THE PRESENTATION
And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were
accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord.
S. Luke II. 22.
O come let us worship the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost,--we the Christian nations, for He is our true God.
And we hope in Holy Mary, that God will have mercy upon us through her
prayers.
Hail to thee, Mary, the fair dove, who hath borne for us God the Word.
COPTIC
The reading of a story in the Gospels is often like looking through a
window down some long arcade; there is in the foreground the group of
actors in whom we are presently interested, and beyond them is the whole
background of contemporary life to which they belong, of which they are
a part. If we have time to think out the meaning of this surrounding
life we gain added insight into the meaning of our principal characters.
It is so now as we watch this group of humble peasant folk coming up to
the temple to fulfil the demands of the law of Moses. In the precincts
of the temple they are merged in a larger group whose interests are
clearly identical with their own, and whom we easily see to be the local
representatives of a party--the name, no doubt, suggests an organisation
which they had not--scattered throughout Judea. Their interest was the
redemption of Israel. They were the true heirs of the prophets, and
among them the prophecies which concerned the Lord's Christ were the
subject of constant study and meditation. Amid the movements and
intrigues of political and religious parties, they abode quietly in the
temple, as Simeon and Anna, or in their homes, as Zacharias and
Elizabeth, _waiting_. Their power was the silent power of sanctity, the
power that flows from lives steeped in meditation and prayer. They
constitute that remnant which is the depository of the hopes of Israel
and the saving salt which prevents the utter putrefaction of the body of
the nation.
We cannot for a moment doubt that Mary and Joseph were of this remnant,
and that they were in complete sympathy with those whom they found here
in the temple when the Child Jesus was brought in "to do for him after
the custom of the law." The actual ceremony of the purification was soon
over, the demands of the law satisfied. Neither Jesus nor Mary had any
inner need of these observances; their value in their case was that by
submission to them they associated themselves closely with their
brethren, our Lord thus continuing that divine self-emptying which he
had begun at the Incarnation. We are impressed with the completeness of
this stooping of God when we see the offering that Mary brings, "A pair
of turtle doves," the offering of the very poor. Our Lord has accepted
life on its lowest economic terms in order that nothing in His mission
shall flow from adventitious aids. He must owe all in the accomplishment
of His work to the Father Who gave it Him to do. It will be the essence
of the temptation that He must soon undergo that He shall consent to
call to His aid earthly and material supports and base His hopes of
success on something other than God.
Accidentally, there is this further demonstration contained in the
poverty of the Holy Family, that, namely, the completest spiritual
privilege, the fullest spiritual development, is independent of
"possessions." It is no doubt true that "great possessions" do not of
necessity create a bar in all cases to spiritual accomplishment; but to
many of us it is a consolation to know that the completest sanctity
humanity has known has been wrought out in utter poverty of life. We
shall have occasion to speak more of this later; we now only note the
fact that those whom we meet in the pages of the New Testament as
waiting hopefully for the redemption of Israel are waiting in poverty
and hard work.
What we find in S. Mary as she passes through the ceremony of her
purification from a child-bearing which had in no circumstance of it
anything impure, is the spirit of sacrifice which submission to the law
implies. She has caught the spirit of her Son, the spirit of selfless
offering to the will of God. It is the central accomplishment of the
life of sanctity. The life of sanctity must be wrought out from the
centre, from our contact with God. No one becomes holy by works,
whatever may be the nature of the works. Works, the external life, are
the expression of what we are, they are the externalization of our
character. If they be not the expression of a life hid with Christ in
God they can have no spiritual value, whatever may be their social
value. The kind of works which "are done to be seen of men" "have their
reward," that is, the sort of reward they seek, human approval; they
have no value in the realm of the spirit.
But the life that is lived as sacrifice, as a thing perfectly offered to
God, is a life growing up in God day by day. It is our Lord's life,
summed up from this point of view in the "I come to do thy will, O
God." Its most perfect reflection is caught by blessed Mary with her
acceptance of God's will: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord." But it is
the life expression of all sanctity; for the saint is such chiefly by
virtue of his sacrificial attitude. It is the completest account of the
life of sanctity that it "leaves all" to follow a divine call. It is the
response of the Apostles who, as James and John, leave their father
Zebedee and the boats and the nets and the hired servants, to follow
Jesus. It is the answer of Matthew who rises from the receipt of custom
at the Master's word. It is the answer of all saints in all times.
