Heralds of God/Chapter 2
Chapter II
THE PREACHER'S THEME
"From the beginning of time until now, this is the only thing that has ever really happened. When you understand this you will understand all prophecies, and all history."
IN that profoundly moving book, Tolstoy's War and Peace, one of the most memorable scenes describes the night at Russian Headquarters when a messenger brought to Koutouzow, the old Commander-in-Chief, the first news of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. After the years of terrific strain and agony to which the soul of Russia had been subjected, the tidings sounded incredible. The envoy finished his report and then waited for orders in silence. A Staff Officer was about to speak, but Koutouzow checked him with his hand, and tried to say something himself. Not a word would come. Finally the old man turned away to where the sacred images stood against the wall. And then suddenly and unrestrainedly, "Great God" he cried, "my Lord and Creator! Thou hast heard my prayer! Russia is saved!" And then he burst into tears.
To-day the envoy of the Gospel is charged with tidings more moving and more wonderful by far. If this message is fantasy, there is no hope for humanity anywhere. If this is true, the whole world is saved.
We proceed, therefore, to a consideration of the content of the message. What is the preacher's theme?
Some years ago there appeared a composite volume with the intriguing title If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach. It was an interesting experiment: yet one suspects that upon most of the contributors the necessity of including the whole of revelation within the narrow limits of one all-comprehensive sermon must have exercised a somewhat depressing influence and imposed a considerable handicap. It would prove too much even for an apostle. You will find that your best sermons—best in the sense of being most truly charged with spiritual power—are not those you compose when the mood seizes you to write something outstanding and exceptional and definitive; in all probability, not even those you construct with special occasions in view; on the contrary, your best sermons will get themselves made in the ordinary course of your ministry week by week. You are likely in the good providence of God to have not only one sermon to preach but hundreds, and you must order your methods accordingly: so that over a course of months and years your sermons will balance and correct one another in their emphasis on different aspects of what the apostle called the "many-coloured" wisdom of God. You will soon discover that one of the most important arts you have to learn is the art of omission. You have apostolic authority for endeavouring to "become all things to all men"; but Paul never suggested that the right way to do it was to pack a little of everything into every sermon, mixing your ingredients in order to have something in the dish for every palate! There is a cautionary recipe in an eighteenth-century book for the making of a salad. It specifies scores of different delicacies, and bids the ingenuous cook add a little of this, a touch of that, a flavour of something else, until every imaginable ingredient has been included; then somewhat sardonically it goes on to say, "After mixing well, open a large window and throw out the whole mess." To concentrate too much into one miscellaneous masterpiece—whether it be a salad or a sermon—is the surest way to fail All sermons should indeed be crammed with the Gospel, and it is nothing less than "the whole counsel of God" that you are commissioned to declare; but to say that all sermons should comprise every facet of Christian doctrine is absurd. "There are those highly illuminated beings," complained Joseph Parker, "who expect a whole scheme of theology in every discourse, I trust," he added, "they will be starved to death,"
There is, however, another sense in which the thought behind the title If Had Only One Sermon to Preach may prove salutary; and Richard Baxter's injunction—"preach as a dying man to dying men"—is not simply to be discounted as morbid hyperbole. For every gathering of God's people for worship is a quite distinctive event; and though a congregation may meet twice a Sunday all the year round, no such event ever exactly repeats itself. Always there are differentiating circumstances; always "Now is the accepted time" One thing at least is clear: we have no right in our preaching to waste time on side-issues and irrelevances. In other words, if we are not determined that in every sermon Christ is to be preached, it were better that we should resign our commission forthwith and seek some other vocation. Alexander Whyte, describing his Saturday walks and talks with Marcus Dods, declared: "Whatever we started off with in our conversations, we soon made across country, somehow, to Jesus of Nazareth, to His death, and His resurrection, and His indwelling"; and unless our sermons make for the same goal, and arrive at the same mark, they are simply beating the air. It was a favourite dictum of the preachers of a bygone day that, just as from every village in Britain there was a road which, linking on to other roads, would bring you to London at last, so from every text in the Bible, even the remotest and least likely, there was a road to Christ. Possibly there were occasions when strange turns of exegesis and dubious allegorizings were pressed into service for the making of that road; but the instinct was entirely sound which declared that no preaching which failed to exalt Christ was worthy to be called Christian preaching. This is our great master-theme. In the expressive, forthright language of John Donne: "All knowledge that begins not, and ends not with His glory, is but a giddy, but a vertiginous circle, but an elaborate and exquisite ignorance."
I
But what does it mean—to "preach Christ"? The phrase calls for definition. I suggest that you should go, for the true touchstone in this matter, to the preaching of the early Church. When Henry Ward Beecher began his ministry, he was baffled by a disappointing absence of results and an almost total lack of response. The chariot wheels dragged; there were no signs of an awakening; the indifferent remained sunk in their indifference. But one day the thought gripped him: "There was a reason why, when the apostles preached, they succeeded, and I will find it out if it is to be found out." That was sound strategy, and it had an immediate reward. It would be well for us if a similar experience should drive us back to the New Testament, to search for the secret of the first generation of preachers of the Word. What was this message which consumed these men like a flame, and through them kindled the world?
It is worth noticing, to begin with, what it was not. It was not a theory or an idea. It was not something they had arrived at by the processes of their own thought and research. It was neither an argument with paganism, nor a panegyric on brotherhood; neither ethical exhortation, nor religious edification; neither mystical experience, nor spiritual uplift. It was not even a reproduction of the Sermon on the Mount; nor was it an account of their subjective reaction to the teaching and example of their Lord,
In Its essence, it was none of these things. Doubtless it included some of them, but basically it was quite different. It was the announcement of certain concrete facts of history, the heralding of real, objective events. Its keynote was, "That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you." Declaration, not debate, was its characteristic attitude. The driving-force of the early Christian mission was not propaganda of beautiful ideals of the brotherhood of man; it was proclamation of the mighty acts of God.
