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‘Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar … the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.’
Luk_3:1-2
I. To whom the message came.—Why are we asked to believe that God should have singled out a nation so peculiarly unattractive in their history as the Jews would seem to have been to be His own chosen people? Yet so it is. He who most is disposed to cavil at the Divine estimate of the world’s history, as set forth in the Holy Scriptures, must feel that the Jew is a present problem which cannot be explained off-hand. Clearly he has had a past; it is difficult to believe that he has not a future—‘the wanderer of the nations’; indispensable to all, yet cruelly persecuted and oppressed; thriving, yet never prosperous as a nation. We surely do not make enough in our modern perplexities of the strange and unique phenomenon of this nation to whom we believe that the Word of God came, which bears witness in its decay to the loss of a privilege whose very memory is a tradition of power. The great nations of the world had their opportunities and lost them; the Jews had their opportunity and lost it. It is our turn to-day. What are we going to do with our Imperial responsibility? There it is: Tiberius Cæsar sits on his throne; we are shouting ourselves hoarse with our grandiloquent cries, we think imperially, we are trying to act imperially; we open the map with pride if red means the extent of the British Empire, we close it with shame if it means the extent of the Empire of Jesus Christ. There are our procurators and representatives in all parts of the world, ready to uphold the honour of the British flag, but not quite so sure of what they ought to do with the Cross of Jesus Christ, and very Pilates in their keen scrutiny of the political trend of religious enterprise. There are our dependents—the different Herods which rule by our means, to whom we exhibit too often a civilisation barely tinged with Christian responsibility, and who, in imitating European manners, find them largely composed of European vices. There are our allies—perhaps in some ways more religious than ourselves—whom we leave to societies and amateurs if they wish to study the religious sources of our strength, while we give them of our best instruction in everything else which has to do with the construction or defence of our material empire. Annas and Caiaphas are not wanting, rival religious agencies, rival religious claims strive with each other in deadly theological contest, until perplexity merges into disgust, and disgust into opposition, and the Word of God passes on its way, leaving those channels which have choked and polluted it.
II. The message.—Progress, not retrenchment, was in the mind of kings; an ever-widening luxury and aggrandisement for the future, not a mournful looking into the past. We cannot imagine ‘repentance’ as a word in the vocabularies of Tiberius or Herod, or any way of the Lord other than their own way. If Domitian could not blush, certainly a Herod would know and care little about his past misdeeds. Even religion had twisted and turned God’s revelation, putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter, perverting promises and minimising judgments. A Messiah reigning on the throne of David, an earthly kingdom and freedom from the Roman yoke—thus they brooded and plotted, and the day of the Lord was to them darkness. And every age has a tendency to magnify its own importance, to proclaim its own millennium, and shout aloud its proud message, until the voice of God is driven away into quiet corners where they can only hear it who have ears to hear, the ready heart, and the humble mind. Is not there a strange discrepancy between the important things as the world counts importance and the important things according to the mind of God? And here stands John the son of Zacharias. Here stands the Church, saying, ‘O soul, you were made for God. Seek Him, He is your rest.’ ‘You were made for happiness, it is here.’ ‘You are the son of God, here is He Who became Incarnate for you.’ Joy is the never-ceasing message which God proclaims to you—heaven here, and heaven hereafter, in the satisfaction of every longing, in the gratification of all true aspirations.
III. We should do well not to turn a deaf ear to the appeal of special seasons for quiet, for times of earnest and serious thought, for a resolute facing of some of these great questions which concern time and eternity. To many a man the hour of death is his first really quiet time, and alone with his own soul he hardly knows it, its powers, and its needs, and its strong vitality. Gradually he has been driven in, as outwork after outwork is taken; he can no longer take his exercise or follow his all-absorbing sports and games. His acquaintances have gone away from the falling house, and his friends are few, and they gradually drop off; insensibly he is pressed in upon himself, until he finds himself alone with his artificial life fallen from him and face to face with God. Surely we ought to make more of the quiet times of our life. Our Lord has bid us with His own lips to enter into our closet and shut the door and pray to our Father which is in secret. In prayer, if it be only for a short time each day, we can stand face to face with eternal verities, and deal with things that really signify, and talk to Him Who links the past, the present, and the future in one.
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Rev. Canon Newbolt.