Sermon II. for the Second Sunday in Advent.
St. Luke xxi. 27.
And then shall they see the Son of Man coming
in a cloud with power and great glory.
LAST Sunday we were led by the Gospel for the day to consider the dispositions
with which the approach of Jesus Christ is apt to be regarded by the soul
of man. To-day’s Gospel leads us to consider His second coming to judgment;
His second, that is to say, in point of time, but first in the order of
spiritual instruction. First, I say, in the order of the soul’s knowledge
of truth, and for this reason. it is when God’s judgments are abroad, when
they are presented vividly to the contemplation of men, whether in communities
or individually, that the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.
(Isa. xxvi. 9.) These judgments are to moral righteousness, at least in
part, what miracles are to revealed doctrine: they arrest attention first,
and next they imply the reality of that to which they call it. This is
the true and highest work of great public calamities, of famines and revolutions,
as well as of private suffering, disease, and death; they put us out of
heart with that which meets the eye, and bid us plant our foot on some
rock beyond the shifting sands of time. And especially when the last and
most awful of the Divine judgments is seriously pondered over, men are
ready and willing to do this; to take a bona fide and honest survey of
their own actual condition before God, and then to consider how the mighty
future may be prepared for, by those who live in the Kingdom of the Incarnation;
now that the kindness and love of God to-wards man hath appeared, and not
by natural works of righteousness which we have done, but according to
His mercy, He hath saved us. (Tit. iii. 4, 5.) Thus, in the order of spiritual
enlightenment, the study of the Second Advent prepares us for that of the
First; the day of the Great Account educates us to appreciate the treasures
of love and power which centre in the Manger of Bethlehem.
I.
When our Lord speaks of “the Son of Man” coming “in His glory, and all
His Holy Angels with Him," (St. Matt. xxv. 31.) the first question which
presents itself is this: Is He referring to an event distinct from any
which has yet occurred, and as future to us as it was future to the disciples
who listened to Him in the Temple?
Now, here, it must be at once and fully admitted that throughout that
most solemn and pathetic series of predictions from which to-day’s Gospel
is taken, our Lord is speaking of two distinct events, so simultaneously,
that it is at times difficult to say of which He is speaking. The whole
discourse took its rise from an allusion of the disciples to the scene
around them.
The disciples were expressing their wonder at the great constructive
works in the Temple area, which Herod had begun, and which were still in
progress; “the buildings of the Temple,” as St. Matthew (St. Matt. xxiv.
1.) has it; the adornments “of goodly stones and gifts,” as St. Luke reports.
These structures, so solid, so beautiful, seemed to have been built, as
men speak, for eternity; of themselves they seemed to promise and insure
a long future of prosperity and splendour. Our Lord knew that the constructions
which so impressed His simple followers were raised only to be—almost immediately—destroyed;
that, almost before the sculptor’s tool had ceased to echo on the unfinished
walls, the ear would detect the tramp of the Roman legions advancing towards
the doomed city on their terrible errand of justice and of destruction.
“And He said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto
you, There shall not be left. here one stone upon another, that shall not
be thrown down.” (St. Matt. xxiv. 2.) And then when the disciples pressed
Him privately for further information as to the time when this catastrophe
might be expected to take place, He told them that it would be preceded
by the appearance of false Messiahs; by great political troubles; by persecutions
of Christians, specially of themselves; by a preaching of the “Gospel of
the Kingdom" (St. Matt. xxiv. 14.) throughout the world, for a witness
to all nations.”
Were these conditions satisfied before the destruction of Jerusalem
by Titus? In a certain sense they were; but only in a modified and imperfect
sense. Already our Lord’s thought appears to be passing, or to have passed,
from the nearer judgment upon Jerusalem to a sterner and more awful judgment
of which it was a shadow.
He has before Him two future events—a nearer and a more distant; not
one event. When He is speaking, each of these events is future; and they
are, as St. Chrysostom puts it, like two ranges of distant mountains, one
beyond another. To the eye of a distant spectator these horizons seem to
form a single line. Their real distinctness is only apparent when you approach
them, or rather, when you have passed the first of the two ranges. “This
generation shall not pass away, till all these things be fulfilled,” (St.