What were these historic events thus heralded far and wide? There were two events, which in reality were not two but one. "Christ died for our sins." That was fundamental. At the very heart of the apostles' message stood the divine redemptive deed on Calvary. But this literally crucial event was never in their preaching isolated from the other which crowned and completed it, forming as it were the keystone of the arch. In the terse language of the Book of Acts, they preached "Jesus and the Resurrection." "So we preach," wrote Paul summarily to the Corinthians, "and so ye believed." It is worth remembering that when towards the end he was indicted before Festus and Agrippa, it was this unceasing witness to the Resurrection which formed the major count in the charge his accusers brought against him. All the trouble centred in "one Jesus, which was dead, whom Paul affirmed to be alive." In other words, the Resurrection—so far from being dragged in or tacked on to the Gospel of the Cross—was implicit in every word the preachers spoke.
But they went further. For they declared that in these two shattering events, now seen to be one, the Kingdom of God had broken in with power. Its consummation still lay out of sight, waiting for the fulness of the time and the completion of the purposes of God; but the new epoch foretold by the prophets had actually dawned. From the realm of the invisible beyond, the one far-off divine event had suddenly projected itself into history. What had formerly been pure eschatology was there before their eyes: the supernatural made visible, the Word made flesh. No longer were they dreaming of the Kingdom age: they were living in it. It had arrived. This was the essential crisis of the hour.
They went still further. The death and the resurrection of Jesus, they said, were nothing less than God in omnipotent action. What assailed the crowds in the streets of Jerusalem at Pentecost was no abstract scheme of salvation; nor was it the story of a spiritual genius who had gone about continually doing good, uttering beautiful thoughts about the divine Fatherhood and the whole duty of man, and founding a new religion. It was the stupendous tidings, dwarfing all other facts whatever, that the sovereign Power of the universe had cleft history asunder, travelling in the greatness of His strength, mighty to save, "We do hear them speak in our tongues," they cried, "the wonderful works of God." This was the apostolic theme. This was the characteristic kerygma of the Church. And its power was irresistible.
I have dwelt on this, because it bears so directly on the contemporary situation and on our own work as preachers. There is an extraordinary amount of vagueness, even among enlightened people, as to what Christianity really is. One recalls a striking passage in Galsworthy where Jolyon and his son are discussing things together and the talk turns to religion. "'Do you believe in God, Dad? I've never known 'What do you mean by God?' he said; 'there are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle—one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man—naturally one believes in That.' 'I see. That leaves out Christ, doesn't it?' Jolyon stared. Christ, the link between those two ideas! Out of the mouths of babes!" But you will find to-day that, even where Christ is brought in, the vagueness is apt to persist; and in many quarters there are only the haziest notions of what it means to be a Christian, The Gospel is regarded as a codification of human ideals and aspirations; religious instruction means teaching the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount; Jesus is the noblest pattern of the good life. This, it is assumed, is basic Christianity: anything which goes beyond it is "sectarian theology," mere debatable theory. What this view fails utterly to realize is that the Christian religion is not primarily a discussion of desirable human virtues and qualities—not that at all—but a message about God: not a summary of the ways men ought to act in an ideal society, but an account of the way in which God has acted in history decisively and for ever.
There can be no doubt that for this prevalent vagueness the Church itself must accept some share of the blame. Too often we have wandered away from our true centre. Perhaps almost unconsciously we have shifted the emphasis from where the apostles put it. We have become entangled in side-issues. We have concentrated too little on the primal verities of the faith, too much on what Phillips Brooks once called the bric-à-brac of theology" Do not misunderstand me. I am not arguing against detailed instruction in the implications of our holy religion for life and character and conduct. On the contrary, I believe that an interpretation of the Gospel in terms of its ethical, social and economic challenge is to-day an urgent necessity. Dr. L. P. Jacks was entirely right to remind us that "every truth that religion announces passes insensibly into a command. Its indicatives are veiled imperatives." But what I am concerned to assert is that in the Christian religion the indicatives are basic and fundamental And nothing could be more marrowless and stultified and futile than the preaching which is for ever exhorting "Thus and thus you must act" and neglecting the one thing which essentially makes Christianity: "Thus has God acted, once and for all."
Of Him that brought salvation down,
By meekness called thy Son:
Thou that stupendous truth believed;
And now the matchless deed's achieved,
Determined, darred, and done.
Surely it is a great thing to realize that, just as the early Church knew itself commissioned for something far more vital and incisive than vague talk about topical problems, far more dynamic and explosive than the propagating of interesting ideas or the fostering of a new type of piety, so you are being sent forth to-day to thrust God upon men, to announce that in the fact of Christ God has bridged the gulf between two worlds, has shattered the massive tyranny of the powers of darkness, has changed radically and for ever the human prospect and the total aspect of the world, and brought life and immortality to light! Here is no academic speculation or cold, insipid moralizing; here is no dull collection of views and impressions, schemes and theories; here is a Gospel, able to bind up the broken-hearted, proclaim deliverance to the captives, and bid a distracted world stand still and see the glory of the coming of the Lord.
How foolish, then, the clamour for non-doctrinal preaching! And how desperately you will impoverish your ministry if you yield to that demand! The underlying assumption is, of course, that doctrine is dull: a perfectly absurd misapprehension. It is indeed lamentably true that the sublimest doctrine can be treated in a way that will reduce the average congregation to leaden apathy and boredom. "Buy a theological barrel-organ, brethren," growled Spurgeon scathingly, "with five tunes accurately adjusted!" John Keats complained that "Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, unweave a rainbow"; and he might have added that there is a formal type of preaching which all too successfully clips the wings of wonder and unweaves the rainbow arch of the salvation of God. But to maintain that doctrine, as such, is necessarily a dull affair is simply a confession of ignorance or downright spiritual deficiency. Only a crass blindness could fail to see that such a truth as that presented in the sentence "The Word was made flesh" is overpoweringly dramatic in itself and utterly revolutionary in its consequences. "If this is dull" exclaims Dorothy Sayers, "then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to be called exciting?"
