I need not remind you how vivid and profoundly significant that
emblem of leaven, as applied to all manner of evil, is. But let me
remind you how, just as in the Jewish Ritual, the cleansing from all
that was leavened was the essential pre-requisite to the
participation in the feast, feeding on Jesus Christ, as I have tried
to describe it, is absolutely impossible unless our leaven is
cleansed away. Children spoil their appetites for wholesome food by
eating sweetmeats. Men destroy their capacity for feeding on Christ
by hungry desires, and gluttonous satisfying of those desires with
the delusive sweets of this passing world. But, my brother, your
experience, if you are a Christian man at all, will tell you that in
the direct measure in which you have been drawn away into paltering
with evil, your appetite for Christ and your capacity for gazing upon
Him, contemplating Him, feeding on Him, has died out. There comes a
kind of constriction in a man's throat when he is hungering after
lesser good, especially when there is a tinge of evil in the supposed
good that he is hungering after, which incapacitates Him from eating
the bread of God, which is Jesus Christ.
But let us remember that absolute cleansing from all sin is not
essential, in order to have real participation in Jesus Christ. The
Jew had to take every scrap of leaven out of his house before he
began the Passover. If that were the condition for us, alas! for us
all; but the effort after purity, though it has not entirely attained
its aim, is enough. Sin abhorred does not prevent a man from
participating in the Bread that came down from heaven.
Then observe, too, that for this power to cleanse ourselves, we must
have had some participation in Christ, by which there is given to us
that new life that conquers evil. In the words immediately preceding
my text, the Apostle bases his injunction to purge out the old leaven
on the fact that 'ye are unleavened.' Ideally, in so far as the power
possessed by them was concerned, these Corinthians were unleavened,
even whilst they were bid to purge out the leaven. That is to say, be
what you are; realise your ideal, utilise the power you possess, and
since by your faith there has been given to you a new life that can
conquer all corruption and sin, see that you use the life that is
given. Purge out the old leaven because ye are unleavened.
One last word--this stringent exhortation, which makes Christian
effort after absolute purity a Christian duty, and the condition of
participation in the Paschal Lamb, is based upon that thought to
which I have already referred, of the diabolical power of infection
which Evil possesses. Either you must cast it out, or it will choke
the better thing in you. It spreads and grows, and propagates itself,
and works underground through and through the whole mass. A
water-weed got into some of our canals years ago, and it has all but
choked some of them. The slime on a pond spreads its green mantle
over the whole surface with rapidity. If we do not eject Evil it will
eject the good from us. Use the implanted power to cast out this
creeping, advancing evil. Sometimes a wine-grower has gone into his
cellars, and found in a cask no wine, but a monstrous fungus into
which all the wine had, in the darkness, passed unnoticed. I fear
some Christian people, though they do not know it, have something
like that going on in them.
It is possible for us all to keep this perpetual festival. To live
in, on, for, Jesus Christ will give us victory over enemies, burdens,
sorrows, sins. We may, if we will, dwell in a calm zone where no
tempests rage, hear a perpetual strain of sweet music persisting
through thunder peals of sorrow and suffering, and find a table
spread for us in the presence of our enemies, at which we shall renew
our strength for conflict, and whence we shall rise to fight the good
fight a little longer, till we sit with Him at His table in His
Kingdom, and 'eat, and live for ever.'