Redeeming Love

Unto him that loveth us and loosed us from our sins by his blood; and he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father; to him be the glory and the dominion for ever and ever. Amen.—Revelation 1:5-6.

John is writing to the seven churches of Asia, representative of all churches in all time. He salutes them in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit, though employing unusual phraseology, coined in his own mint and very precious. While setting forth the work and glory of Christ as “the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth,” he can contain himself no longer. He cannot deliver his message till he has relieved his heart, and he pours forth, as from a fountain of thanksgiving aspiring heavenward, the anthem of the Church of the redeemed below—“Unto him that loveth us!”

An utterance like this gathers up so many experiences in itself; it implies so much, reminds us of so much, suggests so much. In the story of the Roman Empire we read of the banquet in which, because the rarest wines were not costly enough, the guests drank from goblets in which priceless pearls had been dissolved. But how richly filled is the chalice containing the thanksgivings of saints, forgiven, cleansed, and fitted for lofty service; and who can estimate the significance of the praises they offer to their Saviour for His redeeming grace? And best of all, such a text, while reminding us of our sins and our redemption, our trials and deliverances, our evil and its mastery, our low estate and the rank to which Christ has raised us, leads entirely away from self and fastens all our attention on another Figure—to Him be glory for ever!

Like Christian who, encountering the perils of the Valley, found there also the delivering power of the Lord of the Hill, the soul redeemed and restored cannot but sing,—

O world of wonders! (I can say no less)

That I should be preserv’d in that distress

That I have met with here! O blessed be

The Hand that from it hath delivered me!

Dangers in darkness, devils, hell, and sin

Did compass me, while I this vale was in:

Yea, snares, and pits, and traps, and nets did lie

My path about, that worthless silly I

Might have been catch’d, entangled, and cast down.

But since I live, let Jesus wear the Crown.

The text is an ascription of praise unto Him whose love is—

  I.  An Unceasing Love—“who loveth us.”

  II.  An Emancipating Love—“who loosed us from our sins.”

  III.  An Enfranchising Love—“who made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father.”

I

The Love that is Ever with Us

“Unto him that loveth us.”

So the true text reads. Some copyist, who was thinking more of grammar than of Christian experience, thought it must be a mistake, and altered it to “loved.” Or perhaps St. John himself first wrote “loved” and then bethought him: “Why should I say ‘loved’ when He loves us still?” At any rate, this is the conviction of the Early Church: the Jesus whom they had known not only loved them while He was their Companion on the earth, but loves them still, shares therefore in that further quality of the Godhead of which St. John writes elsewhere: “God is Love,” and gives to that quality just what each man requires to find in it—personal direction towards himself. Thus Jesus is the link between the universal God and the individual soul. What without Him would be incredible, not only becomes credible, but is actually realized through Him. God loves me: I know it by referring myself to the historical Jesus: and when that is so, He has for me the value of God.

1. Love begins with God.—That is where our hopes are born. That is the background in which we find the warrant for all our confidence and all our faith. God loves us. All effective reasoning concerning human redemption must begin here. God loves! The beginning is not to be found in us, in our inclinations and gropings and resolvings and prayers. These are essential but secondary. The primary element is the inclination of God. Omnia exeunt in mysterium, says Sir Thomas Browne; all things issue in mystery. But also all things issue from mystery; by which we mean not the incomprehensible, but the all-comprehending; not the unintelligible, but the self-sufficing and self-explaining; not the blackness of darkness, but the blaze of truth with excess of light.

We cannot get behind Divine love as a cause. In Deuteronomy (Revelation 6:7) Israel is told that Jehovah loved His people—because He loved them. The Christian hymn says the same thing. “He hath loved, He hath loved us, we cannot tell why; He hath loved, He hath loved us because He would love.” The Jews were chosen, not because of their numbers, not because of their warlike virtues, not because of their “religious instincts” or amenability to religious teaching, but because God loved them. A Syrian ready to perish was their father, but God made of them a nation to whom all the world has been, and still is, indebted. That does not mean that Divine love is irrational, arbitrary, capricious; but it does mean that for personal beings love is a primary fact, a source, a fountain, an ultimate explanation, beyond which it is well not to strive to pass—especially the unworthy, the wayward, and the evil; all they can do is to sing—

Who for me vouchsafed to die,

Loves me still—I know not why!