This, I believe, is the true answer to the anxiety which haunts many a young minister at the outset of his work, the anxiety lest he may exhaust the subject-matter of the faith he has to preach long before his course is run. Take comfort! Enshrined at the heart of the faith are facts of such perennial vitality and incalculable force that you will never, to your dying day, tell more than a fraction of the truth that God has blazed across your sky. "We preach always Him," declared Luther, "the true God and man. This may seem a limited and monotonous subject, likely to be soon exhausted, but we are never at the end of it." Why should you imagine that the stimulating atmosphere of expectation which surrounds you at the opening of your ministry must inevitably give way sooner or later to a sultry air of tedious disenchantment? Does spring, regularly returning year by year, ever become monotonous? Is not its wonder as fresh and unspoilt still as when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy? And are God's mighty acts in history and redemption less enthralling than His mighty acts in nature? Drop dogma from your preaching, and for a brief time you may titillate the fancy of the superficial, and have them talking about your cleverness; but that type of ministry wears out speedily, and garners no spiritual harvest in the end. Therefore settle it with your own souls now that, whatever else you may do or leave undone, you will preach in season and out of season God's redemptive deed in Christ. This is the one inexhaustible theme. "We may call that doctrine exhilarating," writes Dorothy Sayers again, "or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all." I am not counselling you to keep harping on one string, for variety is the very breath of life in preaching. I am insisting on what is paradoxical but true—that the more resolutely and stubbornly you refuse to be deflected from the one decisive theme, the greater the variety you will achieve; while the more you seek variety by wandering from your centre, the faster the descent to bathos and monotony. God's deed in Christ touches life at every point. It speaks to every aspect of the human predicament. It stretches all horizons inimitably. It bursts through the narrow orbit of habitual thought-forms, hackneyed social attitudes, doctrinal predilections. There is no plummet that can sound this ocean's depth, no yard-stick that can measure the length and breadth of this Jerusalem. And the surest way to keep your ministry living and vigorous and immune from the blight of spiritual lassitude and drudgery is to draw continually upon the unsearchable riches which in Christian doctrine are lying to your hand; and to remember that you—no less than the New Testament preachers—are commissioned for the purpose of kerygma the proclamation of news, the heralding of the wonderful works of God.
II
Now here we come in sight of that much-debated question: What is the relationship between preaching and worship? You are doubtless aware that there exists to-day a tendency to set preaching and worship in opposition. According to this view, the prayers and praises of the sanctuary, and the celebration of the Sacraments, are divine, in the sense that there we have direct touch with God; whereas preaching is merely human, as representing reflections, appeals and exhortations issuing from the mind of man. It is characteristic of this attitude to disparage preaching, to regret that the sermon should ever have come to hold so important a place in the services of the House of Prayer, and even to hint that the position it occupies is a subtle form of selfishness, detracting from the glory of God. No doubt this view is largely to be explained as a reaction from the disgraceful custom of regarding prayers and praises as mere "preliminaries" to something more important to follow: a horrid caricature of true worship, which to-day would be almost universally repudiated. But surely it is deplorable that some, going to the opposite extreme, should deny to preaching any integral place in the context of the act of worship, or at best should tolerate it as an intrusion, regrettable but inevitable, of the human element into what is essentially divine. The ominous thing about such an attitude is the complete misunderstanding it betrays, not only of the preacher's function, but even of the nature of the Christian faith. If Christianity were the formulation of a body of human ideals; if the pulpit were a public platform for the dissemination of personal opinions or the propagation of a party programme; if the preacher were a kind of religious commentator on current events; if his main function were to explore the contemporary situation and to diagnose the malady of society; if the sermon were a literary lecture, a medicinal dose of psychological uplift, or a vehicle for the giving of good advice—the distinction between preaching and worship would be justified. But, in fact, that distinction is based either on a seriously defective understanding of the Gospel itself, or on a refusal to realize what happens when the Gospel is truly preached. If Christianity is indeed the revelation of God, and not the research of man; if preaching is the proclamation of a message which has come not merely through human lips, but out from the deeps of the eternal; if the preacher is sent (in St. Paul's expressive phrase) to "placard" Christ, to declare a Word which is not his own, because it Is the Word of God Incarnate—it follows that the attempt to segregate preaching from worship is fundamentally false. The fact is that the sermon is divinely intended to be one of those high places of the spirit where men and women grow piercingly aware of the eternal, and where a worshipping congregation—forgetting all about the preacher—sees "no man, save Jesus only," And ours must have been a singularly barren and unfortunate experience if we have never, when sitting in church listening to the preaching of the Word, been moved to adoration, never seen the angels ascending and descending on the ladder linking Bethel to the world unseen, and never whispered to ourselves, "This is none other but the house of God, this is the gate of heaven"
In this connection, I would recall to your minds the famous passage in Robert Wodrow's Analecta where an English merchant of three hundred years ago describes to his friends in London certain preachers he had heard during a business visit to Scotland. At St. Andrews he had listened to Robert Blair. "That man," he said, "showed me the majesty of God." Afterwards he had heard "a little fair man" preach—this was Samuel Rutherford: "and that man showed me the loveliness of Christ." Then at Irvine he had heard a discourse by "a well-favoured, proper old man"—David Dickson: "and that man showed me all my heart. " These, surely, are the supreme functions of preaching in every age. And if these things are happening, if in a congregation one soul here and another there may be receiving, as the sermon proceeds, some vision of the majesty of God, some glimpse of the loveliness of Christ, some revelation of personal need beneath the searchlight of the Spirit, is the ministry of the Word to be minimized, or regarded as less divine, more doubtfully devotional, than other parts of the service? Is not such preaching worship?
