Luminescence, Volume 2. C. K. Barrett
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health all their lives, and without honor. Nor can we think of old folk, cold and hungry, dying prematurely, without a shudder. It is very right that such thoughts should wake us to be content with our rations, so that we say, “even if there are no bananas, not many eggs, thank you God it is not like that here.” Yes, but as Christians we have more than that to look at, and the sight of many of our own sleek and well-fed countrymen is, or ought to be, as agonizing as the picture of Greek children. I know, they don’t feel hungry. That’s the tragedy of it. That doesn’t mean that all is well. A missionary told me of malnutrition in India. “A good quantity of rice,” he said, “will fill the stomach, make you feel full,” but it hasn’t got the food values that are needed.
So with us. Our people fill their heads and souls with stuff that satisfies them without giving them true nutrition. The Gospel feast really satisfies. If the Gospel is a feast, it means fellowship. A feast, I said, not a public dinner. You have probably been, as I have, at a funeral dinner where you exchanged half a dozen brief remarks with your neighbors, and never really got beyond passing “the salt please” and the abominable weather. I don’t call that a feast. It may be a meal, even a good meal, but not a feast. When I think of a feast I think of the barbaric lines of the medieval hymn—“the shout of them that triumph/the song of them that feast.” Or if you will not think me irreverent, I think of a bump supper at Cambridge. Or to be a little more dignified but still in Cambridge of our Founder’s Feast, where we all meet who owe a debt to Mary de St. Pol who lived 600 years ago and who was a great and munificent lady. A feast means real fellowship. And therefore it means real joy. One could talk about these things forever. The Gospel is a feast, the Church is a festival. Why do we forget it? Why do we go about looking like a wet cat? Why do we dishonor Christ in this way? In view of Easter, in view of all the gladness of it, let us hear Paul’s words—“let us keep the festival!” But I have not finished. I should be saying that if you thought I was giving way to an unbridled enthusiasm to a light-heartedness that borders on light-headedness, this can never be if we consider both the origin and the consequences of our feast.
ITS ORIGIN—THE NEW PASSOVER
Paul, as ever, is arguing here. “Wherefore,” he says, “let us keep the feast.” What does that “wherefore” mean? What has he just said? “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us.” I have already said something about the Old Passover. Paul here takes it up in a dark picture. Just as the Passover lamb meant safety and deliverance to the Jews, so does Christ in his death mean that to us. We have all the gladness that the Passover feast suggests, all the good things, but we are never to forget what it cost.
That is why a Christian, the most joyful person in the world, never loses his poise, never loses his sense of responsibility, and never develops a swelled head. He never supposes that his own deserts have won for him the privileges he enjoys. He never forms the idea that they are a natural right of his. It is no doubt natural for Mr. H.G. Wells to talk about the rights of humankind; a Christian knows he has no rights and is profoundly thankful he is not getting his deserts.
Our sense of infinite indebtedness to Jesus Christ is profoundly humbling; all our privileges, all our joy, are his gift not our achievement, his bounty not our earning. Yet at the same time it gives us a proper sense of dignity, the only dignity a person can have without becoming arrogant. We perceive that in ourselves we are worth nothing; but Christ has created worth in us and for us. Christ died and rose again that we might be, not ourselves, but his new creation. The status that we now have is not our own but his. This means no lack of joy, but a deep seriousness.
You will recall how the epistle to the Hebrews recoils in horror from those who treat the blood of Christ as a profane thing—an ordinary, trivial, insignificant affair. Yet I have known Christians who did seem to do something very much like that, who were so familiar for the whole thing that it never moved them. I will say two perfectly plain practical things that could be said: 1) I cannot conceive how any Christian, hearing this, can entertain a hard thought about a brother or sister Christian; 2) I cannot conceive how any Christian, without the gravest reason, can entirely absent himself on the Lord’s Day from the presentation of the Word of the Cross, and the Communion of the broken body and shed blood of our Lord. Now we consider its consequences—purgation.
PURGATION
The edition of the Passover Haggadah which I possess is a cheap one, but it has a good selection of traditional pictures. On the first page you will see a reverent and bearded old gentleman carrying a candle in his hand. He is looking for leaven. With the Passover feast is associated that of the Unleavened Bread, and before the festival began, all the leavened bread had to be disposed of. It was not unnatural that leaven should come to be regarded as a symbol of evil, of moral evil. So St. Paul can use the metaphor. Leaven stands for malice and wickedness. To have purged it out means sincerity and truth. His command comes in its customary form. “You are unleavened,” he says, “because of what Christ has done, therefore be unleavened.” Christ has worked your salvation, now do you work it out.
The feast is set, he calls us to rejoice with him on this festival day, and to live in joy forever with him. But that has its consequences and obligations. If you are to come to the wedding meal, put on a wedding garment. Purge out the old leaven; ask him to cleanse you. Cry out to him, “I am undone, but do not depart from me. Come to me thyself, purge me from every stain, open the door on which thou knockest, come in that we may feast together, and that henceforth life may have that sober gaiety of the feast of the Kingdom of God.”
Quite literally, the feast of Christ is before us. Soon I shall be saying, “you who do truly and earnestly repent of your sins, draw near with faith and take the holy sacrament to thy comfort.” Will you do so as a pledge that you want to clean up your life, that you want to enter now into a life of fellowship with living Christ?
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“AS IF NOT”—1 Corinthians 7.29–31
[Preached eighteen times from 4/22/73 at Langley Park to 3/14/96 at Coxhoe]
That is a long and complicated text, and it may appear to have very little to do with the theme that is in the mind of us all on this Stewardship Sunday. It is true that the Corinthians were getting very bothered about the whole question of marriage, whether or not it was right to have a wife or husband. If you had one—how to treat it, if you hadn’t one, whether to look for one, and so on. And no doubt it was wise for Paul to deal with the questions his people had written to him about. But has this anything to do with us? You are in the Stewardship scheme if you are single, but not if you are married, or vice versa? No, but to be serious, Stewardship is about the pattern of Christian living, the Christian responsibility with which we should treat all our possessions and resources. And nowhere does Paul set out the pattern of Christian living more profoundly than he does here.
If only because Paul has so often been misrepresented notice carefully what he does say, and what he doesn’t say. He does not say—“you mustn’t marry; only celibates can be good Christians.” He assumes that most Christians will marry, and he tells them that their marrying must be complete, including the physical side. There is no hint of an ascetical treatment of sex. He does not say that a Christian must not buy and sell, engage in the world of business and commerce. There is no ascetic renunciation of property; if Paul expects you to buy and sell, he surely does not expect you to do so every time at a loss. He does not say that Christians will neither weep nor rejoice, but live in a super-Stoic apathy. On the contrary, he tells you to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice in a warm-hearted universal sympathy. He does not say that Christians should withdraw from the world. But he does say, and this is what we must try to understand, that a Christian will do all these things (marry, buy, sell, weep, rejoice, live in the world) “as if you were not doing them at all.” He will handle these things, but with so light a touch that he will scarcely be aware of doing so.
Now there is a difficulty in these verses, and it will be both honest and profitable, honesty is always the best policy in dealing with the Bible, to have a good look at it before we go further. Paul says, the time is shortened. Many early Christians, perhaps Paul himself, thought that the world would not last long. Of course the New Testament committed itself to this belief; it is not to be discarded