The passage: To the one who overcomes, Christ will give a white stone with a new name written on it, which no one knows except the one who receives it.
Whether or not the Book of the Revelation was written by the author of the Gospel according to St John, the two share at least one element: mysticism.
I use mysticism for a way of embodying truth common, in various degrees, to almost all the New Testament writers. Defining it would take an essay; I offer one suggestion. A mystical mind has seen that truth is best expressed through the symbolism of nature and the customs that arise from human needs, and pursues its thought about truth so embodied by working with the symbols themselves in logical forms. This is the highest way of conveying the deepest truth, and the Lord often used it, as in the whole passage ending, “If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness!”
The mysticism of St John’s Gospel is of the simplest and therefore noblest kind. No dweller on this planet can imagine a purer, loftier method of embodying truth. Other worlds may have higher modes, or may not; of all ours, these forms best illustrate the highest. John’s own mysticism apparently let him report our Lord’s words with sufficient accuracy; they seem to me always recognizably different from those of any other New Testament writer, chiefly in the simplicity of their poetical mysticism.
The mysticism of the Revelation is more complicated, more gorgeous, less poetic, and occasionally, I think, arbitrary or near it; it reminds one of Swedenborg. Setting aside historical and literary criticism, on which I have no right even to an opinion, I suggest that this difference of tone may be just what we should expect when the recorder of a mystical teacher’s sayings goes on to embody his own thoughts and inspirations: when the revelation flows no longer from the Master’s lips but through the disciple’s own heart, soul and brain. Surely not even the most idolatrous Bible-worshipper will assert that the Spirit of God could speak as freely by the lips of the wind-swayed, rebukable Peter, or of the Thomas who could believe his own eyes but neither his brethren’s word nor his Master’s nature, as by the lips of Him who was blind and deaf to everything but the will of him that sent him.
Truth is truth, whether from Jesus or Balaam. But in its deepest sense the truth is a condition of heart, soul, mind and strength toward God and our fellow, not an utterance or even a right form of words; so truth in words is in a sense the person speaking. Many utterances of truth in the Revelation carry the conviction that the writer was no mere “trumpet of a prophecy” but spoke what he knew and testified to what he had seen.
In this passage about the gift of the white stone I think we find the essence of religion.
What the writer had in mind about the white stone matters comparatively little. I take it to belong more to the arbitrary and fanciful than to true mystical imagery, though fancy, glorified, serves the mystic’s imagination. I doubt he attached any essential meaning to it. I will not allow that he meant so poor a thing as a voting pebble, white because the receiver is chosen; the word also means a jewel, and a mystical writer is likelier to refer to nature than to a political custom. Different minds will take his meaning differently; I think he sees purity in its whiteness and indestructibility in its substance. But I care chiefly for the stone as the vehicle of the name, the form in which it passes from God to the man, and what that involves. If my reader will not accept this as St John’s meaning, I hope to set it forth so that he sees it true in itself, and I will leave the interpretation to its fate.
I say in brief that the giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication to the man of what God thinks about him. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the “Come, thou blessed,” spoken to the individual.
To see this we must first understand what a name is, in its perfect idea. Since the mystical energy of a holy mind here speaks of God as giving something, we must understand that the essential thing is meant, not any of its accidents or imitations.
An ordinary name in this world has nothing essential in it. It is a label by which one man and a scrap of his history are told from another. The only significant names are those that popular judgment, prejudice or humour bestows, for ridicule or honour, on a few of the many, each founded on some external characteristic: a predominant peculiarity of temper, some excellence or the reverse, something done well or ill, or singularly enough, to mark him off from other men. As far as they go these are real names, for they express individuality in some poor measure.
The true name expresses the character, nature, being and meaning of the person who bears it: his own symbol, his soul’s picture, the sign that belongs to him alone. Who can give a man this? God alone, for no one else sees what the man is, or could express the sum and harmony of it in a name-word. To whom is it given? To him that overcometh, when he has overcome. Does God then not know what a man will become? As surely as he sees the oak he put there lying in the heart of the acorn. Why does he wait till the man has overcome before settling his name? He does not wait; he knows it from the first. But as repentance comes because God pardons, yet the man becomes aware of the pardon only in the repentance, so God gives the stone with the name only when the man has become his name, for then first can he understand what it signifies. The blossom determines the name; God foresees it from the first because he made it so; but the tree of the soul, before it blossoms, cannot understand what blossom it will bear, or know what the word meant that named its own unarrived completeness. The name cannot be given until the man is the name.
God’s name for a man must be the expression, in a mystical word of the language all overcomers understand, of his own idea of the man: the being he had in thought when he began to make the child and kept in thought through the long process of creation. To tell the name is to seal the success: to say, “In thee also I am well pleased.”
