Sermon VIII. for Christmas Day.
ST. JOHN
i. 14.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt
among us.
CHRISTMAS DAY, we are all agreed, is the greatest birthday in the year.
It is the birthday of the greatest Man, of the greatest Teacher of men,
of the greatest Benefactor of the human race that ever lived. It
is this; but it is also much more. For as on this day was born One
Who, while He is truly man, is also and immeasurably more than man.
I.
He Who was born, as on this day, did not begin to be when He was conceived
by His human Mother; since He bad already existed from before all worlds—from
an eternity. His human nature, His human Body, and His human Soul
were not, as is the case with us, the whole outfit of His Being; they were,
in truth, the least important part of it. He had already lived for
an eternity when He condescended to make a human body and a human soul
in an entirely new sense His own, by uniting them to His Divine and Eternal
Person; and then He wore them as a garment, and acted through them as through
an instrument, during His Life on earth, as He does now in the courts of
Heaven. Thus the Apostle says that He “took upon Him the form of
a servant,” (Phil. ii. 7.) and that “He took not on Him the nature of angels,
but He took on Him the seed of Abraham “ (Heb. ii. 16.) and so the
Collect for pleads that He “took our nature upon Him, and was as at this
time born of a pure Virgin.” And it was in this sense that He became or
was made flesh: after having existed from eternity, He united to Himself
for evermore a perfect and representative Sample of the bodily and immaterial
nature of man, and thus clothed with It, as on this day, He entered into
the world of sense and time. “The Word was made flesh, and tabernacled
among us.”
It is perhaps not surprising that from the early days of Christianity
men should have misconceived or misstated what was meant by this central
but mysterious truth of the Christian Creed, the Incarnation of the Eternal
Son. In truth, the misconceptions about it have been and are many
and great.
Sometimes Christians have been supposed to hold that two persons were
united in Christ, instead of two natures in His single Person; sometimes
that the Infinite Being was confined within the bounds of the finite Nature
which He assumed; sometimes that God ceased to be really Himself when He
thus took on Him man’s nature; sometimes that the Human Nature which He
took was absorbed into or annihilated by its union with the Deity.
All the chief misconceptions of the true sense of the Apostles have been
successively considered and rejected by the Christian Church; and “the
right faith is, that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, is God and Man. God of the substance of His Father,
begotten before all worlds, and Man of the substance of His mother, born
in the world; perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human
flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and
inferior to the Father as touching His manhood. Who although He be
God and man, yet is He not two, but one Christ.” (Athanasian Creed.)
Thus did God the Son take the simple out of the dust and lift the poor
out of the mire, (Ps. cxiii. 6.) when He raised our frail human nature
to the incomparable prerogative of union with Himself. So real was
and is this union, that all the acts, words, and sufferings of Christ’s
Human Body, all the thoughts, reasonings, resolves, emotions of His Human
Soul, while being properly human, are yet also the acts, words, sufferings,
the thoughts, reasonings, resolves, and emotions of the Eternal Son, Who
controls all, and imparts to all the value and elevation which belong to
the Infinite and the Supreme. Thus, although Christ suffered in His
Human Soul in the garden, and in His Human Body on the Cross, His sufferings
acquired an entirely superhuman worth and meaning from the Person of the
Eternal Word to Whom His Manhood was joined; and St. Paul goes so far as
to say that God purchased the Church with His own Blood (Acts xx. 28.)--meaning
that the Blood which was shed by the Crucified was that of a Human Body
personally united to God the Son.
It was perhaps inevitable that the question should be asked how such
a union of two natures, which differ as the Creator differs from the creature—as
the Infinite differs from the finite—was possible. It might be enough
to reply that “with God all things are possible ;" (St. Matt. xix. 26.)
all things, at least, which do not contradict His moral Perfections, that
is to say, His essential Nature. And most assuredly no such contradiction
can be detected in the Divine Incarnation. But, in truth, it ought
not to be difficult for a being possessed of such a composite nature as
is man to answer this question; perhaps such a being as man might have
been reasonably expected never to have asked it. For what is the
Incarnation but the union of two natures, the Divine and the human, in
a single Person, Who governs both? And what is man, what are you and I,
but samples, at an immeasurably lower level, of a union of two totally
different substances; one material, the other immaterial, under the presidency
and control of a single human personality? What can be more remote from
each other in their properties than are matter and spirit? What would be
more incredible, antecedently to experience, than the union of such substances
as matter and spirit, of a human body and a human soul, in a single personality?
