Sermons from the Latins/Sermon 49
Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost.
Religion and Religionism.
" Every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." — Luke xiv. II.
SYNOPSIS.
Ex. : I. The spirit and the letter. II. Origin of liturgy. III. Human tendency.
I. Phariseeism: i. Religious controversies. 2. Gods remonstrance. 3. Pharisees' practice.
II. Third command: 1. Pharisaic precepts. 2. Gloom of sinners. 3. Joy of saints.
III. Gospel incident: 1. Christ and His enemies. 2. In spirit and truth, The first places.
Per.: 1. Rational Sabbath. 2. No monopoly in heaven. 3. Substance and accident.
SERMON.
Brethren, in the spiritual history of mankind two phases of religion continually present themselves: the spirit and the letter, interior sanctification and empty externalism, in a word, religion and religionism. No student of Scripture can doubt for a moment that the outward forms of religion have their place and their usefulness in the economy of salvation, for from the earliest times they have been established and insisted upon by God Himself. That God prescribed a ritual at all, was due, no doubt, to the exigencies of the occasion, for man's material and social nature would never have been content with worshipping the Deity in spirit alone, but would have irresistibly impelled him to the building up of a code of ceremonies as unworthy of their high purpose as were the rites of Paganism. This craving for ritualism is evidenced even to-day, no less in the powerful influence of our grand Catholic functions over the minds and hearts of the faithful, than in the elaborate rituals of secret and semi-religious societies; and the absence of such was one of the many weak points in primitive Protestantism. But the world's tendency has ever been to convert the means into an end, to be content with the outward form to the neglect of interior sanctification, to divorce religion and morality, to so exaggerate the importance of creeds and rites and ceremonies as to lose sight in whole or in part of God's commandments. But religion, clean and unspotted before God and the Father is, first of all, to keep oneself undefiled from this world. Neither the click-clack of the Buddhist's prayer-wheel, nor the Pharisee's scrupulous loyalty to ancient traditions, nor the Catholic's devotedness to his daily prayers and his Sunday Mass will avail one particle unless the inner man be right with God; unless the end and object of all religion, personal sanctification, be looked to, and the means necessary for its attainment employed.
Brethren, religionism has wrought more mischief than religion can ever undo. Holy wars have again and again rent the world in twain, and Church controversies have at times dismembered Christ's mystical body, and what were they all about? Matters of opinion, for the most part, and modes of worship. The means were ever the point at issue, but on the ends in view, sanctification and salvation, the disputes had no other bearing than to unwittingly defeat them. Alas! how many times has the history recorded in the twelfth chapter of Judges repeated itself! How many times has a point in religion as unimportant as the difference between Schibboleth and Sibboleth brought down social ostracism and anathema on individuals and nations, or proved for them, mayhap, a matter of life and death? Take, for example, the incident of to-day's Gospel. The Pharisees, you know, were great sticklers for the law; to expound and enforce it was the chief business of their lives. The ten brief commands, or " words " handed down by God to Moses, had in the course of time been so divided, subdivided, and multiplied, and canning casuistry had surrounded them with such a tangle of cases and exceptions and human traditions, that the service of God had become a veritable burden. Again and again God had signified His disapproval. " Bring no more vain oblations," He said by Isaias, " incense is an abomination unto Me, and your feasts My soul abhorreth." " Hath the Lord," says Samuel, " as great delight in sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, obedience is better than sacrifices, and to hearken than the fat of rams." " Will the Lord " asks Micheas, " be pleased with thousands of rams and ten thousand rivers of oil, and human sacrifice? No, He hath showed thee, O man, what is good. And what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God? 99 But, notwithstanding all this, the Pharisees had gone on multiplying laws, and surrounding every trivial circumstance of life with absurd rules and regulations. They were greatly concerned about phylacteries and fringes, and long prayers, and tithing of mint and anise and cumin, and hand-washing, etc., but the weightier things of the law, such as judgment and mercy and faith, they neglected. They strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel; they made clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but not the inside; for within they were full of rapine and iniquity. Such were the proud, conceited hypocrites against whom Our Lord pronounced a woe and a heavy judgment, for that they neither entered heaven themselves nor allowed others to do so, nor moved with a finger of their own the insupportable burdens with which they loaded others.