But we are still in the region of symbol. Even if such a form were actually observed between God and the overcomer, it would be a symbol still, only an acted one. We must look deeper, and shall soon find that the mystic symbol centres on the personal, individual relation of every man to his God. That every man has affairs, and his first affairs, with God stands to the reason of anyone who attaches any meaning to the words Maker, Father, God. Were we children of a day, given one holiday by someone, there would be something to think, feel and do because we knew it; our nature would suit our fate, and we could worship and die. But that would be the praise of the dead, not the living, for death would be the deepest and lasting thing; we would have come out of nothingness, not out of God, who could be only our Maker, not our Father, our Origin. But God cannot be the God of the dead; he must be the God of the living, since knowing that we died would freeze the heart of worship, and we could not say Our God. To him who offers this God of the living his own self in sacrifice, who has brought his individual life back to its source and knows he is one of God’s children, this one of the Father’s making, God gives the white stone. To him who climbs the stair of all his God-born efforts and God-given victories to the height of his being—to look face to face on his ideal self in the Father’s bosom, God’s him, realized through the Father’s love in the Elder Brother’s devotion—God gives the new name written.
But I leave this, because what follows intensifies this individuality. The name is one “which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” So each man has not only an individual but a peculiar relation to God: made after his own fashion and no one else’s, he will receive, when perfected, a new name no one else can understand. So he can worship and understand God as no one else can; another may understand God more or better, but none as he does. God give me grace to be humble before thee, my brother, that I drag not my simulacrum of thee before the judgment-seat of the unjust judge, but look to thyself for the revelation of God thou alone canst give. As the fir-tree lifts itself with a far different need from the palm, each man lifts a different humanity to the common Father, and to each God gives a different response. With every man he has a secret, the secret of the new name. In every man is an inner chamber of peculiar life that only God can enter. I do not say it is the innermost chamber, but no brother, nay, no sister, can come into it.
It follows that there is also a chamber (O God, humble and accept my speech) in God himself, which none can enter but the one, individual, peculiar man, and out of which he must bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is what he was made for: to reveal the secret things of the Father.
By his creation each man is isolated with God; by his peculiar making each can say “my God,” and come to him alone and speak with him face to face as with a friend. There is no massing of men with God; gathered men are a spiritual body, not a mass, for in a body every part is individual and so fit to be part of it.
See what significance the symbolism now takes on. Each of us is a distinct flower or tree in God’s garden, precious for his own sake to the one who is even now making us, watered, shone upon and filled with life for the sake of the flower, the completed being that will at last blossom out of him to the great gardener’s glory and pleasure. Each has within him a secret of the Divinity and is growing toward its revelation to himself, and so toward receiving the divine according to his measure. Each moment he is true to his true self, some new shine of the white stone breaks on his inward eye and some fresh channel opens for the coming glory of the flower, the conscious offering of his whole being in beauty to the Maker. Each man is of worth in God’s sight; life and action, thought and intent, are sacred. And what an end lies before us: a consciousness of our own ideal being flashed into us from God’s thought! For this our paltry self-consciousness, self-admiration and self-worship may well give way; to know what he thinks of us will pale out all our thoughts about ourselves. St Paul had drawn near to this when he who began the race with a bitter cry for deliverance from the body of his death could say he no longer judged his own self.
“But is there not the worst of all dangers in such teaching, spiritual pride?” Must we refuse the spirit for fear of the pride, when there is no deliverance from pride except the spirit? Pride springs from supposed success in the high aim; with attainment comes humility. And here there is no room for ambition, the desire to be above one’s neighbour, for no comparison is possible: no one knows what the white stone contains but the man who receives it. There is room for endless aspiration toward the unseen ideal, but none for ambition, which would only be higher than others where aspiration would be high. Relative worth is not only unknown but, to the children of the kingdom, unknowable; each esteems the other better than himself. How shall the glowing rose rejoice against the snowdrop rising with hanging head from the snow? Both are God’s thoughts, dear to him, needed for the completeness of his earth and the revelation of himself. “God has cared to make me for himself,” says the victor with the white stone, “and has called me what I like best, for my name must be what I would have it, seeing it is myself. What matter whether I am a grass of the field or an eagle of the air, a stone for his temple or a Boanerges to wield his thunder? I am his idea, his making, perfect in my kind and in his sight, full of him, revealing him, alone with him. Let him call me what he will; the name shall be precious as my life.”
He will no longer worry what his neighbour thinks of him; it is enough that God thinks about him. To be something to God—is that not praise enough? To be a thing God cares for and would have complete for himself, because it is worth caring for—is that not life enough?
Nor will he thus be isolated from his fellows, for what we say of one we say of all, and it is as one that a man has claims among them. Each will feel the awe of his neighbour’s dark and silent speech with God, regard him as a prophet, and look to him for what the Lord has spoken. Each, like a high priest returning from his Holy of Holies, will bring some gospel of truth that his neighbours will understand. Each will see in the other a marvel of revelation, a son or daughter of the Most High come forth to reveal him afresh. In God each will draw nigh to each.
