'Ye are strangers and sojourners'--pilgrims who make a brief halt in a
foreign country. The image has in it an allusion to the nomad life of
Abraham and his son and grandson, as well as to the desert-wanderings
of the people, and suggests the thought, 'You are homeless wanderers,
not having where to lay your heads, as truly when you have been settled
for generations on your ancestral lands, as when you plodded wearily in
the wilderness.' It is a universal truth, ever acknowledged and
forgotten, wholesome though sometimes sad to feel, and preached to even
frivolous natures by the change in our calendar which a New Year brings.
How vividly this word of our text brings out the contrast between the
permanence of the external world and our brief stay in it!
In Israel there would be few vineyards or olive-grounds held by the
same man at two, and none at three, successive jubilees. The hoary
twisted olives yielded their black berries, say, to Simeon, the son of
Joseph, to-day, as they did fifty years ago to Joseph, the son of
Reuben, and as they will do fifty years hence to Judas, the son of
Simeon. So is it with us all. There is nothing more pathetic than the
thought of how generations come and go, and empires rise and fall,
while the scene on which they play their brief parts remains the same.
'The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea.'
to-day as they did more than two millenniums ago, only the grass was
for a while a little ranker on the plain. Olivet lifts the same outline
against the pale morning twilight as when David went up its slope a
weeping exile. The pebble that we kick out of our path had thousands of
years of existence ere we were born, and may lie there unaltered to all
appearance for centuries after we are dead. 'One generation cometh and
another goeth, but the earth abideth for ever.'
And how much more lasting our possessions are than their possessors!
Where are the strong hands that clutched the rude weapons that lie now
quietly ticketed in our museums? How dim and dark the bright brave eyes
that once flashed through the bars of these helmets, hanging just a
little rusted, over the tombs in Westminster Abbey! Other men will live
in our houses, read our books, own our mills, use our furniture, preach
in our pulpits, sit in our pews: we are but lodgers in this abiding
nature, 'like a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night,'
and to-morrow morning vacates his rooms for a new arrival, and goes
away unregretted and is forgotten in an hour.
The constant change and progression of life are enforced, too, in this
metaphor.
The old threadbare emblem of a journey which is implied in the text
suggests how, moment by moment, we hurry on and how everything is
slipping past us, as fields and towns do to a traveller in a train.
Only our journey is smooth and noiseless, like the old-fashioned canal
boat travelling, where, if you shut your eyes, you could not tell that
you were moving. We glide on and never know it, and so gradually and
silently is the scene 'changed by still degrees,' that it is only now
and then that men have any vivid consciousness that the 'fashion of
this world is' ever 'in the act of passing,' like the canvas of a
panorama ever winding and unwinding on its twin rollers with slow,
equable motion. It needs an effort of attention and will to discern the
movement, and it is worth while to make the effort, for that clear and
poignant sense of the constant flux and mutation of all things around
us, and of the ebbing away of our own lives, is fundamental to all
elevation of thought, to all nobleness of deed, to all worthy
conception of duty and of joy. Everything that is, stands poised, like
Fortune, on a rolling ball. The solid earth is a movable sphere, for
ever spinning on its axis and rushing on its path among the stars. Ever
some star is sinking in mist, or dipping below the horizon; ever new
constellations are climbing to the zenith. A long, patient discipline
is needed to keep fresh in our hearts the sense of this transiency. Let
us set ourselves consciously to deepen our convictions of it, and
amidst all the illusions of these solid-seeming shows of things, keep
firm hold of the assurance that they are but fleeting shadows that
sweep across the solemn mountain's side, and that only God and the
doing of His will lasts. So shall our life pierce down with its seeking
roots to the abiding ground of all Being, and, looking to the 'things
that are eternal,' we shall be able to make what is but for a moment
contribute to the everlasting ennobling of our character and enrichment
of our life yonder.
Surely these words, too, tell of the true home.
'Ye are strangers'--because your native land is elsewhere. It is not
merely the physical facts of death and change that make us strangers
here, but the direction of our desires, and the true affinities of our
nature. If by these we belong to heaven and God, then here we shall
feel that we have not where to lay our heads, and shall 'dwell in
tabernacles' because 'we look for the city.'
What a contrast between the perishable tents of the wilderness and the
rock-built mansions of that city. And how short this phase of being
must look when seen from above! You remember how long a year, a week,
seemed to you when a child--what do the first ten years of your life
look to you now? What must the earthly life of Abel, the first who
died, look to him even now, when he contrasts its short twenty or
thirty years with the thousands since? and, after thousands and
thousands more, how it will dwindle! So to us, if we reach that safe
shore, and look back upon the sea that brought us thither, as it
stretches to the horizon, miles of billows once so terrible will seem
shrunken to a line of white foam.
Cherish, then, constant consciousness of that solemn eternity, and let
your eyes be ever directed to it, like a man who sees some great flush
of light on the horizon, and is ever turning from his work to look. Use
the transient as preparation for the eternal, the fleeting days as
those which determine the undying 'Day' and its character. Keep your
cares and interests in the present rigidly limited to necessary things.
Why should travellers burden themselves? The less luggage, the easier
marching. The accommodation and equipment in the desert do not matter
much. The wise man will say, 'Oh, it will do. I shall soon be home.'
'Ye are strangers and sojourners.'