he would love.” The love of God and his wonderful patience, even his humility.
A very old Christian writer pointed out the wonder of this. How did he send him? Not in wrath, not commanding, but in love, persuading, exhorting people, being patient with them. And on our side, what corresponds to this? What is our reply? In our behavior toward God and toward our fellow human beings governed by the same love, the same patience, the same humility, that we see in Jesus?
In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles is spoken of as a “spirit which ever denies.” And there is something of that in us; something that says no to God’s love and kindness, something that is on Herod’s side rather than Christ’s. A communist I was arguing with after an open air meeting told me that our present rulers were entirely selfish, and the people should rule themselves. Without quarreling with the principle, I wanted to know how he could be sure that the new rulers would not show the same selfishness. He said ‘you must change their ideology. That’s a big way of putting a simple yet terribly difficult thing. Change their ideology, that means change the “No” into a “Yes,” and turn the hard selfishness into the love and patience of God.
We may well recognize anyway, that it is something that needs to be done. It is true that we live in a world that is saying no to the God who with infinite love and compassion made his home and his grave among human beings. Do not think this is something abstract. It appears again and again in the whole fabric of human life. Sin is a fact of experience. You may forget it for a time, but you cannot blot your sinful acts out of your mind. Like David, you will meet your Nathan. Like Elijah, your Ahab. And sins are not isolated, because they are built up into habits, the chain that we forge for ourselves and bind upon our own limbs. This is the human NO! to the grace of God, which is more than the no to his commandments. Can nothing be done about it? Something has been done about it.
HE SHALL SAVE HIS PEOPLE FROM THEIR SINS
That is what Jesus came to do. He it is, and no other can do it; that is the meaning of the stress in the Greek—“thou canst save, and thou alone.” We run in vain from one supposed source of help to another, and he is the only Savior from sin. And that is what he is. People have tried from time to time to show him to be other things. The first communist, the first pacifist, the great teacher, the supreme moral example. But he is the Savior from sin. That at least was his own idea, and the idea of St. Paul of his work. But how can he save people from their sins?
1) By being with them, associating his purity with their evil. Have you ever read through the first sixteen verses of the New Testament? It is Matthew’s genealogy and repays reading, if you know the Old Testament. Notice especially the women who are mentioned—Tamar, Rahab, Bathsheba—all women of the worst of reputations, and Ruth, no Jew at all. Somehow these are the people who have to be brought in, and that reflects the whole of the mission, and the character of Jesus. For he was the friend of publicans and sinners. He was the shepherd of the lost sheep and the doctor of the sick. Jesus healed people’s bodies at a distance, but he did not heal their souls that way. It was when people like Levi and Zacchaeus opened their homes to him that they became changed persons.
2) By his power to forgive. Jesus knew that the most terrible consequence of sin was the barrier it erected between humankind and God, its breaking down of the relationship between them. Not that there was ever much to break down, because human beings had been trying to come to God by the wrong road; trying to earn his favor by the good things he did. But this attempt is constantly vitiated by the fact of sin, so that what Jesus did, in effect, was to create a new relationship between God and human beings, and our relationship to God exists only in Him. He is our righteousness and we have no other. So the jolly feasts with sinners could indeed become a holy communion, because Jesus bore them up to the presence of God. He was with them, but he was not one of them, and because he was different, and came from above he was able to forgive; to give us a new start, a new relationship to God, the life of sonship.
3) By his victory over the power of evil. Look again at the genealogy and see how Matthew splits it up into three sections. This is not coincidence, it is a philosophy of history. It means that for Matthew, the coming of Christ, is the inauguration of a new era, different from all that preceded this, in the fact of the presence of the Kingdom, the mighty rule of God. God manifests his power in overcoming the power of evil and setting up his own kingdom in the hearts of human beings. This means the defeat of sin, which on its own ground was invincible. “Give me somewhere to stand,” says Archimedes, “and I will move the world.” He meant that if, by a miracle, he could stand outside the world, he could exert force enough to move it. That is what the coming of Jesus means—power from outside the world applied inside it, power that was able to conquer sin and death in Jesus and those who believe in him. I have related all this to the time of Jesus himself, but he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And what he did for sinful persons in the past he can do for you.5
APPLICATION
When people gave names, they looked backward as well as forward, and we may look too at the two Joshua’s of the Old Testament. One was the triumphant leader of a young and vigorous people whom he led into their promised land with glory and daring exploits. The other comes much later after a long and weary history, strained with sin and suffering. And he is not a soldier, but a priest, sacrificing, atoning for his people, sanctifying them.
And Jesus is both, so that whether you stand with a big life’s history in front of you, or with a tale of failure and defeat behind, he is the one who can save you from sin, and save you into the glory of his Kingdom. On one occasion, a friend, Sir Henry Leeland found Michael Faraday in tears, with his head bent over an open Bible. “I fear you are feeling unwell,” he said. “No,” answered Faraday, “it’s not that, but why O why will not people believe the blessed truths here revealed?”6
Pages from C. K. Barrett’s notebook
4. Editor’s Note: There are many sermons composed in the 1930s as CKB began to preach regularly that he did not use thereafter, perhaps because he thought they could stand improvement or replacement. Whatever the case, this was not one of them for he used it in various places for over forty years. In general, I have followed his own implicit evaluation of those very early sermons, and presented here those that he felt worthwhile to use across many decades.
5. Editor’s Note: Here in pencil, he writes the name Lew Batchelor, about whom the story is told in another sermon in this volume. Presumably, he repeated that story here, at least in some of the uses of this sermon.
6. Editor’s Note: This illustration is crossed out in pencil, so presumably it was not used in later versions of the preaching of this sermon.
“IMMANUEL”—Matthew 1.22–23
[Preached twenty-seven times from 12/25/56 at Langley Park to 12/11/05 at Bowburn]
All that there is to say this morning is contained in the one word—Immanuel. It is one word when it stands as a proper name, but it is two words in Hebrew which it takes four words in English to translate—”With us is God.” Short enough, but it means everything. It always has meant everything, once humankind has learned to understand it.
Years ago, before the war, I read a story which has always stuck in my mind. The sorrows