Yes, there will be danger, as everywhere; but he gives more grace. And if the man who has striven up the heights should fall from them into the deeps, is there not the consuming fire of God, which burns and does not destroy?
To anyone who has not already had some speech with God, or at least felt some aspiration toward the fount of his being, all this must seem foolishness. So be it.
But, Lord, help them and us, and make our being grow into thy likeness. If through ages of strife and growth, yet let us at last see thy face and receive the white stone from thy hand. To that end give us day by day our daily bread, fill us with the words that proceed out of thy mouth, and help us lay up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.
The Heart with the Treasure
The passage: Do not store up treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal. Store up treasures in heaven, where nothing destroys them and no thief can reach them. For wherever your treasure is, your heart will be there too.
To understand our Lord’s words is the business of life, because it is the main road to understanding The Word himself. To receive him is to receive the Father and so to have Life in ourselves; and that original Life, higher, deeper and simpler than any other, is the business of life.
The Word is that by which we live, namely Jesus himself, and his words show something of him in shadow and suggestion. Any utterance worthy of being called a truth is food for human beings; how much more The Word, who gives no abstract laws of our being but the living relation of soul and body, heart and will, strength and joy, beauty and light, to Him who gave birth to them all. The Son came to be, before our eyes and in our hearts, what he made us for, so that we might see the truth in him and cry out for the living God, who in the highest sense is The Truth: not as understood but as understanding, living, being, doing and creating the truth. “I am the truth,” said our Lord, and only those who are in some measure like him in being the truth can understand the Word. Let us try.
No doubt the Saviour would sometimes have spoken differently had he come to Englishmen instead of Jews. But his lessons would have been the same, for even when asked about a passing matter, he stated the great human principle in it, and that does not change as circumstances change. With the added experience of Christian ages, we should find his words easier to understand than his first hearers did.
What is the force of his For: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”? Its meaning is not obvious on the surface; it must be sought, because it is deep and simple. But it is so complete, and works so directly on the conscience through its poetry, that once understood there is nothing more to say and everything to do.
“Why not lay up treasures on earth?”
“Because there the moth and rust and the thief come.”
“So we would lose them!”
“Yes.”
“Does the Lord then mean the reason is that such treasures are transitory and corruptible?”
“No. He adds a For: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’”
“Of course the heart will be where the treasure is; but what has that to do with it?”
This: what is with the treasure must fare as the treasure fares. The heart that haunts a treasure-house where moth and rust corrupt will suffer the same ravages and be rusted and moth-eaten itself.
Many a man and woman, fair and flourishing to look at, goes about with a rusty, moth-eaten heart inside that form of strength or beauty.
“But this is only a figure.” True. But is the reality less than the figure, or more? Do the rust and the moth mean more than disease, and the heart more than the heart? It means a deeper heart: your own self, not your body; the self that suffers not pain but misery, whose end is not comfort but blessedness, even ecstasy; the inmost chamber where the divine fountain of your being springs. God regards that heart, though you may never have known it was there, even when its writhing under moth and rust sends a dull pain to the outer heart. If God sees it corroded by cares and riddled by the worms of ambition and greed, that is your heart, for God sees things as they are. One day you will be forced to feel your heart as God sees it, and to know that the cankered thing within you is the centre of your being.
Nor does the lesson apply only to worshippers of Mammon, who give their best energies to accumulating wealth. It applies equally to anyone who worships the transitory: who seeks the praise of men more than the praise of God, who would make a show by wealth, taste, intellect, power, art or any kind of genius, and so gather golden opinions to be treasured in an earthly storehouse.
Nor only to these, but to those whose pleasures are more plainly transitory still, the pleasures of the senses in every direction, lawful or unlawful, if the joy of being is centred in them. The hurt is not that such pleasures are false, like the deceptions of magic; they are real pleasures. Nor is it that they pass and leave a fierce disappointment; that is so much the better. The hurt is that the immortal, the infinite, made in the image of the everlasting God, is housed with the fading and corrupting and clings to them as its good, until it is infected with their diseases. These are more terrible in it in proportion to its higher kind: what is mere decay in the one becomes moral vileness in the other, and what fits the one for the dunghill casts the other into outer darkness. It creeps into a burrow in the earth, and its budded wings wither and drop away, when it should have roamed the open plains and high table-lands, spreading young wings to the sun and strengthening them in further flights until they could bear the God-born into the presence of its Father in Heaven. Therein lies the hurt.
The man whose heart is sound because it haunts the treasure-house of heaven may be tempted of the devil, but he will first be led up of the Spirit into the wilderness.