But it was on the question of Sabbath observance that the Pharisees outdid themselves. In their hands that simple precept : " Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath day " grew and dilated into twenty-four long and inconceivably intricate chapters of the Talmud. No journey over 2,000 cubits in length should be undertaken, no meal prepared, no candle or fire lighted, no forbidden food greater than the size of an olive partaken of, no labor done heavier than the lifting of a fig. Then follows such a mass of cases, suppositions, difficulties, and evasions that one wonders how "sane men could have been led to the invention or discussion of such trivialities. The Puritanic Sabbath was child's play compared with the rigor of that of the Pharisees. Like the Puritans they believed that God was to be served in a spirit of sadness and gloom, and how great was their error may be learned from Christ and His followers. " Rejoice and be glad," He says, " for your reward is exceeding great," and, " Be not like the hypocrites, sad." " Rejoice," says St. Paul, "and again I say rejoice; let your moderation be known to all men: the Lord is nigh." Sadness is rather the lot of sinners, of whom St. James says: "Be afflicted, and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy into sorrow. Go to, now, ye rich men; weep and howl in your miseries." Every true servant of God, from that band of Apostles which returned from the Ascension to Jerusalem rejoicing, down to the saints of to-day, has been characterized by a cheerful, joyous disposition. And rightly so, for our body's capacity for enjoyment is to that of our soul as is a shallow cup to a mighty reservoir, and as a source of happiness God is to the world as is a limitless ocean to a little pool. The saints rejoice " always," for worldly joy is fitful, and the only joy that is stable is " joy in the Lord." Theirs is a double joy, for they rejoice in the Lord, and again in His works; in God their Creator, and again in God their Redeemer; in prosperity, and again in adversity. Theirs is an evenly-balanced joy, without excess, without irreverence, their moderation patent to all men, for their Lord, who is nigh and ever before their eyes and their minds, is both the source and the moderator of their gladness. Whatever is innocent in the way of enjoyment, whatever is necessary in the way of labor, whatever is good and useful in the way of benevolence can never be unlawful, be the day ever so holy, and any legislation or petty ordinances or cavilings to the contrary are Puritanic, Pharisaical, hypocritical.
Jesus, then, is dining with a distinguished company of Pharisees, on the Sabbath day, and they are watching Him. There is a marked contrast between the Guest's loving condescension and the malice of His entertainers. He, correct in outward form and interiorly righteous, presents a striking figure of religion pure and unspotted, but they illustrate religionism, for their hospitality, though effusive or perhaps excessive, is none the less hollow and insincere. They hate Him, in fact, and have purposely seated opposite to Him a man sick of the palsy, that, should Christ heal him, they may have in this breach of the Sabbath some ground for accusation. Here is an opportunity to emphasize a great truth, and Our Lord seizes it eagerly. With one hand He brushes aside the accumulated traditions and prejudices and absurdities which for ages have passed for godliness, and with the other He lays bare the very heart and essence of all religion by curing the palsied mac. His action is in line with His entire teaching and practice. "I will have mercy," He says, "and not sacrifice." " Not every man that saith to Me: Lord, Lord, shall be saved, but he that doeth the will of My Father." Rancor and hatred raged between the Jews and the Samaritans as to whether God was to be worshipped on Garizim or in Jerusalem, and Christ exposed their folly by saying simply : God is to be adored in spirit and in truth." With the Pharisees various articles of diet were unclean and forbidden, but Christ abolished their ordinances and made all meats clean, saying: " The things from without cannot defile a man, but from within, out of the heart, proceed all defilements." When asked to teach His disciples to pray, How simple and brief was the prayer He taught! When the demand was made: " Lord, what must I do to possess eternal life? " did He designate certain opinions and writes and ceremonies as essential to that end? No. His answer was : " Keep the commandments." What commandments? Those two on which depend the whole law and the prophets: " Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself." The keeping of these produces within us that new creature, in comparison with which, says St. Paul, circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. For if we have prophecy and know all mysteries, and have faith so as to move mountains, and speak with the tongue of angels, and fast and pray, and give our substance to the poor and our bodies to be burned, and if withal we have not interior righteousness, it will profit us nothing, for