"Ye do proclaim the Lord's death till He come"--
1 Corinthians 11:26
The Lord's Supper is a permanent
memorial of Calvary. It is purposed to keep a stupendous sacrifice in mind,
and to prevent it from becoming a neglected commonplace. It is a lowly gateway
into a most mysterious place. In its wonderful precincts there is unthinkable
bitterness of sorrow. And yet out of the very bitterness there comes sweet
bread for the soul. There are tears in its silences, and there is also "joy
unspeakable and full of glory." How, then, shall we come to the feast?
Sometimes we have come to the Lord's Supper as
though it were a battleground, and we have forgotten the feast. We have come
as noisy controversialists, and not as hungry guests. We have contended for
spiritual privileges which we have not used. We have been heated, quarrelsome,
defiant, and we have gone unblessed away.
And ministers have sometimes been so ensnared by
the administrative part of the office that they have altogether forgotten that
they were sinners. They have "administered," but they have not received, and
when they have left the table there has been no holy glow about their souls,
and no taste in their mouth of "the glorious liberty of the children of
God."
How, then, shall we come to the feast? Let us
come as impure suppliants. There is no room here to boast of personal
merits, but abundance of room to sing the wonders of redeeming grace. This is
no place to exhibit webs of our own weaving; it is rather a place of exchange,
where we lay down our defective garments and humbly receive "the best robe" in
the Father's house, even "the robe of righteousness and the garment of
salvation." The most elaborate garment of the self-made man looks very drab
and seedy when set in the light which shines around the table of the Lord.
The best thing we can do is to say nothing about
our own clothes, but humbly seek that "wedding garment," which is the gift of
the Lord of the feast. "Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and stood
before the angel. And he answered and spoke unto those that stood before him,
saying, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will
clothe thee with apparel. . . . So they set a fair mitre upon his head, and
clothed him with garments; and the angel of the Lord stood by."
How shall we come to the feast? Let us come as
sickly disciples, whose obedience has been thin and faint. We have been
anaemic in His service. There has been an obtrusive want of rich, red blood,
and the curious, quizzing world has seen the lack, and has wondered whether we
were real kinsmen of the warrior with the "red apparel," or whether our claim
is a presumptuous pretense. The only authorized Alpine rope has a red worsted
strand running through it from end to end. And the really sealed followers of
the Lord are known by their red strand, the blood sign, the red, endless line
of sacrifice. A life which shows the wan colour of a selfish worldliness,
which has nothing to distinguish it from the children of mammon, cannot claim
moral kinship with the Lord, who "laid down His life for His friends." We need
the red strand. "My blood is drink indeed." We come to the table in order
that our sickly anaemia may be changed into strong and sacrificial chivalry.
"We
lay in dust life's glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life
that shall endless be!"
And so we come as unimpressive
weaklings, who in ourselves are devoid of forceful grip, and who lack the
splendid virile influence of contagious health. We have too frequently moved
about our work as though we had "received the spirit of bondage again to fear,"
and were strangers to the spirit of "love and of power and of a sound mind."
And, therefore, devils have not trembled when we
drew near, and when we have commanded their expulsion they have remained
powerful and enthroned. They have laughed at our approach, and had we
carefully listened we might have heard the old challenge: "Jesus we know, and
Paul we know, but who are ye?" The "voice of the great Eternal" was not in our
tone, and so the evil spirit proved himself stronger than the professed
disciples of the Lord, and we could not cast him out.
And now we come for the bread of strengthening.
And this holy bread, this bread of tears, this bread of affliction, is the food
of giants. It endows the soul with "the power of His resurrection," and it
transforms the ineffective weakling into a strong son of God, and perfectly
equips him as a minister of salvation. We have come from defeat and failure up
many a pilgrim road, and from many a clime, and we are now in the guest
chamber, where the gracious Host is accustomed to meet weary and disheartened
pilgrims, and where he graciously feeds them with "the finest of the wheat."
"Jesus, Thou joy of
loving hearts,
Thou
fount of life, Thou light of men,
From the best bliss
that earth imparts
We
turn unfilled to Thee again!"
