Now it is to be observed that, properly speaking, the Apostle is not
here referring to the state of the dead, but to the act of dying. The
language would more literally and accurately be rendered 'willing to
_go from_ home, from the body, and to _go_ home, to the Lord.' The
moment of transition of course leads to a permanent state, but it is
the moment of transition which is in view in the words. I need not
remind you, I suppose, that the metaphor of the home is one which has
already been dwelt upon in the early part of the chapter, where the
contrast is drawn between the transitory house of 'this tent,' and
the 'building of God,' the body of incorruption and glory which the
saints at the Resurrection day shall receive. So, then, the Christian
view of the act of death is that it is simply a change of abode.
Very clearly and firmly does Paul draw the line between the man and
his dwelling-place. Life is more than a result of organisation.
Consciousness, thought, feeling, are more than functions of matter.
No materialist philosopher has ever been, or ever will be, able to
explain within the limits of his system the strange difference
between the cause and the effect; how it comes to pass that at the
one end of the chain there is an impression upon a nerve, and at the
other there is pain; how at the one end there is the throb of an inch
of matter in a man's skull, and at the other end there are thoughts
that breathe and words that burn, and that live for ever. That brings
us up to the edge of a gulf over which no materialist philosopher has
ever been able to cast a bridge. The scalpel cannot cut deep enough
to solve this mystery. Conscience as well as instinct cry out against
the theory that the worker and the tools are inseparable. For such a
theory reduces human actions to mechanical results, and shatters all
responsibility. Man is more than his dwelling-place. You crush a
shell on the beach with your heel, and you slay its tiny inhabitant.
But you can pull down the tent, and pluck up its pegs, and roll up
its canvas, and put it away in a dark corner, and the tenant is
untouched. The foolish senses crown Death as last, and lord of all.
But wisdom says, 'Life and thought have gone away side by side,
leaving doors and windows wide,' and that is all that has happened.
Still further, my text suggests that to the Christian soul the
departure from the one house is the entrance into the other. The home
has been the body; the home is now to be Jesus Christ. And very
beautiful and significant with meanings, which only experience will
fully unfold, is the representation that the Lord Christ Himself
assumes the place which the bodily environment has hitherto held.
That teaches us, at all events, that there is a new depth and
closeness of union with Jesus waiting the Christian soul, when it
lays aside the separating film of flesh. Here the bodily
organisation, with its limitations, necessarily shuts us off from the
closeness of intercourse which is possible for a naked soul. We know
not how much separation may depend upon the immersing of the spirit
in the fleshly tabernacle, but this we know, that, though here and
now, by faith which dominates sense, souls can live in Christ even
whilst they live in the body; yet there shall come a form of union so
much more close, intimate, all-pervading, and all-encircling, as that
the present union with Him by faith, precious as it is, shall be, as
the Apostle calls it in our context, 'absence from the Lord.' 'We
have to be discharged,' says an old thinker, 'of a great deal of what
we call body, and then we shall be more truly ourselves,' and more
truly united to Him who, if we are Christian people at all, is the
self of ourselves and the life of our lives. No man knows how close
he can nestle to the bosom of Christ when the film of flesh is rent
away. Just as when in some crowded street of a great city some grimy
building is pulled down, a sudden daylight fills the vacant space,
and all the site that had been shut out from the sky for many years
is drenched in sunshine, so when 'the earthly house of this
tabernacle' is ruinated and falls, the light will flood the place
where it stood, and to be 'absent from the body' shall be to be
'present with the Lord.'
