“And He went down with them, and came to Nazareth; and was subject to them.” Luke ii. 51.
At this Christmas season, when we are celebrating those joyful mysteries which ushered in the Gospel, it seems almost an officious intrusion upon our holiday to engage in any exercise of the reason, even though it be in order to enliven the devotional feelings proper to the holy tide. It is a time of religious rest and spiritual festivity, and even on the ground that discussion is a kind of labour, we seem to have a right to be protected against it. And yet, as the days go on, and thankfulness has had free current and joy has had its fill, it seems allowable too, to look back at length on what has been occupying the heart, and to reason upon it. Nay, we seem to have the highest of possible authorities for doing so; for after two of the joyful mysteries, the third and the fifth, the holy Virgin is said to have done this very thing. Upon the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour, the very feast we have been celebrating, the Evangelist tells us, “Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart”; and after she had found Him in the Temple in the midst of the Doctors, which is the subject of this day’s Gospel, “His Mother,” we are told, “kept all these words in her heart.” Surely, then, it is permitted to me, consistently with the love and adoration due to this happy time of Christmas, to direct your minds, my Brethren, to a consideration which it suggests, not indeed very recondite, on the contrary, obvious to all of us, lying on the very face of the great Mystery, but adapted, I think, both to strengthen the faith and to deepen the love, with which we receive it into our hearts.
“The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us;” this is the glorious, unsearchable, incomprehensible Truth, on which all our hopes for the future depend, and which we have now been commemorating. It is the wonderful Economy of Redemption, by which God became man, the Highest became the lowest, the Creator took His place among His own creatures, Power became weakness, and Wisdom looked to men like folly. He that was rich was made poor; the Lord of all was rejected: “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.” This, I say, is the grand mystery of the season, and this is the subject on which I now propose to make one remark.
I say then, my Brethren, consider what the Divine Being is, and what we mean, when we use His name. The very first idea of Him, if we make the Creed our guide, is Omnipotence: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty.” And if you wish to enter into this idea of Omnipotence, and investigate what it is, trace it back into the further mystery of a past eternity. For ages innumerable, for infinite periods, long and long before any creature existed, He was. When there was no creature to exercise His power upon, still He was Omnipotent in His very Essence, as being not sovereign merely, but sole,—as the One Being, without any greater, less, or equal, full of all resources within, and in need of nothing, and, though infinitely one, yet being, at the same time, a whole infinite universe, as I may say, in Himself;—so much so that the breadth and depth and richness and variety and splendour of this created world which we behold, is simply nothing at all, compared to the vastness of that Ocean of perfection which lay concentrated in the intensity of His unity. A king of this world, though a sovereign, though an autocrat, depends on his subjects; but the Almighty God is absolutely and utterly free from any necessary alliance with His creatures. He is complete in Himself, for this reason, if for no other, that He existed for everlasting ages before any one of them was, and was able to do without them for a past eternity, and then created them all out of nothing. He borrows nothing from them; He owes nothing whatever even to the highest of them; they, on the contrary, owe it to Him that they are even able to remain in their own proper nature, and they derive from Him, moment by moment, every pulsation of their life and every ray of such glory as they possess.
Such is the omnipotent, self-dependent God: fixed in His own centre, and needing no point of motion or vantage-ground out of Himself, whereupon to bring into action, or to use, or to apply, His inexhaustible power. He can make, He can unmake; He can decree and bring to pass, He can direct, control, and resolve, absolutely according to His will. He could create this vast material world, with all its suns and globes, and its illimitable spaces, in a moment. All its overwhelming multiplicity of laws, and complexity of formations, and intricacy of contrivances, both to originate and to accomplish, is with Him but the work of a moment. He could destroy it all in all its parts in a moment; in the same one moment He could create another universe instead of it, indefinitely more vast, more beautiful, more marvellous, and indefinitely unlike that universe which He was annihilating. He could bring into existence and destroy an infinite series of such universes, each in succession more perfect than that which immediately preceded it. He is the Creator, too, of all the intellectual natures which exist, whether in the heavens above, or on the earth, or in the regions under the earth. Angels in their nine multitudinous orders, and men in their populous generations, good spirits and bad, saints and souls on trial, the saved and the lost, first, He created them and creates, each in its own time; and next, He keeps the complete and exact tale of them all, as He keeps the catalogue also of all the beasts, the birds, the fishes, the reptiles, and insects, all over the earth. Not a sparrow falls without Him; not a hair of our heads, but He has counted it in with the rest; and so, too, not a soul, but He has before Him its whole history from beginning to end, and its every thought, word, and deed, and its every motion through every day, and its relative place in the scale of merit and of sin.