Matt. xxiv. 34) could only refer to the nearer judgment. But “the Gospel
of the Kingdom must first be preached in all the world for a witness unto
all nations,” cannot be supposed to have been realized, in its full complement
of meaning, even yet. The precept to flee to the mountain (xxiv. 16) districts
of Judaea on the approach of the Roman armies, could only refer to the
destruction of the Holy City. The prediction that “the powers of heaven
should be shaken,” (xxiv. 29) could only be applied to anything that would
occur in the Jerusalem of the age of the Caesars—whether its hierarchy
or its worship—by very frivolous interpreters. When our Lord said that
men would see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with power and great
glory, He did not merely mean that they would see in the destruction of
Jerusalem a vindication and triumph of the cause of Christ; that His coming
in the clouds of heaven was a metaphorical equivalent for the destruction
of the city of David amid scenes of fire and blood. If that had been His
meaning, it might have been much more simply expressed, and in less misleading
terms. If His language is carefully examined, it will be seen that He Himself
distinguished the two events, as belonging to distinct periods. He first
dwells on the destruction of the city. He then predicts, as a later and
an altogether distinct occurrence, His own coming to judgment; although
there are also sentences in which He speaks of these events as together
embodying that idea of judgment which is common to them both.
Certainly, when our Lord spoke in these solemn terms of Himself, as
coming in a cloud, or, as St. Matthew (St. Matt. xxiv. 30) has it, “in
the clouds of heaven,” He was appropriating, as belonging to His Person,
that vision of the Prophet Daniel in which “One like the Son of Man came
with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought
Him near before Him. And there was given Him dominion, and glory, and a
kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve Him.” But
Daniel (Dan. vii. 13.) says nothing of the judgment; and our Lord, therefore,
is not merely applying the Prophet’s language to Himself; He is doing so
with reference to a particular occasion which He announces. It is this
which would of itself have made it impossible to resolve the allusions
to the “clouds” and “dominion” and “glory” into a mere metaphor, descriptive
of the spiritual side of great calamities, if indeed our Lord had not,
in that great representation of the Last Judgment which is given us by
St. Matthew, (Ch. xxv.) and which followed immediately upon this discourse,
so expanded what He here refers to more concisely as to make this procedure
impossible. That awful picture of the King on His Throne, with all nations
before Him, with the hosts of ministering angels, with the impassable chasm
between saved and lost, with the twofold sentence, is either in its broad
outlines a substantial prediction, or it is a worthless fiction. There
is no real room for doubting what the Speaker meant by it; and He will
be taken at His word or not, as men believe or do not believe that He is
what He claimed to be.
Undoubtedly the destruction of Jerusalem, like earlier judgments, was
a shadow of the Great Day. It was to the generation which listened to our
Lord and His Apostles what the great judgments upon Assyria and Babylon
had been to the hearers of Isaiah and Jeremiah. In the language of those
prophets, there is a continual hinting at, a more or less distinct anticipation
of, a judgment beyond that immediately in view. With them, also, the frontier-line
between the nearer present and a distant future continually becomes indistinct;
the horizon constantly widens. Beyond the Eastern metropolis the sin-laden
civilization of all ages comes into view; beyond the Rings of Assyria or
Babylon, the evil spirit, the prince of the power of the air; beyond the
victorious Cyrus and the avenging Persians, we almost discern the form
of the true King of Humanity, and of those countless ministers of His who
surround His Throne. Every judgment is a forecast of the Last, just as
every earlier grace is a type and presentiment of the great Redemption.
Every judgment, the greatest as well as the least, is the outcome and expression
of an eternal law in the Mind of God; of the law which binds Him, in virtue
of His unalterable Nature, to hate moral evil, as being a contradiction
of that Nature; to separate it from good; to judge it. In our Lord’s Mind,
we may dare to say, the destruction of Jerusalem and the final Day of Doom
are two illustrations, on very different scales, of that one and the same
aspect of the Being of God which looks towards moral evil. The two judgments
melt into each other, because in principle they are one; but they are not
the less really distinct from each other either in the language of Christ
or in the order of events.
II.
The difficulty, which most men probably feel at some time, is how to
realize that the Last Judgment will one day certainly take place; as certainly
as that we have met in this Cathedral this afternoon. For a man who has
any hold whatever upon the Christian Faith, this difficulty exists for
the imagination rather than for the reason. if the reason is convinced,
first, of the possibility of miracles —and this possibility cannot be denied
by a serious believer in a living and moral God—and, secondly, of the truth
of the historical fact that Jesus Christ did really rise again from the
dead—and St. Paul will tell him that while the fact was in his lifetime
a matter of widespread notoriety, it could not be denied without breaking
altogether with anything that could be called Christianity ( 1 Cor. xv.