May we go a step further and suggest that, perhaps, in the bold
metaphor of my text, there is an answer to the questions which so
often rack loving and parted hearts? 'Do the dead know aught of what
affects us here? and can they do aught but gaze on Him, and love, and
rest?' If it be that there is any such analogy as seems to be dimly
shadowed in my text, between the relation of the body on earth to the
spirit that inhabits it, and that of Jesus Christ to him who dwells
in Him, and is clothed by Him, then it may be that, as the flesh, so
the Christ transmits to the spirit that has Him for its home
impressions from the outside world, and affords a means of action
upon that world. Christ may be, if I might so say, the sensorium of
the disembodied spirit; and Christ may be the hand of the man who
hath no other instrument by which to express himself. But all that is
fancy perhaps, speculation certainly; and yet there seems to be a
shadow of a foundation for at least entertaining the possibility of
such a thought as that Jesus is the means of knowing and the means of
acting to those who rest from their labours in Him, and dwell in
peace in His arms. But be that as it may, the reality of a close
communion and encircling by the felt presence of Jesus Christ, which,
in its blessed closeness, will make the closest communion here seem
to be obscure, is certainly declared in the words before us.
Then this transition is regarded in my text as being the work of a
moment. It is not a long journey of which the beginning is 'to go
_from_ home, from the body,' and the end is 'to _go_ home, to the
Lord.' But it is one and the same motion which, looked at from the
one side, is departure, and looked at from the other is arrival. The
old saying has it, 'there is but a step between me and death.' The
truth is, there is but a step between me and _life_. The mighty angel
in the Apocalypse, that stood with one foot on the firm land and the
other on the boundless ocean, is but the type of the spirit in the
brief moment of transition, when the consciousness of two worlds
blends, and it is clothed upon with the house which is from heaven,
in the very act of stripping off the earthly house of this
tabernacle.
Nor need I remind you, I suppose, in more than a sentence, that this
transition obviously leads into a state of conscious communion with
Jesus Christ. The dreary figment of an unconscious interval for the
disembodied spirit has no foundation, either in what we know of
spirit, or in what is revealed to us in Scripture. For the one thing
that seems to make it probable--the use of that metaphor of 'sleeping
in Jesus'--is quite sufficiently accounted for by the notions of
repose, and cessation of outward activity, and withdrawal of capacity
of being influenced by the so-called realities of this lower world,
without dragging in the unfounded notion of unconsciousness. My text
is incompatible with it, for it is absurd to say of an unconscious
spirit, clear of a bodily environment, that it is anywhere; and there
is no intelligible sense in which the condition of such a spirit can
be called being 'with the Lord.'
So, then, I think a momentary transition, with uninterrupted
consciousness, which leads to a far deeper and more wonderful and
blessed sense of unity with Jesus Christ than is possible here on
earth, is the true shape in which the act of death presents itself to
the Christian thinker.
And remember, dear brethren, that is all we know. Nothing else is
certain--nothing but this, 'with the Lord,' and the resulting
certainty that therefore it is well with them. It is enough for our
faith, for our comfort, for our patient waiting. They live in Christ,
'and there we find them worthier to be loved,' and certainly lapped
in a deeper rest. 'Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.'
II. In the next place, note the Christian temper in which to
anticipate the transition.
'We are always courageous, and willing rather to leave our home in
the body, and to go home to the Lord.' Now I must briefly remind you
of how the Apostle comes to this state of feeling. He has been
speaking about the natural shrinking, which belongs to all humanity,
from the act of dissolution, considered as being the stripping off of
the garment of the flesh. And he has declared, on behalf of himself
and the early Christian Church, his own and their personal desire
that they might escape from that trial by the path which seemed
possible to the early Christians--viz. that of surviving until the
return of Jesus Christ from Heaven, when they would be 'clothed upon
with the house which is from Heaven,' without the necessity of
stripping off that with which at present they are invested. Then he
says--and this is a very remarkable thought--that just because this
instinctive shrinking from death and yearning for the glorified body
is so strong in the Christian heart, that is a sign that there is
such a glorified body waiting for us. He says, 'we know that if our
house ... were dissolved, we have a building of God.' And his reason
for knowing it is this, '_for_ in this we groan.' That is a bold
position to say that a yearning in the Christian consciousness
prophesies its own fulfilment. Our desires are the prophecies of His
gifts. Then, on this certainty--which he deduces from the fact of the
longing for it--on this certainty of the glorious, ultimate body of
the Resurrection he bases his willingness expressed in the text, to
go through the unwelcome process of leaving the old house, although
he shrinks from it.
