Читать книгу Luminescence, Volume 1 - C. K. Barrett - Страница 9

[Preached 24 times between 12/24/39 at Hollyhead Road and 12/11/83 at Trimdon]4

What’s in a name? Not very much to us. We are matter of fact people and sufficiently scientific to recognize the fact that to call a rose a turnip would make no difference to its scent. And we are not very impressed by another’s name either. And the names we give to our children are not, as a rule, based on any strange insight into their character or even hopes of what their character will ultimately prove to be. A name is therefore just a convenience, and that’s all.

But customs have not always and everywhere been like that. In the country and times of Jesus names were very significant things. To know the name of a person or a demon was to have him in your power. Have you noticed how Jesus himself would ask the demons their names? And to know the name of God meant not merely to know what was the proper title by which to address God, but what was his nature, and what he would do. So when Jesus said (John 17.26) “I have made known unto them thy name and will make it know,” he meant that he, in his teaching and life, was telling people what God was like, who he was, and what he was doing.

The name therefore of God’s Son, of him who was God, and was doing the work of God on earth is very significant. Of course before the birth of Jesus, people were expecting a Messiah, the King of the Jews. And they were expecting him to do many things. They thought of him as a great military leader, who should drive the foreign armies out of the land. They thought of him as God coming to judgment, one who would drown the world in the blood of his enemies. But it was a different idea that was expressed by the name Joseph was commanded to call his child. The name Jesus (“Yeshua”) means God saves, and the angel knew what sort of a savior this child was to be. It was true, as for hundreds of years, God’s people had dreamed, and hoped, and despaired that God was on his way, stooping from heaven to deliver his people from that which oppressed them. But it was also true, that God could see much more clearly than could his people what was their worst enemy. It was not easy to look beyond the hard lives created by the Roman army rambling across their land; it was not easy to feel more than the prick of hunger and hardship, the humiliation of defeat; but there was something else. There was a greater enemy, a more bitter defeat. There was Sin.

SIN

It may be that sin is an idea one would prefer not to think about at Christmas time. This is a season, we like to think, of general goodwill and kindliness. There is no one so hard of heart but that Christmas makes him merry and kindly. Christmas reveals the innate good nature in us all, often buried, often dissembled, but always there. Is that true? Are we really like that? Ought we really to use the fact of Christmas to set aside the matter of sin, as an excuse for putting aside the probing questions of the New Testament?

Let us at least make no mistake about the first Christmas. It is very easy to think of it as a beautiful, happy, idyllic scene, especially with so many Christmas cards about. I should rather like to send out more Christmas cards not with pictures of romantic looking shepherds, but with a realistic view of Herod’s hired assassins murdering young children. I don’t want to take away the beauty of Christmas but let us not act the ostrich, and hide our head in the sand when anything unpleasant appears.

Do not forget why Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem at all. They were living in a land not unlike Poland today (i.e., 1939), and had to go where they were told for the convenience of those imposing crushing taxation upon them. Do not forget that after that weary journey, and arriving in a blackout, there was no room in the inn. Do not forget where the birth of Jesus took place—in a stable, and let the stained glass windows go and see the stench and filth of it. Do not forget Herod and his massacre. Do not forget the hurried flight into Egypt.

There is plenty of beauty indeed in the story of the Nativity, but there is a dark side to the picture. It is the very contrast that helps us to see the infamy, the ingratitude, the utter sinfulness of it all, and so to the Cross. And having seen that contrast we may move on to another which extends as far as our own time, and as far as our own lives; the contrast between God’s act in sending his only Son into the world, and the sort of world we have made to receive Him. I suppose the most obvious thing to do is to point out, that he, the Prince of Peace, came and still comes into a world of war. In Jesus, God offers to us, to all his peace.

But there is something which strikes home even more personally than that. God’s coming into the world in Jesus, proclaims most of all God’s love, a love not based on merit or desert, but freely descending to the undeserving, a love that gives its all for people, not because they are loveable but only of its own inner necessity. “He hath loved, he hath loved us because he would love.” The love of God and his wonderful patience, even his humility.

A very old Christian writer pointed out the wonder of this. How did he send him? Not in wrath, not commanding, but in love, persuading, exhorting people, being patient with them. And on our side, what corresponds to this? What is our reply? In our behavior toward God and toward our fellow human beings governed by the same love, the same patience, the same humility, that we see in Jesus?

In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles is spoken of as a “spirit which ever denies.” And there is something of that in us; something that says no to God’s love and kindness, something that is on Herod’s side rather than Christ’s. A communist I was arguing with after an open air meeting told me that our present rulers were entirely selfish, and the people should rule themselves. Without quarreling with the principle, I wanted to know how he could be sure that the new rulers would not show the same selfishness. He said ‘you must change their ideology. That’s a big way of putting a simple yet terribly difficult thing. Change their ideology, that means change the “No” into a “Yes,” and turn the hard selfishness into the love and patience of God.