The late Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William Temple, once propounded a thesis which, he admitted, many people would feel to be outrageous and fantastic. "This world, " he said, "can be saved from political chaos and collapse by one thing only, and that is worship." Certainly, as it stands, that dictum may look eccentric and absurd. But Dr. Temple proceeded to define what worship is, (Notice how significantly the three elements enshrined in Wodrow's story make here their reappearance.) "To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God." But are not these precisely the aims and ends of all genuine preaching? And that being so, is not the supposed antithesis between the sermon and the devotions of the sanctuary again discovered to be thoroughly misleading and untenable? Is not true preaching worship?
I grant you that such a conception of the preacher's task may well overwhelm us with a sense of personal inadequacy and unworthiness. But no lower conception can do justice to the stupendous theme of which we are the heralds. Moreover, the very recognition of preaching as an integral part of worship will save us from many errors. It will restrain us from using the pulpit for the expression of views, preferences and prejudices which are purely personal and subjective. "The pulpit" wrote Bernard Manning, "is no more the minister's than the communion table is his." It will make us resolute to eliminate from our preaching everything that is cheap and showy and meretricious. It will give us a salutary horror of flashy rhetoric, slovenly informality and elegant frippery. It will arm us against the vulgarity of a self-conscious exhibitionism. "No man," declared James Denney, "can give at once the impressions that he himself is clever and that Jesus Christ is mighty to save." Above all, it will inspire us to make our preaching "a living sacrifice, which is our reasonable service." It will drive us to our knees. It will baptize every sermon in the spirit of importunate prayer. Then preaching will be worship indeed.
III
We have seen that the apostolic kerygma which at the first carried the Gospel like fire across the world centred in two historic events. To the supreme facts of the Cross and the Resurrection, which are really not two but one, our preaching must ever return, and from them it must continually derive fresh strength and urgency and inspiration.
"I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me." There is no magnetism like that. Show men Calvary "towering o'er the wrecks of time," and you will not preach in vain. Incomparably the greatest service you can ever perform for those committed to your charge is to thrust the Cross before their eyes. Leave this out, and all your other appeals and exhortations will be as nothing: empty, useless, unsubstantial words. Set this at the centre, and it will prove itself to be, in the twentieth century as in the first, the power of God unto salvation.
Now the herald of the Cross has a twofold task. He must present his theme in a double setting. On the one hand, he must preach the Cross in the context of the world's suffering. Your own congregation will be a microcosm of humanity; and for many of those to whom you minister, the dark mystery which has haunted the sons of men from the dawn of time will be no abstract, impersonal problem to be academically explained, but a grim reality to be faced and fought. Be very clear about this, that what men and women need, face to face with the mystery of pain and trouble and tragedy, is not a solution that will satisfy the intellect, not that primarily at any rate, but a force that will stabilize the soul; not a convincing and coercive argument as to the origins of evil or the reasons why such suffering is permitted on the earth, but a power that will enable them to "stand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand": in short, not an explanation, but a victory.
Right down in the heart of this situation you are to set the Cross. You may, indeed, lead up to the great light that breaks from Calvary by calling attention to certain gleams that pierce the darkness of the way. For example, you will surely be constrained to show that much of what men suffer is but the other side, the necessary correlative, of the immense gain and privilege of living in a world where law and not caprice holds sway; that those who accept the assets of corporate membership in the human family must also be prepared to accept its liabilities; that any system which guaranteed preferential treatment to the righteous and immunity from trouble to the unoffending would in point of fact corrupt the very ethic that it seemed to stablish and support; that in any case man demands danger, and thrives on hazard, and wants no lotus-land of ghastly ease; above all, that it is possible to use trouble creatively, transmuting pain into power and sorrow into love, so that in the end such trouble positively adds on to life's total experience, instead of negatively subtracting from it. All this may rightly enter into the message by which you seek to reinforce faith and to rally the courage in the depths of sorely burdened hearts. Nor will you lack vivid illustration of the thrilling truth that the worst sufferings may be the raw material of character and Christlike loveliness of soul.
Yet I should pity the man who has to stand and face a congregation with no surer word than that. And I would implore you not to mock the bitterness of human hearts with facile phrases about the nobility of pain, nor to invade with well-meaning platitudes the holy ground where angels fear to tread. There are experiences—desolating experiences of calamity, of wrecked homes and shattered dreams, of frantic pain, of the tragic and apparently senseless waste of precious lives—in the face of which the most rational and philosophical interpretation and even the best theistic theories must sound hollow and irrelevant. It were better, if there is no clearer light to give, to be silent altogether in the presence of the ultimate mystery; or else to leave with those who suffer the immeasurably poignant message of one who died some twenty years before Christ was born: "O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem."
But the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than Vergil when he penned that mighty line. For we have seen the Cross. We have found the clue to the enigma. Long ago there was a prophet who, bewildered by the ways of Providence and appalled by the grim and harrowing aspect of the world, took counsel with his soul and made a high resolve: "I will stand upon my watch-tower, and set me upon the outlook-turret, and will watch to see what He will say unto me" And a great part of our task as preachers is to help others, battered and besieged by the assaults of doubt, to climb to that high rampart above the dust and smoke and tumult, the watch-tower of Mount Calvary. For there the new perspective is given which makes men more than conquerors. None of our poor human explanations of life's dark mystery can heal the hurt of baffled and tormented souls. Nothing can suffice but this—to see Love Incarnate taking upon itself the very worst that suffering and evil can do upon the earth, God going into action once for all against the powers of darkness, Christ reigning from the deadly tree, and making His victory there the pledge and the assurance for all the sons of men.
Preach the Cross in the context of the world's suffering, and men will learn, not only that Christ is with them in the dark valley, God "afflicted in all their affliction" gathering up their distress and desolation into His own eternal heart—not only that, though that indeed, even if there were no more to be said, would be a mighty reinforcement: they will learn this other great thing, that God in His sovereign love still leads captivity captive, still transforms the wrecking circumstances of life into means of grace, the dark places into a Holy of Holies, and the thorns that pierce into a crown of glory. For the Cross means that even when things are at their worst, even when life does not bear thinking about, God is master of the situation still, and nothing can spoil His final pattern or defeat His purpose of love.
