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Behold, this child is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel; and for a sign which is spoken against; yea and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul; that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.—Luk_2:34-35.
Simeon, bravely patient, outlasts the time of silence: while the winds of God blow where they list, and gently stir the surface of his soul, breathing deep to sources of emotion, springs of thought, centres of will, and faculties of being, which all receptive and expectant wait for impulses of life, co-operant with the touch of the Divine. Intuition waits on growing consciousness: things seen afar become defined in detail: thought expands, impression greatens into form and shape: the Christ hath come, the morning breathes, the shadows flee away. Thus there comes a day when he is led under the impulse of the Holy Ghost into the Sanctuary of God. There he sees, he feels, he holds the Christ in likeness of an infant come, the Babe of Bethlehem. He bows before the Vision of the Lord: joyous yet awed he sings of Glory and of Light, Salvation for the World and Israel’s Hope enthroned. And so he saw not death but Christ: and holding Him passed into Life, and felt within his soul the waters rise which satisfy, and fail us not but spring eternally.1 [Note: A. Daintree, Studies in Hope, 76.]
The first pastor of Craigdam—Rev. William Brown, ordained in 1752—was enough to give character to any church.… His grandson, Principal Brown, remembers an old man describing a service conducted by the first minister of Craigdam at Knock, near Portsoy. One thing in the sermon which came to him and was indelibly imprinted upon his memory was the vivid and fervid way in which the preacher used the historical incident of Simeon holding the child Jesus in his arms:—“There did not appear to be much in the old man’s arms, and yet the salvation of the world was dependent upon what was there—all was wrapt up in that Jesus held by Simeon.” Then, holding out his own arms as if embracing that which Simeon esteemed to be so precious, Mr. Brown with tearful urgency of voice cried to the people assembled—“Have you, my freens, taken a grip o’ Jesus?”1 [Note: J. Stark, The Lights of the North, 288.]
Simeon the just and the devout,
Who frequent in the fane
Had for the Saviour waited long,
But waited still in vain,—
Came Heaven-directed at the hour
When Mary held her Son;
He stretched forth his aged arms,
While tears of gladness run:
With holy joy upon his face
The good old father smiled,
While fondly in his wither’d arms
He clasp’d the promised Child.
And then he lifted up to Heaven
An earnest asking eye;
“My joy is full, my hour is come;
Lord, let Thy servant die.
At last my arms embrace my Lord;
Now let their vigour cease;
At last my eyes my Saviour see,
Now let them close in peace!
The Star and Glory of the land
Hath now begun to shine;
The morning that shall gild the globe
Breaks on these eyes of mine!”2 [Note: Michael Bruce.]
2. Simeon looked far into the future, and saw the final goal of Christ’s mission. He regarded Christ’s coming as “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” and the consolation and glory of Israel. But he also foresaw its nearer and more immediate effects. This Child, he says, who is to be the light of the Gentiles and the glory of Israel is also to be as a rock over which many will fall and on which many will rise, a signal for strife and gainsaying, a sword piercing and dividing the very soul, even where the soul is purest, and a touchstone revealing the inward thoughts of many hearts and showing how evil they are. Now, large as the contradiction looks between these two conceptions of the immediate and the ultimate results of Christ’s influence on the world, is there any real contradiction between them? For if the Light is to shine into a dark world, or a dark heart, it must struggle with and disperse; the darkness before it can shed order and fruitfulness and gladness into it. In such a world as this there can be no victory without conflict, no achievement without strenuous effort, no joy without pain, no perfection except through suffering.
An Appointed Test
“This child is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel.”
1. Jesus Christ is thus inevitable. He is obtrusive. He is there. He forces Himself upon our attention as every universal fact and law must. He is set as fixedly in the firmament of our spiritual and moral life as the sun is set in the heavens. He rides into every world of human interest and concern just as gloriously as the sun comes over the mountains at the break of day. You tell me you know nothing at all about astronomical law. You believe what wise men tell you about the stately march of the seasons and the procession of the planets in regular orbit, and you disavow any knowledge of the inner mysteries of science. In your knowledge or ignorance you accept the fact you cannot alter, the fact that this world owes light and heat and colour and beauty to the sun which God has set to rule our day and night. Jesus Christ is as obtrusive and fixed a fact.