14.) —if, I say, a man be thus convinced that such a miracle as the Resurrection
of Christ is historically true, he ought to have no serious difficulty,
on the score of reason, in believing the Last Judgment. He has already
admitted the truth of the supernatural in an instance of capital importance;
he has already admitted, upon adequate evidence, that the Lord Jesus, while
upon earth, was not uniformly subject to those laws of life and death which
govern us within the range of our present experience. If this fact warrants,
as in reason it does warrant, confidence in the Words of Jesus Christ,
and confidence in His Power, it obliges us to believe that He will come
to judge us. For that He uttered the words of the text is beyond question.
The most destructive criticism of the day sees in them, what it condescends
to term, one of the really historical elements of the first Gospel. That
He had a right to utter them, is proved by the fact of His Resurrection;
it set the seal upon His words.
Unless, then, reason takes exception either to the possibility of miracles,
and so rejects any serious Theism, or to the truth of Christ’s Resurrection,
and so denies the truth of Christianity, reason must perforce admit that
the Last Judgment is not a difficulty—at least, for itself.
But it is a difficulty for the imagination; and the imagination has
a trick, upon occasions, of making itself look very like reason. The imagination
finds it hard to picture to itself this tremendous collapse, this altogether
unparalleled catastrophe, after the passage of centuries or of ages, during
which the world has pursued its accustomed course. The imagination cannot
conceive, amid the well-ordered, prosaic facts of our daily life, so sublime
and terrific an interruption, so overwhelming a conclusion of all that
we see and are conversant with. That (2 St. Pet. iii. 10.) “the day of
the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall
pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent
heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up,”
seemed quite natural to St. Peter, because it had, in effect, been announced
by his Master. And when St. Peter foresaw that there would come, in the
last times, scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where
is the promise of His coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things
continue as they were from the beginning of the Creation,” he dismisses
the objection by observing that it transfers to the counsels of the Eternal
Mind our petty and cramped ideas about the lapse of time. With Him, in
Whose Nature there is no succession of events, Who knows neither present
nor future, “one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one
day.” ((2 St. Pet. v. 8.) If He seems to delay, it is His mercy, not His
forgetfulness or His impotence, that is the reason: He is “not willing
that any should perish, but that all should come to be saved.” (2 St. Pet.
iii. 9)
In these days the form of the objection is altered. We do not—at least,
with few exceptions— endeavour to decide on God’s movements by anticipation,
and then profess ourselves unsatisfied if the event does not, corresponds
It is now said that scientific intellect, which might perhaps be more accurately
described as scientific imagination, tends more and more decidedly to reject
the idea of catastrophes, whether in the physical or the moral world, and
to substitute for them the idea of a graduated development. Where a ruder
world looked for some personal agencies, our age, we are told, sees the
tranquil operation of unchanging laws; and this difference of conception
makes the idea of a vast catastrophe, such as is the Judgment, as brought
before us in the New Testament, more and more unwelcome to the thought
of the time.
And yet, let me ask, is there really any such antagonism as is here
assumed between the idea of a catastrophe and the idea of a progressive
development? Is it not, at least, possible that a development, whether
in external nature or in human life, is the cause of the catastrophes which
momentarily arrest it, and give it possibly a new direction?
The outbreak of a volcano, for instance, or a landslip, or one of those
vast changes which, at a period, it is difficult to say how remote, upheaved
central rocks and, as the geologists tell us, changed the surface of this
globe again and again before it was inhabited by man, are examples of such
catastrophes. And these catastrophes are each of them the product of a
long, unseen process of ferment and preparation. The volcanic lava does
not boil for the first time when it breaks forth from the crater; the soil
does not disappear in a moment from beneath the topmost stratum, so as
to make a landslip possible; and as for those great catastrophes, the history
of which is written in the rocks, they can only have been possible after
a long preceding travail in the bowels of the earth, which at length expressed
itself in a terrific outbreak.
So it is in the moral and social world. There is an old saying that
no criminal becomes very bad indeed, quite suddenly. ("Nemo
repente fuit turpissimus.") Nothing may have been remarked in his
outward bearing; but there must have been an inward history of the resistance
to conscience and spiritual light, that gradually led up to the public
crime which has startled the world out of belief in his respectability.
In the same way, acts of heroic goodness, which may be observed sometimes
in very simple, unpretending people, and which seem to be almost out of
place in them, are really the creation of a long secret training by the
Holy Spirit, which no human eye has witnessed, but which has at last produced
this sublime and unexpected result. So it is in the collective life of
man, whether social, political, or national. If ever there was an historical
catastrophe, it was the French Revolution, at the end of the last century;
the events which began in 1789 are certainly the most remarkable in modern
European history. But who supposes that the causes of the French Revolution
date from 1789? Every student of history knows that they reach back, some
of them into the Middle Ages, most of them to the reign of Louis XIV.,
all of them, it may be said with certainty, to a time which preceded the
accession to the throne of France of the unfortunate king who died in 1793
on the scaffold. They had been working beneath the smooth surface of French
life, and at last they took an outward and visible form, and broke up a
social fabric which had lasted for a thousand years. It was a vast catastrophe;
but it was the result of a still more vast and complex process of development.
