SERMON VIII. THE WORD MADE FLESH. (CHRISTMAS DAY.) ST. JOHN I. 14. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. CHRISTMAS DAY, we are all agreed, is the greatest birthday in the year. It is the birthday of the greatest Man, of the greatest Teacher of men, of the greatest Benefactor of the human race that ever lived. It is this; but it is also much more. For as on this day was born One Who, while He is truly man, is also and immeasurably more than man. I. He Who was born, as on this day, did not begin to be when He was conceived by His human Mother; since He had already existed from before all worlds-from an eternity. His human nature, His human Body, and His human Soul were not, as is the case with us, the whole outfit of His Being; they were, in truth, the least important part of it. He had already lived for an eternity when He condescended to make a human body and a human soul in an entirely new sense His own, by uniting them to His Divine and Eternal Person; and then He wore them as a garment, and acted through them as through an instrument, during His Life on earth, as He does now in the courts of Heaven. Thus the Apostle says that He "took upon Him the form of a servant,' and that "He took not on Him the nature of angels, but He took on Him the seed of Abraham;" and so the Collect for to-day pleads that He "took our nature upon Him, and was as at this time born of a pure Virgin." And it was in this sense that He became or was made flesh after having existed from eternity, He united to Himself for evermore a perfect and representative Sample of the bodily and immaterial nature of man, and thus clothed with It, as on this day, He entered into the world of sense and time. "The Word was made flesh, and tabernacled among us." It is perhaps not surprising that from the early days of Christianity men should have misconceived or misstated what was meant by this central but mysterious truth of the Christian Creed, the Incarnation of the Eternal Son, In truth, the misconceptions about it have been and are many and great. Sometimes Christians have been supposed to hold that two persons were united in Christ, instead of two natures in His single Person; sometimes that the Infinite Being was confined within the bounds of the finite Nature which He assumed; sometimes that God ceased to be really Himself when He thus took on Him man's nature; sometimes that the Human Nature which He took was absorbed into or annihilated by its union with the Deity. All the chief misconceptions of the true sense of the Apostles have been successively considered and rejected by the Christian Church; and “the right faith is, that we believe c Christmas Day. a Phil. ii. 7. b Heb. ii. 16. and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man. God of the substance of His Father, begotten before all worlds, and Man of the substance of His mother, born in the world; perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood. Who although He be God and man, yet is He not two, but one Christ." a Thus did God the Son take the simple out of the dust and lift the poor out of the mire," when He raised our frail human nature to the incomparable prerogative of union with Himself. So real was and is this union, that all the acts, words, and sufferings of Christ's Human Body, all the thoughts, reasonings, resolves, emotions of His Human Soul, while being properly human, are yet also the acts, words, sufferings, the thoughts, reasonings, resolves, and emotions of the Eternal Son, Who controls all, and imparts to all the value and elevation which belong to the Infinite and the Supreme. Thus, although Christ suffered in His Human Soul in the garden, and in His Human Body on the Cross, His sufferings acquired an entirely superhuman worth and meaning from the Person of the Eternal Word to Whom His Manhood was joined; and St. Paul goes so far as to say that God purchased the Church with His own Blood-meaning that the Blood which was shed by the Crucified was that of a Human Body personally united to God the Son. It was perhaps inevitable that the question should be asked how such a union of two natures, which differ as the Creator differs from the creature-as the Infinite differs from the finite-was possible. It might be enough to reply that "with God all things are possible;" all things, a Athanasian Creed. b Ps. cxiii. 6. a St. Matt. xix. 26. at least, which do not contradict His moral Perfections, that is to say, His essential Nature. And most assuredly no such contradiction can be detected in the Divine Incarnation. But, in truth, it ought not to be difficult for a being possessed of such a composite nature as is man to answer this question; perhaps such a being as man might have been reasonably expected never to have asked it. For what is the Incarnation but the union of two natures, the Divine and the human, in a single Person, Who governs both? And what is man, what are you and I, but samples, at an immeasurably lower level, of a union of two totally different substances; one material, the other immaterial, under the presidency and control of a single human personality? What can be more remote from each other in their properties than are matter and spirit? What would be more incredible, antecedently to experience, than the union of such substances as matter and spirit, of a human body and a human soul, in a single personality? Yet that they are so united is a matter of experience to every one of us. We only do not marvel at it because we are so intimately familiar with it. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, we observe, each within himself, a central authority, directing and controlling, on the one hand, the movements and operations of an animal frame, and on the other the faculties and efforts of an intelligent spirit, both of which find in this central authority or person their point of unity. How this can be we know not. We know not how an immaterial essence can dictate its movements to an arm or a leg, but we see that it does this; and we can only escape from the admitted mystery into difficulties far greater than those which we leave behind, by frankly avowing ourselves materialists, and denying that man has anything that can properly be called a soul, or that he is anything a more than an oddly agitated mass of bones and muscles. If we shrink from this, we must recognize, in the composite structure of our own mysterious being, the means of answering the question about the possibility of the Incarnation. "As the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ." He Who could thus bring together matter and spirit, notwithstanding their utter contrariety of nature, and could constitute out of them a single human personality or being, might surely, if it pleased Him, raise both matter and spirit--a human body and a human soul-to union with His Divinity, under the control of His Eternal Person. Those who have taken even superficially the measure of the twofold nature of man, ought not to find it hard to understand that for sufficient reasons God and man might be united in a single person, or, as St. John says, that the Word might be made flesh, and might dwell among us. But what, it may be asked, can be conceived of as moving God thus to join Himself to a created form? Is not such an innovation on the associations, if not on the conditions, of His Eternal Being too great to be accounted for by any cause or motive that we can possibly assign for it? Here we enter a region in which, it need hardly be said, we dare not indulge our own conjectures as to the fitness of things. We do not know enough of the Eternal Mind to presume to account for Its resolves by any suppositions of human origin. If we are to take a single step forward, it must be under the guidance of Revelation. But when men speak of the Incarnation as an innovation on the Eternal Life of God so great as to be beyond accounting for or even conceiving, they forget a still older innovation—if the word may be permitted-about which a Athanasian Creed. |