I would point out that this is a Gospel you can preach without any fear of sentimentalism. There is always a danger that the longing to help the troubled and to bind up the broken-hearted may lead to a preaching of the wrong kind of comfort. There is a type of consolation which tends to romanticize the burden of the mystery, and to interpose religion as a cushion against the blows of fate. Beware of all such expedients: they are far removed from what the New Testament means by comfort. They serve only to hypnotize the troubled mind and to enervate the soul; and in the end they reduce efficiency for the battle of life. "The noblest specimen in existence" according to Principal W. M. Macgregor, "of the preaching of consolation is found in the First Epistle of Peter "True Gospel comfort never plays down to natural weakness: it lifts up to supernatural strength. There is nothing enfeebling or demoralizing about it, no flying to the drug of fantasy: it is essentially virile, bracing, reinforcing. And what gives it this character, preserving it from the risk of sentimentalism, is the Cross at the centre of it. In the last resort, the human heart is too big to find its comfort in any soothing anodyne of consolatory words. There is no comfort short of victory. And it is this, nothing less, that the preacher of the Gospel is empowered to offer to all who turn their faces to the Cross—the comfort of mastering every dark situation, and triumphing in every tribulation, through the grace of Him who conquered there.
IV
But the herald of the Cross has a further task. He must present his theme, not only in the setting of human suffering, but also in the context of the world's sin. He will not allow any superficial appearances of complacence to deceive him. For he knows that all history is the record of man's age-long desperate endeavour to answer the dilemma of moral failure and defeat. He knows that God is sending him to people wrestling with the same stubborn predicament. He knows the secret struggles, frustrations and contradictions of his own soul. He dare not on this matter be hesitant or ambiguous. His preaching will never really touch a single heart unless it brings some sure word about sin and its forgiveness.
There have been, indeed, certain classical answers to the dilemma, to which men cling pathetically even to-day. There is the answer of the Jew: over against the guilt and power of sin, the Jew sets the sacrificial system and the efficacy of an elaborate cult. There is the answer of the Greek: it was characteristic of the Greek mind, with its double allegiance to art and philosophy, that it believed man could work out his own salvation aesthetically and intellectually. There is the answer of the Roman: law and order would redeem the race from disintegration, moralism and disciplined conduct would guarantee the soul. These three historic answers to the human dilemma have made their way right down the centuries, resurrecting themselves in every new generation. Multitudes of our fellow-men—and some of those to whom you will preach—have no other creed to-day. Religious observance and the due performance of ritual acts, the development of culture and the application of logic and intelligence, the natural virtues of the human heart and the attention to good works—what more, it is asked, does man require for his deliverance? But our age, perhaps more than any of its predecessors, is being visited by doubts. It suspects that the malady is too radical to yield to any of these expedients. It has had such an appalling insight into what the apostle called "the mystery of iniquity" that its poise and confidence have been irreparably disturbed. It dare not face a future in which man is his own redeemer.
Wherefore God be thanked that right down in the heart of that situation you can set the Cross! Rising out of the midnight of man's despair, smiting the darkness like a sudden dawn, comes the solving word, the divine decisive deed; and all the classic answers of Jew and Greek and Roman fade away before the glory of it.
Now when you set the Cross in the context of the world's sin, there will be three main notes in your preaching.
You will preach the Cross, first, as Revelation. Where else does the terrible truth about sin stand so nakedly revealed as at the place where it crucifies the Son of God? All the habitual rationalizations which reduce sin to ignorance, or biological maladjustment, a thing to be cured by education, social planning or psychological suggestion, are seen at Calvary to be bland distortions of the truth. Let your preaching of the Cross drive home the fact that the same sins which put Christ there are rampant in the world to-day; that it was no monstrous eruption of iniquity that perpetrated the deed of Calvary, but familiar, common things like pride and cowardice and apathy and self-seeking which make their dwelling in the hearts of all; and that these things, rooted in our own lives, working themselves out eventually on the scale of society and gathering themselves up into the collective evil of the world, still crucify the Lord of glory. "Why persecutest thou Me?"
Moreover, you will hold up the Cross as a revelation, not only of the hatefulness of sin, but also of the divine judgment upon it. For on the day when Christ died at its hands, rather than submit or come to terms, He showed once for all what God's mind is about sin to all eternity. Here the divine uncompromising antagonism was irrevocably proclaimed. No way of dealing with sin which blurred the moral issue could be tolerated; for otherwise the chaos on the earth, so far from being removed, would have been intensified, and there would now have been added to it chaos in heaven as well. Before sin could be overcome, it must be judged. And Christ, by resisting it unto blood, has pronounced its utter condemnation. God has judged it for ever.
But greatest of all the paradoxes you will have to preach is this—that the same event which unveils evil in its terrifying, demonic malignity reveals also invincible love. That God should have taken the most awful triumph of naked, unmitigated iniquity, and made precisely that the vehicle for the supreme revelation of Himself—here surely is a marvel that beggars description: here is the ultimate hope of our sin-tormented world. You do not preach the Cross aright until you make men hear, on the lips of the Crucified, such words as Joseph spoke to his betrayers: "So now it was not you who sent me hither, but God." Call the Cross the nefarious deed of Annas, Caiaphas and Pilate, call it the supreme revelation of the inmost essence of sin, call it the act of our own contemporary society or (in Pauline phrase) of "the potentates of the dark present, the spirit-forces of evil"—and you will tell the truth, but not the whole truth, not the final and decisive truth. Call it the act of God, call it the mightiest of all His mighty acts, call it the point in history where love divine was supremely master of the situation—and the deeper truth will begin to emerge. You will be helping men to realize that the most desperate chaos sin can perpetrate to-day is not too grim for this amazing love to handle and transform. And through your preaching—please God—they will understand in a new and living way the magnificent outburst of the apostle: "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?"
