Prayer

Almighty God, because the house is thine, there is peace in it, and a great light makes it glad with a morn bright as heaven. This is the day the Lord hath made: we will rejoice and be glad in it. We would fain dry our tears today and have nothing but joy dwelling in the heart and singing along all the range of the redeemed life. Thou hast redeemed us with blood, thou hast encountered the adversary in mighty battle, and behold the outshedding of the blood of the heart of Christ was the very victory of the Son of God. We are redeemed not with corruptible things, but with the precious blood of Jesus Christ thy Son. We know not the price thereof: they only who have lived long as thyself can add up the mighty value. To us it is precious, redeeming blood, the blood which cleanseth from all sin, the answer of God to the wickedness of the world.

We have come up to thine house with all musical instruments making glad noises, with shoutings of the heart because of thy goodness, yea our whole life lifts itself up in anthems of joyous praise, because thou hast beset us behind and before and laid thine hand upon us. Thou hast held over us the lamp which thou hast set for thine anointed, and thou hast found for us a rod and a staff. We have come to render our whole life to thee in grateful return: Lord, accept the worthless gift, and make it worthy through him that was slain.

We have come to sign thy book again, to write our names upon the open pages, and publicly, in the light of noontide, to proclaim ourselves sinners saved by grace. We would be living sacrifices unto God, our life would rise up into the heavens daily as an acceptable incense. Lord, what are those impulses and desires of ours, but inspirations of the Holy Ghost? Herein do we feel the might gracious ministry of the Holy Spirit. These impulses are thy creation, these prayers come out of thine own wisdom, and this uplifting of the soul is the marvel of thy power.

Save us from the dust, from the trifles of time, from the vexations of earth, from seeking prizes that have no value, and grasping at that which perishes in the hand. Enable us to covet the true riches; may we be misers in the sanctuary, treasuring up all thou dost give, and loving it, and often counting it, and making ourselves wealthy because of thy daily revelation and grace. Enable us to turn our back upon the yesterdays that were poor and mean, and to set ourselves with glad faces and new desires towards the unborn time; inspired by the Holy Ghost, anointed daily with an unction from heaven, made clean by the blood which alone can cleanse, may the time to come be more profitable than the time that is gone, in all holiness of heart, consecration of spirit, and industry of hands.

We commend one another to thy benediction; great Father, give us a sense of fellowship in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, give us keen and clear insight into the holy mysteries of thy book and into the unwritten law of thy universe. Graciously help us to understand ourselves, our greatness, our littleness, thy purpose concerning us, the subtlety of temptation, the might of the enemy, the inexhaustibility of thy resource, and thus may we walk soberly, wisely, with all watchfulness of mind and heart, so that, come when thou mayest, we may be found ready.

Thou knowest what we are and what we need; what we pine for most and what we love the best. Thou knowest what is right for us, whether it be better to be on the hill-top, amid all the healthy wind, or to be down in the valley, suffering, crushed, hopeless. Where thou wilt, there it is best for us to be, and give us the peace of resignation where we cannot have the joy of triumph.

Regard the old and the young, the withered, and those who are in the vernal freshness of their beauty and youth. The busy man forget not, but remind him of the littleness of time and the greatness of eternity. The sick at heart, the ill at ease, do thou comfort with the hidden balm of heaven, wherewith thou hast comforted the saints of every age and made glad the holy men of every time—it is not exhausted, it is like thyself, without measure, without end. Do thou therefore bring from the hidden sanctuary the solaces so rich and tender, which the heart needs every day, and comfort those who trust in thee with the consolations of God.

Where thou hast smitten with heavy blows, thou wilt recover with great redemption and tenderness; where the darkness has been intolerable, thou wilt set a great wealth of light, and in the shining thereof the darkness shall be forgotten.

We commend to thee this day all who suffer personal loss, family bereavement, or national desolation. Let the mercy and the pity of the God of men and families and nations be not repelled from those who are in great sorrow. Magnify thyself in the darkness, let thy grace be greater than all human want, and may souls buried in the depths of night know how true it is that light is greater than all darkness.

Now that we set ourselves to our worship and to our study of thy book, looking behind we bless thee for all thy care and love and pity and sustenance, and looking before we commit ourselves lovingly, hopefully, to thy wisdom and thy power. Sanctify this reunion, re-establish our confidence in one another, cause our love to burn with a steadier glow, comfort us in all immediate distress or prospective trouble, and when the twilight shall come, and the eventide, and the farewell, may they all come, not in wrath but in mercy. At eventide may there be light, and may the night of earth be the beginning of the day of heaven. Amen.