Yet that they are so united is a matter of experience to every one of us.
We only do not marvel at it because we are so intimately familiar with
it. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, we observe, each
within himself, a central authority, directing and controlling, on the
one hand, the movements and operations of an animal frame, and on the other
the faculties and efforts of an intelligent spirit, both of which find
in this central authority or person their point of unity. How this
can be we know not. We know not how an immaterial essence can dictate
its movements to an arm or a leg, but we see that it does this; and we
can only escape from the admitted mystery into difficulties far greater
than those which we leave behind, by frankly avowing ourselves materialists,
and denying that man has anything that can properly be called a soul, or
that he is anything more than an oddly agitated mass of bones and muscles.
If we shrink from this, we must recognize, in the composite structure of
our own mysterious being, the means of answering the question about the
possibility of the Incarnation. “As the reasonable soul and flesh
is one man, so God and man is one Christ.” (Athanasian Creed.) He
Who could thus bring together matter and spirit, notwithstanding their
utter contrariety of nature, and could constitute out of them a single
human personality or being, might surely, if it pleased Him, raise both
matter and spirit—a human body and a human soul—to union with His Divinity,
under the control of His Eternal Person. Those who have taken even
superficially the measure of the twofold nature of man, ought not to find
it hard to understand that for sufficient reasons God and man might be
united in a single person, or, as St. John says, that the Word might be
made flesh, and might dwell among us.
But what, it may be asked, can be conceived of as moving God thus to
join Himself to a created form? Is not such an innovation on the associations,
if not on the conditions, of His Eternal Being too great to be accounted
for by any cause or motive that we can possibly assign for it?
Here we enter a region in which, it need hardly be said, we dare not
indulge our own conjectures as to the fitness of things. We do not
know enough of the Eternal Mind to presume to account for Its resolves
by any suppositions of human origin. If we are to take a single step
forward, it must be under the guidance of Revelation. But when men
speak of the Incarnation as an innovation on the Eternal Life of God so
great as to be beyond accounting for or even conceiving, they forget a
still older innovation—if the word may be permitted—about which there is,
assuredly, no room for doubt. They forget that, after existing for
an eternity in solitary blessedness, contemplating Himself and rejoicing
in the contemplation, God willed to surround Himself with creatures who
should derive their life from Him, and be sustained in it by Him, and should
subsist within His all-encompassing Presence, while yet utterly distinct
from Him. Creation, surely, was an astonishing innovation on the
Life of God; and creation, as we know, involved possibilities which led
to much else beyond. If God was to be served by moral creatures endowed
with reflective reason, and conscience, and free will, that they might
offer Him the noblest, because a perfectly voluntary service, this prerogative
dignity necessarily carried with it the possibility of failure; and man,
in fact, at the very beginning of his history, did fail. That God
should have created at all is, indeed, a mystery; that He should have created
a moral world of which He must have foreseen the history, is a still greater
mystery; but that, having done this, He-the Eternal Justice, the Eternal
Charity—should have left His handiwork to itself, would have been, had
it been true or possible, a much greater, and I will add, a much darker
mystery. As God must have created out of love, (Jer. xxxi. 3.) so
out of love must He bring a remedy to the ruined creature of His Hands;
(St. John iii. 16.) though the form of the remedy only He could prescribe.
We do not know whether there were other ways of raising a fallen race;
probably there were, since God is infinite in His resources as in all else.
But we may be sure that the way adopted was the best. Of other remedies
nothing has been told us. What we do know is the truth of that saying,
“that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners;" (1 Tim. i. 15.)
what we do confess before God and man is that, “being of one substance
with the Father, by Whom all things were made, He for us men and for our
salvation came down from Heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of
the Virgin Mary, and was made Man." (Nicene Creed.)
II.
And now, perhaps, some one is asking himself what can be the appropriateness
of much that has been said on the afternoon of such a day as Christmas
Day. Let us consider.
In the course of his history man has by turns depreciated and exaggerated
his true importance among the creatures of God. Sometimes he has
made himself the measure of all things, as though his was the sovereign
mind, and the Creator a being whose proceedings could be easily understood
by him. Sometimes man has appeared to revel in self-depreciation,
placing himself side by side with or below the beasts that perish, insisting
on his animal kinship with them, and anxiously endeavouring to ignore or
deny all that points to a higher element in his life. Sometimes,
in a strange spirit of paradox, he has combined theories which ascribe
to himself an origin and a nature as degraded as well can be, with passionate
assertions of his capacity to judge of all things in earth and Heaven.