Our physical frames afford an illustration of the same law, it has been
said that every man in middle life carries about with him the seeds of
the disease which, if nothing else anticipates its action, will lay him
in his grave. Of course, as we know, the development of this latent germ
of death may be traversed and arrested by some other and more powerful
cause. A man may be cut off by violence; he may fall a victim to an infection;
he may destroy his physical powers by profligate excesses. But, barring
these contingencies, he carries within him some constitutional predisposition,
some imperfection of a vital organ, some half-concealed but fatal irregularity
or weakness which bides its time. It bides its time; and as the years pass
it strengthens its hold upon the system. We do not see much difference
from day to day, or from week to week; but, looking over longer tracts
of time, between this year and that, we see a difference. It bides its
time; and at last that up to which it leads, that for which it prepares,
has come. It may be the calmest of deaths; so calm that the bystanders
cannot say when the last breath is drawn. But, for all that, it is a catastrophe;
the cata-strophe which is the product of a long development. That one moment
in which we first enter upon another world, and see new sights, and hear
new sounds, and find ourselves in a sphere of being utterly distinct from
any of which we have had experience, however it may be ushered in, must
be to each one of us an unparalleled catastrophe.
Nor will it be otherwise with that mighty event—the Last Judgment—which
the Gospel of to-day forces on our notice. Doubtless the date of the Judgment
is in the Hands of God; of that day and that hour neither man nor angel
knows, but only the Father. (St. Matt. xxiv. 36.) It is one of those times
and seasons which He has put in His own power. (Acts i. 7.) And, as the
earliest Christians, especially at Thessalonica, found by experience (2
Thess. ii. 2-5) beneath the very eyes of the Apostle, its date cannot be
conjectured by man without risk of folly and disappointment. But it is
not, therefore, arbitrarily or capriciously fixed in such sense as to have
no relation to the collective life of humanity. In this matter, as in all
His Providences, the Everlasting Moral Being works by rule. And we may
dare to say that the Day of Judgment will have as real a relation to a
network of antecedent causes leading up to it, and, indeed, demanding it
as necessary to a perfect moral government, as is the case with all the
lesser judgments, having this world only for their sphere, which have preceded
it. The idea of a “fulness of time" (Gal. iv. 4.) with which we meet in
Scripture, as applied to the Incarnation, is applicable to the Judgment.
God alone knows when the time is full, when all the necessary probations
are over, all the destined siftings and separations are completed, all
the measures of iniquity have overflowed,—in a word, when all the process
of preceding development is at an end. We can but watch and wait; but if
the veil could be removed from our eyes we should see, where now we can
at best conjecture. Corresponding to that ceaseless going to and fro before
the Throne of those angel ministers of God who do His pleasure, (Ps. ciii.
21.) we should note the gradual ripening and perfecting of good and evil
here beneath, the ever-accumulating multitudes of those who will stand
on the right hand and on the left, the growth of all the preparations in
individuals and in history, which will only be completed, and which will
have been completed at the decisive moment when the heavens shall open,
and we shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with power and great
glory.
III.
Brethren, what will be to all of us the significance of that moment?
There are many public events of great political importance which take place
every year, which affect the destinies of monarchs and of nations, but
which do not really touch you and me. We look at them with interest because
they are public; but they pass over our heads, and we find that the day
after their occurrence is much the same as the day before it. But it will
not be so with the Last Judgment. It will come home to every one of us
as directly, as closely, as anything can. We shall all see Jesus Christ
as He is, in His great Majesty and Glory. He veiled His true dignity when
He lived on earth; and it has been hidden in the heights of heaven from
mortal sight during the eighteen centuries of Christendom. And so it happens
that, comparatively speaking, only a minority think of Him at all, since
“the natural man understandeth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither
can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Cor. ii. 14.)
But when He comes to Judgment, “every eye shall see Him." (Rev. i. 7.)
Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Mussulmans, Buddhists and Pagans, will
see Jesus Christ on His Throne of Glory. Those words of David, “The Lord
is known by the judgment which He executeth,” (Ps. ix. 16.) will be fulfilled.
He will be known in His righteousness and His power; He will teach every
soul what He is in Himself, and what He has been to it during the day of
life; He will justify His award by a complete revelation of His Mercy and
His Justice.