This leads me to the second note in your preaching of the Cross. Preach it as Victory. If you speak of Calvary only in terms of revelation, you may be gaining the approval of the opponents of a "transactional theology," but you are certainly diluting disastrously the faith of the New Testament. No Pentecost will ever attend a ministry which boggles at the implications of Christ's cry upon the Cross, "It is finished!" For something happened then which settled the issue for ever. "Once and for all"—that is the authentic trumpet-note of apostolic religion. "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." That is decisive, After Calvary, it can never be midnight again. Long and hard may be the campaign: for "we wrestle against principalities and powers." But we know now that we are fighting a defeated enemy. "Christ died for our sins," says Peter in his epistle, "the just for the unjust, once for all." "In that He died," writes Paul to the Romans, "He died for sin, once for all." "He has appeared," declares the epistle to the Hebrews, "once for all to abolish sin by the sacrifice of Himself." By all means, drop the word "transaction" if you please: no doubt the term has been abused. But do not mutilate the Gospel of the Cross by reducing it to a doctrine of subjective influence. Preach the Cross as victory. Here where the very greatness of the apparent triumph of iniquity was its own irrevocable defeat; here where evil once for all has shot its bolt, and its deadly weapon is turned against itself; here where eternal love is seen asserting its sovereignty, not just in spite of the tragic mystery of sin, but—as by a master-stroke of divine strategy—precisely through that mystery—here is the ground of all our hope. Here the human prospect has been transfigured radically and for ever.
Preach the Cross, then, as God's all-sufficient answer to man's perpetual question, "How can I win salvation? How can I achieve self-conquest?" There are people in all our congregations to-day asking that question, just as Saul of Tarsus asked it in the lecture-room of Gamaliel, as Luther asked it in the monastery at Erfurt, as John Wesley asked it in the Holy Club at Oxford. Laboriously these men hewed out (to use Jeremiah's figure) their broken cisterns, toiling to store up their good works and creditable achievements, their charities, austerities and penances. But for Saul and Luther and Wesley the day came when their question "How shall I win salvation?" was answered from the throne of God. And the answer was, "You can't! Take it at the Cross for nothing, or not at all" "I have gotten me Christ," cried Donald Cargill in the hour of his execution, "and Christ hath gotten me the victory!"
But it is the whole human situation, not simply the plight of the individual, which the Cross transforms. Let no one, listening to your preaching, have any doubt that when we Christians say that the dark demonic powers which leave their dreadful trail of devastation across the world are ultimately less powerful than Jesus, we really mean it—just as the early disciples meant it when they declared that Christ had raided the realm of Satan and broken the fast-bound chains of hell. If there are professing Christians to-day who do not see the relevance of the Gospel to the desperate situation of this tortured world, it can only be because there is still a veil upon their hearts when they stand at Calvary. It is for you to show them the Cross as it truly is—Christ in action, victor over death, vanquisher of the demons, going forth conquering and to conquer.
Finally, your preaching of the Cross, having struck the notes of Revelation and Victory, will include the note of Challenge. Our own hearts bear witness that there is nothing like the Cross of Jesus to shame our selfishness, to abase our pride of intellect, to rebuke our false ambitions, and to bring to birth within us a passionate longing that our lives might reveal something of the spirit which shone so gloriously in His, No doubt, as Bernard Manning has argued, it is a weakness of Cardinal Newman's great hymn "Praise to the Holiest in the height" that after the strong, pungent theology of the earlier verses the penultimate stanza descends to anti-climax—"humanitarian tinkling," Manning calls it:
And in the garden secretly,
And on the Cross on high.
Should teach His brethren, and inspire
To suffer and to die.
The sacrifice of the God-Man was infinitely more, as we have seen, than an example of gallantry and fortitude, a lesson to humanity how to suffer and die. Nevertheless, the element of challenge persists: and in every soul out of which the sense of honour and chivalry has not died the Cross lets loose a cleansing tide of penitence and hope, and creates a motive stronger even than the instinct of self-preservation. Lead men straight to Calvary, if you would bind them to Christ's allegiance with the unbreakable fetters which alone give perfect freedom. "He died for us that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him."
V
But now let me raise a question. What is the most characteristic word of the Christian religion? Suppose you were asked to single out one word to carry and convey the cardinal truth of the Gospel, what word would you choose? I suggest it would have to be the word Resurrection, That is what Christianity essentially is—a religion of Resurrection. Go back and listen to the preachers of the early Church. They never pointed men to the Cross without showing them the Resurrection light breaking behind it. Even when, like Paul, they "determined to know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified" what gave their preaching such grip and converting power was the testimony, implicit in every word, that this same Jesus was alive, and present, and at work in the world. That was the tremendous truth that coloured and conditioned all their thinking. It did not merely give a distinctive accent to their preaching: it throbbed through every word they said. How could it be otherwise? Christ risen and alive was for them the one dominating reality of life and the very centre of the universe. Paul might have put things even more strongly than he did to the Corinthians. "If Christ be not risen," he declared, "then is our preaching vain." He might have added that, without the Resurrection, the voice of the Christian preacher would never have been heard in the land. There was no Christian congregation in that early age which did not recognize itself to be a community of the Resurrection: and there is no hope of revival in the Church to-day until that basic, glorious truth is reasserted and comes back into its own. Far too often we have been inclined to regard the Resurrection as an epilogue to the Gospel, an addendum to the scheme of salvation, a codicil to the divine last will and testament: thereby betraying not only a deficient historic perspective and a singular disregard of the whole tenor of the New Testament, but also a failure in spiritual understanding and an insufficient hold upon the great verities of the faith. This is no appendix to the faith. This is the faith. He is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. To preach this is your life-work: and there is no Gospel without it.