God “prepared” Him: pre-arranged, fore-ordained, and took steps beforehand for His coming; made ready the way before Him by His Law and by His prophets, by a gradual education of the world to desire Him and to find its need of Him; and at last brought Him into it “before the face”—in the sight—“of all the peoples,” of all the races and nations of mankind, so as to be as much “a light to lighten the Gentiles”—a light (more literally) unto the unveiling of the Gentiles; that is, for the purpose of taking off from the Gentiles that “veil” of which Isaiah speaks as “spread over all nations,” the veil of indifference and blindness and hardness of heart—as “the glory of God’s own people Israel.” The eye of the faithful old man was opened to see beyond the confines of his own nation; to embrace in one glance all the kingdoms of the earth in all time and in every place; and to declare that to each and to all Christ comes—comes to take off from them the veil of sin; and to fulfil at last the glorious prediction, “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Freeman, the historian, in speaking about the fall of the Roman Empire and the overturning of the throne of Cæsar Augustus by the triumph of Christianity, finds in that event something which he calls more miraculous even than the resurrection of Christ. And certainly it was an extraordinary triumph. Within eighty years of the day Jesus was put to death as a common malefactor, a governor of one of the Provinces of the Roman Empire writes to his Imperial master, and asks, “What in the world am I to do? People are deserting the pagan temple, and are gathering in illegal conventicles to worship somebody who, it was always understood, had a name of infamy—one Christus who had been put to an ignominious death years before.” Would you believe that before another three hundred years had passed, sitting in the seat of Cæsar was a Christian Emperor, and surrounding him a body-guard of Christian stalwarts, men bearing the stigma of Jesus, for they had been tortured and mutilated for their faith. Before another hundred years had gone, the throne had vanished altogether, and in the seat of Cæsar there sat one, and there still sits one, whose only right to be there is that he claims to be there as the Vicar and Vicegerent of Jesus Christ. That was the historic triumph in the early ages. It is a triumph that is repeated every day. Through storm and earthquake and eclipse, through the coming and the going of the generations of men, through the founding and the overturning of Empires, through the migrations of the peoples, Jesus Christ moves steadily on.1 [Note: A. Connell.]
2. Christ’s influence on men corresponds to their attitude towards Him. This is only to say that the spiritual world is not ruled mechanically. If Christ had come from heaven as a resistless influence for good, so that men could not but be bettered by Him, the result would have been mechanical—just as mechanical as anything which is set going by steam-power or by water-power. And yet, even in vegetable or brute nature, some conditions are requisite if physical reinforcements of vital power are to be of real use. The sun and the rain can do little for the sickly or withered tree. The greenest pasturage cannot tempt the dying hind. There must be an existing capacity for being nourished, in the tree and in the animal, if there is to be improvement. Much more does this law obtain in the spiritual world. For, being a spirit, man is free; he can accept or reject even the highest gifts of God. He is never coerced into excellence, any more than he is coerced into wickedness; he is, in the highest sense, master of his destiny. The truth and grace of God act upon him with good results only so far as he is willing that they should do so. God has made man free. He does not withdraw this prerogative of freedom, even when it is used against Himself; and the exercise of this freedom by man to accept or reject even his own highest good, explains the different results of Christ’s coming in different souls.
A departure from the perfect will of God was an absolute necessity if God wished to make a perfect or a good race of men. It is true God could have made men who would have had no choice but to serve Him, whose love would have been the result of law, whose worship a necessity of their condition; but would you care for a man who was made to love you, compelled to serve you? How then could God be satisfied with service that would not even satisfy the wants of our human nature? If love is to be real love, service real service, it must be voluntary and spontaneous; men must be free to give or withhold it. Now even Omnipotence cannot reconcile two absolutely antagonistic thin. It is past even the power of God to let a man have free will and yet not have it, to make men free and yet slaves; and if God gave men free will, then in the long run it was a dead certainty that some one so endowed would put up his own self-will again the will of his Father and exercise the gift which might make him worthy to be a son of God in a way that would drag him down to be impure and evil.1 [Note: Quintin Hogg: A Biography, 309.]
A Signal for Contradiction
“A sign which is spoken against.”