The fire which warms the hearthstone is not original; it is derivative, and refers us back to the sun. The candle with which we search for the lost piece of silver is not original and originating; it is borrowed flame from the great altar-fires of the sun. Earth’s broken lights, a candle here, a lamp there, a fire yonder, all index backwards, and point us to the great originating centre of solar light and heat. The lamps and candles and fires that burn in human life, everything that is bright and genial and aspiring, have reference backward to some creative and beneficent source. “We love, because he first loveth us.” “He first loveth!” That is the primary quantity, and every kindly feeling that warms the heart, every pure hope that illumines the mind, were begotten of that most gracious source.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, 237.]

2. This love never leaves us.—The past tense expresses a blessed truth, but “loveth” includes all—past, present, and future; it is a timeless word, bringing with it fresh breezes from across the ocean of eternity. It is not a single act that is here indicated, but a state abiding. For this “loveth” is the timeless present of that Divine nature, of which we cannot properly say either that it was or that it will be, but only that it for ever is; and the outgoings of His love are like the outgoings of that Divine energy of which we cannot properly say that it did or that it will do, but only that it ever does. His love, if one may use such a phrase, is lifted above all tenses, and transcends even the bounds of grammar. He did love. He does love. He will love. All three forms of speech must be combined in setting forth the ever present, because timeless and eternal, love of the Incarnate Word.

The great poems of the world have been love-poems; they have been poems of love betrayed, or unrequited, or they have been thunders wailed out over a dead and buried love. But the greatest love-story of all is of One who loves for ever because He lives for ever. The Lord Jesus Christ has awakened a passionate love in unnumbered hearts, but among them all not one sweet, dead, disappointed face—like Elaine’s confronting Lancelot at the river-gate of Arthur’s palace—upturned in mute appeal, has ever reproached the Crucified for having offered to Him in vain an unmeasured affection. The love of the living has been offered to the living, and only a living Lord could have awakened and satisfied a love which has been poured out at His feet like spikenard. It is this consciousness of being loved that gives ever deeper meaning and ever gathering volume to the great doxology, “Unto him be the dominion for ever.”

When Sir James Mackintosh lay dying, his friends by the bedside saw his lips slightly moving, and as one of them desired to catch, if possible, the last words of the great and good man, he leaned over, and applying the ear close, heard him saying, “Jesus, love, the same thing; Jesus, love, the same thing.”2 [Note: A. H. Drysdale, A Moderator’s Year, 99.]

There is a highroad which I knew full well away in the distant North, and a gladsome, shining river keeps it company. Their tracks remain in closest fellowship. They turn and wind together, and at any moment you may step from the dusty highway and drink deep draughts from the limpid stream. “There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God.” Here is the hard, dusty highway of the individual life, and near it there flows the gladdening river of the Eternal Love. It turns with our turnings, and winds through all the perplexing labyrinths of our intensely varied day. We may ignore the river; we cannot ignore it away. Thrice blessed are they who heed and use it. “They drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.” The inspiring resources are always just at hand. The river of love runs just by the hard road. It never parts company with the highway.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, 239.]

3. We can set no limit to the extent of this love.—“Unto him that loveth us.” The words become especially beautiful if we remember that they come from the lips of him whose distinction it was that he was “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” It is as if he had said, “I share my privilege with you all. I was no nearer Him than you may be. Every head may rest on the breast where mine rested. Having the sweet remembrance of that early love, these things write I unto you that ye also may have fellowship with me in that which was my great distinction. I, the disciple whom Jesus loved, speak to you as the disciples whom Jesus loves.” He is speaking of One who had been dead for half a century, and he is speaking to people none of whom had probably ever seen Jesus in His lifetime, and most of whom had not been born when He died. Yet to them all he turns with that profound and mighty present tense, and says, “He loveth us.” He was speaking to all generations, and telling all the tribes of men of a love which is in active operation towards each of them, not only at the moment when St. John spoke to Asiatic Greeks, but at the moment when we Englishmen read his words, “Christ that loveth us.”