Sanctity means the abandonment of all for Christ: it means the embracing
of the poverty of Jesus and Mary.
Is sanctity then, or the possibility of it, shut within the narrow
limits of a poor life? Well, even if it were, the limits would not be so
very narrow. By far the greater part of the human race at any time has
been poor, as poor as the Holy Family. Unfortunately, Christianity is
forgetting its vocation of poverty and becoming a matter of
well-to-do-ness. But we need not forget that the poor are the majority.
However, the fact is not that economical poverty is automatically
productive of spirituality, but that accepted and offered poverty is the
road to the heart of God. It is not denied that the rich man may
consecrate and offer his goods to God and make them instruments of God's
service; but in the process he runs great risk of deceiving himself and
of attempting to deceive God--the risk of quietly substituting for the
spirit of sacrifice the spirit of commercial bargaining, and attempting
to buy the favour of God, and of ransoming his great possessions by a
well-calculated tribute. It is not so much our possessions as the way we
hold them that is in question; it is a question whether the inner motive
of our life is the will to sacrifice or the will to be rich. "They that
desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many
foolish and hurtful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition,"
These dangers S. Paul noted as the besetting dangers of riches are
counteracted by the possession of the spirit of sacrifice which holds
all things at the disposal of God, and views life as opportunity for the
service of God. And in so estimating life, we must remember that money
is not the only thing that human beings possess. As I pointed out the
vast majority of the human race have no money: it by no means follows
that they have no capacity or field for the exercise of the spirit of
sacrifice. There is, for instance, an abundant opportunity for the
exercise of that spirit in the glad acceptance of the narrow lot that
may be ours. Probably many, indeed most, poor are only economically
poor; they fall under S. Paul's criticism in that "they desire to be
rich," and are therefore devoid of the spirit of sacrifice that would
transform their actual poverty into a spiritual value. But all the
powers and energies of life do in fact constitute life's capital. A poor
boy has great possessions in the gifts of nature that God has granted
him. He may use this capital as he will. He may be governed by "the
desire to be rich," or by the desire to consecrate himself to the will
and service of God--and the working out of life will be accordingly. He
may become very rich economically, or he may devote his life to the
service of his fellows as physician, teacher, missionary, or in
numberless other paths. Once more, the meaning of life is in its
voluntary direction, and whatever may be his economic state, he may, if
he will, be "rich toward God."
If what we are seeking is to follow the Gospel-life, if we are seeking
to express toward man the spirit of the Master, we find abundant field
for the exercise of this spirit of sacrifice in our daily relations with
others. S. Paul's rule of life: "Look not every man to his own things,
but every man also to the things of others," is the practical rule of
the sacrificed will. It seeks to fulfil the service of the Master by
taking the spirit of the Master--His helpfulness, His consideration, His
sympathy--with one into the detail of the day's work. It is one of the
peculiarities of human nature that it finds it quite possible to work
itself up to an occasional accomplishment, especially in a spectacular
setting, of spiritual works, which it finds itself quite impotent to do
under the commonplace routine of life. The race experience is accurately
enough summed up in the cynical proverb: "No man is a hero to his
valet." It expresses the fact that in ordinary circumstances, and under
commonplace temptations, we do not succeed in holding life to the
accomplishment which is ours when we are, as it were, on dress parade.
In other words, we respond to the opinions we desire to create in
others; and the spirit of sanctity is a response not to public opinion,
but to the mind and thought of God. When we seek the mind of Christ, and
seek to reproduce that mind in our own lives, seek to be possessed by
it, then we shall gladly render back to God all life's riches which we
have received from Him, and acknowledge in the true spirit of poverty
that "all things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we
given Thee."
The world has got into a very ill way of thinking of God as _force_.
