Verses 6-13
Chapter 87
Prayer
Almighty God, thine is a holy mountain, and the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. May we approach thee in a spirit of humility and great expectation, inspired by the hope which thou thyself hast justified, that if we come to thee in the right way, with the right prayer, thou wilt grant unto us gracious replies. We come by the way of the Cross, we come by the way of Calvary we know no other road; it is strait, and yet it is broad: we renounce ourselves and accept the Saviour, we put away our own ability, which is utter weakness, and run with eager delight and thankfulness to the almighty strength of Christ.
We come with our. accustomed prayer and our accustomed song, yet is our experience new, for thy mercy is always surprising, and thy compassion a continual revelation. Enlarge our prayer, enlarge our praise, and receive, we humbly pray thee, in the name of the Mediator, what we now utter in thy hearing as the supreme desire of our hearts. Thou hast done great things for us, whereof we are glad, but not glad with sufficiency of joy, for verily our gladness would have purified us, and our very joy would have disputed all dominions but thine own. Yet we are glad of thy tender grace and loving patience and eternal training of our wayward souls often to ourselves hopeless and only hopeful to thine infinite compassion.
Thou hast arranged our life, thou hast directed it according to thy wisdom: we are here and not there, because the bounds of our habitation are fixed. We are this and not that, because the Lord hath so said. The mouth of the Lord hath spoken it, and he who fixed the sea in its basin hath also fixed the waters of our life in their small channels. We think we are free, and behold we are bound: we stretch out ourselves as if we had stature and height enough, in order to fill all things, and behold the firmament is still above us: it is the bound of its height, and beyond it we cannot move. Thou hast tethered us with invisible chains, thou hast fastened us down to centres, and given us the delusion of liberty, whilst we have been all the while the bondsmen of thy wisdom and love.
We bless thee for this mode of training us; thou dost lure us by wondrous love along the widening way of life, thou dost promise us that which immediately appeals to our senses, and lo, thou dost train the senses themselves to contemn the blessing, and look for something grander still. Train us, thou loving God; make of us what thou wilt thy will alone is good, ours is broken and insufficient to meet the whole necessity strong only in points, and strong only with violence and not with the serenity of complete power. Enable us therefore lovingly to fall into the movement of thy will, and to ask for no other composure or rest but to be at one with the purpose of God.
Thou dost make us old day by day, and subtly dost thou withdraw our strength from us, until we know that our weakness is complete. Thou dost not smite us always with the great blow of thy thunder, but thou takest away our days with invisible hands and with silent movement, and we know it not until the sum which is taken is larger than the sum that remains. Others die in their full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet, but whether in this way or in that, thou wilt surely withdraw us from the scene which we were not consulted about entering, and thou wilt work out thy purpose on the other side as thou hast done all along without word or will of ours. Oh that we might rest in thy goodness, that we might be taught by the very bitterness of our experience, that we might see how frail we are, and turn our very frailty into a sign or prayer for greater strength.
Today make us glad in thine house: fill every window with light, come in upon us by every opening, and make our whole heart glad with great joy and thrilling rapture, and while the fire burns may we speak with our lips. Let the day be made memorable because of the large baptism of the Holy Ghost: let all the people praise thee, O God, yea, let all the people praise thee; thou who dost open dumb mouths and unloose silent tongues, come to us and cause us who have been too long speechless and songless in this house, to utter our prayer and our praise with a new and glad strength.
We pray for our loved ones who are not with us. The number is incomplete, the vacancy is a lesson to our anxious hearts do thou go after those who have left us for a while: with all Sabbatic comforts make them glad, on the high road, in the wilderness, on the sea wheresoever they are, let the light of thy Heaven be a Sabbatic glory. We pray for the sick, the weary, the sad, the dying; for the whole side and aspect of humanity, viewing which our hearts sink within us in hopelessness and fear because of our entire weakness and inability to meet the urgent pain. Lord, gather us to thine heart, give us to feel the presence of the everlasting arms, the arms that can crush the universe, but will not hurt a little child. Amen.
No Waste In Love
In this incident we see Jesus Christ indebted to others. It seems to be a humble position: he is in another man's house, for he has no house of his own at times he had not where to lay his head. The writers of his story are never ashamed to say so, they do not want any adventitious glory, they do not care to build up a grand exterior: though they claim great things for their Master, they never claimed a house for him: they always found him the guest of others. He receives too the ointment from the woman who poured it upon his head. He had no ointment of his own. If any such token of love or care was to be bestowed upon him, it must be not of his own finding, it must be the expression of other hearts, and at the expense of other hands.
