their Saviour, that they may in time be glorified with Him.