Matthew 27:1-19

1. When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel (held a council) against Jesus to put him to death:

2. And when they had bound him, they led him away, and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor (the Procurator of Judea).

3. Then Judas, which had betrayed (the Greek participle is in the present tense) him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented (Greek—a simple change of feeling) himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders,

4. Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.

5. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple (the part of it known as "the sanctuary,"—the money was thrown into the Holy Place), and departed, and went and hanged himself.

6. And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury (Corban, or sacred treasure chest), because it is the price of blood.

7. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field (the type of the unseen Gehenna), to bury strangers in.

8. Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day.

9. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value;

10. And gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me.

11. And Jesus stood before the governor: and the governor asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And Jesus said unto him, Thou sayest.

12. And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing.

13. Then said Pilate unto him, Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee?

14. And he answered him to never a word; insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly.

15. Now at that feast the governor was wont to release unto the people (a common incident in a Latin feast in honour of the gods) a prisoner, whom they would.

16. And they had then a notable prisoner, called Barabbas.

17. Therefore when they were gathered together, Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?

18. For he knew that for envy they had delivered him.

19. When he was set down on the judgment seat (the chair of Judgment, which was placed on a mosaic pavement), his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.

Christ Before Pilate

When the morning was come." Was ever morning invited to look upon so ghastly a spectacle? Morn and death! There is a grim irony in this conjunction of terms. God sends a fair day upon the earth, and we befoul the very dew that glistens upon the heavenly gift. We rise from sleep as men skilled in evil, and begin at once, with practised hands, to rub out the commandments written upon the rocks, and to pervert every promise hidden in the sweet flowers. We begin soon: we might have spent some little time in hesitation, but we are apt scholars in the school of evil; we soon cease to be scholars and become teachers. The morning that once had in it some gladness for us, and some hint of veneration and religiousness, and that came to us as a revelation, and a lifting up of the heart, now comes a new chance to serve the devil. What I say unto one, I say unto all, "Watch."

Judas went by night to seek the Lord. It was better. There was a kind of remnant of religion about the traitor when he chose the night for his villainy. He was not quite so bad as he might have been: he waited till torch-time. The chief priests and elders seized the morning—thus the whole day has been stained through and through with wickedness, the morning, the night, the shining of the sun and the trembling of the stars, the whole circle of the day has not had one degree of it left without taint of blasphemy and evil.

There are no particular times for sinning. If you want a chance it will come. Thus a God of pity has to take up every day like a spoiled thing, and baptize it and regenerate it and send it upon the earth as a new morning to us. But he never fails to do this. He giveth more grace, he will not cast us off for ever, he will yet rub out the evil of the day and of the night, and he will save us if he can. If lost, we shall be suicides; there shall be no imprint of the fingers of God upon us as having thrust us out, when we find ourselves in utter darkness. He lives to save!

The chief priests and elders held a council against Jesus to put him to death. They are still holding it: that council never rises.

Until Christ be killed and utterly slain, the chief priests and elders of history will have no peace—no priest can live peacefully on the same earth with Christ; he came to put down the priest, to destroy the elder, to abolish self-conceit, self-centring, self-sufficiency, and to reduce men to such a sense of sin and moral humiliation and personal guilt as would excite the cry in every heart, "God be merciful unto me a sinner." Jesus Christ is still bound, and is being led away to Pontius Pilate every morning, and is being crucified at high noon every day. Every third day, thank God, he stands up again, still there, still ready to teach, and still mighty to save. Disabuse yourselves of the foolish notion that this transaction occurred once for all. Any transaction that can occur once for all is a trifle. These are the solemn realities of history: they are continually repeating, and amidst those solemn realities there is none so stern, so grand, so tender, and so beneficent, as this whole transaction relative to the arrest, the trial, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of him whom we publicly and loyally call Lord.

Our purpose in these studies, however, has been to find out how Christ deported himself under all the circumstances which from time to time gathered around him and constituted the story of the passing day. We have therefore only to do with these facts in their peculiar relation to the central Figure. The one question which we have to ask, and if possible to answer, is—How did Jesus Christ deport himself in these tragical circumstances?