When we extend our thoughts or our sympathies to a crowd, we lose the individual. We generalize, as logicians say, by neglecting the particular instances. That is to say, when we look at the forest we do not see the trees. But Jesus Christ sees each tree, each stem, each branch, each leaf, just as when the crowd thronged Him and pressed Him, He knew when the tremulous finger, wasted and shrunken to skin and bone, was timidly laid on the hem of His garment; as there was room for all the five thousand on the grass, and no man’s plenty was secured at the expense of another man’s penury, so each of us has a place in that heart; and my abundance will not starve you, or your feeding full diminish the supplies for me. Christ loves all, not with the vague general philanthropy with which men love the mass, but with the individualizing knowledge and special direction of affection towards the individual which demands for its fulness a Divine nature to exercise it. And so each of us may have our own rainbow, to each of us the sunbeam may come straight from the sun and strike upon our eye in a direct line, to each of us the whole warmth of the orb may be conveyed, and each of us may say, “He loved me, and gave himself for me.”

Let us now turn aside and look upon this great sight, of Love that burneth with fire, yet is not consumed; of Love that having poured out its soul unto death, yet liveth, to see of that soul’s long travail and to be satisfied with it. “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.” When were Love’s arms stretched so wide as upon the Cross? When did they embrace so much as when Thou, O Christ, didst gather within Thy bosom the spears and arrows of the mighty to open us a Lane for Freedom!1 [Note: Dora Greenwell, The Patience of Hope (ed. 1894), 130.]

“He loveth us.” That covers past, present, and future. The love of our Redeemer stretches from eternity to eternity. It had no beginning, and will have no ending. It is unchanged, unmodified, untouched, either by lapse of time or variation of circumstance. Utterly inexhaustible, it flows incessantly in undiminished and undiminishable tide into the lives towards which it is directed.

Immortal Love, for ever full,

For ever flowing free,

For ever shared, for ever whole,

A never ebbing sea.2 [Note: Hector Mackiunon: A Memoir, by his Wife (1914), 181.]

II

The Love that has Made Us Free

“And loosed us from our sins by his blood.”

This work is described by two different words in A.V. and R.V.—“washed” and “loosed.” These are two figures for one fact. There is but the difference of a single letter in the Greek, and not a letter of difference in the reality, though the point of view differs. The one word regards sin as defilement, the other as bondage. The one thanksgiving rejoices in our being purified, the other in our being freed. The same Divine act accomplishes both ends; and at one time we may rejoice in the thought that the old foul self may be made clean, at another in the delightful consciousness that our chains are snapped, the dungeon walls broken down, and the slave is emancipated for ever.

1. The notion of bondage underlies the metaphor of loosing a fetter. If we would be honest with ourselves, in our account of our own inward experiences, that bondage we all know. There is the bondage of sin as guilt, the sense of responsibility, the feeling that we have to answer for what we have done, and to answer not only here but also hereafter, when we appear before the judgment-seat of Christ. Guilt is a chain. And there is the bondage of habit, which ties and holds us with the cords of our sins, so that, slight as the fetter may seem at first, it has an awful power of thickening and becoming heavier and more pressing, till at last it holds a man in a grip from which he cannot get away.

Sin finds men out in the form of Temptation. Temptation is the result of constantly yielding. A constant doing passing into a habit—it really comes to be a predisposition to do what we have done before over again, and this is temptation. We have built up the muscle-fibre of temptation by constantly using it. Some day Tennyson’s lines will be true, that our character is a part of all we have met. Look at the brain. It is made up, as you know, of countless cells and processes. If an intellectual process runs through our brain once, it leaves comparatively no effect. But say it over a hundred times, and a footpath is worn through the brain; the hundred and first time will be easy. Say it a thousand times, and lo! through all the cellular structure of the brain there is for ever laid a thoroughfare upon this one intellectual idea, and temptations and sins march to and fro in endless procession along the beaten track. Men do not commit two different kinds of sin. You have your own favourite sin, and I have mine, and as it grows the trick is intensified, the path more beaten still, and the end is Death. One thing kills a man, and if you are guilty of one sin, your doom is sealed. Therefore guard against making a thoroughfare. Decide once for all to close the thoroughfare by gates which shall last for ever. Let that evil thought never pass that way again.1 [Note: The Life of Henry Drummond, 478.]