And what will He do with us? What will
He do for us? What will He do in us? Well, first of all, He will
commune with us. He will whisper again to our hearts the wondrous
consolations of the fourteenth of John. He will deliver us from our
distraction, and He will smooth out all wrinkling and wasteful cares.
"Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it
be afraid!" Have we not experienced this quieting ministry of the feast? Have
we not known the gracious seasons when the real life forces have begun to move,
and the soul has begun to kindle, and the envious distractions of the world
have melted away, just as the imprisoning ice loosens its grasp in the genial
breath of the spring? "Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with
us by the way?"
And thus, while He communes He will communicate,
and the communication is so marvelously abounding and complete that we become
incorporate with the Lord. The fifteenth of John shall follow the fourteenth;
and when the separating fears and sins have been washed away and we are clean,
we shall know ourselves to be engrafted into the Vine of Life. And no figure
of speech, be it ever so intimate, can express the closeness of the
incorporation. But friendship, be it endowed with feelers and tendrils most
exquisite, leaves half the tale untold. Even wedded bliss, when the union
seems fleckless and indissoluble, only dimly reflects the fellowship of the
soul and Christ. The Apostle Paul ransacked human experience for symbols of
correspondence and intimacy; but even when he had used the best and most
expressive, he laid down his pen in utter impotence, despairing ever to shadow
forth the marvelous kinship of the soul whose life is "hid with Christ in
God."
And how shall we go away from the feast? We
must go as heralds. We must "proclaim the Lord's death till He come."
The Lord's death! We must go out to vagrant pilgrims, who are painfully
following illicit lights, and becoming more and more confused, and we must lead
them to this strange, solemn birthplace of eternal life and light and hope.
We must "proclaim the Lord's death!" We must
tell our struggling fellows that in that fertile gloom gilt finds its solvent,
tears become translucent, and moral infirmity begins to "leap as a hart." Yes,
we must leave the table as heralds, and this must be our cry: "Ho, everyone
that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye, buy
and eat; yea, come buy wine and milk without money and without price."
And we must go as covenanters. We have
taken "the new covenant" in His blood, and the holy sacrament will be fresh
upon our lips. And there must be something about us akin to the Scottish
Covenanters when they emerged from Greyfriars churchyard, having entered into
holy bond and covenant with the Lord. There must be something in our very
demeanour telling the world that we have been at a great tryst, and our lives
must be gravely, grandly quiet, confident in the glorious Ally, with whom the
covenant has been made.
There must be nothing dubious in our stride. Our
courage must be kingly, as though we have imperial friendships, and as though
in very truth we "walk with God." It must be apparent to everybody, in the
home, and in the market, and in the street, that we, too, have been "brought
again from the dead, . . . through the blood of the everlasting covenant."
As heralds we must go, and as covenanters, and
as crusaders, too. We must leave the table as the covenanted knights
left King Arthur's table, "to ride abroad, redressing human wrong," and to
labour for the creation of conditions like unto those whose fair pattern we
have seen in the Mount. We may test the reality of our communion by the vigour
of our crusades. We must drink our politics "from the breasts of the
Gospel."
There is a great word in one of Kingsley's
letters which was written when the condition of the people was burdening him
with its ever-deepening tragedy, and when his spirit was being tortured with
the sense of accumulated degradations. And this is what he wrote:
"If I had not had the communion at church today
to tell me that Jesus does reign, I should have blasphemed in my heart,
I think, and said, `The devil is king!'" But he left the feast, he assures us,
braced and strengthened, and with "a wild longing to do something for his
fellow men!" That is it, the power of the holy blood must be proved in our
positive action upon the kingdom of the night.
"The Son of God
goes forth to war,
A
kingly crown to gain;
His blood-red
banner streams afar,
Who
follows in His train?"
And so let us turn to our feast. The
door is open and the King is near, and blessed are all they that love His
appearing. Let all human ministries veil their faces and stand aside, and let
the soul have undistracted dealings with the Lord.