The contrast between this scene and others which have passed before us is so vivid as to be startling. We have seen him in the narrative raising the dead, opening the eyes of the blind, quieting the storm on the sea, and now he is indebted to another man for his dinner, and to a kind and loving woman for bestowing upon him a token of personal love and regard. He touched the extreme poles extremely poor, infinitely rich: weaker than a bruised reed, strong with the almightiness of God.
How singular the imagination which conceived such a life, how violent in its action, how utterly improbable in its conceptions: how irrational to suppose that the world would receive a story apparently on the very surface of it so self-contradictory and self-stultifying! Yet truth is stranger than fiction. All these rapid alternations and self-contradictions take place in every deep and great life. If you do not realise within you something answering to the same marvellous rapidity, violence, and collision, blame the narrowness of your own experience rather than doubt what may appear miraculous to a hope that was never a great flame and to a faith that was more than half mere reason and cold factual understanding.
How meekly he receives what is given to him. He realises his poverty. There is nothing of pretence about him: he never takes a thing as if it were not given. He stoops down to bless the giver, to name the donor, so to enlarge the gift and the giving that there can be no mistake about his own poverty in the matter. With no sleight of hand does he take the offerings that are presented: frankly, with all the honesty of a true love, he puts out his hand, receives what is offered, kisses it, places it in his heart, and writes the donor's name in heaven.
And yet consider what it was that he received. Let us look a little into what was actually given to him. What was it in this case? He sat at meat in the house of Simon the leper: he was eating his daily bread, partaking of friendly hospitality. What else was given to him? A box of spikenard, very precious, such as, probably, only the comparatively rich could hold in their possession. These were the things that were given. They were poor things, and he was the greater for accepting them in their meanness. Who ever gave him a thought? Who ever enriched him with an idea? Who ever startled him into gratitude by a revelation of truth which had not come within his own horizon? who ever pointed out to him, as the result of a more powerful telescope than his own, some planet in deeper plunges of the sky than he had ever penetrated? He takes your bread, your ointment, and shelters himself under the roof of our house: at that end he is one with us, just as human as we are: tired, he asks to sit down; thirsty, he says, "Give me to drink;" without food hour by hour, he is glad to take a meal at any man's table, though he be publican and sinner, and much murmured at and about by those who look upon outsides only. And yet, whilst he is guest, he is host: no man can claim any table that he sits at: he fills the place, he leaves more bread than he began with, the feast multiplies under his look. He blesses the house, and it is never poor any more. The last lingering ghost that hid itself in some out-of-the-way corner vanishes, and heaven's cloudless light fills the place as if it had become a chosen temple.
These are the things that prove him to my heart to be...
GOD. Again and again we have seen that he is no grammatical deity, dependent for his primacy and sovereignty upon some cunning adaptation of ancient verbs and irregular conjugations, but a regal God, a palpable deity, a friendly God so near that I can touch him and speak to him, so far that my eye cannot carry its vision to the infinite distance. He is all things: he comes in and sits down to dinner like a common carpenter, his clothes very coarse and mean and much wayworn, and his look haggard, and his eyes dim with watching that nobody could keep up with. Then we call him Nazarene and peasant, Galilean and strange character, partially maniac, evidently gone out of his head, past the thin veil which separates genius from insanity, and we look and wonder and are filled with a piteous amazement that such a Man should run such a course of wildness. Whilst we are wondering, he gives us one look which we can never forget, he utters a word as familiar as our mother's name, but with such tonic force as makes it music, revelation, light!
So I find him indebted to others, and yet not indebted, for he always gives the very things which he was receiving. This is the way of the Lord: we will come to know presently, if we keep long companionship, and close heart-intercourse with him, that we ourselves are not our own. Simon the leper thought the bread he was giving belonged to himself. Not a crumb of it! Mary thought she had purchased the ointment or had otherwise secured the spikenard, so that she had a right of property in it. Only in an intermediate sense. The ointment was Christ's before it was hers she only held it for him. She could not account for what she did. Inspiration has no explanation: it touches the soul and moves the hand like unsuspected presences, and we cannot tell how we did it: we only know that the deed was done. Oh, cold, cold hearts are they that can tell why they do things and set down their reasons in numerical order, and justify themselves upon affidavits, and before magisterial benches. Be mine the life whose reason is swallowed up in higher reason which I have come to know by the mysterious name of inspiration. See him there then, debtor yet no debtor, a receiver and yet a giver, receiving from the hand only, but never having the light that burned in him increased by a single ray from any spark that ever issued from another brain. Set down in your common day books all that was given to him: any coarse paper will do on which to enter the record, any clumsy pencil will do to write the vulgar words. The pencil will never be required to write thought, idea, suggestion, flash from heaven; revelation from unexpected and impenetrated sanctuaries. It is up there that he is Lord!