Force seems in the popular mind to be the synonym of _power_. The only
power that we understand is the power that _compels_, that secures the
execution of its will by physical or moral constraint. With this
conception of power in mind men are continually asking: "Why does not
God do this or that? If he be God and wills goodness, why does He not
execute goodness, use power to accomplish it?"
It ought to be unnecessary to point out that such a conception of power
is quite foreign to the Christian conception of God. Goodness that is
compulsory is not goodness. Human legislation, in its enforcement of
law, looks not to the production of goodness but to the production of
order, a quite different thing. But God's heart is set upon the
sanctification of His children and is satisfied with nothing less than
that. "This is the will of God, even your sanctification." But
sanctification cannot be compelled. The divine method is, that "when the
fulness of time was come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born
under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might
receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God sent forth
the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." Through
this method we "were reconciled to God by the death of His Son." The
result is not that we are compelled to obey, but that "the love of
Christ constraineth us." The account of the apostolic authority is not
that it is a commission to rule the universal Church, but "now then we
are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us; we pray
you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God."
The study of this divine method should put us on the right track in the
attempt to estimate the nature of sanctity and the results we may expect
from it. We shall expect nothing of spiritual value from force. We shall
be quite prepared to turn away from the governing parties in Jerusalem
as from those who have repudiated the divine method and are therefore
useless for the divine ends. We shall turn rather to those who gather
about the temple and there, in a life of prayer and meditation, wait for
the redemption. It is to these, who are the real temple of the Lord,
that the Lord "shall come suddenly," that the manifestation of God will
be made. And their hearts will overflow with joy as they behold the
fulfilment of the promises of God.
The power of God is the power of love; and it is that love, and that
love alone, that has won the victories of God. It is a very slow method,
men say. No doubt. But it is the only method that has any success. The
method of force seems effective; but its triumphs are illusory. Force
cannot make men love, it can only make them hate. The world is being won
to God by the love of God manifested in Christ Jesus our Lord. And it is
as well to remember, when we are tempted to complain of the slowness of
the process, that the slowness is ours, not God's. The process is slow
because men will not consent to become the instruments of God's love for
the world, will not transmit the crucified love of God's Son to their
fellows. They continually, in their impatience, revert to force of some
sort, for the attainment of spiritual ends. They become the tools of all
sorts of secular ambitions which promise support in return for their
co-operation. And the result may be read by any one not blinded by
prejudice in the futility and incompetence of modern religions of all
sorts. It is seen perhaps most of all in the pride of opinion which
keeps the Christian world in a fragmentary condition, and which
approaches the undoing of the sin of a divided Christendom with the
preliminary announcement that no separated body must be required to
admit that it has been in the wrong. Human disregard of the divine
method of love and humility can hardly go farther; and the only
practical result that can be expected to follow is such as followed from
the negotiations of Herod and Pontius Pilate--a new Crucifixion of the
Ever-sacrificed Christ.
We have risen to the divine method when we have learned to rely for
spiritual results upon God alone. Then is revealed to us the power of
sanctity. We turn over the pages of the lives of the saints, of those
who have been great in the Kingdom of God, and we are struck by the
growing influence of these men and women. They are simple men and women
whose life's energy is concentrated on some special work; they are
confessors or directors; they work among the very poor; they lead lives
of retirement in Religious Houses; they are preachers of the Gospel;
they are missionaries. The one thing that they appear to have in common
is utter consecration to the work in hand. And we see, it may be with
some wonder, that as they become more and more absorbed in their special
work, they become more and more centres of influence. Without at all
willing it they draw people about them, become centres of influences,
arouse interest, become widely known. In short, they are, without
willing it, centres of energy. Of what energy? Obviously, of the energy
of love: the love of God manifested in them draws men to God. The man at
whose disposal is unlimited force compels men to do his will; but he
draws no one to him except the hypocrite and the sycophant who expect to
gain something by their servility. The saint draws men, not to himself,
but to God; for obviously it is not his power but God's power that is
being manifested through him.
Unless we are very unfortunate we all know people whose attractiveness
is the attractiveness of simple goodness. They are not learned nor
influential nor witty nor clever, but we like to be with them. When we
are asked why, we can only explain it by the attractiveness of their
Christlikeness. What we gain from intercourse with them is spiritual
insight and power. Their influence might be described as sacramental:
they are means our Blessed Lord uses to impart Himself. They are so
filled with the mind of Christ that they easily show Him to the world;
and withal, quite unconsciously. For great love is possible only where
there is great humility.