2. But we have an Emancipator. “He loosed us from our sins.” This proclaims not a mere cleansing, but a liberation; not the remission of penalty only, but the removal also of moral bondage. Sin’s bondage is one of the strongest forces in life; for sin, like a tyrant, subjugates memory, deteriorates moral strength, and increasingly destroys a man’s power of resistance and action. And to such as are fast bound in its remorseless grip, this Evangel proclaims “liberty to the captives,” such liberty indeed as befits and enables men to serve God “in holiness and righteousness.”

I think I have never coveted happiness, but freedom of spirit I have earnestly desired, freedom from that burden which crushes joy and sorrow both—the mere dead weight of care and of remorse. And I believe God, who gave me this desire, has in some measure fulfilled it, and will fulfil it more in spite of my rebellion. The spirit of freedom, of peace, of a sound mind, is, I am sure, given to us. We are only to remember its presence and to walk in it.

The Spirit does make intercessions within us, with groanings that cannot be uttered, and if the sense of personal sins presses them out, they do extend, I trust, to the whole universe; they are groans for its redemption and not for ours only. The word redemption, all the past which it implies, all the future which it points to, has for me a wonderful charm. I cannot separate the idea of deliverance from the idea of God, or ever think of man as blessed except as he enters into God’s redeeming purpose, and labours to make others free.

The bondage of circumstances, of the world, but chiefly of self, has at times seemed to me quite intolerable; the more because it takes away all one’s energy to throw it off, and then the difficulty of escaping to God! of asking to have the weight taken away! Oh there is infinite comfort in the thought that He hears all our cries for rescue, and is Himself the Author and Finisher of it.1 [Note: Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i. 520.]

3. “He loosed us from our sins by his blood.” Christ is the Emancipator, and the instrument by which He makes us free is His blood. The teaching of Scripture is that the death of Christ was necessary for the remission of man’s sin. The explanation of that necessity may be beyond us; a full explanation is certainly beyond our powers at present. But not only is the fact made clear in Scripture, the reasons are not obscurely shadowed forth. And we are taught that without such death God could not Himself righteously forgive sin, and that its bands could not be loosed, because the chief bondage which holds an unforgiven sinner under the wrath of a holy God cannot be relaxed by mere fiat, by the single word, Go free! It is not that the Father is angry and the Son steps in to save us from His wrath, as if there could be schism in the Godhead. It is, God so loved the world that He gave His Son to save it, and Christ so loved the world that He loosed the bands of its sins by His blood. As without shedding of blood there was no remission under the Jewish law, so without the death of the cross there is no redemption for a sinful world. A Saviour who stopped short of death would have lacked the power to loose man from sin, in relation either to God or to the powers of evil or to his own moral and spiritual constitution.

Any simple statement of the Gospel had a great attraction for him, and the simpler it was he enjoyed it the more, if it was not controversial but the genuine utterance of the heart. The account of redemption from the lips of an African woman, a slave, impressed him deeply; he liked to repeat it in conversation, and on one occasion at a meeting for prayer, he stood up and said without further remark of his own: “I have never heard the gospel better stated than it was put by a poor negress: ‘Me die, or He die; He die, me no die.’ ”2 [Note: A. Moody Stuart, Recollections of the late John Duncan, 193.]

Some of the great artists of the Crucifixion have painted the cross as reaching into the skies, exercising a cosmic influence for the world upon which its foot rests, whilst its top touches and moves the very heavens. There is such a painting by Luino at Lugano, and another by Guido Reni at Rome. The head of the suffering Christ in the latter is often reproduced, but the whole of the picture should be seen to understand the artist’s thought. And so the power of the Cross touches the burden of sin which we sinners carry on our shoulders at a thousand points, loosening it at every one and so causing it to fall away from our shoulders in the way Bunyan describes. Freed from condemnation in the sight of God, we are freed altogether: it is God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth? We are freed from the bondage of law, from the thraldom of the devil, from the power of evil habit, from the fear of death and that which follows after death.

Neither passion nor pride

Thy cross can abide,

But melt in the fountain that streams from Thy side.1 [Note: W. T. Davison, Strength for the Way, 29.]