But when his disciples saw it they had indignation, and said, "To what purpose is this waste?" In John we learn that it was Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, that began the objection and inquired into this matter of what was called waste. Said he, "Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence and given to the poor?" The man who said that condemned himself. He knew the pence value of the ointment, and any man who knows the pence value of anything that takes place in the church is a bad man. There is no pence value to the higher life: you jumble unrelated languages. The very question is a condemnation: it was not the question of an economist, it was the inquiry of a thief. Do not believe in schedules and tables and comparative statistics in the church. Any man who gets up tables and comparative statistics in the church is either a bad man or a mistaken one: he is always a hinderer of true progress. There should be no comparative statistics in the church. What have we to do whether the pews are full or empty, or the treasury exhausted or overflowing? Nothing. We have to preach the word, declare the testimony, read the writing, decipher the inscription on the cross and on the sky, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear, and as to comparing this year with ten years ago, let those do so who live in dust, but not those who are here for a night and will be gone tomorrow like the morning dew. Iscariot cannot do anything in the church, but debase and injure it.
Jesus Christ was often misunderstood by others. When indeed was he ever understood? Now and then it seemed as if he was just going to be understood, and then his great heart rocked within him and went out after the understanding man as one might go after a friend long expected and at length come. Sometimes a stranger surprised him by great faith, and he instantly went over the boundary line separating Jew and Gentile, and took hold of him, and with all the pathos and unreserve of an ancient and indestructible masonry shook him by the hand and heart, and claimed him by right of affinity.
It must come to that in the last building of the church. We cannot be built upon words and phrases. In the last issue the church will be a church of affinity, sympathy, love, friendship, brotherhood, a commonwealth men understanding men who never saw one another before, but by look and touch and tone and gesture feeling that brothers of a commonwealth have met.
A man is not necessarily a Christian because he is a disciple, nor is a man necessarily at one with Christ because his name is Judas Iscariot. A bad disposition misunderstands everything. Do not suppose that the bad disposition understands Christ alone; whatever it looks at it desecrates. When a bad man looks at a flower, he sends a chill to its little heart: when a Judas kisses your child, he blackens its soul. Do not go to the bad man for poetry, or for high and bright interpretation of life and nature. The bad man cannot give you what you seek for. Wherever he is, all the holy spirits vanish and leave him in the vacancy of solitude. And yet the bad man can use nice words: he talks about the poor. The poor he would sell his mother's bones to enrich himself! The poor he would tear the gas lamps from their sockets in the church and sell them, if he could do it secretly, if he could do it and not be found out! Yet he talks about the poor, makes a mouthful of the word, says it unctuously, as if he cared for the poor. He can care for nothing that is wise, beautiful, tender, and truly necessitous. The disease is vital, the disorder is fundamental: he is bad in the inner fibres, and every look he gives is a blasphemy. He comes into the church, and he says, looking at anything which he may call by the name of ornament, "Why was this waste made? Why was not this sold, and given to the poor, my clients?" He misunderstands all beauty, as if the beautiful were not a gift to the poor. Why, sometimes the poor see more in a picture than the rich can see. To put up a beautiful building of any kind in a town is to give something to the poor.
What are the poor? Mere eaters and drinkers, gormandisers, people gathered around a trough to eat and drink? Have they not eyes, imaginations, sensibilities, divinity of nature that can be touched by the appeals of beauty and music and heroism and nobleness? Simon the leper could give a dinner, but he who gives an idea gives a continual feast. He who shows a beautiful picture, and gets a man to look right into it and through it, is actually giving to the poor. We misunderstand the poor when we suppose that they can only eat and drink, and that to give to them means to give them something in their hands or something they can gnaw with their teeth. It is a base idea, it is a total misconception of the whole case, it must not have any place in Christ's church. Build the most beautiful churches you can and you sustain labour, you keep men at work in an honest way; and fill the places with the poor. Every picture may be a hint, every tint of beauty may thrill the soul with a new hope, and every sound of the organ may answer something already in the soul, but silent. Abolish all narrow views, and do not suppose that the poor are only so many machines for the consumption of food and drink. Better to learn in Christ's school than in Iscariot's.
