(Christmas Sermon.)
“Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, and goodwill towards men!”
TEXT: MATT. x. 34. “Think not that I came to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”
HOW wonderfully out of harmony these words sound with the angelic greeting that we have just heard; threatening to rob us of all the joy and blessedness of this holy season! For is the sword pre-eminently the glory of God? and if it rages anew, is that a special delight to men? When the message has come down from heaven, Let there be peace on earth, how can the Lord Himself say, “Think not that I came to send peace, but a sword”? and even though this is true, should we not, on this very day of rejoicing over His coming, try our utmost to conceal from our selves the sorrowful truth and to put it far from our souls? No, this will not do. It has long been the custom in a great part of the Christian Church to commemorate, on this second day of the Christmas festival, that first martyr who died for the name of the Lord. It was in that death that this Word of the Lord began to be fulfilled. And why then do we thus connect the two events? Does it not seem just to express this thought, that the birth of martyrdom is, as it were, the first and most direct glorification of the birth of Christ Himself? Yes; and as at other times we think of what it cost Him to redeem us at so great a price, so now, in these our days, we ought to know and lay specially to heart what kind of crowns of victory are thereby procured for us—I mean for the whole race of believing men since Christ’s first appearing. All the suffering that men have endured for His name’s sake, all the misery that has come upon His believing disciples, all the disquiet that has been caused on earth by strife about His name—all these things we should keep in view when we celebrate His appearing; and thus we shall recognise Him as the Dayspring from on high who hath visited us, as the Prince of peace, who guides our feet into the way of peace. “Well then, in this way we shall not be afraid to join the thought of this earnest and weighty word of the Lord with our Christmas joy; rather, let us use the consideration that the Lord came to bring a sword, in the way of exalting and purifying our joy on account of His coming. It is to this thought, then, that I beg your devout Christian attention for this sacred hour. And the points to be considered are these; first, the fact that the Lord came to bring a sword on the earth affords us the strongest security for the truth that He became really our Brother; even to the extent of His whole life and work being subject to all the conditions of really human work; secondly, we find in it the best guarantee that the fulness of the Godhead truly dwelt in Him; and, finally, it gives us the most comforting assurance of the immovable firmness of the covenant between Him and us. Let us try to look at these more clearly in their order.
I. I say, in the first place, the fact that the Lord could not but bring a sword on earth gives us the strongest security that His life and work were, from the very first, truly human.
For how do men act in relation to every human influence that acts on them? They inherit, as the indelible mark of their frailty, the liability to mistake, to which, however well-intentioned they may be, and however earnestly striving towards good, they are still unhappily so subject that it may even steal on them unawares. Hence a man may blind himself about everything that is offered to him by others; that which is most beneficent may appear to him dangerous; what is most salutary he may think hurtful; even what is divine may seem to him wrong and unpleasant. Now if the influence of the Lord Himself was to be a really human influence, with no secret power modifying the usual way of communication between the minds of men, then He also must have been subject to having His work received and judged in the same way as that of other men. When the evil spirits fled before Him, it could not fail to happen that some of those who witnessed His deeds should be so blinded about Him and what He was, as to imagine that He cast out devils only through the prince of the devils. When the rumour of Him began to spread abroad, and men softly and, as it were, stealthily whispered to each other the surmise whether this Jesus of Nazareth might not be He who was to come, the Helper, the Saviour, the Messiah; it could not but be that even among His own people, acquainted though they were with the divine promises given to that nation through many generations, there would be some so blinded about Him that even the proofs and indications of Scripture confirmed them in their blindness. And thus it came about that some said, When Christ comes, we shall not know whence He is; but we know whence this Man is, we are acquainted with His father and mother, his brothers and sisters. Others again held to another prejudice, and said, Is He not from Nazareth? and did you ever hear that a prophet had arisen, or should arise, out of Galilee? It was inevitable that this should be the lot of the Saviour if His influence was to be genuinely and purely human; and it was just this blindness of men who wished to find salvation in some other way than that in which alone it is to be securely and abidingly found, that was the cause, in the first place, of His bringing a sword on earth, by parents taking up arms against children, and children against parents, brothers and sisters and friends against each other, on His account.