III

The Love that has Given Us Citizenship

“And he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father.”

1. Here the Revisers adopted, not the reading that would give the smoothest and simplest English, but the reading that had the highest support in the Greek text. And so they substituted “a kingdom” for “kings.” This substitution places the promises of the new dispensation in direct connexion with the facts of the old. The language of St. Peter and St. John was no novel coinage. It was merely an adaptation to the Israel after the spirit of the titles and distinctions accorded of old to the “Israel after the flesh.” There was a holy nation, a peculiar people, a regal priesthood, before Christianity. It was only enlarged, developed, spiritualized, under the gospel. The foundation passage in the Old Testament on which the language of both Christian Apostles alike was moulded is the promise made to the Israelites through Moses on Sinai, “If ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people … ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” Thus the mention of the kingdom links Sinai with Zion—the old with the new.

If we lose the idea of the kingdom we lose with it the most valuable lesson of the passage. A kingdom denotes an organized, united whole. It implies consolidation and harmony. It is not enough that we should realize the individual Christian as a king; we must think of him as a member of a kingdom. The kings of this world are constantly at war one with another. Self-aggrandizement and self-assertion seem natural to their position. Solitariness, isolation, independence—these are ideas inseparable from the kingly throne. But this is not the conception of the true disciple of Christ. He is before all things a member of a body. In the Kingdom of Christ indeed all the citizens are kings, because all are associated in the kingliness of Christ. But they are citizens still. They have the duties, the responsibilities, the manifold and complex relationships of citizens. This Kingdom of God, this Church of Christ, exists for a definite end. Its citizen-kings have each their proper functions, perform each their several tasks, contribute each their special gifts to the fulfilment of this purpose.

The Kingdom of God cometh to a man when he sets up Jesus’ Cross in his heart, and begins to live what Mr. Laurence Oliphant used to call “the life.” It passes on its way when that man rises from table and girds himself and serves the person next him. Yesterday the kingdom was one man, now it is a group. From the one who washes to the one whose feet are washed the kingdom grows and multiplies. It stands around us on every side,—not in Pharisees nor in fanatics, not in noise nor tumult, but in modest and Christ-like men. One can see it in their faces, and catch it in the tone of their voices. And if one has eyes to see and ears to hear, then let him be of good cheer, for the Kingdom of God is come. It is the world-wide state, whose law is the Divine will, whose members obey the spirit of Jesus, whose strength is goodness, whose heritage is God.1 [Note: John Watson, The Mind of the Master.]

2. We were made not only a “kingdom,” but also “priests.” The two ideas are not carelessly united. Indeed they cannot be separated. The uniting bond is the words, “unto God.” One may be a king without being a priest, but not a king unto God. Human life is a Divine thing. It has no coherence, no meaning, no use or end except as it is brought under the laws of God. A man does not find himself, he does not get upon the track of true living, until along with self-culture he combines the rule and habit of service—making the most of others as well as the most of himself.

(1) The priest has direct access to God.—All of us, each of us, may pass into the secret place of the Most High, and stand there with happy hearts, unabashed and unafraid, beneath the very blaze of the light of the Shekinah. And we can do so because Jesus Christ has come to us with these words upon His lips: “I am the way; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” The path into that Divine Presence is blocked for every sinful soul by an immense black rock, its own transgressions; but He has blasted away the rock, and the path is patent for all our feet. By His death we have the way made open into the holiest of all. And so we can come, come with lowly hearts, come with childlike confidence, come with the whole burden of our weaknesses and wants and woes, and can spread them all before Him, and nestle to the great heart of God the Father Himself. We are priests to God, and our prerogative is to pass within the veil by the new and living Way which Christ is for us.

There were many Old Testament customs that were the chrysalis of some beautiful winged truth, to be set free at the touch of Christ. The shell had to be shattered, that such spiritual treasure as Judaism held might become available for the world. That was what Christ meant when He said He came not to destroy, but to fulfil. Priesthood was abolished in the narrow exclusive sense by making all believers priests.1 [Note: F. C. Hoggarth.]

