be unjust to good ones, because the value of their degree would be depressed.
This is a dreadful illustration. May I take it one step further and make it more objectionable still? Of all the jobs I have given up, there is none I am so glad to be rid of as examining. Why? Because it is a frightful chore to read fifty answers to the same question? Well, yes, that comes into it. But mainly because it is such a moral and emotional strain. There are not many sheer failures at Durham; we are proud of our low dropout rate. But there are disappointments, people who hoped for firsts get 2.1’s, and so on. And year after year the examiner knows that in order to keep the standard where it ought to be, he must disappoint X, Y, and Z. I won’t use the wearisome cliché and say that it hurts me more than it hurts you, but it hurts.
Do you understand why I am saying this? It is God’s love, God’s righteousness—in biblical usage these are not very different—that is experienced in both kindness and severity. And the hurt this does to God is experienced in the central manifestation of his love and righteousness (Rom 5.8; 3.21). “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” “The Gospel is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes . . . for in it the righteousness of God is revealed.”
In this sermon I am leaving you any number of loose ends, which it will be your business to tie up. I am not worried about them because I am not concerned to make a neat and watertight dogmatic statement. I am using this difficult theological text in the interests of responsible Christianity. Many of us, most of us no doubt, are well meaning enough in our faith, but intellectually and morally, and in our churchmanship shockingly irresponsible. So I go back to the place where we began. There is something to be said for the short, sharp, shock. Consider the kindness and the severity of God.
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“A LIVING SACRIFICE”—Romans 12. 1–2
[Preached three times from 1/7/45 at Bondgate to 1/7/62 at Leamside]
I will tell you at once what I’m going to do. This is Covenant Sunday. For nearly (if not quite) two hundred years Methodists have had the custom of making or renewing their covenant with God on the first Sunday of the year. I have been studying John Wesley’s Journal to find out just how old the custom is, but I cannot say precisely. The first reference is on Sunday January 1, 1764. He says, “At every place this week I endeavored to prepare our brethren for renewing their covenant with God. We met in the evening for that solemn purpose. I believe the number of those that met was considerably larger than last year, and so was the blessing. Truly, the consolations of God were not small with us. Many were filled with peace, joy; many with holy fear, and several backsliders were healed.” So they had certainly had at least one such meeting before that. At least the custom is very old, and a very good Methodist custom.
Now in the service book which we use for the Covenant Service, you will find a quite considerable little document that I am prepared to say not one in ten of you has ever read. It is called “Directions to Penitents and Believers for Making and Renewing their Covenant with God.” I would urge you very strongly to read it. What I want to do now is to use the exposition of this text for the same purpose. I am convinced of this, that if we could recover that real original Methodist concentration upon our real message, we shall be an infinitely stronger power as a Church. I hardly dare use such strong language as the old directions use. We are not used to it in these days. But I shall give you as much as I can.
The form of the text is significant for us. Paul, of course, is looking back over the first eleven chapters of the epistle, in which he has discussed with incomparable grandeur and breadth the whole merciful plan of God’s redemption. And he says, “Now brothers and sisters, such is God’s mercy—what about you?” “What are you going to do about it?” There is no question here of a sacrifice offered to win God’s mercy. God’s mercy is there, freely given; cannot you in return give the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving?
We too are looking back and look on. We are looking back over a year that, for good or ill, is a closed book now. We are looking ahead to the unknown. What I have to do now is to recall for you—for myself—the mercies of God, and to ask what we are prepared to do about them. There are of course the two sides of the covenant—God’s promise and love—and our response. “Christian morality (Dodd ad loc) is the response to all the mercy of God. . . . It does not begin with a person’s ambition to make himself a fine specimen of virtuous humanity . . . it begins with the thankful recognition that God . . . has done for him what he never could do for himself.” I invite you to think first of the mercies of God.
THE MERCIES OF GOD
I am not so foolish as to think that I can read through the covers of your diaries and count the blessings of 1944 for you. The task would be too big for you, and therefore infinitely too difficult for anyone else. Instead I want to ask a very bold question. Did anything happen to you in 1944 which might not have been used by God as some sort of blessing for you? Don’t misunderstand me. I know that 1944 brought to some of you experiences of the sharpest sorrow. The last thing on earth I want to say (and if you know me at all, you know I speak the truth) is—“it can’t have been so bad after all. Pull yourselves up and never mind.” I don’t mean that nor do I mean simply Henry V’s “there is some soul of goodness in things evil / Would men observingly distil it out.”
For my own part, I can truthfully say that I have learned more of God in the sorrows of life than when I have been enjoying myself. Again, don’t misunderstand me; I do thank God for the joys of life, even the simplest, for a good score at cricket as well as for a symphony; for a good play as well as for a good friend. But it has been in the loneliness and anxiety of life that God has convinced me of his own reality and love. I want to suggest that, very gently, to you. Give God a chance to transmute the sorrows of the past into the profits of the future. In the light of that, reflect on the mercies of God.
That will lead us to the fundamental meaning of God’s mercies. If you can turn sorrow into blessing, then the Cross is the supreme instance of what he does; more, it is the means by which he does it. I want to speak to you very simply about this. As I have said to you before, this is the point where in the last resort the preacher is bound to drop his interesting illustrations and speak directly, and even then, it is hard enough to find the right words. It was an old writer of the Middle Ages who found himself in this position, and whose words I want to use.
What language shall I borrow To praise Thee, heavenly friend, For this my dying sorrow, Thy pity without end? (Bernard of Clairvaux)
What language is there? He loved me and gave himself for me. There is something old about that, but how can I give you the meaning that is in my mind? The other day at home, we were thinking, dreaming if you like, about the places we want to visit when the war is over, and that sort of thing becomes possible again. I turned again to pictures of old Provence—you know my love for classical antiquity—thought of all those places where the Greeks and Romans thought lofty thoughts of life and death when England was a haunt of wild animals and all the ache of the past of history came back to me. So it does here. He loved me—before the foundations of the world, the New Testament says. Press your thought back into the misty obscurity of remotest time, beyond the origins of barbarian England, beyond the beginnings of Greece and Rome, beyond the first speech of one human being to another, before the upheaval or rock and ice and vapor that was the beginning of earth—then he loved me, then the Son of God had it in mind to die for me.
But his love is not like, say the old amphitheater at Nimes—worn out, unused, the mere shell of its ancient glory, not like Avignon, the old home of the Popes where the glory has now departed. He loves me now, in spite of and in my sin. And this is the measure of his love, his care. You sometimes here the expression used, say of those in the army, “they would go through hell for him.” Christ has done that for us; that is how he loves, and love of that order does not change. “I beseech
