These elders did not think loftily of Jesus Christ. The conception
that we have of Him goes a long way to settle whether it is possible
or not for us to approach Him with the word 'worthy' on our lips.
The higher we lift our thought of Christ, the lower becomes our
thought of ourselves. These elders saw the centurion from the
outside, and estimated him accordingly. There is no more frequent,
there is no more unprofitable and impossible occupation, than that
of trying to estimate other people's characters. Yet there are few
things that we are so fond of doing. Half our conversation consists
of it, and a very large part of what we call literature consists of
it; and it is bound to be always wrong, whether it is eulogistic or
condemnatory, because it only deals with the surface.
Here we have the shallow plea advanced by these elders in reference
to the centurion which corresponds to the equally shallow plea that
some of us are tempted to advance in reference to ourselves. The
disposition to do so is in us all. Luther said that every man was
born with a Pope in his belly. Every man is born with a Pharisee in
himself, who thinks that religion is a matter of barter, that it is
so much work, buying so much favour here, or heaven hereafter.
Wherever you look, you see the working of that tendency. It is the
very mainspring of heathenism, with all its penances and
performances. It is enshrined in the heart of Roman Catholicism,
with its dreams of a treasury of merits, and works of supererogation
and the like. Ay! and it has passed over into a great deal of what
calls itself Evangelical Protestantism, which thinks that, somehow
or other, it is all for our good to come here, for instance on a
Sunday, though we have no desire to come and no true worship in us
when we have come, and to do a great many things that we would much
rather not do, and to abstain from a great many things that we are
strongly inclined to, and all with the notion that we have to bring
some 'worthiness' in order to move Jesus Christ to deal graciously
with us.
And then notice that the religion of barter, which thinks to earn
God's favour by deeds, and is, alas! the only religion of
multitudes, and subtly mingles with the thoughts of all, tends to
lay the main stress on the mere external arts of cult and ritual.
'He loveth our nation, and hath built us a synagogue'; not, 'He is
gentle, good, Godlike.' 'He has built a synagogue.' That is the type
of work which most people who fall into the notion that heaven is to
be bought, offer as the price. I have no doubt that there are many
people who have never caught a glimpse of any loftier conception than
that, and who, when they think--which they do not often do--about
religious subjects at all, are saying to themselves, 'I do as well
as I can,' and who thus bring in some vague thought of the mercy of
God as a kind of make-weight to help out what of their own they put
in the scale. Ah, dear brethren! that is a wearying, an endless, a
self-torturing, an imprisoning, an enervating thought, and the plea
of 'worthiness' is utterly out of place and unsustainable before God.
II. Now let me turn to the deeper conviction which silences that
plea.
'I am not worthy that Thou shouldest enter under my roof, wherefore
neither thought I myself worthy to come unto Thee.' This man had a
loftier conception of who and what Christ was than the elders had.
To them He was only one of themselves, perhaps endowed with some
kind of prophetic power, but still one of themselves. The centurion
had pondered over the mystic power of the word of command, as he
knew it by experience in the legion, or in the little troop of which
he, though a man under the authority of his higher officers, was the
commander; and he knew that even his limited power carried with it
absolute authority and compelled obedience. And he had looked at
Christ, and wondered, and thought, and had come at last to a dim
apprehension of that great truth that, somehow or other, in this Man
there did lie a power which, by the mere utterance of His will,
could affect matter, could raise the dead, could still a storm,
could banish disease, could quell devils. He did not formulate his
belief, he could not have said exactly what it led to, or what it
contained, but he felt that there was something divine about Him.
And so, seeing, though it was but through mists, the sight of that
great perfection, that divine humanity and human divinity, he bowed
himself and said, 'Lord! I am not worthy.'
When you see Christ as He is, and give Him the honour due to His
name, all notions of desert will vanish utterly.
Further, the centurion saw himself from the inside, and that makes
all the difference. Ah, brethren! most of us know our own characters
just as little as we know our own faces, and find it as difficult to
form a just estimate of what the hidden man of the heart looks like
as we find it impossible to form a just estimate of what we look to
other people as we walk down the street. But if we once turned the
searchlight upon ourselves, I do not think that any of us would long
be able to stand by that plea, 'I am worthy.' Have you ever been on
a tour of discovery, like what they go through at the Houses of
Parliament on the first day of each session, down into the cellars
to see what stores of explosive material, and what villains to fire
it, may be lurking there? If you have once seen yourself as you are,
and take into account, not only actions but base tendencies, foul,
evil thoughts, imagined sins of the flesh, meannesses and basenesses
that never have come to the surface, but which you know are bits of
you, I do not think that you will have much more to say about 'I am
worthy.' The flashing waters of the sea may be all blazing in the
sunshine, but if they were drained off, what a frightful sight the
mud and the ooze at the bottom would be! Others look at the dancing,
glittering surface, but you, if you are a wise man, will go down in
the diving-bell sometimes, and for a while stop there at the bottom,
and turn a bull's-eye straight upon all the slimy, crawling things
that are there, and that would die if they came into the light.