1. Jesus roused the bitterest opposition of those whose falsit He exposed. Do you think it likely that Pharisaism and Jewis intolerance, the pagan gods and the thousands whose living depended on idolatrous worship, or the existing schools of thought the Stoics and Epicureans, liked being pushed out of the way A vast amount of interested selfishness and of honest conservatism necessarily opposed Christ—fought and died to keep Him out Compare Jesus washing His disciples’ feet with the mood Tiberius surrounded by an army of informers and abandoned to vile debauchery, and think what must inevitably happen before Christ is received as the King of Rome. Call to mind the amphitheatres of the Roman Empire, the hosts of slaves, and think what changes must take place before the cross could be elevated as the divinest of symbols. Read the description of the immorality then common, not in the lines of indignant satirists but in the admitted antecedents of the people who formed the first converts to Christianity, and think what changes in public opinion, what open collisions between classes, what terrible inner struggles in the individual soul, must needs occur before one soul could turn to Him who puts duty for pleasure, self-control for indulgence, self-surrender for self-gratification; who tells each one of us that we must die to live, die to our lusts, die to our tempers, die to our self-importance, die to the flattering idea of our own righteousness and goodness.
There came a man, whence, none could tell,
Bearing a touchstone in his hand;
And tested all things in the land,
By its unerring spell.
And lo, what sudden changes smote
The fair to foul, the foul to fair!
Purple nor ermine did he spare
Nor scorn the dusty coat.
Of heirloom jewels prized so much
Many were changed to chips and clods,
And even statues of the gods
Crumbled beneath its touch.
Then angrily the people cried,
“The loss outweighs the profit far,
Our goods suffice us as they are,
We will not have them tried.”
And since they could not so avail
To check his unrelenting quest
They seized him saying, “Let him test
How real is our jail.”
But though they slew him with a sword
And in a fire his touchstone burned,
Its doings could not be o’erturned,
Its undoings restored.
2. He offered Himself as a Saviour under an aspect incredible and offensive. He demanded an utter renunciation of human righteousness; He asked them to give their whole confidence to One who should die in weakness and agony upon the shameful tree.
For nearly three centuries, of course with varying intensity, the name of Jesus of Nazareth and His followers was a name of shame, hateful and despised. Not only among the Roman idolaters was “the Name” spoken against with intense bitterness (see the expressions used by men like Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny), but also among His own nation, the Jews, was Jesus known as “the Deceiver,” “that Man,” “the Hung.” These were common expressions used in the great Rabbinical schools which flourished in the early days of Christianity. How different is it all now!
“Where can we find a name so holy as that we may surrender our whole souls to it, before which obedience, reverence without measure, intense humility, most unreserved adoration may all be fully rendered?” was the earnest inquiry of his whole nature, intellectual and moral no less than religious. And the answer to it in like manner expressed what he endeavoured to make the rule of his own personal conduct, and the centre of all his moral and religious convictions: “One name there is, and one alone, one alone in heaven and earth—not truth, not justice, not benevolence, not Christ’s mother, not His holiest servants, not His blessed sacraments, nor His very mystical body the Church, but Himself only who died for us and rose again, Jesus Christ, both God and man.”1 [Note: A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, i. 34.]
A Sword in the Soul
“Yea and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul.”
In the huge temple, deck’d by Herod’s pride,
Who fain would bribe a God he ne’er believed,
Kneels a meek woman, that hath once conceived,
Tho’ she was never like an earthly bride.
And yet the stainless would be purified,
And wash away the stain that yet was none,
And for the birth of her immaculate Son
With the stern rigour of the law complied:
The duty paid received its due reward
When Simeon bless’d the Baby on her arm;
And though he plainly told her that a sword
Must pierce her soul, she felt no weak alarm,
For that for which a Prophet thank’d the Lord
Once to have seen, could never end in harm.1 [Note: Hartley Coleridge.]
2. Must not the prediction that a sword would pierce through her soul also be a reminder that her unique position as the mother of the Saviour did not exempt her from the probation through which all had to pass who listened to the teaching and beheld the mighty works of her Son? But the commentators, with a unanimity which is unusual, resort to another interpretation. From Origen to Sir William Ramsay, they bid us find in the simile of the sword a picture of the sufferings which the career of the Christ would of necessity entail upon His mother. There is more difference of opinion when the attempt is made to determine the special nature of the sufferings which are foretold, the particular incident of her career to which the words apply. Some, with reason, as it would seem, leave the reference vague and undefined. The Christ was a great Reformer. He was the leader of a religious revolution. He was therefore certain to meet with fierce opposition from the votaries of the ancient traditions and the ancient faith. He was a sign which would be spoken against. His life would inevitably be one of sorrow; and, with every anguish of her Son, the mother’s heart would be torn. Others becoming a little more precise, would have us think of some unknown eclipse of faith, by which the Virgin’s confidence in the Divine mission of her Son was clouded. Epiphanius, with no less imagination, will have it that Simeon foresees her martyrdom. But the dominant view, stereotyped in the words of one of the few Sequences which still remain in the Roman Missal, finds in the mention of the sword piercing her soul an allusion to the agony of the Mother as she watched her Divine Son hanging upon the cross, and dying the malefactor’s death—
Stabat Mater dolorosa
Juxta crucem lacrimosa,
Qua pendebat Filius,
Cuius animam gementem
Contristantem et dolentem
Pertransiuit gladius.
