(Christmas Sermon.)
“Glory to God in” the Highest, on earth peace; goodwill towards men. Amen.”
TEXT: LUKE i. 31, 32. “Behold, … thou shalt bring forth a Son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High.”
THESE were the words of promise spoken by the angel to Mary, that Ho whom she should bear should be called the Son of the Highest; and as this promise is after wards brought into direct connection with the statement that the power of the Highest should overshadow her, Mary had no room to suppose that her son was only to become the Son of God at some future time through some specially great deeds of His own, or by the outpouring of God’s grace upon Him. She was made to understand that from His very birth He was to be the Son of God, for from that time she was to call His name Jesus. And it is only in this fact that we grasp the full meaning of our solemn Christmas joy, to-day and always. For if the Saviour of the world had not been different from others at His birth, if the divine nature which we adore in Him had only come down upon Him afterwards, then our special connection with Him would not have begun with His birth; and our joy in His appearing would make less account of His birth (seeing that He was not yet, in that case, the Saviour) than of that moment of His life in which He became filled in a special manner with the power of the Highest. This, then, is the central thought in all that stirs our hearts on these days of solemn festival; that the Saviour was born the Son of God; that the divine power by which He was able to redeem the world dwelt in Him from the beginning of His life; and let this be to-day the subject of our devout meditation. Let Us consider the necessary connection of this truth on the One hand with Our common Christian faith; On the other, with that love through which faith works.
I. We assert first then, that it belongs to the deepest foundations of our Christian faith, (as this very festival bears witness), that we regard Christ as endowed, from the moment of His appearing in this world, with all that was necessary for Him as the Saviour of the world. We are to believe that He was already in Himself the eternal Word, though as yet silent; the Light sent to shine in the darkness, though as yet concealed; distinguished from all sinners by that saving power that dwelt in Him; and separated from the fellowship of sin. This, I admit, is a hard saying. It is so because of the difficulty we find in doing in connection with spiritual things what we are constantly doing in material and natural things—fully believing in what we cannot clearly imagine and picture to ourselves in all its bearings; and that is what is required of us here. Our own experience contributes to this difficulty. For while there is no question that we know something of an inward union of a divine power with the human soul, because all of us who can glory in belonging to Christ know that in becoming partakers of the Holy Spirit, we become partakers of a divine Being, thus being made one with God; we know also that we could not actually receive this divine gift until full human consciousness had begun in us, and all the mental powers which the Spirit of God should directly and specially control were awakened, so that He could begin this control, and with it His sanctifying work; and otherwise than thus we have never become conscious of Him. But in the case of the Saviour, if we are to think of the divine power being in Him while He was still in man’s most imperfect state,—that of the newborn babe, in whom all the faculties, through which the presence of the higher divine power could be manifested and proved, were still dormant,—we must conceive of it as having been present without being in any way brought into exercise; and it is just this that we find it difficult to imagine, and therefore hard to believe.
Hence it comes that there have always been Christians who hold an opinion such as I have referred to,—that not only in the years of the Saviour’s childhood, but up to the time when His human faculties attained maturity, He was in no way different and bore within Him nothing different from other children; and that not until He was to enter on the great work to which He was appointed, did the power of God come upon Him and pervade His whole being. And hence it is also that many Christians, though they do not hold this opinion, yet cannot quite heartily join in the child like devotion which, going back to the very beginning of Christ’s life, with the full reverence which binds the grateful soul to the Saviour, recognises in the new-born Babe, even in His unconsciousness, the Son of God, in such a sense that He needed to receive nothing new from above, but would become, by the ordinary development of His human soul, the Saviour who, by word and deed, by His life and by His death would both merit and produce that faith which those doubtful Christians themselves cherish; that He was, in short, the Son of the living God, He through whom God would in these last days speak for the last time to men, and after whom we need expect no other. But if these fellow-Christians will only look at things clearly; if they are really in earnest in that faith which brings us here together, then must they not grant that it would be at least as hard for us to give up this faith, on which the festival of to-day is founded, merely because we can no more understand the beginning of the second creation than that of the first or any other beginning? For if in Christ the divine Word did not become flesh so soon as His human eyes opened, what follows? This much is certain, that it is the experience of all without exception that in every one who has appeared on earth, endowed only as the children of men, sin has sooner or later developed. There will be differences; but these, great as they may seem to us, are really slight when we take into account the differences in mental capacity and strength of will; but that the development of sin should ever be wholly wanting, is entirely contradicted by the testimony of our consciousness. And therefore we cannot but believe that so it would have been with the Redeemer Himself if he had been from His birth like other children. Whatever promise the angel had left laid up in the humble soul of Mary, however thoughtfully she might have prepared herself, in childlike and fervent fear of God, to be the mother and nurse of One who was to be called the Son of the Highest; still, if He was only to become this in the future, however faithfully and wisely she might have watched over the tender mind, and kept far from Him the wide-spread poison which, alas, is breathed by every child of man, she would not have been able entirely to guard Him from it; for here we recognise the limit of all, even the most perfect human love and faithfulness and wisdom. And if Christ had been a sinner even in the least degree, could He have been our Saviour? God might have spoken through Him, as through the prophets of the old covenant, who were, like ourselves, sinful men. But would we call ourselves after the name of a prophet—would we gather together in the name of a prophet, whose work was only a continuation of what had gone before? And in deed, as there can never be little sin anywhere, however little it were thought to be in Him, we could never be sure that this continuation of the old way was the last. And though God might speak more fully by Him, and manifest Himself more clearly through His life than ever before, still all this would come only under the head of law. And whether an external law, written on tables of stone or brass, comes directly down from heaven, or is a human law and given through a man, such a law can never redeem the human race. Even when spoken by the holiest lips, and written with the finger of God, it can only produce a consciousness of sin, from which it provides no deliverance,—a consciousness which, the more fully we recognise our sin, constrains us the more to cry, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Salvation must consist, before everything, just in this, that we are freed from the consciousness of sin. We must have sinlessness clearly set forth to us; and the Redeemer is this living sinlessness; and only as we make this our own by the most intimate friendship and fellowship with Him, (as all things are common with friends), only so can we partake of the peace and blessedness which are the fruits of redemption.