Now here let me stress the urgency of showing forth the Resurrection in its dynamic relevance to world-history. The trouble is that many good, devout people have not yet begun to grasp the full range and sweep of the Easter Gospel. Their conception of it is much too narrow and individualistic, too remote from the struggles of humanity. To them the Resurrection means only the escape of Jesus from the grave, the return of the Master to His disciples, the lovely stories of His meetings with Mary, with Peter, with Thomas, with the two men on the Emmaus road. They have not gone beyond that, nor seen this event related to the perpetual conflict of which history is the arena—the conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, God and the demons. Therefore I would urge you to preach the Resurrection as the one fact above all others which vitally concerns, not only the life of the individual Christian, but the entire human scene and the destiny of the race. It is the break-through of the eternal order into this world of suffering and confusion and sin and death. It is much more than the dramatic reanimation of One who had died: it is the vindication of eternal righteousness, the declaration that the heart of the universe is spiritual. It is the Kingdom of God made visible. No wonder Paul, meeting the risen Christ outside Damascus, suddenly fell blinded to the earth! It was no glare of Syrian sunshine that had dazzled him. The man had seen, for one tremendous, piercing moment, the unveiled purpose of God.
Can it be right, then, when our people come up to God's House on Easter morning, that we should treat them to reflections on the reawakening of the earth in springtime, or to a réchauffé of the arguments for immortality? It is a desolating corruption of the Resurrection Gospel to regard it merely as one more argument for individual survival. The human heart indeed cries out for light beyond the grave. All through your ministry you will hear that cry; and you will seek, God helping you, to answer it. Nor can you ever point to any light more clear or steady or reassuring than that which shines from the empty tomb of Jesus. But I do beseech you to let men see the Easter hope destroying not only the fear of death, but every other fear besides, and very specially the fear of the principalities and powers and wicked forces that corrupt human nature and fill the earth with ruin. I beg you to swing the Resurrection light not only over the dim shadows of the narrow grave, but over the thick darkness of the whole wide world. For the Resurrection was, and is, the sign of God's unshakable determination to make Christ Lord of all. The concentrated might of arrogant iniquity is puny and pathetic and impotent against the power that took Jesus out of the grave, This was the conviction which at the first launched Christianity like a thunderbolt upon the world, and made its ambassadors superbly fearless. This is the certainty which burns undimmed in every truly Christian heart to-day. The power which went into action in the raising again of Jesus will never, through the darkest of dark ages, fail nor be discouraged: one day it will resurrect the world. "This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes."
But there is a further fact which makes the high calling of the preacher of the Resurrection immeasurably thrilling and momentous, and it is this. Christ, being raised from the dead, is an abiding presence for ever; and you, the preachers of the Resurrection, are not only the heralds of a historic event, but also the mediators of a living presence. This is no exaggerated cliché of a nebulous mysticism: it is a strictly accurate, unrhetorical statement of fact. You remember Wordsworth's plaintive cry to the shade of Milton, whose mighty voice had long since ceased to speak:
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters.
But if men, looking out upon the stricken human scene to-day, are fain to cry, "Christ, Thou shouldst be living at this hour: the world hath need of Thee!"—back comes the answer with a thousand trumpets in it, "Should be? He is!" "I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore." And you, the commissioned servants of the Lord of the Resurrection, are to tell men that the same Jesus who was with Latimer and Ridley in the fire, with Margaret Wilson tied to a stake on the Solway Sands, with Bunyan in prison, with Gordon in Khartoum, with Shackleton on the great ice-barrier, with Paul in the wilds of Asia, with John in the convict-mines of Patmos, with Peter in the Roman arena—that this same Jesus still travels through the world in the greatness of His strength, mighty to save, still meets the troubled heart with the divine promise, "Lo, as I was with all those others, so will I be with thee!" Nothing else your ministry may achieve will be of much account unless you show men that Christ, and get their eyes open to the real presence of the risen Lord. If in the grace of God you can do that, they will bless you for it, and the power of the Spirit will go through the Church again; and hearts will burn with that authentic fire without which all altars are cold and all worship dead.
Need I add that the first essential is that your own life should be possessed utterly by the truth and the glory of the Resurrection Gospel? Perhaps the vitalizing of many a ministry waits upon some such experience as that which came to R. W. Dale. The story is familiar how one day when he was engaged upon writing an Easter sermon for his people the reality of the all-but-incredible fact broke in upon him as it had never done before. "Christ is alive" he found himself crying, "alive! Living as really as I myself am! It came upon me as a burst .of sudden glory. Christ is living! My people shall know it." It may not come to us—the great heart-piercing conviction—in any such dramatic way: but if not, then come in some more secret way it must, or we have no awakening Gospel to preach. Pray God that the truth of the Resurrection may smite you with its glory, and go through your mind and spirit with its consuming flame! Only so will you be able to lead others out of the torpor of vague half-belief to the vitality of passionate conviction. John Keats said of his poem Lamia that it had "that sort of fire in it that must take hold of people some way"; and of Christian preaching the same claim should be true. Too often in our churches we are still on the wrong side of Easter. We are like the groping, fumbling disciples between Good Friday and the Resurrection, How our congregations would worship, with what joy and eagerness and abandon the sacrifice of praise would rise to God, if all worshippers knew themselves in very truth to be sons and daughters of the Resurrection!
Alfred Noyes has a striking poem. The Lord of Misrule which confronts us with the challenging thought that if the facts of our holy religion and our supernatural faith no longer move us to exultation, then the pagan world itself will rise up and condemn us—that pagan world which revels in the lesser gifts of nature. The poem is based on the tradition reported by an old Puritan writer that "on May-days the wild heads of the parish would choose a Lord of Misrule, whom they would follow even into the Church, though the minister were at prayer or preaching, dancing and swinging their may-boughs about."
Come up, come in with streamers!
Come in, with boughs of may!
Now by the gold upon your toe
You walked the primrose way.
Come up, with white and crimson!
O, shake your bells and sing;
Let the porch bend, the pillars bow,
Before our Lord, the Spring!
Then into the pulpit itself, where a few moments before the preacher had been droning his drowsy flock to sleep, the Lord of Misrule pushes his way, and faces the congregation:
"You chatter in Church like jackdaws,
Words that would wake the dead,
Were there one breath of life in you,
One drop of blood," he said.