3. The higher the privilege, the deeper will be the wound. “The nearer to Christ, the nearer,” from the very first, “to the sword.” The more real her title to be the “Blessed among women,” the more real the anguish which would crush her spirit as she awoke to the cross which was to be the crown of His mission. The more genuine the love which treasured up the angels’ song as she “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart,” the more intense the disappointment which “sought him sorrowing,” not once, but again and again, and failed to find Him in His true being till Calvary and the opened sepulchre have made all things plain.
Those who have seen Holman Hunt’s “Shadow of the Cross,” will remember how Mary is employed when she gets the first awful premonition of what her Child’s fate is to be. She is engaged—so the painter fancies her—looking into a coffer, where the gifts of the wise men are preserved, feasting her eyes on the beautiful crowns and bracelets and jewels, so prophetic, as she thinks, of what her Son’s after-destiny is to be. And then she turns, and what a contrast! There, in shadow on the wall, imprinted by the western light, she sees her Son stretched on a cross! What a sight for a mother to see! As she looks, the solemn, mysterious words of Simeon flash through her heart, “Yea and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul.” Against that awful destiny her mother’s heart rises up in arms, and it was, I believe, this love, this misguided love, that led her to seek to keep back her Child from His mission, and point Him into a path of glory, not of shame; of royalty, not of sacrifice; of a crown, not of a cross.1 [Note: W. M. Mackay, Bible Types of Modern Women, 325.]
O Holy Mother, pierced with awful grief,
Oppressed with agonizing, nameless fears,
Beyond all human power of relief
Are these thy tears.
Thy tender, spotless, holy Babe lies there—
Is He unconscious of thine agony?
Doth He not even now thy burden share,
Thy sorrow see?
His Body sleeps; but ah! that sacred Heart
Is to His loved one’s anguish still awake;
He only consolation can impart
To hearts that break.
The holy Babe awakes! In mute surprise
(As He would say—“Mine hour is not yet come”);
He gazes in His blessed Mother’s eyes
In pity dumb.
And once again her heart doth magnify
Rejoicingly, her Saviour and her Lord:
Yea! e’en before her tearful cheeks are dry
Is He adored!
Almighty Father, Thou hast veiled our sight,
The future Thou hast hidden from our eyes,
Great is Thy mercy! Lead us in Thy light
To willing sacrifice!2 [Note: M. Hitchin-Kemp, The Ideal of Sympathy, 19.]
4. The pierced soul is at length healed. That is the thought Titian so beautifully renders in his glorious “Assumption of the Madonna” in the great Venetian Gallery. The framework of the picture is but legend; its truth is eternal. It depicts the soul of Mary as it passes, after life’s sorrows, into the presence of God. The artist has painted her upturned face as it first catches sight of her Lord. It is a face of exquisite sweetness and beauty. And it is the face of the first Mary, the Mary of the Magnificat. Perfect faith is there, perfect joy, unsullied gladness. The piercing of the sword is now for ever past. But what most of all shines out from it is its sweet adoring love—the love no more of a mother for her child, but of a ransomed soul for its Saviour. The lips, as they open in rapture, seem to be framing the words sung long ago, but now uttered with a deeper, richer melody than was possible to her then: “My spirit doth rejoice in God my Saviour.”
O Lady Mary, thy bright crown
Is no mere crown of majesty;
For with the reflex of His own
Resplendent thorns Christ circled thee.
The red rose of this passion tide
Doth take a deeper hue from thee,
In the five Wounds of Jesus dyed,
And in Thy bleeding thoughts, Mary.
The soldier struck a triple stroke
That smote thy Jesus on the tree;
He broke the Heart of hearts, and broke
The Saint’s and Mother’s hearts in thee.
Thy Son went up the Angels’ ways,
His passion ended; but, ah me!
Thou found’st the road of further days
A longer way of Calvary.
On the hard cross of hopes deferred
Thou hung’st in loving agony,
Until the mortal dreaded word,
Which chills our mirth, spake mirth to thee.