He so acted as to rouse to very madness the conscience of the man who had betrayed him. Judas was appalled by the issue. No man can betray Christ without first betraying himself. Understand that. No man can give Christ away, or sell him, or play foully with any of the great verities of the sanctuary, without having first betrayed and sold and damned himself. These are not the actions of the hand, done for the moment, set down and forgotten as accidents of the transient day; you could never have spoken a word against the sanctuary, its Lord, its light and its revelation, until something had taken place in your own heart amounting to self-betrayal. The villainy is in the heart before it is in the hand. Not only does all history elucidate this, but much of our personal experience and observation goes to confirm it. Who has ever known a man play falsely with the balances of the sanctuary, with the light and spirit and truth of the holy place, who did not at some time—quickly it may be—afterward show that before he did so there had been a tremendous collapse in his own heart? Then he sought for excuses, then he would mortgage the future, then he would so lay his lines that they might be useful to him on the occasion which he too vividly foresaw. And they who look but with the eyes of the body only, and do not read moral mysteries and penetrate into spiritual secrets, are bewildered or misled, or are for the moment shocked into undeserved pity for the man who, having dug the pit, fell into it, instead of being allowed to bring others whose ruin he had contemplated into the tremendous catastrophe.

Judas always reveals himself. He never was so revealed to himself as when Christ acted as he did immediately after the betrayal. If Jesus Christ had taken any other course than the one which he then adopted, he would have justified the spirit and the policy of Judas Iscariot. Search into Christ's method of meeting the circumstances, and you will find here, as everywhere, the ineffable wisdom that is always at peace with itself, so complete in its range, and in its purpose, that it cannot be ruffled, and can never know the torment of vital disquiet. Jesus Christ will utter no words about Iscariot, but he will so conduct himself as to show Iscariot in his true light. This is his method of judgment with us all: he enters into no wordy controversy, he does not bandy terms with us, or set himself into weaving elaborate accusations: he so orders his providence, the whole method of his economy, as to bring out of us the reality of our soul.

Suppose Jesus Christ had betaken himself to personal resentment. Judas would have stood justified before the public, he would have been credited with the insight that this man only needed to be brought into certain circumstances to reveal the evil quality that lurked within him. But there was no anger,—anger, a sputter for a moment, an indignity inflicted upon the man who is himself angry! There was the appalling quietness which makes criminal men afraid. To speak to one who will not answer— why that silence? a fit of madness, a lull before the storm, a secret which tabernacles the very God of heaven himself! Why that persistent speechlessness? The man is thrown upon himself: he has to find the explanation in his own heart, he has to be forced to the conclusion that he has done something for whose accusation and impeachment there is nothing in human language to touch the tremendous matter.

Suppose Jesus Christ had proclaimed himself King of the Jews, in the vulgar sense which the disciples had conceived and acted upon so long—Judas would have stood justified: he would be hailed as the second man in the empire; his the crafty-headed-ness that forced the proclamation—his the high and subtle statesmanship that saw the hour had come for the coronation of the king! But there was no such proclamation: to Pilate's courteous question there was a courteous reply which carried with it a deeper mystery than it answered. What could be thought of a Man who to Pilate's inquiry "Art thou a king?" said to Pilate himself, "Thou sayest." An unexpected echo, a question turned into a confirmation, an enquiry made the starting-point of thought and a new set of actions!

Thus he answers our questions as if we ourselves had answered them, and thus he replies to our prayers as if we ourselves had uttered and answered both.

Suppose Jesus Christ had betaken himself to recantation. Seeing that the chief priests and elders of the people were really in earnest, and that death was meant, suppose that he had hung his head and said, "I have been wrong all this time and presumed upon your ignorance: I have cast myself upon the well-known credulity of the world, I have acted with the highest-handed empiricism ever attempted in all the history of time—now seeing anger in your faces and malice in your eyes, believing that you are about to cut me in twain and to pour out my blood upon the earth, pity me and forgive me." Judas would have stood justified: he was the man who had brought to a proper issue the most monstrous imposture that ever appalled the human imagination!

The man who betrayed Jesus actually gave him the highest compliment ever offered to his sacred name. What said Judas? "Innocent blood." He said it who had spent days and nights in the company of the accused Man; he said it who had heard the very whispers of the heart which he had sold; he said it who had followed him night and day, week and month, year and year, and who knew all there was to be known; and looking upon the whole circle of the wondrous life, among his last words were, "It is innocent blood." Had there been a flaw in that character Judas would have known it: had there been any temporizing or cunning arrangement of policy or expressed purpose in the most concealing whispers, Judas would have been well acquainted with the whole circumstances. If he could have gone back upon the three years' story and what had been done, thai was his time for the relation of scandalous anecdote or suspicious circumstance; standing there—himself to die before the Man he had offered to death—he said, "innocent blood."

So say we all, when we come to our true consciousness; we will not blame God's providence or God's way of conducting and developing life—we will vindicate his course, though in doing so we should write in bolder characters our own condemnation. Let God be just, and every man unjust before him; let God be true, and every man a liar. It may suit us for momentary purposes to seek to cast reflections upon the divine providence, but when we come to see the reality of things we shall say, "Innocent God, innocent blood, innocent sanctuary—the evil is in myself only."