And this power of sanctity which is the outcome of union with God is a
permanent acquisition to the Kingdom of God. God's Kingdom is ultimately
a Kingdom of saints. The sphere of God's self-manifestation in human
life increases ever as the saints increase; and the power of sanctity
necessarily remains while the saint remains, that is, forever. The saint
remains a permanent organ of the Body of Christ, a perdurable instrument
of the divine love. To speak humanly, the more saints there are, the
more the love of God can manifest itself; the wider its influence on
humanity. And the greater the Saint, that is, the nearer the Saint
approaches the perfection of God, to which he is called--Be ye therefore
perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect--the more influential he
must be; that is the more perfectly he will show the divine likeness and
transmit the divine influence. When we think of the power of the saints
as intercessors that is what actually we are thinking of,--the
perfection of their understanding of the mind of Christ.
But to return to this world and to the gathering in the temple on the
day of the Purification. These are they in whom the hope of Israel
rests. Israel is not a failure because it has brought forth these. God's
work through the centuries has not come to naught because in these
there is the possibility of a new beginning. The consummate flower of
Israel's life is the Blessed Mother through whom God becomes man; and
these who meet her in the temple are the representatives of those hidden
ones in Israel who will be the field wherein the seed of the Word can be
sown and where it will bring forth fruit an hundredfold. Jesus, this
Child, is God made man; and these around Him to-day, Mary and Joseph,
Simeon and Anna, are those who will receive His love and will show its
power in the universe forever.
And so it will remain always; the good ground wherein the seed may be
sown and bring forth unto eternal life is the spiritual nature of man,
made ready by humility and love,--"In quietness and confidence shall be
your strength." In the quietness that waits for God to act, the
confidence that knows that He will act when the time comes. It is well
if our aspiration is to be of the number of those who live lives hid
with Christ in God; who are seeking nothing but that the love of God may
be shed abroad in their hearts; who are "constrained" by nothing but the
love of Jesus. It is true that this simplicity of motive and aim will
bring it about that our lives will be hidden lives, lives of which the
world will take no note. We may be quite sure that none of the rulers of
Israel thought much about old Simeon who passed his time praying in the
temple. And if we want to be known of rulers it is doubtless a mistake
to take the road that Simeon followed. But the reward of that way was
that he saw "the Lord's Christ," that it was permitted him to take in
his arms Incarnate God, and then, in his rapture, to sing _Nunc
Dimittis_. We cannot travel two roads at once. When the Holy Family goes
out from the temple it can go, if it will, to the palace of Herod, or it
can go back to Bethlehem. It cannot go both ways and we know the way
that it took. And we in our self-examination to-night can see two roads
stretching out before us. We can go the way of the world, the way that
seeks (whether it finds or no) popularity and prominence, or we can join
the Holy Family and in company with Jesus and Mary and Joseph go back to
the quietness and hiddenness of the House of Bread where the saints
dwell. With them, sheltered by the Sacrifice of Jesus and the prayers of
Mary and Joseph we can wait for the Redemption in the full manifestation
of the life of God in us, and for the time when the love of God shall be
fully "shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given us."
O Sion, ope thy temple-gates;
See, Christ, the Priest and Victim, waits--
Let lifeless shadows flee:
No more to heaven shall vainly rise
The ancient rites--a sacrifice
All pure and perfect, see.
Behold, the Maiden knowing well
The hidden Godhead that doth dwell
In him her infant Son:
And with her Infant, see her bring
The doves, the humble offering
For Christ, the Holy One.
Here, all who for his coming sighed
Behold him, and are satisfied--
Their faith the prize hath won:
While Mary, in her breast conceals
The holy joys her Lord reveals,
And ponders them alone.
Come, let us tune our hearts to sing
The glory of our God and King,
The blessed One and Three:
Be everlasting praise and love
To him who reigns in heaven above,
Through all eternity.
PART TWO