The Angel Death from this cold tomb
Of life did roll the stone away;
And He thou barest in thy womb
Caught thee at last into the day—
Before the living throne of whom
The lights of heaven burning pray.1 [Note: Francis Thompson.]
A Revelation of the Heart
“That thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.”
The artist Rossetti has a picture in the foreground of which is a modest Oriental house, Jesus sitting in its room, His face just visible through a window. Along the street in which it stands is merrily hurrying that other Mary. I mean the Magdalene. She is arrayed in loosely-flowing garments, and her hair hangs dishevelled about her shoulders. With her is a troop of rollicking and revelling companions. The picture has all the suggestion of complete abandonment. But, just as she is to rush past, the woman’s eye meets—what? Through the window the eye of Christ, clear as crystal, and cutting as any knife. It holds her, and tortures her. On her face is graven blank horror and dismay. The harlot is filled with self-loathing and self-contempt. Through Jesus the thoughts of her heart are revealed in their hideous and revolting shape. “She trembles like a guilty thing surprised.”1 [Note: F. Y. Leggatt.]
2. Christ comes to heal as well as to reveal. His coming to men in His humanity, as Jesus of Nazareth, or coming to men in a preached Gospel, as the Living Saviour, is the one great test of men’s moral condition, of their attitude towards God. He is the revealer of all hearts; and, for the most part, the revelation is humbling—it would be hopelessly humbling were it not that the revealer is also the Redeemer; and He reveals and humbles only as a necessary preparatory condition to redeeming. The sterner side of Christ’s work is necessary; but the necessity arises from His persistently carrying out the purposes of Divine love. A man must be brought to “know himself,” as only Christ can show him himself, before he will even care to know what Christ can be, and would be, to him. Blessed are all they who have stood in the testing light of Christ and been shown up to themselves. He who falls in presence of Christ is surely raised up by the hand of Christ. He who probes also heals.
Lockwood had a religious mind, and retained through life his faith in the Christianity his parents had taught him. The chatter in the magazines about such matters had never interested him, and not even the symposia of eminent men, paid three guineas a sheet, about immortality had engaged his attention. He knew enough about human nature to know it was deeply wounded somewhere, and sorely stood in need of a healer.2 [Note: A. Birrell, Sir Frank Lockwood, 192.]
I was reading a while ago a little book in which the author told the story of his own life, and in the preface he had written: “This is a book with but one intention—that in being read, it may read you.” That is what might be said of the influence of the Gospels. They are the story of a life; but, in being read, they read you. They report to you, not only the story of Jesus, but the story of your own experience. It is not only you that find their meaning; but, as Coleridge said, they “find you.” In his letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul tells the same story in a striking figure. It is, he writes, as though the Christian were set before a wonder-working mirror, in which was reflected the glory of God. At first the image of this glory dazzles the beholder, and he puts a veil between it and himself; but gradually, as he looks again into the mirror, he discerns his own features reflected back to him, but touched with something of that glory which was itself too bright to bear, until at last his own image is changed into the image of the Divine likeness, so that the looker-on becomes like that on which he looks. “Beholding,” the Apostle says, “as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image … by the spirit of the Lord.” That, he thinks, is what may happen as one looks steadily into the mirror of God. It is not that he shall be all at once made perfect, but that by degrees the veil shall be drawn away before the magic glass, and he shall see his imperfect thoughts touched with the glory of God’s intention, until that which he is changes before him into that which he prays to be, as by the Spirit of the Lord.1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel, 28.]
Literature
Brooke (S. A.), The Early Life of Jesus, 37.
Carter (T. T.), Meditations on the Hidden Life of our Lord, i. 80.
Cox (S.), Expositions, iv. 16.
Edgar (R. M.), The Philosophy of the Cross, 35.
Griffin (E. D.), Plain Practical Sermons, 449.
Gurney (T. A.), Nunc Dimittis, 132.
Hall (E. H.), Discourses, 213.
Hutchings (W. H.), in Sermons for the People, ii. 131.
Lawlor (H. J.), Thoughts on Belief and Life, 31.
Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul’s, 245.
Mantle (J. G.), The Way of the Cross, 19.
Peabody (F. G.), Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel, 19.
Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 185.
Tholuck (A.), Light from the Cross, 9.
Tymms (T. V.), The Private Relationships of Christ, 12.
Vaughan (C. J.), Christ the Light of the World, 43.
Christian World Pulpit, xlviii. 40 (A. M. Fairbairn); lviii. 5 (A. Connell); lxiv. 413 (S. O. Tattersall); lxv. 154 (F. Y, Leggatt).