we are before God as a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. This is the lesson Christ's action in to-day's Gospel has for the Pharisees of all time. God made the Sabbath for man and not man for the Sabbath, and it is a wicked perversion of truth which will make the observance of the Lord's day conflict with one's urgent duty to God, his neighbor, or himself. Even the fanatical Pharisees yielded when it was a question of self-interest, for they had decreed that, should a valuable animal have fallen into a pit on the Sabbath, he might without breach of the law be extricated. And ought not this child of God, this palsied one, be healed of his disease on the Sabbath day? Christ, therefore, healed him, and with infinite delicacy bade him go in peace, lest the cavilings of the Pharisees should mar his joy in his newly found health. Then turning to the others, He proceeded to expose their selfish pride and vanity, and their hypocritical pretensions to sanctity. The social standing of the dropsical man was doubtless vastly inferior to that of the others, nor would he have been there at all had not his condition served their purpose. Christ, too, though invited, was despised by them and hated. It is probable, therefore, that the Saviour and the sick man were assigned positions face to face at the very foot of the table, while the others with mock humility or shameless effrontery maneuvered for the first places. And when the host proceeded to rearrange his guests, and those highest up were forced to give place, blushing and confused, to others more honorable than they, what myriads of human lives, religious histories, divine judgments, the scene must have brought to the Saviour's mind! What millions of self-opinionated Pharisees He must have seen throughout all time, zealous for the letter but knowing nothing of the spirit of the law, exaggerating the accidentals of religion and minimizing or altogether neglecting its essentials, anathematizing all who dare to differ with them, and setting apart for themselves as if by divine right the very first place in the kingdom of heaven. But presently His eyes meet those of the one honest man there, the paralytic, and He sees in them a new meaning, a dawning understanding of it all, a kindling faith and hope and love, and then and there Christ heals him. " The first shall be last, and the last, first." Christ is the real host there, and the banquet is of His bounty: His end of the table is really the head, and His it is to place the guests. The last, the righteous, are now first, and the first, the religionists and hypocrites, are now last, and verily so shall it be in God's heavenly kingdom.
Brethren, there are two points I would wish to especially impress upon you to-day: first, that a cheerful disposition and innocent amusement are not inconsistent with true religion; and secondly, that we must be careful not to set up a monopoly in paradise and its mercies. It was to virtuous Pagans that St. Peter said: " Verily I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every station he that feareth Him and doeth righteousness is accepted of Him." Let us not be too hard on people who refuse to adopt our opinions, rites, and ceremonies. After all, the liturgy of primitive Christianity was a very simple affair, and we would doubtless find it hard to recognize it in our own, External and accidental differences are no sure ground on which to base a judgment as to who are God's own children and who are not, nor are they the points on which God will judge us. Even St, Paul confesses that no man knows whether he be praiseworthy or blameworthy in the sight of God, and whatever vague ideas we may acquire on the subject must be determined by the rule Christ laid down: " By their fruits — not by their opinions or outward observances — but by their fruits ye shall know them.,, This was precisely where the Pharisees erred. Christ refused to conform to their usages as to Sabbath observance and hand-washing, and though they saw Him going around doing good, they yet deemed Him a devil incarnate; and though they beheld Him miraculously feeding the multitudes, they saw therein only a violation of their ordinances. Let us live and let live, and think betimes of the beam in our own eye, and imitate more the good God who makes His sun to shine on the good and bad alike. But of all things let us beware of contenting ourselves with the accessories of religion and neglecting its substance. No such easy compromise between God and the world is possible. God will not be deceived as was Isaac: His eye will penetrate the disguise and detect Jacob, though the hands and the face be those of Esau. No matter how strict our outward observance may have been, no matter if we have even done miracles and prophesied in Christ's name, if we neglect our interior sanctification He will declare at the last that amen, He never knew us. Let us beware lest the first become last and the last first. Let us remember that he that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and that he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.