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[Preached twenty times from 7/29/45 at Bondgate, Darlington to 2/20/94 at Howden-le-Wear]

“Not to please ourselves” yet that is precisely what most of us spend most of our time doing. Or if “most of us” is wrong, then at least “most of our generation.” And so many of them, and so plausibly, that I suspect the principle has even invaded our faith itself. I shall make plain later what I mean by that. I warned you in the Christian Talk last Sunday morning that I was going to preach this sermon, when I told you about a small boy who announced decisively “I’m looking for me.” It’s all about me and sometimes the excuses are hilarious.

For example, here’s a recent note in the paper—the headmistress of a school preserved for posterity this excuse note she once received: “Miss—Please will you excuse Mary from being away last Wednesday as her Aunty got buried and also had a Cold in her Glands and still has a cold now. Kindly Oblige, Mrs.—.” One is sorry for Aunty still suffering from her cold, but you see the point no doubt, and the misplaced modifier in the sentence as well.

If I were in the habit, which I am not, of preaching on subjects rather than texts, I should tell you that my subject was Hedonism. That title would at any rate have the merit of concealing my intentions from some of you, but I will draw the curtain by giving you a definition. This is the Chamber’s Dictionary—“Hedonism: the doctrine that happiness is the highest good.” So you see we are back again to the text—“pleasing yourself.”

Now if there is a prevailing characteristic of this age, it is this hedonism, pleasing yourself, pursuing happiness. I could give you plenty of proof if there were time. For example, a few days ago in a house where I was visiting, I picked up a copy of John Bull and looked over an article, written by a young married man, to explain why young people of today were unwilling to have children. This young man who thought himself very badly paid at three pounds a week more than your minister receives (that is not a complaint) explained that he and his wife were rather fond of dancing and pictures and were not minded to give them up. And that was that. I am not surprised that the article was anonymous, but I am sure that millions of people would write to the same effect. But you say, “How are we to judge? Do you want us to always be miserable?” I borrow the title of a book I am reading and ask what are the tests of life?

THE TESTS OF LIFE?

How can you tell when you are living the right kind of life? What are the things to aim at? Of course life is a tricky, complicated thing to handle at best. You buy an electric battery in a shop. The assistant puts a lamp holder across the terminals. The lamp gleams good, signaling the battery is alright. Or the examiner takes the examination papers, makes them and lists his candidates 55 percent, 53 percent, 50 percent—draw the line! These have passed, and these have failed.

But life doesn’t work like that. As I say, it is nothing like so easy. It is as if you took a bulb holder with an electric bulb, out it across the terminals and then—no light appeared but a bell rang. Or as if when you looked at your list of candidates today, Mr. X had scored 70, and when you looked tomorrow, only 30. Where is he, and how can you draw the line? Enough of talking in pictures. Let’s have some facts (though my pictures were facts).

What is wrong with living for pleasure, living to please oneself anyway? I think we ought to be quite realistic about this, and very many people aren’t. It won’t do for us to be forever busy condemning people seeking for happiness in a purely sensual way when we are doing the same thing in our Christian faith. Most people agree—perhaps rather unfairly—to condemn “rice Christians,” folk on the mission field who have been attracted into the Church by financial and material benefits they hoped to obtain. Isn’t it equally bad to be a Christian for the sake even of spiritual profit? For the sake of a future life? For the sake of some more or less emotional experience now?

I don’t want anyone to be a Christian because it is nice to be a Christian, because it gives him a glow of comfortable self-satisfaction, a Jack Hornerish sentiment of “Oh, what a good boy am I.” Listen to some words of Francis Xavier (we shall have more of them later), who apparently did not get much out of his religion. “My God, I love thee, not because I hope for heaven thereby, nor because those who love thee not are lost eternally.” But we are jumping ahead too quickly. The question still is—Why not? Why not do this, that, and the other for the happiness it brings? Shall I surprise you? I don’t know the answer to that question. At least I don’t know a purely negative answer. I cannot prove that this is not a logical attitude to life. I cannot break it down by the weapons of dialectic. It is perfectly true that many who have pursued pleasure have found it turned into something different in their hands, like Proteus in the grip of Hercules. But that is not universally true.

I think for example of Epicurus, founder of the Epicureans, the most thorough-going of all hedonists. He wrote this in a letter on the day of his death—“I write to you on the blissful day which is the last of my life. The obstruction of my bladder and internal pains have reached the extreme point, but there is marshalled against them the delight of my mind in thinking over our talks together.” You may brand this Epicurean doctrine as escapism, but you cannot deny the man’s achievement.

Why should strong people (to go back to Paul’s argument) bear the infirmities of the weak? Why should free people constantly be stooping under the chains of the feeble? Why not live for pleasure? I am not aware that St. Paul ever tried to break down that position by argument. There is no negative answer, there is only a positive answer. That is often so in law. One party puts up what looks like a good prima facie case, on circumstantial evidence, and just because the evidence is circumstantial the opposing counsel cannot break it down. What he can do is to set over against it a different case, that also fits the facts and fits more of the facts better than the other case. That is what Paul does here. He says, the test of life is Christ.

THE TEST OF LIFE IS CHRIST

Your hedonist makes out his case, and mind, it is a better case than preachers commonly allow it to be. To reply, “Selfish creature with your selfish happiness. What about the rest of humankind?” is quite wide of the mark. For your modern hedonist says quite readily, the highest form of happiness is social happiness, and I cannot be perfectly happy unless all human beings are happy too. Where is the selfishness in that? It is a good case, but St. Paul will help us to beat it. “You have a good case, we will admit it. But you left out a fundamental fact. Call the witnesses. Yes there is Epicurus. Yes he retired from Athens to his garden (what about the poor devils who have not gardens) and lived a tranquil happy life.”

But now we call another witness—Jesus Christ and you dare not neglect him. And even Christ pleased not himself. St. Paul never tells us much about the earthly life of Jesus, but such a phrase would be meaningless if the writer could not presuppose a knowledge of how Jesus lived.

Inured to poverty and pain, A suffering life my Master led;The Son of God, the Son of Man,He had not where to lay His head (C. Wesley).

Now if the Maker lived like that, how then should we live? But there is far more here than an example to counter-balance Epicurus. I don’t think it conceivable that any of us would have written vs. 3 as Paul does. We should have said, “Christ pleased not himself, he died on the Cross.” Or “Christ pleased not himself, he went about doing good to others.” Or “Christ pleased not himself, for he left home and family and friends in obedience to his call.” St. Paul says none of these things. He says, “Christ pleased not himself, for . . .” and then an obscure text from the Old Testament.

I have no time to go into the doctrine of the Old Testament involved. Only, notice this. It means that the actions of Jesus are thought of not as a living example and a precept of a great philosopher. They are the realization of what was always in the mind of God, the fulfillment in the world of God’s purposes. I have time to draw only three brief conclusions.

Here is the key for our treatment of others. It is simply that through this Christ we are related to them, and we must live to them as he lived to them. What made aristocratic Francis of Assisi give himself to poverty and service? That which gave him the strange habit of calling everybody and everything brother and sister? A new relationship to life in Christ. And here is the real reason for being a Christian. Hear Francis Xavier again:

Not with the hope of gaining ought,Not seeking a reward,But as thou hast loved me, O ever-loving Lord.

It is because he loved us. Because there is no other decent response. I am not offering you a bed of roses, only his own way of being—sacrifice. Is it your way? Or will you please yourself?

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