'I am not worthy that Thou shouldest enter under my roof.' But then,
as I have said, most of us are strangers to ourselves. The very fact
of a course of action which, in other people, we should describe
with severe condemnation, being ours, bribes us to indulgence and
lenient judgment. Familiarity, too, weakens our sense of the
foulness of our own evils. If you have been in the Black Hole all
night, you do not know how vitiated the atmosphere is. You have to
come out into the fresh air to find out that. We look at the errors
of others through a microscope; we look at our own through the wrong
end of the telescope; and the one set, when we are in a cynical
humour, seem bigger than they are; and the other set always seem
smaller.
Now, that clear consciousness of my own sinfulness ought to underlie
all my religious feelings and thoughts. I believe, for my part, that
no man is in a position to apprehend Christianity rightly who has
not made the acquaintance of his own bad self. And I trace a very
large proportion of the shallow Christianity of this day as well as
of the disproportion in which its various truths are set forth, and
the rising of crops of erroneous conceptions just to this, that this
generation has to a large extent lost--no, do not let me say this
generation, _you and I_--have to a large extent lost, that
wholesome consciousness of our own unworthiness and sin.
But on the other hand, let me remind you that the centurion's deeper
conviction is not yet the deepest of all, and that whilst the
Christianity which ignores sin is sure to be impotent, on the other
hand the Christianity which sees very little but sin is bondage and
misery, and is impotent too. And there are many of us whose type of
religion is far gloomier than it should be, and whose motive of
service is far more servile than it ought to be, just because we
have not got beyond the centurion, and can only say, 'I am not
worthy; I am a poor, miserable sinner.'
III. And so I come to the third point, which is not in my text, but
which both my texts converge upon, and that is the deepest truth of
all, that worthiness or unworthiness has nothing to do with Christ's
love.
When these elders interceded with Jesus, He at once rose and went
with them, and that not because of their intercession or of the
certificate of character which they had given, but because His own
loving heart impelled Him to go to any soul that sought His help. So
we are led away from all anxious questionings as to whether we are
worthy or no, and learn that, far above all thoughts either of undue
self-complacency or of undue self-depreciation, lies the motive for
Christ's gracious and healing approach in
'His ceaseless, unexhausted love,
Unmerited and free.'
This is the truth to which the consciousness of sinfulness and
unworthiness points us all, for which that consciousness prepares
us, in which that consciousness does not melt away, but rather is
increased and ceases to be any longer a burden or a pain. Here,
then, we come to the very bed-rock of everything, for
'Merit lives from man to man,
But not from man, O Lord, to Thee.'
Jesus Christ comes to us, not drawn by our deserts, but impelled by
His own love, and that love pours itself out upon each of us. So we
do not need painfully to amass a store of worthiness, nor to pile up
our own works, by which we may climb to heaven. 'Say not, who shall
ascend up into heaven,' to bring Christ down again, 'but the word is
nigh thee, that if thou wilt believe with thine heart, thou shalt be
saved.' Worthiness or unworthiness is to be swept clean out of the
field, and I am to be content to be a pauper, to owe everything to
what I have done nothing to procure, and to cast myself on the sole,
all-sufficient mercy of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.
And then comes liberty, and then comes joy. If the gift is given
from no consideration of men's deserts, then the only thing that men
have to do is to exercise the faith that takes it. As the Apostle
says in words that sound very hard and technical, but which, if you
would only ponder them, are throbbing with vitality, 'It is of faith
that it might be by grace.' Since He gives simply because He loves,
the only requisites are the knowledge of our need, the will to
receive, the trust that, in clasping the Giver, possesses the gift.
The consciousness of unworthiness will be deepened. The more we know
ourselves to be sinful, the more we shall cleave to Christ, and the
more we cleave to Christ, the more we shall know ourselves to be
sinful. Peter caught a glimpse of what Jesus was when he sat in the
boat, and he said, 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!'
But Peter saw both himself and his Lord more clearly, that is more
truly, when, subsequent to his black treachery, his brother Apostle
said to him concerning the figure standing on the beach in the grey
morning, 'It is the Lord,' and he flung himself over the side and
floundered through the water to get to his Master's feet. For that
is the place for the man who knows himself unworthy. The more we are
conscious of our sin, the closer let us cling to our Lord's
forgiving heart, and the more sure we are that we have that love
which we have not earned, the more shall we feel how unworthy of it
we are. As one of the prophets says, with profound meaning, 'Thou
shalt be ashamed and confounded, and never open thy mouth any more
because of thy transgression, when I am pacified towards thee for
all that thou hast done.' The child buries its face on its mother's
breast, and feels its fault the more because the loving arms clasp
it close.
And so, dear brethren, deepen your convictions, if you are deluded
by that notion of merit; deepen your convictions, if you see your
own evil so clearly that you see little else. Come into the light,
come into the liberty, rise to that great thought, 'Not by works of
righteousness which we have done, but by His mercy He saved us.'
Have done with the religion of barter, and come to the religion of
undeserved grace. If you are going to stop on the commercial level,
'the wages of sin is death'; rise to the higher ground: 'the gift of
God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.'