Finally, the organ itself takes up the challenge:
'Come up with blood-red streamers.'
The reeds began the strain.
The vox humana pealed on high,
'The spring is risen again!'
The vox angelica replied—"The shadows flee away!
Our house-beams were of cedar. Come in, with boughs of may!'
The diapason deepened it—'Before the darkness fall,
We tell you He is risen again!
Our God hath burst His prison again!
The Lord of Life is risen again; and Love is Lord of all.'
So out of the mouth of paganism itself our dull loss of wonder is judged and our half-belief stands condemned. For if the rebirth of nature is a theme for shouts of joy, how much more the rising from the dead of a Saviour God! And if we, the children of the Resurrection, should hold our peace, would not the stones immediately cry out?
Make it, then, the goal of your endeavour to help others to discover, or to rediscover, the magnificence of their Christian heritage. The splendour of the Resurrection Gospel baffles speech, and breaks through language and escapes. But there is a Spirit who will take our poor, faltering, stammering words, and will work even through these to smite men with the glory of Christ's rising.
VI
One point remains. Apostolic preaching, as we have already noted, set forth the facts of the Cross and the Resurrection in their organic relationship to the Kingdom of God. In these supreme events, it declared, the Kingdom, long dreamt of and foretold, had now appeared. By this invasion of the supernatural into human experience all life's issues were immeasurably deepened, and the sense of urgency and crisis dramatically intensified. The new era of the Spirit had broken in with power. Until we recapture and restore this apostolic perspective and emphasis, our preaching will be maimed and crippled.
If the trumpet give an uncertain sound on this matter, the whole cause of the Kingdom will suffer. And at no point has there been greater confusion, even amongst Christians. Some have thought of the Kingdom of God as a New Jerusalem for man to build. Some have postponed it to an indefinite future, a far-off divine event in which man has no part. Thus two opposing attitudes have emerged and come into collision: the activism of a thoroughgoing thisworldliness, and the quietism of a thoroughgoing otherworldliness. Your Gospel of the Kingdom must act as a corrective of both these distorted views. To those who stand for the former, it will say: "You are right to bear the world's injustices and oppressions upon your souls, and to go forth against these with the passion of crusaders. You are right to denounce a piety that talks incessantly to men about the bread of heaven, and never stirs a finger to give them bread for their bodies or employment for their energies or decent housing for their families. You are right to insist that if Christianity once turned the world upside down, it can do the same to-day. But you are wrong to disregard the one true source of all strong action and effective power. You are wrong to think the human demand can ever be satisfied with improved communities and garden cities. You are wrong to think that the best economic Paradise will ever still the tumult of a heart that goes crying out for ever for 'a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God'." On the other hand, to those who stand for a predominantly otherworldly quietism, your Gospel of the Kingdom will declare: "You are right to dwell in the secret place of the Most High. You are right to walk with God as pilgrims and sojourners here, looking beyond this transitory scene to the bliss of life eternal. You are right to believe that to God alone belong the Kingdom, the power, and the glory. But you are wrong to lock yourselves up in that secret place of devotion. You are wrong to reduce religion to an unethical, sentimental irrelevance. You are wrong if, in the presence of social misery and injustice, you do not see Christ's eyes blazing like a flame of fire, nor hear His voice, like a trumpet, crying 'I will have mercy, and not sacrifice!'"
It is not within the scope of these Lectures to discuss Christianity and the social order. This only I will say. Carlyle once wrote a letter to Emerson, warning him against a philosophy of spiritual aloofness. "Alas, it is so easy to screw one's self up into high and ever higher altitudes of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you, for me: but whither does it lead? Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, 'Be damned!' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you." So too, in your presentation of the great facts of faith, you must resolutely work out the ethical implications of the doctrines you preach. The suspicion that the Church of Christ lacks zeal for social righteousness can be terribly damaging. Nor can it be denied that too often in the past organized religion has tended to play for safety. As Phillips Brooks once put it: "The pillars of the Church are apt to be like the Pillars of Hercules, beyond which no man might sail." It is the function of economists, not of the pulpit, to work out plans of reconstruction. But it is emphatically the function of the pulpit to stab men broad awake to the terrible pity of Jesus, to expose their hearts to the constraint of that divine compassion which haloes the oppressed and the suffering and flames in judgment against every social wrong. Dr. J. S. Whale has put it forcefully and well: "Any present-day theology which has not a revolutionary sociology as part of its implicit logic is not truly Christian." There is no room for a preaching devoid of ethical directness and social passion, in a day when heaven's trumpets sound and the Son of God goes forth to war.
The conclusion of the matter, then, is this, that if you would keep your emphasis right, avoiding extremes on either side, you must continually be returning, in your preaching of the Kingdom, to the insight of the New Testament preachers. In, Jesus Christ, they declared, the great new age had broken through into history. It was really and actively present. Those who had tasted its power were living in a transformed world. But not yet was the divine purpose completely fulfilled. Not yet was the human burden of bodily weakness, frustration and death removed. And so, beyond the mighty acts of the Cross and the Resurrection, these men awaited the crowning verification. The drama of history would have a climax and a goal. God Himself would bring in His perfect Kingdom, and make Christ Lord of all.
These things are true. These we believe, and these we preach. We do not minimize the present, when we say Christ is coming again. On the contrary, It is just because we know the divine will must at last be regnant and supreme that we are passionately concerned that it should rule upon the earth here and now. Just because the future belongs to Christ, we preach that now is the accepted time, now is the critical hour for the assertion of His sovereignty in all the affairs of men, now is the day of salvation.
I have spoken to you of our theme as Christian ministers. Who can measure the responsibility of those who are heralds of such tidings? The late Bishop Gore used to give his final charge to candidates on the eve of their ordination in these impressive words: "To-morrow I shall say to you, wilt thou, wilt thou, wilt thou? But there will come a day to you when Another will say to you, hast thou, hast thou, hast thou?" God grant us unwavering fidelity to our high theme, lest we be ashamed to stand at last before the face of the Son of Man.