We may well recognize anyway, that it is something that needs to be done. It is true that we live in a world that is saying no to the God who with infinite love and compassion made his home and his grave among human beings. Do not think this is something abstract. It appears again and again in the whole fabric of human life. Sin is a fact of experience. You may forget it for a time, but you cannot blot your sinful acts out of your mind. Like David, you will meet your Nathan. Like Elijah, your Ahab. And sins are not isolated, because they are built up into habits, the chain that we forge for ourselves and bind upon our own limbs. This is the human NO! to the grace of God, which is more than the no to his commandments. Can nothing be done about it? Something has been done about it.

HE SHALL SAVE HIS PEOPLE FROM THEIR SINS

That is what Jesus came to do. He it is, and no other can do it; that is the meaning of the stress in the Greek—“thou canst save, and thou alone.” We run in vain from one supposed source of help to another, and he is the only Savior from sin. And that is what he is. People have tried from time to time to show him to be other things. The first communist, the first pacifist, the great teacher, the supreme moral example. But he is the Savior from sin. That at least was his own idea, and the idea of St. Paul of his work. But how can he save people from their sins?

1) By being with them, associating his purity with their evil. Have you ever read through the first sixteen verses of the New Testament? It is Matthew’s genealogy and repays reading, if you know the Old Testament. Notice especially the women who are mentioned—Tamar, Rahab, Bathsheba—all women of the worst of reputations, and Ruth, no Jew at all. Somehow these are the people who have to be brought in, and that reflects the whole of the mission, and the character of Jesus. For he was the friend of publicans and sinners. He was the shepherd of the lost sheep and the doctor of the sick. Jesus healed people’s bodies at a distance, but he did not heal their souls that way. It was when people like Levi and Zacchaeus opened their homes to him that they became changed persons.

2) By his power to forgive. Jesus knew that the most terrible consequence of sin was the barrier it erected between humankind and God, its breaking down of the relationship between them. Not that there was ever much to break down, because human beings had been trying to come to God by the wrong road; trying to earn his favor by the good things he did. But this attempt is constantly vitiated by the fact of sin, so that what Jesus did, in effect, was to create a new relationship between God and human beings, and our relationship to God exists only in Him. He is our righteousness and we have no other. So the jolly feasts with sinners could indeed become a holy communion, because Jesus bore them up to the presence of God. He was with them, but he was not one of them, and because he was different, and came from above he was able to forgive; to give us a new start, a new relationship to God, the life of sonship.

3) By his victory over the power of evil. Look again at the genealogy and see how Matthew splits it up into three sections. This is not coincidence, it is a philosophy of history. It means that for Matthew, the coming of Christ, is the inauguration of a new era, different from all that preceded this, in the fact of the presence of the Kingdom, the mighty rule of God. God manifests his power in overcoming the power of evil and setting up his own kingdom in the hearts of human beings. This means the defeat of sin, which on its own ground was invincible. “Give me somewhere to stand,” says Archimedes, “and I will move the world.” He meant that if, by a miracle, he could stand outside the world, he could exert force enough to move it. That is what the coming of Jesus means—power from outside the world applied inside it, power that was able to conquer sin and death in Jesus and those who believe in him. I have related all this to the time of Jesus himself, but he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And what he did for sinful persons in the past he can do for you.5

APPLICATION

When people gave names, they looked backward as well as forward, and we may look too at the two Joshua’s of the Old Testament. One was the triumphant leader of a young and vigorous people whom he led into their promised land with glory and daring exploits. The other comes much later after a long and weary history, strained with sin and suffering. And he is not a soldier, but a priest, sacrificing, atoning for his people, sanctifying them.

And Jesus is both, so that whether you stand with a big life’s history in front of you, or with a tale of failure and defeat behind, he is the one who can save you from sin, and save you into the glory of his Kingdom. On one occasion, a friend, Sir Henry Leeland found Michael Faraday in tears, with his head bent over an open Bible. “I fear you are feeling unwell,” he said. “No,” answered Faraday, “it’s not that, but why O why will not people believe the blessed truths here revealed?”6

Pages from C. K. Barrett’s notebook

4. Editor’s Note: There are many sermons composed in the 1930s as CKB began to preach regularly that he did not use thereafter, perhaps because he thought they could stand improvement or replacement. Whatever the case, this was not one of them for he used it in various places for over forty years. In general, I have followed his own implicit evaluation of those very early sermons, and presented here those that he felt worthwhile to use across many decades.

5. Editor’s Note: Here in pencil, he writes the name Lew Batchelor, about whom the story is told in another sermon in this volume. Presumably, he repeated that story here, at least in some of the uses of this sermon.

6. Editor’s Note: This illustration is crossed out in pencil, so presumably it was not used in later versions of the preaching of this sermon.