The passage: You are to call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (Matthew i. 21.)
I want to help some people understand what Jesus came from our Father’s home to be and do for us. Everything in the world is at first misunderstood; we must learn what it is, and come to see that it could not be otherwise. Only then do we really know it.
I suppose hardly anyone, speaking openly, would deny having something that plagues him, something he would gladly be rid of, which keeps him from calling life altogether good. Most imagine that without this or that adversary life would be an unmixed satisfaction. The discomforts range from simple uneasiness to a misery that makes annihilation the sufferer’s highest hope, and perhaps most of the world’s energy goes into escaping them. Some keep climbing the social scale, finding fresh trouble at every height, as they think; in truth they brought it with them. Others hurry to be rich, slow to learn that the poverty of their souls will keep them unhappy while their purses fill. Some court endless change, not knowing that the change that will free them must pass on themselves. Others enlarge their souls with knowledge, only to find that content will not live in the great house they have built. All seek the thing whose lack seems the cause of their misery, but it is only the changeable occasion, the cause of its shape and not of the misery itself; remove one apparent cause and another succeeds it. The real cause is something the man may not have recognized as existing, and does not yet know in its true nature.
However absurd it seems to one who has not yet found it out, the cause of every man’s discomfort is moral evil: first his own sin and wrongness, and then the evil in those he loves, which I leave aside, since the only way to be rid of it is for the man to be rid of his own sin. No particular sin may explain this or that physical discomfort, which may have begun with some ancestor; but evil in ourselves is why it continues, and it prevents the patience that would soon blunt its sting. The evil is essentially unnecessary and passes when its purpose is reached, the development of pure will in man; the suffering is also essentially unnecessary, yet while the evil lasts it is absolutely necessary. Foolish is the man, and there are many, who would rid himself and others of discomfort by setting the world right and warring on the evils around him, while neglecting his first business, his own character and conduct. Even if the world could be righted from outside, a man who helped and stayed what he was could never enjoy the result: out of tune himself, he would think the organ he had tuned still jarring. The philanthropist who sees the wrong as in the race forgets that the race is made of conscious, wrong individuals; that wrong is always generated in and done by an individual, who passes it on as a tendency; and that no evil can be cured in the race except in its individuals. Tendency is not absolute evil; it is there to be resisted. Three men can be made right only by making each right, but the cure of one man who repents and turns begins the cure of the whole race.
Even if a man’s suffering is a distant inheritance that this life is too short to cure, faith and obedience will make it endurable and overflow in help to his fellow-sufferers. The groaning body, wrapped in the garment of hope, will look with outstretched neck for its redemption, and endure.
The one cure for any organism is to be set right, all its parts brought into harmony, and the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Return to its true self is its only ease. To free a man from suffering he must be put in health, and the health at the root of his being is freedom from wrongness, from sin. I do not mean freedom from the sins he has done, which will follow, but from the sins he is doing or capable of doing: the wrongness that spoils his nature, the evil he consents to, the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.
To save a man from his sins is to say to him, in a perfect and eternal sense, ‘Rise up and walk. Be free as the son of God is free.’ To do this Jesus was born, and remains born to all the ages. When misery drives a man to call out to the source of his life (and I take the growing outcry against existence as a sign that the race is growing toward a sense of its need of regeneration), the answer, I think, will be a quickening of his conscience. This will probably not be what he wants, for he wants only to be rid of suffering, which he cannot have except by deliverance from its root, infinitely worse than any suffering. If he will not have that, he must keep his suffering; through chastisement he will at last take the only way into liberty. There is no deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.
It is true that in delivering us from our sins Jesus came also to deliver us from their painful consequences. But these consequences exist by the one law of the universe, the true will of the Perfect. When the creature disobeys it, suffering is inevitable; it is the natural consequence of the unnatural, and in God’s perfect creation it tends to heal the breach. The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while the sins remained; that would be to throw the medicine out of the window while the man lay sick. Yet men who love their sins have constantly taken this word to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins, and this miserable fancy has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. Unable to believe in their Father’s forgiveness, imagining him unable to forgive outright, or bound by his own nature or by a law above him to exact satisfaction for sin, many teachers have taught that Jesus came to bear our punishment and save us from hell. They have made a result the object of his mission, one no true man would want except as following from the real object. His mission came from the same source and had the same object as the punishment of our sins: he came to side with it and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins; but one to whom his sins are a burden will soon forget he ever had any hell to think of but that. To him his sins are hell; he would go to the other hell to be free of them, and free of them could endure it. For hell is God’s and not the devil’s, on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from the corruption of death. No soul will be redeemed from hell except by being saved from the evil in him; if hell is needed, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the Father’s will. Salvation from hell is salvation as conceived by those to whom hell, not evil, is the terror. But if even for dread of hell a poor soul seeks the Father, he will be heard, and taught to seek the immeasurably greater gift, and in the greater will receive the less.
