I THE DIVINE MANIFESTED IN THE HUMAN In celebrating our Christmas festival there is great propriety that sincere Christian disciples should come into the sanctuary of the Lord's house and mentally, worshipfully, enter into that Holy of holies where God reveals himself to those who with faith and love wait upon him. We are constantly tempted to the vulgarizing and degrading of Christian festivals. The chastened thought, the devout feeling which they ought to excite we are apt to miss in the excessive attention which, at a time like Christmas, we give to the showy externalities that have obtruded themselves upon us. Of course, there is much to be said for that kind of good feeling which Dickens has dramatized so exquisitely in his Christmas Carol, where a miserly old creature is melted into a beautiful humaneness of disposition by the influence of an extraordinary dream. But the trust committed to the Christian Church is of a sublime dignity and greatness — to preserve to the world a mighty fact embodying a truth so great that its area is as broad as humanity, the truth of the Incarnation, the divine manifested in the human, a truth which is not simply something speculative for the human mind to discuss; but a truth so practical that it gives the law for all effective life, human and divine. If we are to appreciate this truth as we ought we must receive it in the beautiful human way in which it is given. The truth of the Incarnation comes to us first as a babe, making its appeal to the heart of every true woman and to the loving curiosity of every inquiring child. The truth begins by claiming our life in the cradle. It comes to sanctify every home by exalting motherhood as God's most sacred means of the revelation of himself. Take a true, genuine, pure woman, like Mary of Nazareth, devoutly submissive to the divine will, and there is no channel of revelation to be found on earth that so faithfully adumbrates the divine love. Over every such woman the words may not inappropriately be used: "the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee." Idle and irreverent curiosity may perplex itself with the mystery of the Incarnation and make no practical advance into the heart of the matter. Of course there is mystery. Everything in the world is draped in mystery. The whole of anything we can name is not known to us. The mystery of creation; the mystery of man's own nature these remain about as they always have been, from the time when Plato reasoned in Athens to the day we call our own. There is a limit, but never a cessation, never an end, to all man's mental researches. The human mind feels infinity knocking at its doors and is always restless and aspiring when it is alive. Its greatness is shown in its continual soaring. If the mystery of man's own nature is insolvable, if the mystery of creation baffles us, what else can we expect than that what an apostle calls the mystery of godliness-"He who was manifested in the flesh" should refuse to disclose its eternal secret? Take away mystery and you take away infinity and eternity. This word "mystery" occurs about twenty-six times in the New Testament and ten of them are within the brief compass of the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians, testifying to us that the great apostle from Tarsus had brooded over the facts he had to handle from the intellectual side. Generally speaking, however, the word "mystery" on his lips means something which had been concealed but is now revealed. The great mystery of the New Testament is the divine way of salvation hitherto hidden from the world, but now revealed in Christ. So far from the Incarnation, the appearance of the divine in the human, being simply an enigma, or a "theological puzzle for the exercise of the logical understanding" it is, says one of our greatest modern scholars in the fields of philosophy and theology, "the very fundamental principle of the Christian religion, and the supreme source of its moral and spiritual power." There is always a temptation to try to handle a matter of this kind in a way in which it would be interesting to only about a score of people in a congregation, and I want to avoid that. I want that everybody should feel the truth of a thing, even if they cannot grasp it intellectually. For we learn more through feeling and imagination than through intellect. We all should have a vital grasp of Christian truth if only our wills were determinedly set to do the divine will, and so in all simplicity I should try to bring our great Christmas fact of the Incarnation within the grasp of everyone. A great thinker has penned these words: "There is a sense in which it may be said that God would not be God without union with man; and man would not be truly man without union with God." That is a statement worth remembering. The infinite includes the finite, just as the firmament includes this building. The divine and human are not antagonistic, they are cooperative. The divine expresses itself in and through the human. In every one of us is a spark from that divine furnace of life which glows eternally. We may do our utmost to quench it; but we cannot. If we succeeded, it would be our own extinction. In every one of us there is father and mother and God. That, I think, is the reason why the most robust thinker among the apostles insists on each man as being a trinity in unity, body, soul, and spirit. The Incarnation what has it done? Has it not thrown a flood of light upon the nature of God and the nature of man? And, after all, our conduct, as to whether it is wise or foolish, right or wrong, must depend upon what God is and what man is. Think what the Incarnation has done for our idea of God. It has brought Deity within the range of our human sympathies. Of old, men had their great words for setting in evidence their idea of God-omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent - but -- did they touch any human heart? They overawed men. They put Deity at a distance. As children, we were taught that Deity was beyond the clouds far far off. Some few elect souls rose to riper and better ideas. But the multitude of men had a god afar off and not nigh, an omnipotent sovereign only. The heart of Deity had never been disclosed till Jesus came and lived the divine love into a form of expression which the world had never beforetime had. Under the disturbing influence of the new inspiration the apostles were perplexed. "Teach us to pray. Our old prayers don't fit our new feelings." And the great throbbing word came trembling and rejoicing on the astonished air-"Say, our Father." And then, by and by, more emphatically: "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." What, then, has the Incarnation done for our idea of God? It has not dethroned the distant monarch of the universe, it has only done away with the distance. Time and space are conditions of man's life, not of God's. Between natures absolutely unlike there can be no communion, no fellowship. If God is in all respects unlike man, knowledge of him is impossible, worship the expression of terror only. For aught we know, he may be a sovereign devil. He may hate us. He may despise us. He may scorn us. He may delight in tormenting us. The plagues of Egypt may declare his disposition. Heaven may be only a hypocritical name for hell. The birth of babes into this world may be a calamity, as godless pessimists affirm. The babe of Bethlehem may not have consecrated |