a sorrow to me when I see, not very often, young people turning away with scorn or a false shame from the humble homes that nourished them and gave them their start in life. It is no pleasant sight to see a sneer, where gratitude might have been expected. What have you that you did not receive?
There is no room in a university, of all places, for a generation gap, for we are all engaged in a common activity and neither your fellows nor your professor is necessarily a fool because his hair is six inches shorter than yours. It seems to me that a grateful recognition of the gifts we receive ought to lead to something of the spontaneous gaiety, the joie d’vivre, that so often seems lacking in our life today. Our great public benefactors, our parents, the state, have continued to make us free for the world of books and learning, of beauty and ideas, of science and art, a world far more exciting, more intoxicating than the world of drugs and sex. What if some of them have ulterior motives? Can we not enjoy as well as use our privileges?
Enjoy, you say, in a world such as ours? With destruction and death about us? Hemmed in by S. Africa, W. Africa, N. Ireland, S.E. Asia, E. Pakistan? No I am not inciting escapability. Paul’s words are not only, or mainly for academics. They are a text for human beings.
A TEXT FOR HUMAN BEINGS
What I have just said should remind us that as academics we have received much from the outside world. I do not suppose that Ferens knew much about Greek, or differential equations, but where should we be without him? The university is in the world and it receives much from the world, as well as giving much to it. We are all of us human beings before we are academics, and as human beings we are constantly receiving from our fellows. What is there in my daily life that I have received simply by my own efforts? What have I that I have not received?
In this fact lies the ground of a network of mutual service, which could and should bind together the whole human race. Would not the recognition of this fact solve the basic problems of human relationship? I am not foolish enough to suggest that it would solve all of the practical problems. Economic, political, social, psychological problems will go on calling for the best brains we have, and the best brains will not always succeed in solving them. But supposing wealthy and developed countries, and no less the developing ones, took seriously the question—What have we that we did not receive? And supposing every race of every color took seriously the question—and management and unions, and dons and undergraduates, and parents and children? Could anything do so much to engender a sense of natural responsibility, of mutual service? The gifts I have received are no grounds for boasting, they ought to be an incentive for giving.
Five minutes, you may say, of crying for the moon. What chance is there that power-hungry establishments, revolutionary proletariats, will come to think in these terms? Well, not much; apart from the fact that we have not yet finished with the New Testament. Indeed, we have scarcely even begun with it.
For when Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he was certainly not thinking of a crowd of undergraduates and dons in a university service; he was not even thinking (though this comes much closer to his thought) of the universal love which alone can make sense of the world. He was writing specifically a text for Christians.
A TEXT FOR CHRISTIANS
I shall not weary you by trying to piece together the history that lies behind the Corinthian letters. The Corinthians proved to be the most trying kind of people—pupils who were confident they knew more than their teacher, children that were convinced they were better than their parents. Christians certain that they had left their apostle far behind. They had constructed their own religion for themselves, their own wisdom, their own spirituality, had brought them to the Kingdom, while Paul was still stuck fast in the mud. They knew it all, they had it all, they could do it all. It is an attitude that is always threatening to grow up within the Church, where we are all too much inclined to think that our own theological learning, our own warm-hearted piety, our own social activism, have created a Christian faith for whom Almighty God himself ought to be more than grateful.
We meet this, we are guilty of this, in the Church and we do well to be penitent. But you will pardon me if I observe that it is even more common in that half-light relic of Christianity which persists outside the Church. The Christianity that all reasonable persons, or some of them, feel they wish to retain, is a Corinthian Christianity that arises to achieve the kingdom without the old, coarse, apostolic Gospel. And to it, to this phenomenon, whether it occurs inside or outside the Church, we can only address Paul’s question: What have you that you did not receive?
Do not forget your debts, and do not forget your debt to God. You may like or dislike Christianity, but do not be under the illusion that it is about what human beings can do for themselves. It is about what God has given, and we have received, and it is in this fact that all the rest makes sense. The love of the Father is the charter of academic inquiry. The whole of his world is given to me to explore, and it must make sense. The work of the Son is the pledge of our common humanity; it is the focus on which centers, from which radiates, every valid hope of a humanity bound in one by service and responsibility. This is the new humanity, God’s gift to us, awaiting our acceptance and realization. And the gift of the Spirit is the gift of realization, which by making me grateful to God, makes me recognize obligations to all his family. “What have you that you did not receive?” Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift.
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“LET US KEEP THE FESTIVAL”—1 Corinthians 5.7,8
[Preached twenty-three times from 4/9/44 at Bondgate, Darlington to 4/6/86 at Spennymoor]
The profusion of imagery and associations which belongs to this text are quite bewildering. It makes it difficult to know where to begin. There is a wealth of Old Testament allusions and one metaphor here. There is the vivid creative New Testament handling of Old material. There is a Church tradition which has encrusted the words with a new deposit of Christian thought and experience. As a rough analogy one of Shakespeare’s historic plays might serve. Behind it is the ancient story, written down, perhaps rather crabbed from Plutarch or someone else, then comes the creative touch of genius, and the whole thing springs to life as it did on the boards of the old playhouse of Bankside. And now for us there is all that plus three hundred years of criticism from Johnson to Granville-Barker and Dover Wilson, three hundred years of stage traditions from Burbage to Gielgud, and later our reading and seeing of the play.
It is an even larger story that I have to cut short here. It goes back to Exodus to the first associations, grim and murky, of Passover and Unleavened Bread. Details are impossible now, but first get the impression: the horror of the Destroyer stalking through the land in the light of the full moon, the houses protected by sacrifice and purgation from every trace of fermenting yeast—and then deliverance. For me, I must confess, there will always be the recollection of the film Green Pastures and the way in which the singing swells to the mighty shout—“Let my people go!” They went. By death they were delivered, forth they went across sea, and wilderness and river, and they came to the Promised Land. I have told you on another occasion how this basic story governed and still governs the Jewish celebration of the Passover; how the story must be told, “beginning with the shame and ending with the glory.”
All this is taken up by the New Testament writers. If there were time I would show you a number of details where Paul’s words can only be fully understood if we know the Jewish customs of his day; a number of minute correspondences that show that we are right in taking his purpose to be illustration by means of this old recital of its fulfillment. Christ was the Passover sacrifice who by his dying preserved us in safety; Christ the first fruits from the dead leads his people onward and upward to the new life of the resurrection. That is why this text is part of the traditional Easter Anthem. That is why the proper preface for Easter says, “for he is the very Paschal Lamb, which was offered for us, and hath taken away the sins of the world; who by his death hath destroyed death, and by his rising to life again,