Just now the depreciatory account of man is the popular one; and we hear
echoes of the language which was used on this subject by the early assailants
of Christianity. Celsus, the eclectic philosopher who compiled his
assortment of objections to the Christian Creed about A.D. 170, insisted
once and again that man is not really superior to the more intelligent
insects, since bees and ants organize themselves into cities and states
under recognized rulers; they make war upon and peace with each other,
and appear to experience the same vicissitudes of fortune if they do not
feel the same jealousies and ambitions as human beings. (Cf.
Origen, Contr. Cels., iv. SS 81, 82; on bees, SS 83-85.) Christianity,
according to Celsus and other writers, has made man think too much of his
own importance in nature; and some modern successors of Celsus, repeating
his estimate of man’s place among creatures, go on to call attention to
the insignificance of man’s dwelling-place. We are reminded that
it is no longer possible to think of this earth as the centre of the universe,
for the benefit of which the universe exists; as a palace, around which
a fair demesne is laid out only with a view to its beauty and requirements;
as a comfortable home for the most favoured of God’s creatures, to lighten
which the sun rises every morning and the stars shine brightly every night.
Man can no longer look to the heavens above his head as the spangled roof
of the tent in which he dwells; nor can he confidently assume that an eclipse
or a conjunction of planets has no other object than to assure him of some
secret of his petty destiny. We now know that the planet on which
we live is only a smaller satellite of our sun, while this sun itself is
but one of thousands of heavenly bodies moving through space in an orbit
which it takes vast ages to complete round some still undiscovered centre.
We now know that our eye rests on stars the distance of which from this
our earth cannot be expressed in figures; stars whose light, flashing with
the speed of light, takes, at the least, even centuries to reach us.
As we gaze into the boundless spheres which astronomy thus opens for us,
the insignificance of man’s dwelling-place becomes increasingly apparent;
and as we reflect upon it, it seems to involve and make more and more plain
the corresponding and utter insignificance of man.
And this impression about the small worth of human life is deepened
by what may be observed of the vicissitudes to which men are exposed, not
as individuals, but in masses. A survey of the thousands of dead
and dying after a great battle, like Solferino, has for the time being
filled men’s minds with a painful suspicion that man is too worthless a
being to be cared for, and that his lot is controlled by a pitiless and
mechanical fate. (Note: this feeling was expressed
to the author, when visiting the field of Solferino about a fortnight after
the battle, by a Piedmontese soldier who accompanied him, and had himself
been nearly killed at Desenzano.) Every ocean steamship that
sinks beneath the waves of the Atlantic with its great freight of human
lives; every coal-mine that is the scene of an explosion, whereby scores
of families round the pit’s mouth are left without their bread-winner;
nay, every vast collection of men, such as you may see any day in the streets
of London, each one of whom is solitary, unknown, unsympathized with in
the great crowd around him—all of these scenes help to deepen the sense
of man’s pettiness, and so lead a large number of human beings to think
of themselves and of others as leaves blown about by the wind of destiny—
whither or why who can say?
Of course, apart from Christian faith, there is another side to the
matter which nature itself suggests to us. When we look steadily
at any one man—the feeblest, the most worthless, as we may think him—we
become conscious of his having titles to profound and anxious interest.
Be his history what it may; his reason, his conscience, his character,
cannot be attentively examined without revealing his transcendent importance.
Whatever men may say in their more sombre moods, they do not really
believe in all that some philosophers would tell them about the insignificance
of man. Consider the diligence with which a trial for murder is followed
by thousands of readers of the papers. (This was a
remark more than once made to me by the late Dr. J.B. Mozley. He
thought the "relish for justice" inexplicable apart from belief in the
immortality of man.) Here is a man who, before his arrest
as a criminal, threaded his way unnoticed through the crowd; one of the
leaves, as we are told, which “drifts anywhither before the wind of destiny.”