More than this; He will teach us all to know ourselves as we have never
known ourselves before. In His awful light we shall see light; (Ps. xxxvi.
9.) we shall see ourselves. All of us, we shall see ourselves; not as we
appear to others; not as we appear each to himself, in our self-indulgent
thoughts; but as we are. The day for disguises, for false impressions,
for half-truths which dare not be more, will have passed—passed beyond
recall,—passed for ever.
Those who have really loved and served Jesus Christ, amid misunderstanding
and coldness, but with an inward sense of His loving Presence which has
made them indifferent to outward things, will then be seen as they are;
saved amid imperfections, saved because robed in a Righteousness which
is not their own. When Christ, Who is their Life, shall appear, then will
they also appear with Him in glory. (Col. iii. 4.) It will be their day
of triumph over all the criticisms levelled at their presumed folly; it
will be their day of recompense for all the humiliations and sufferings
they have undergone.
But not they only will be manifested in the light of Jesus Christ. “God
shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether
it be good or whether it be evil.” (Eccles. xii. 14.)
All the sins which have been concealed through shame of discovery, or
through hypocrisy; all that has been forgotten, neglected, ignored, will
start up before our eyes into vivid reality, as if memory had not grown
weak, as if time had not passed, since the moment of commission.
Habits as well as acts, intentions as well as completed efforts, words
as well as works, will reappear, each with a photographic distinctness,
before our eyes, just as each was present to us at the very moment of conception,
or utterance, or action, only illuminated as to its true character by a
moral light which nothing can escape.
We shall try to take refuge, perhaps, in the “vain things which charm
us most” here and now. But they will then have ceased to charm; they, too,
will be judged of by us as they are judged of now by God and His angels.
Ambitions, reputations, titles, stations, possessions, which are now so
much to us, will be nothing then. These things were really weighed by Jesus
Christ when He hung upon the Cross of shame; it was a sentence, the Crucifixion,
solemnly passed on the whole outward life of man, as being, relatively
to his inward and eternal life, worthless. This is not understood now,
except by a small minority; it will be as clear as the daylight to all
at the Day of Judgment. “For the day of the Lord of hosts shall be upon
every one that is proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up;
and he shall be brought low; and upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are
high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of Bashan, and upon all the high
mountains, and upon all the hills that are lifted up, and upon every high
tower, and upon every fenced wall, and upon all the ships of Tarshish,
and upon all pleasant pictures. And the loftiness of man shall be bowed
down, and the haughtiness of men shall be made low; and the Lord alone
shall be exalted in that day.” (isa. ii. 12-17.)
This side of the judgment will be more readily understood by us in these
solemn hours, when the whole nation is watching with breathless suspense
at the bedside of the Prince whom it has long learned to look upon as its
future Sovereign. (Note: During a part of Dec., 1871, the
public anxiety on account of the illness of the Prince of Wales was at
its height.) We meet to-day under the shadow of a great anxiety—great
in itself and in its possible consequences. But sickness and death know
no favourites; in presence of the last realities, we are, all of us—the
highest and the lowest—altogether on a level. While we lift up our hearts
earnestly to God in prayer for the sufferer, who but yesterday was enjoying
all that this world could give, and in whose future his country had so
high a stake; while we pray not less fervently for his august mother, our
beloved and gracious Sovereign, and for his wife and children, let us not
forget to note the lesson which all severe sickness teaches, and which
all would have us learn who have to any good purpose been near to death
and judgment. All that does not lead to God or come from Him; all that
belongs merely to the things and scenes of time; all that cannot, as can
God’s grace, and faith, and hope, and love, be truly incorporated with
the very life of that soul to which the death of the body is but a surface-incident
in its existence—is really nothing, if, indeed, it be not much worse than
nothing. The lessons of Judgment which now come to us in the words of Scripture
and in the warnings of the Church, year by year, as the dark and wintry
days come round in Advent, will be then a most solemn reality. God grant
that we may now prepare ourselves for it. As the days pass, the Judgment
comes nearer and nearer. As the days pass, we become, for good or evil,
more and more like what we shall be seen to be when we are judged. The
materials for the Judgment are getting ready, not merely in the courts
of Heaven around the Throne, but within the precincts of our several consciences;
the Judge’s words will find an echo, for weal or woe, within each one of
us. But He Who will judge us then offers to save us now. It is because
“we believe that He will come to be our Judge that we therefore pray Him
to help us His servants, whom He has redeemed with His precious Blood.”
There is still time to be covered with His Robe of Righteousness; there
is time to take such fast hold upon His Cross, as to look forward without
terror to standing before His Throne.