(2) The priest is appointed to offer sacrifice.—In one sense the sacrifice is offered already; our High Priest offered Himself once for all upon the altar of the cross, and in that sacrifice none other may share. Yet as our deepest sufferings in His cause “fill up that which is lacking of his afflictions,” so our sacrifices are participations, such as men may make, by union with Him, in the one great act of obedience whereby He reconciled us to His Father. We “offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” Even in the Old Testament there is the suggestion that God had some pleasure in the smell of the sacrifice. Gradually, through the influence of the prophet in Israel, there grew up a spiritual conception of sacrifice. Micah’s protest (chap. 6) and the Psalmist’s confession (Psalms 51) represent the final teaching of the Old Testament on the matter. This spiritual idea of sacrifice runs throughout the New Testament; e.g., “I beseech you therefore, brethren … to present your bodies a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1). We ought then to offer our conduct as a holy sacrifice to Him. There is also in the New Testament the idea that the new altar, as Hatch says, is that of human need. We give to God in giving to our brother-man. All service that alleviates human suffering, emancipates the enslaved, saves the children, is a sacrifice. “To do good and to communicate forget not: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.”

Love has only one measure—its willingness to sacrifice itself. Love’s general law is to seek to do good to others, by service, toil, suffering, both passively and actively. What does a mother endure for her child? Sleepless nights, without food, as she soothes the suffering of her little one and wins back life and health to the child by the offering and sacrifice of her own health and life. What of Father Damien, and others like him, who became lepers to save lepers? Sister Kate Marsden, too? They give themselves to remove the curse of leprosy, or at least to remove the darker curse of leprosy. It is love undertaking on another’s behalf, by means of sacrifice, to win for them some good. There is nothing great and noble and praiseworthy in the world, but this principle of love is at the root of it.1 [Note: John Brown Paton, by his Son (1914), 372.]

(3) The priest is a mediator representing God before men, and representing men before God. As our Lord Jesus Christ represents God to men, and we, being one with Him, also stand as being, in a secondary sense, God’s representatives, so He is perfect man, and in Him the whole of our race is summed up, and we, after a partial manner, may also appear in God’s sight on behalf of our fellow-men. They do not need to approach God through us, yet we can voice their wants even when they themselves do not know them. We cannot bear the burden of a world’s sin, under which our Saviour bowed, but we can by our prayer and intercession—and that, rightly understood, is no light burden—make the silence of our fellows articulate at the throne of grace.

Man is sometimes spoken of as a priest in relation to nature; as George Herbert puts it—

Man is the world’s high-priest: he doth present

The sacrifice for all; while they below

Unto the service mutter an assent,

Such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow.

But this is a poet’s graceful fancy. The truth of the text lies in the relation of the Christian to God and his fellow-men. There is no human priest in Christianity to come between God and any single human heart; the only Mediator is He who is Son of God and Son of Man, a High Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. Yet every Christian is to be a priest unto God, as himself offering spiritual sacrifices and helping to interpret God-in-Christ to man and to bring men to the God and Father whom he has learned to love and serve.1 [Note: W. T. Davison, Strength for the Way, 33.]

The whole function of Priesthood was, on Christmas morning, at once and for ever gathered into His Person who was born at Bethlehem; and thenceforward, all who are united with Him, and who with Him make sacrifice of themselves; that is to say, all members of the Invisible Church become, at the instant of their conversion, Priests; and are so called in 1 Peter 2:5 and Revelation 1:6; Revelation 20:6, where, observe, there is no possibility of limiting the expression to the Clergy; the conditions of Priesthood being simply having been loved by Christ, and washed in His blood.2 [Note: Ruskin, The Construction of Sheepfolds, § 15 (Works, xii. 537).]

Priests, priests,—there’s no such name!—God’s own, except

Ye take most vainly. Through heaven’s lifted gate

The priestly ephod in sole glory swept,

When Christ ascended, entered in, and sate

(With victor face sublimely overwept)

At Deity’s right hand, to mediate

He alone, He for ever. On His breast

The Urim and the Thummim, fed with fire

From the full Godhead, flicker with the unrest

Of human, pitiful heartbeats. Come up higher,

All Christians! Levi’s tribe is dispossest.3 [Note: E. B. Browning, Casa Guida Windows.]

Redeeming Love

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