There is another important misunderstanding of the messengers of the good news: that they threaten punishment for the sins we have committed, whereas their message is of forgiveness, not vengeance; of deliverance, not evil to come. No man is condemned for his past sins; even for the worst he need not dread remaining unforgiven. His present, live sins, those that pervade his thoughts and rule his conduct, which he clings to though called to abandon them, and which cause his misery though he may not know it, are what he is condemned for even now. The memory of past wrongs is or will become very bitter, but that is not condemnation, and once what made them possible in us was abolished, remorse would lose its worst bitterness in the hope of amends. The condemnation, in Scripture’s words, is that light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions, that we need delivering from. If a man will not strive against it, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences; to be saved from those consequences would be no deliverance but an ever deepening damnation. Jesus came to deliver us from the evil in our being, no essential part of it, thank God: the miserable fact that the very child of God does not care for his father and will not obey him, so that we desire wrongly, act wrongly, or, where we try not to, still cannot help feeling wrongly. He came to save us not from the things we have done but from the possibility of doing them any more; when that goes, and with the hope of confessing hereafter to those we have wronged, the power of the evil we have done goes too. Our evil judgments, unjust desires, hate, pride, envy, greed and self-satisfaction, the essential opposites of faith and love, are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than their bodies, the deeds (our dead works), because they make us loathsome as well as producing loathsome things. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence but begin to die. We are then on the Lord’s side, as he has always been on ours, and he begins to deliver us from them.
Anything in you that would make your own child less pleasant to you than you would have him is something wrong. What one parent would not mind fills another with horror, who sees the present evil and the serpent-brood to follow. But the love of him who is love is as much higher than ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so he must desire in his child infinitely more than the best mother. He would have him rid of all discontent, fear, grudging and bitterness in word or thought, and of measuring his own by a different rod from another’s. He will have no curling of the lip, no indifference to the man whose service he uses, no desire to excel another or contentment at gaining by his loss, no service received without gratitude, no tone or word that makes another’s heart ache, however briefly. From such sins, as from all others, Jesus was born to deliver us, not primarily from their punishment. When all are gone, the holy punishment will have departed too. He came to make us good, and so blessed children.
One master-sin lies at the root of all the rest. It is no single action or product of mood or passion; it is the man’s failure to recognize, and so to act in, the highest of all relations, the root of every other true relation of the soul: his lack of harmony with the being whose thought is his existence and whose word is his power of thought. As St Paul affirms, God is not far from any of us; were we not in closest contact as created and creating, we could not exist at all. But there is a closer contact still, as necessary to our well-being as the other is to our being. For God’s highest creation in man is his will, and until the highest in man meets the highest in God, their true relation is not yet a spiritual fact. The flower lies in the root, but the root is not the flower; while one party neither knows, loves, nor acts on the relation, it is as yet unborn. The highest in man is not his intellect, imagination or reason, all of which depend on his will. His will must meet God’s, and be distinct from God’s, or no harmony between them would be possible; yet this makes all the more, not less, God’s, for God creates in the man the power to will His will. It may cost God a suffering man can never know to bring him to that point; but when the man declares for God’s will he becomes one with God, and the end for which Jesus was born and died is gained. He is saved from his sins, and the universe flowers again in his redemption. But I would not be supposed to imagine the Lord without sympathy for the pains that reveal what sin is, and by which he would make men sick of sin. He sympathizes with everything human and feels every human pain himself. Evil is not human but the defect and opposite of the human; the suffering that follows it belongs to the human that has sinned, and is for the sinner, that he may be delivered. With tenderest love he wills his brothers and sisters free, that he may fill them with joy, for which they were created; but from the moment they exist truth, not happiness, comes first, and he must make them true. Were it possible for pain to continue after evil was gone, he would never rest while one ache was in the world. A man may recognize the evil in him only as pain, and care nothing about his sins, yet the Lord is sorry for his pain. He cries, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,’ not ‘all ye that feel the burden of your sins’; he opens his arms to all weary enough to come in the poorest hope of rest. He would gladly free them, but knows only one way: to teach them to be like himself, meek and lowly, gladly bearing the yoke of his Father’s will. With them the weariness comes first, with him the sins; there is one cure for both, the Father’s will, which is his joy and will be their deliverance. He might take from them the human, send them down to a lower stage of being and so free them from suffering, but that would be a descent toward annihilation or a new beginning to grow up toward the suffering they left, for what is not growing must die out of creation. The disobedient and selfish would fain have, in the hell of their hearts, the liberty and gladness of purity and love, but cannot; they are weary with what they are and with what they were made for but are not. The Lord knows they need purity, while they know only that they want ease. Their very existence is an evil, of which, but for his resolve to purify them, their maker must rid his universe. Must the creator send forth his virtue to hold alive a thing that ought not to be and has no claim but to cease? The Lord himself would not live save with an existence absolutely good.