So, then, Christian faith does not destroy the natural reluctance to
put aside the old companion of our lives. The old house, though it be
smoky, dimly lighted, and, by our own careless keeping, sluttish and
grimy in many a corner, yet is the only house we have ever known, and
to be absent from it is untried and strange. There is nothing wrong
in saying 'we would not be unclothed but clothed upon.' Nature speaks
there. We may reverently entertain the same feelings which our
Pattern acknowledged, when He said, 'I have a baptism to be baptized
with, and how am I straitened until it be accomplished.' And there
would be nothing sinful in repeating His prayer with His conditions,
'If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.'
But then the text suggests to us the large Christian possessions and
hope which counterwork this reluctance, in the measure in which we
live lives of faith. There is the assurance of that ultimate home in
which all the transiency of the present material organisation is
exchanged for the enduring permanence which knows no corruption. The
'tent' is swept away to make room for the 'building.' The earthly
house is dissolved in order that there may be reared round the
homeless tenant the house eternal, 'not made with hands,' God's own
work, which is waiting in the heavens; because the power that shall
frame it is there. Not only that great hope of the 'body of His
glory,' with which at the last all true souls shall be invested, but
furthermore, 'the earnest of the spirit,' and the blessed experiences
therefrom, resulting even here, ought to make the unwelcome necessity
less unwelcome. If the firstfruits be righteousness and peace and joy
of the Holy Ghost, what shall the harvest be? If the 'earnest,' the
shilling given in advance, be so precious, what will the whole wealth
of the inheritance which it heralds be when it is received?
For such reasons the transitory passage becomes less painful and
unwelcome. Who is there that would hesitate to dip his foot into the
ice-cold brook if he knew that it would not reach above his ankles,
and that a step would land him in blessedness unimagined till
experienced?
Therefore the Christian temper is that of quiet willingness and
constant courage. There is nothing hysterical here, nothing morbid,
nothing overstrained, nothing artificial. The Apostle says: 'I would
rather not. I should like if I could escape it. It is an unwelcome
necessity; but when I see what I do see beyond,' I am ready. Since so
it must be, I will go, not reluctantly, nor dragged away from life,
nor clinging desperately to it as it slips from my hands, nor
dreading anything that may happen beyond; but always courageous, and
prepared to go whithersoever the path may take me, since I am sure
that it ends in His bosom. He is willing to go from the home of the
body, because to do that is to go home to Christ.
There are other references of our Apostle's, substantially of the
same tone as that of my text, but with very beautiful and encouraging
differences. When he was nearer his end, when it seemed to him as if
the headsman's block was not very far off, his _willingness_ had
intensified into 'having a _desire_ to depart and to be with
Christ, which is far better.' And when the end was all but reached,
and he knew that death was waiting just round the next turn in the
road, he said, with the confidence that in the midst of the struggle
would have been vainglory, but at the end of it was a foretaste of
the calm of Heaven, 'I have finished my course, I have kept the
faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.'
That is our model, dear brethren,--'always courageous,' afraid of
nothing in life, in death, or beyond, and therefore willing to go
from home from the body and to go home to the Lord.
Think of this man thus fronting the inevitable, with no excitement
and with no delusions. Remember what Paul believed about death, about
sin, about his own sin, about judgment, about hell. And then think of
how to him death had made its darkness beautiful with the light of
Christ's face, and all the terror was gone out of it. Do you think so
about death? Do you shrink from it? Why? Why do you not take Paul's
cure for the shrinking? If you can say, 'To me to live is Christ,'
you will have no difficulty in saying, 'and to die is gain.' That is
the only way by which you can come to such a temper, and then you
will be willing to move from the cottage to the palace, and to wait
in peace till you are shifted again into 'the building of God, the
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.'