You cannot have any great life without sentiment. Life is not all cold logic; the flowers are the lovelier for the dews that tremble upon them, and you look so much younger and nobler when the tears of real pity are in your eyes you are not unmanned, you are more than manned. The bad spirit cannot understand lavish generosity, spiritual suggestiveness, or religious sentiment. Only the beautiful soul can understand the beautiful act. Jesus Christ understood the woman and told her what it meant, though she did not know it. We do not know the meaning of our best acts: I am so afraid that we yield ourselves to those wooden teachers who would always keep us just between two assignable points, who would put down all madness whereas it is by madness, mistakenly so called, that the world gets on an inch farther on its slow course now and then.
Jesus now becomes the Giver. Making his voice heard amid the tumult, he tells the disciples what the woman has done. She gave the ointment, he gave the explanation, and in that explanation we have revelation. Our deeds mean more than we sometimes mean them to mean, says Christ. "This is done in view of my burial." That was a new idea; the woman did not intend to suggest death and burial when she came with that ointment. "Ah but," says Christ, "this is like a flower laid upon my dead breast, that is like a finger gently pressing my dead eyelids, this is like an odour of heaven rising from the grave I shall presently occupy." He gives our actions such great meanings oh, such verge, margin, and amplitude of significance! he makes us ashamed of our very prayers because they are to him so much more than they are to us. He interprets them at the other end, and seems to stretch them across the sky, whereas we did but mutter them in helplessness and inarticulate necessity. When Christ makes so much of the deed, we wish we had made more of it ourselves, and made it worthier his love.
Jesus Christ thus befriended others. To receive graciously is to benefit the giver. There is a way of denying a gift that hurts the heart that suggested it. There is also a way of receiving a flower from a little child that makes the child long for next summer to come around in a great sudden hurry that it may gather all the flowers in the field for you. Jesus took the spikenard, with the infinite grace which is one of the charmful qualities of his nature, took it as if he had a claim upon it, and yet as if he had no claim at all but the claim of poverty and need. "The poor," said he, "I will give you opportunity enough for attending to the poor: the poor ye have always with you, me ye have not always." Seize the fleeting chance, do good to the man who is going next: he may start before you do the great deed. Have some eye to the reality of things, and where there is a man that you can only see today, for he will be gone tomorrow, do good to him, and let the ten thousand who are not going tomorrow wait for their natural opportunity.
Tender was the speech, and extorted from him by the woman's tenderness. "She," said he, "is right: she knows and yet does not know that I am going to be buried soon: she knows by a feeling, an instinct, a strange and anonymous impulse that something is going to happen. Thank God for those women-prophets amongst us, and men-prophets, who cannot tell what is going to take place, but know very well that there is something in the air, and that work along that apocalyptic line.
There is a good deal that is modern in this ancient instance. Many people care for the poor multitudinously, they care for a great nameless quantity called the poor, they often mention them over their smoking soup, they sometimes refer to them with most touching sympathy as they are gulping down their last champagne. They have a warm side for the poor, understanding by that term something immeasurable and far away. They would take the shadow into their own houses if there were less of it, but being so vast they let it alone. These people are great in epitaphs. I have sometimes ventured to say that if the dead could rise at night in darkness, and had to return to their several graves in the morning, they would never be able to get back again to their right places if they had nothing to guide them but their epitaphs. They would be so surprised at their own grandeur they would not dare to get in again. Men cannot live on epitaphs, and the poor are not much obliged to us for drinking their health in a bacchanalian toast. Better throw a bone without any flesh upon it to the hungriest dog that ever lived, than talk about all the hungry dogs and give them no bone. Church of the living God, you can be mighty amongst the poor: foiled for the moment in wordy argument, you can set up a plea for Christianity in the hearts of the poor that the poor can understand and apply.
The word waste was used in connection with this offering. "Why to what purpose was this waste?" The word that is rendered waste in the English tongue may be rendered perdition. At the last Christ said, concerning this same opposing and querulous Judas Iscariot, "I have lost none but the son of waste, the son of perdition. He accused the poor woman of having done a perditional act. A man can only speak on the level of his own nature: I have lost him: it was not the ointment that was wasted, but himself that was waste."
Ay, so it shall be in the judgment. Nothing shall be lost that can be kept, and what is lost shall be the son of perdition.
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