But this man is put on trial for his life, and he immediately becomes an
object of general interest— of whatever character. If he is really
only an animal, whose deeds and whose death are alike ordered by fate;
if he have no immortal part in him, and no endless destiny before him;
why should the question of life and death be debated more anxiously in
his case than in that of an ox or a sheep? Why should the court in which
his cause is heard be crowded with listeners; the cross-examination of
witnesses scanned with such jealous severity; the words that fall from
the presiding judge scrutinized with such anxious attention; the reply
of the counsel for the prisoner, the summing-up, the verdict of the jury,
all waited for with such hushed yet irrepressible eagerness; the report
of the trial read and read again by thousands outside the court who have
no personal knowledge either of the victim or of the accused; no personal
stake whatever, however remote, in the trial? Do you say that this
is to be explained by a widely diffused appetite for all that touches on
the confines of the horrible; that a sensation relieves the monotony of
thousands of lives; and that those who do not need this relief are not
superior to the instincts of vulgar curiosity? If you say this, you cannot
have attentively considered the seriousness—I had almost said the passion—with
which a trial for murder is followed by persons who would not on any account
give time and attention to cases of another kind. No; men are thus
deeply moved because a human life is at stake; because it is a man’s destiny
that is being weighed in the balance; because it is instinctively felt
that much more is in question than the trifle which the fatalism or materialism
of some of our modern teachers would allow. At these solemn moments
the depreciatory theories of man’s nature and origin are forgotten; they
give way to a higher and more adequate sense of his real place in the universe.
Even the poor prisoner in the dock, who may be guilty of the crime laid
to his charge, and on whose countenance, perchance, vice has traced the
history of its long and degrading ascendancy; even he for the moment represents
the ineffaceable, the indestructible greatness of man. He cannot
be sentenced to die without stirring in us all a sense of our true place
as immortal beings among the creatures of God; he cannot but command our
profoundest interest now that he is bidden test the worth and dignity of
his being as he is forced violently across the line that divides the living
from those whom we name the dead.
There are, of course, other ways in which men show that they recognize
the true dignity of their nature, amidst all its feebleness and degradation.
“Men, too, there are,” it has well been said, “who, in a single moment
of their lives, have shown a superhuman height and majesty of mind, which
it would take ages for them to employ on its proper objects, and, as it
were, to exhaust; and who, by such passing flashes like rays of the sun,
or the darting of lightning,” (Newman, Par. Serm. iv. 246.)
give to all around them a sure token of the immense capacities of
a human being. But it must be owned that man’s judgment about himself,
when he is left to himself, rises and sinks with the varying circumstances
of his life, with the varying moods of his mind. Left to himself,
man has no very solid ground of confidence in any estimate he may form;
and he oscillates with timid indecision between grotesque exaggerations
and unworthy denials of his real place among the creatures of God.
If man was to discover at once the greatness of his needs and the greatness
of his capacities, it must be by reference to some standard independent
of himself; by the teaching of some event breaking in upon and elevating
his collective life, as did the Divine Incarnation. By uniting man’s
nature for ever to that of the Being Who made him, the Incarnation restored
to man his self-respect, while it also made him feel his moral poverty
without God, and his utter dependence upon God. But that human nature
in which the Eternal Word condescended and condescends to dwell can never
be treated by a Christian believer as other than a nature capable of the
highest destinies.
Let us contemplate for a moment the Life of our Lord upon earth from
this point of view, as the Life Which puts such high and exceptional honour
upon human nature.
The moral beauty of which mankind is capable appeared in the earthly
Life of Jesus as it never appeared before, as it has never appeared since.
Had men invented such a moral portrait, the invention would have been scarcely
less a matter for wonder than the reality. But no literary creation
could have made so deep and enduring a mark on generations of human beings
as has been made by the Life of Jesus. Yet we can only surrender
ourselves to its power upon one condition; we must frankly admit that it
is the Life of the Word made flesh no less truly than the Life of the Son
of Man. A mere man might have been inspired to say, “Blessed are
the poor in spirit; blessed are they that mourn; blessed are the meek;
blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness; blessed
are the merciful; blessed are the pure in heart; blessed are the peacemakers;
blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” (St. Matt.
v. 3-10.) But no mere man, being humble and veracious, could have said
of himself, “I am the Life “ (St. John xi. 25; xiv. 6.) am the Light of
the world; “ (St. John viii. 12.) and the Father are one thing; “ (St.
John x. 30.) “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; " (St. John xiv.
9.) “No man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the
Father save the Jesus says too much about Himself if He is to be measured
by a standard of merely human excellence; if He is only man, we cannot
say that all His language is either modest or truthful. All, indeed,
falls into its place if He is also the Eternal Son of God; in accepting
this central and vital truth we recognize the supreme significance of His
Life as that of” God manifest in the flesh.” (1 Tim. iii. 16.) Embrace
this truth, and it is not hard to understand now His death on Calvary might
avail even for much more than the world’s redemption, or how at His Word
the weak and poor elements of water and bread and wine might become instruments
of spiritual blessings, or veils of a Higher Presence, contact with Which
would mean a new life and power for the bodies and souls of men.
