_It is consummated._
He has finished _His Father's business_, He has dealt with sinners and
saints, and has finally disclosed to us the secrets of the Soul and the
Body of His that are the hope of both sinners and saints alike. And
there is no more for Him to do.
An entirely new Beginning, then, is at hand, now that the Last Sabbath
is come--the Last Sabbath, so much greater than the First as Redemption
is greater than Creation. For Creation is a mere introduction to the
Book of Life; it is the arrangement of materials that are to be thrown
instantly into confusion again by man, who should be its crown and
master. The Old Testament is one medley of mistakes and fragments and
broken promises and violated treaties, to reach its climax in the
capital Mistake of Calvary, when men indeed _knew not what they did._
And even God Himself in the New Testament, as man in the Old, has gone
down in the catastrophe and hangs here mutilated and broken. Real life,
then, is now to begin.
Yet, strangely enough, He calls it an End rather than a Beginning.
_Consummatum est!_
I. The one and only thing in human life that God desires to end is Sin.
There is not a pure joy or a sweet human relationship or a selfless
ambition or a divine hope which He does not desire to continue and to be
crowned and transfigured beyond all ambition and all hope. On the
contrary, He desires only to end that one single thing which ruins
relationships and spoils joy and poisons aspirations. For up to the
present there is not one page of history which has not this blot upon
it.
God has had to tolerate, for lack of better, such miserable specimens of
humanity! _Jacob have I loved!_ ... _David a man after my heart;_ the
one a poor, mean, calculating man, who had, however, that single glimmer
of the supernatural which Esau, for all his genial sturdiness, was
without; the other an adulterous murderer, who yet had grace enough for
real contrition. Hitherto He has been content with so little. He has
accepted vinegar for want of wine.
Next, God has had to tolerate, and indeed to sanction--such an unworthy
worship of Himself--all the blood of the temple and the spilled entrails
and the nameless horrors. And yet this was all to which men could rise;
for without it, they never could have learned the more nameless horror
of sin.
Last, for His worshippers He has had to content Himself with but one
People instead of _all peoples and nations and languages._ And what a
People,--whom even Moses could not bear for their treachery and
instability! And all this wretched record ends in the Crime of Calvary,
at which the very earth revolts and the sun grows dark with shame. Is it
any wonder that Christ cried, Thank God that is all done with at last!
II. Instead of this miserable past, then, what is to come? What is that
_New Wine He would drink with us in His Father's Kingdom?_ First; real
and complete saints of God are to take the place of the fragmentary
saints of the Old Dispensation, saints with heads of gold and feet of
clay. Souls are to be born again in Baptism, not merely sealed by
circumcision, and to be purified before they can contract any actual
guilt of their own. And, of these, many shall keep their baptismal
innocence and shall go, wearing that white robe, before God Who gave it
them. Others again shall lose it, but regain it once more, and, through
the power of the Precious Blood, shall rise to heights of which Jacob
and David never even dreamed. To _awake in His likeness_ was the
highest ambition of _the man after God's Heart;_ but to be not merely
like Christ, but one with Him, is the hope of the Christian. _I live_,
the new saints shall say with truth, _yet now not I, but Christ liveth
in me._
Next, instead of the old worship of blood and pain there shall be an
Unbloody Sacrifice and a _Pure Offering_ in which shall be all the power
and propitiation of Calvary without its pain, all the glory without the
degradation. And last, in place of the old enclosed Race of Israel shall
be a Church of all nations and tongues, one vast Society, with all walls
thrown down and all divisions done away, one Jerusalem from above, that
shall be the Mother of us all.
III. That, then, is what Christ intended as He cried, _It is
consummated._ Behold _the old things are passed away!_ Behold, _I make
all things new!_
And now let us see how far that is fulfilled. Where is there, in me, the
New Wine of the Gospel?
I have all that God can give me from His Throne on Calvary. I have the
truth that He proclaimed and the grace that He released. Yet is there in
me, up to the present, even one glimmer of what is meant by Sanctity? Am
I even within an appreciable distance of the saints who knew not Christ?
Have I ever wrestled like Jacob or wept like David? Has my religion,
that is to say, ever inspired me beyond the low elevation of joy into
the august altitudes of pain? Is it possible that with me the old is
not put away, the _old man_ is not yet dead, and the _new man_ not yet
_put on_? Is that New Sacrifice the light of my daily life? Have I done
anything except hinder the growth of Christ's Church, anything except
drag down her standards, so far as I am able, to my own low level? Is
there a single soul now in the world who owes, under God, her conversion
to my efforts?
Why, as I watch my life and review it in His Presence it would seem as
if I had done nothing but disappoint Him all my days! He cried, like the
deacon of His own Sacrifice, Go! it is done! _Ite; missa est!_ The
Sacrifice is finished here; go out in its strength to live the life
which it makes possible!
Let me at least begin to-day, have done with my old compromises and
shifts and evasions. _Ite; missa est!_