Study hymn 376:
Thou great mysterious God unknown,Whose love hath gently led me on,E’en from my infant days,Mine inmost soul expose to view,And tell me if I ever knew Thy justifying grace,Thy justifying grace.
Whate’er obstructs Thy pardoning love,Or sin, or righteousness, remove,Thy glory to display;My heart of unbelief convince,And now absolve me from my sins,And take them all away. (Charles Wesley)
ON THIS ROCK I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH
We must not run away from the plain meaning of these words. It is said that Jesus will build his Church upon Peter. The play upon words, especially when you consider the Aramaic makes that perfectly clear. It will be well, however, to spend just a moment in observing precisely what that does and what it does not mean. It does mean that the Church is to be built on Peter, Peter the recipient of God’s revelation, Peter the apostle. There is nothing startling in that. We read elsewhere (in Ephesians) that the Church is build upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, and here Peter, making this earliest of confessions of faith, is thought of as first of the apostles. This we must think of again, later.
Let us now notice what the text does not mean. It means nothing at all with regard to those who regard themselves as the successors of Peter, in the bishopric of Rome. I will say nothing about whether Peter ever visited Rome at all. There is of course no certainty that he did. But there is a much more important point at stake here. Suppose it is true that Peter went to Rome and there instituted an episcopal Church. We are asked to suppose that the words spoken to Peter can be mechanically transferred to his second, his third, his a hundredth successor. If that is done, the very words are made to contradict themselves, for they themselves declare that the confession of Christ is a spiritually given thing. Not flesh and blood, but God in heaven. This is the same as Paul’s “no one can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit.” And now we are able to equate the Holy Spirit with so profane a thing as a list of bishops! No that is what we can never do, whether we are asked by Rome or by Canterbury or by Lambeth. Yet in our polemic against this abuse, we must not forget this: the Church is built upon the apostles, we do rely on their God-given testimony and their God-given faith in Him. If they had not believed, if they had not preached, our faith would have no resting place at all, it would have been, if it had existed at all, but an airy fancy. It is they who point us back to Jesus, and it is through this testimony that we know him. Finally then we must consider the nature and strength of the church.
THE NATURE AND STRENGTH OF THE CHURCH
It is against this Church that the gates of Hell shall not prevail. Not because the Church is so strong, but because its Lord is so strong, not because we can make politic concordats with our neighbors, but because rather we remain faithful. Kierkegaard once made this parable about the Church. “Imagine a fortress absolutely impregnable, provisioned for an eternity. There comes a new commandant. He conceives that it might be a good idea to build bridges over the moats, so as to be able to attack the besiegers. Voila! It converts the fortress into a country seat and naturally the enemy takes it. So it is with Christianity. They changed the method, and naturally the world conquered.” Kierkegaard believed that had happened to the Danish Church in his day. I believe that there is a real danger of it happening at any time, of it happening now. Are we really a community that lives by faith and lives under the Cross?
Think of what it means to be the Church of Christ crucified and of what it means to be an apostolic Church. You cannot rely upon the ordination of your minister— ‘because he was ordained by a bishop in apostolic succession, we are alright.’ You have the responsibility of checking all my teaching by the Word of God. You and I can only prove our faith by what we say and what we do. I will mention this only. Peter was made a shepherd, an under-shepherd under the authority of Jesus. The true Church is a shepherd Church that seeks the lost and shepherds its own. I cannot but think of this in terms of the Commando Campaign. Are we ready for a mission of the Churches to the outsiders? And are we ready to welcome strangers in?
“THE KING ON AN ASS”—Matthew 21.5
[Preached twenty-five times from 11/27/60 at St. Margaret’s Whitley Bay to Coxhoe 4/13/03]
There are several reasons why we should think today about the coming of Christ. First, we may remind ourselves that as important as Whitby Bay is, the world is a bigger place, and the church is bigger than this building. And throughout the Church, this day is the first Sunday in Advent when we begin to turn our mind specifically to the coming of Christ, his coming on earth in humility, and poverty and his coming in glory and power to judge the living and the dead.
But there is another reason we should speak of the coming of Christ. We have been busy this morning with the rededication of a restored Church. This was all of it right and proper; it is good that so great an occasion should be solemnized and celebrated. It has been a privilege to take part in it all. But we must be quite clear about this: that the whole proceedings have been mere hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo if Christ does not come, now and repeatedly, into this house which is called by his name. You may have the most beautiful church building in Christendom, but if Christ does not come into it, if he is not truly present in his word and in his sacraments, then it is a whited sepulchre. What then do we learn from the story in the Gospel about the coming of Christ? First, how Christ comes.
HOW CHRIST COMES
He is meek and riding upon an ass. That is not how you expect a king to come. It is not how the people of Jesus expected their Messiah to come. The greatest of all kings will come with pomp and power, displaying every possible kind of wealth and magnificence. And Jesus the king comes looking not like a king, but like a beggar, poor and meek, a ridiculous spectacle. Our picture today is doubtless different, though in fact when we do equip a royal procession, for a marriage or a coronation, it is much the same as the spectacles of ancient times. But even when we are less ostentatious, we still cling to the fundamental vestiges of power. Mr. Castro may wear battle dress and wear an open neck shirt, but he demands his own way and bulldozes the opposition. We still know the meaning of social, political, financial power. We are accustomed to rulers who exercise whatever power they can seize; we have witnessed them in our world.
And Jesus comes into our world, the beggar king. Even in the Church, we get out our ecclesiastical pomp to meet him. We put up splendid and ornate buildings, we prepare elaborate liturgies, we organize magnificent hierarchies in the religious civil service. We cherish, consciously and unconsciously, our fixed notions of where Christ ought to go, and what he ought to do, and with whom he ought to mix.
And here too Christ comes meek and lowly, riding upon his ass—though indeed it is not his, but borrowed. The beggar king. When Christ comes, all our instinctive values are inverted. If we invent a picture of a king riding upon a horse or driving a carriage, with all the magnificent apparel of state upon him, and about him, it is because in our hearts we should like to do this ourselves. Perhaps we should in the literal sense, or at least in some way. “Ah,” we say, “if only I had the chance I would show them. If only I had my way, I would put so-in-so in his place, and show him who was master. I would see to it that I had my rights, and more than that I would have power. I would make others serve me.”
And Christ comes meek and riding upon an ass. He is the king of kings, but he doesn’t mean to be king after our pattern. For him, kingship doesn’t mean acquiring power and claiming rights. It means service, love, giving, humility, sacrifice. Not that he is a feeble king. Read the rest of Zechariah’s prophecy which Mathew quotes. He is just, and having salvation. But he comes to deal with our problems at their roots, not by substituting one tyranny for another, but by replacing tyranny with love. What he does for us is to release us from bondage to sin, to selfishness, and thus to death.
The king does not