My reader may want me to say how the Lord will deliver him from his sins. That is like the lawyer’s ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The spirit of such a question is the root of all the horrors of a corrupt theology, so welcome to lovers of weak and beggarly hornbooks of religion; it springs from the passion for the fruit of the tree of knowledge, not the tree of life. Men want to understand and do not care to obey, though it is impossible to understand except by obeying; by searching into the Lord’s work instead of doing their part, they hinder both his work and their own power to see it. Instead of at once obeying the Lord of life, the one condition on which he can help them and itself the beginning of their deliverance, they question their unenlightened intellects about his plans, not only how he means to deliver them but how he is able. They would bind their Samson until they have scanned his limbs and thews. Unable to understand the first motions of freedom in themselves, they turn his glorious verse into their paltry commercial prose, and then, grown presumptuous, insist that their neighbours accept these distorted shadows of ‘the plan of salvation’ as the truth of him in whom is no darkness, and as the one condition of acceptance with him. They will not set foot on the only stair to the house of wisdom until they have settled how it is built; for the sake of knowing they postpone what alone can enable them to know, and put a false persuasion that they understand in place of true understanding. They will not act upon their highest privilege, obeying the Son of God. On those who do his will the day dawns; to them the day-star arises in their hearts. Obedience is the soul of knowledge.
By obedience I do not mean obedience to man, or submission to authority claimed by any man or community, but obedience to the Father’s will, however revealed in our conscience.
God forbid I should seem to despise understanding; the New Testament is full of urgings to understand, and our whole life must be a growth in it. What I cry out against is the misunderstanding that comes of trying to understand without obeying. Our energy must go to obedience; understanding will follow. If we are not anxious to know our duty, or know it and do not do it, how shall we understand what only a true heart and clean soul can? The power in us that would understand, were it free, lies in the bonds of imperfection and impurity, and cannot judge the divine; it cannot see the truth, and if it could, it would not know it or have it. Until a man begins to obey, the light in him is darkness.
Any honest soul may understand this much, for we can judge it right of ourselves: the Lord cannot save a man from his sins while he holds to them. An omnipotence that could both do and not do the same thing at once is too absurd for mockery; so is one that could make a man at once free and a self-degraded slave, the very likeness of God yet good only because he could not help it.
But the Lord is not unreasonable; he requires no high motives where they could not yet exist. He does not say, ‘You must be sorry for your sins, or you need not come to me’: to be sorry a man must love God and man, and love is just what has to be developed in him. It is common sense that a man who longs to be freed from suffering, or made able to bear it, should go to the Power by whom he is; equally that, to be delivered from the evil in him, he must himself begin to cast it out and work righteousness, expecting his Father’s help. Alone he might labour to all eternity and not succeed: he who has not made himself cannot set himself right without him who made him. But his maker is in him and is his strength. The man who broods speculating on the metaphysics of him who calls him, instead of doing what he is told, stands leaning his back against the door by which the Lord would enter to help him. The moment he begins to put straight what is crooked, doing right where he did wrong, he gives way for the Master to come in. He cannot make himself pure, but he can leave what is impure and spread the ‘defiled, discoloured web’ of his life before the bleaching sun of righteousness; he cannot save himself, but he can let the Lord save him. The struggle of his weakness is as essential to the coming victory as the strength of Him who resisted unto death, striving against sin.
The sum of the matter is this: the Son has come from the Father to set the children free from their sins; the children must hear and obey him, that he may send forth judgment unto victory.
Son of our Father, help us to do what you say, and so die with you to sin, that we may rise to the sonship for which we were created. Help us to repent even to the sending away of our sins.