Gloria Crucis Part 4

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, is reconciliation, union, resurrection, eternal life, has begun in us. And He Who has, visibly and manifestly, "begun in us" that "good work," will a.s.suredly "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 a.s.sumption 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 on _Mysticism 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 t.i.tle. He is that living, personal Thought of G.o.d 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 not less 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."

VI REDEMPTION

"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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d means to cease to be the object of the Wrath of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d'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 exhausted the 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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?

"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 pa.s.sions 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 a.s.sault of the foe, and man conquered.

O loving wisdom of our G.o.d!

When all was sin and shame, A second Adam to the fight And 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 a.s.sumed 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 fact that 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. G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 individuality cannot be imparted to us, but a common nature can. And that nature which the Eternal Word a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d to be. "Thanks be to G.o.d through Jesus Christ our Lord."

VII REDEMPTION (CONTINUED)

"He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath life eternal."--JOHN VI. 54.

We were made for holiness, union with G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, that ye may know that ye have eternal life."

Being as it is a moral and spiritual reality, it is outside time and s.p.a.ce. 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sumed, in which He died to sin, which He raised from the dead and exalted to the Right Hand of G.o.d, 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 ill.u.s.tration.

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: _every_ outward 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 G.o.d, 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 ill.u.s.tration, although a most momentous one, of the universal sacramental principle, of which all things else in the world are also ill.u.s.trations. 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 refres.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.similation into its own substance of other substances which we call foods, is the exact a.n.a.logue of the way in which our true, spiritual manhood lives by the incorporation and a.s.similation 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 achieved _for_ us upon the Cross, the repudiation of, or dying to sin, the realisation of perfect obedience, obedience unto death, comes to be _in_ us, is made all our own.