Nor does it matter whether such a Life as that of Jesus, radiant with
the beauty and charged with the force of God, was lived on a large sun
or on a small planet. The moral world has no relation to the material;
the Perfect Moral Being is not impressed, as some of our physicists would
seem to be impressed, by mere material bulk. If it is true of God
that “He bath no pleasure in the strength of an horse, neither delighteth
He in any man’s legs,” (Ps. cxlvii. 10.) so it is true that “since the
heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him,” the vastest stars
and suns have no particular claim, on account of their size, on His regard.
When He would unite Himself to a Human Form in and through Which to achieve
the elevation and re-demption of the human family, He chose the scene whence
the Divine work would be best achieved; He chose the little planet on which
we live; He chose as His birthplace not Rome, not even Jerusalem, but Bethlehem,
though it was “little among the thousands of Judah; “ (Micah v. 2.) He
was laid in a rude manger outside the crowded village: He did “not abhor
the Virgin’s womb." (The Te Deum.)
III.
And therefore Christmas Day is the birthday of the best hopes of man;
it is the second birthday of the human family. No other day in the
year reminds us more persuasively of the greatness of man; of the greatness,
actual or possible, of every human being. Nothing that can be said
about man’s capacities, or progress, or prerogatives, or rights, approaches
even distantly to that which is involved in God’s having so loved the human
world that He gave His only begotten Son (St. John iii. 16.) to take our
nature upon Him. Already, while He was upon earth, we see the meaning
of His appearance in the irradiated lives of those around Him. Why
is it that poor fishermen, like Peter and Andrew, and peasants like Simon
and Jude and James, and tax collectors like Matthew, are far more to us
than the great soldiers and statesmen who ruled the Roman world; why is
the uncultivated penitent of Magdala infinitely more interesting than the
stately ladies who moved amid crowds of prostrate slaves through the halls
of the Caesars? It is because the wonder-working touch of the Word
made flesh had already begun to create in these poor country-folk the first
samples of a new humanity in which human nature should recover its lost
dignity and its lost self-respect; it is because each of them would repeat,
from his place in Paradise, the words which one has already written down
in the pages of the everlasting Gospel: “We beheld His glory, the glory
as of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” (St. John
i. 14.)
Surely Christmas, as the birthday of human greatness, should kindle
in us the sense of our true Christian dignity, and nerve us to claim and
to protect it by all that guards and invigorates true Christian life.
May “the Father of Glory gives us this spirit of wisdom and revelation
in the knowledge of Him, that the eyes of our understanding being enlightened,
we may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the
glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness
of His power to usward who believe.” (Eph. i. 17-19.)
And as Christmas Day is the birthday of true human dignity, so it is
the birthday of true human brotherhood. Kneeling around the cradle
of the Incarnate Word, we may understand that great sentence of His Apostle,
that for the new man, renewed after the image of Him that created him,
“there is neither Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian
nor Scythian, bond nor free; but Christ is all and in all.” (Col. iii.
11.) At the manger of Bethlehem, we may dare to look forward, in some coming
time, to that union of human lives, of human hearts, of which the noblest
of our race again and again have dreamt; to a brotherhood which has sometimes
been recommended by abstract arguments, sometimes dictated by revolutionary
terrorism, but which to be genuine must be the perfectly free movement
of hearts drawn towards each other by a supreme attraction. That
attraction we find in the Divine Child of Bethlehem, born that He might
redeem and regenerate the world. And all the courtesies and kindnesses
of this happy season between members of families, and members of households,
and members of the same parish; between the rich and the poor, and the
old and the young, and the so-called great and the so-called insignificant,
are rightly done in His honour, Who by coming to reveal to us what we may
be in Him and through Him, came also to bind us to each other by uniting
us to Himself. If still as heretofore the ideal is only too far from
being realized; if we hear of sombre jealousies between classes, and of
rumours of wars between powerful countries, and of much else at home and
abroad that is in opposition to the work which He came to do; let us look
to it that, however humble be our place in the scale of moral and spiritual
agents, while we linger on this passing scene, we be found among those
who have heard to some purpose the angel-song in the meadows of Bethlehem—”
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men in whom God is
well pleased.” (St. Luke ii. 14. (Tisch., App. crit. ed.,
8vo).)