Jesus Christ so acted as to call forth the real quality of the men who hated him. Outwardly he left them to themselves, but inwardly he plagued their hearts as with stings and torments of hell. He would give them no hold upon him: he gathered himself so intensely into himself that they could nowhere grasp the victim they would kill. This silence was meant as a judgment. This was a controversy not to be settled by the noise of anger or the sharpness of intellectual defence: it went down to the very heart of things, and carried before it the destiny of the whole world. He showed that the men who undertook to slay him knew exactly what they were doing; he made them say it in plain words, and those plain words are, "It is the price of blood."

He forces us into speech: he who can be so silent can make us so talkative! Men must be driven to say in plain words what they have been doing: there must be no making of haste over the matter, but a deliberation which brings out every accent and gives it ample scope to ring itself into the hearing of the soul and of the world, every man must state his own case and make plain his own sin.

They would call the field "a place to bury strangers in," but the common people would not be misled by any such euphemism—hence it was called "the field of blood." Trust the instincts of a great people for knowing how to name things rightly. The priests and the elders label them with fine terms, cunning men seek for classical terms in which to hide the iniquity of their lives, but there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding, and though the priests and elders might morning after morning call it "a place to bury strangers in," an act of beneficence, the great heart of the nation said, "Aceldama, blood-bought, blood-soaked, the field of blood!"

Until we name things properly, we cannot deal reformatively with them in any deep sense. Do not seek a great word to describe your course in life, use the little word—SIN. Let no man delude you by using long terms, empty polysyllables, in the sounding of which you lose the consciousness of your guilt, but say with plainness that cannot be misunderstood, "God be merciful unto me a sinner."

The men who were in charge of this base business paid no heed to the pain and sorrow of Judas. When he made his confession they said, "What is that to us? See thou to that." The bad man can co-operate only up to a given point: his policy always breaks itself up. What, would you trust a bad man? He will watch you, balance you, value you, drain you dry, study your character—and when he has brought you either to the extreme of remorse or to the humiliation of destitution, he will say to you, "See thou to that." There is no duration in evil, there is no health in Wickedness, there is no honour in the bad heart. Will you trust men who tell lies to you, will you trust men who can sell innocent blood? They will leave you to yourselves one day. "My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not; if they say, Let us lurk privily for blood, let us have one purse, let us enter into a compact—O my son, consent thou not; they will rob thee, ruin thee, mock thee, disown thee, and send thee out to a felon's rope.

Jesus Christ developed the wickedness of the world. As the light shows all things, so the life of Christ showed human nature exactly as it was. But for this life of Christ we never should have known what human nature is, in reality. We should have seen it in parts and sections and aspects, but its inner self, its essential quality, we never could have known.

Jesus Christ allowed these men to lie to the top of their bent. Pilate himself listening, wonder-struck, said, "How many things they witness against thee!" They who did not know him, they who read only the outside, they who were eavesdroppers and not allowed to go into the inner sanctuary, they who were fertile in falsehood—how many things they witnessed against him! But the man who had come from the inside, with the odour of sanctity not quite exhausted, said, "Innocent blood." They dropped the word "innocent," and kept the word "blood." Jesus Christ allowed them to go to the full length of their tether, to show how base was their criminality, how mean their purpose, and how little they deserved the titles they wore.

So he does with us. He strips every man of unworthy garments, and forces every man to a confession and a revelation of his real quality. He is set for the fall and the rising of many. Judging ourselves by ourselves, we pronounce upon ourselves condemnation, and confer upon ourselves dying honours, but standing in the sanctuary, weighed in the balances divine, coming near to the Son of God, we can only say, if we speak the true word, "I abhor myself in dust and ashes."

What mystery and embarrassment Christ created in those circumstances! Pilate did not know what to make of him. No such case had ever come before him. What he heard by the ear was contradicted by what he heard in the spirit. He listened to witnesses against the Man, and all the while there was a spirit talking to his heart saying, "They are liars, do not heed them." They made out a fine case, and a Spirit said to his heart, "This is envy." "Pilate knew that for envy they had delivered him." And envy is a thing that cannot be legislated about. No man knows where it begins, where it operates, where it ends. It taints the speech, it perverts the spirit, it gives a twist to the look, it writes its base signature upon every feature of the countenance. There is no law for it, there is no whip made for the scourging of the envious man: he must be left to those subtle ministries of Providence which bring the jealous to the ground and torment the envious with intolerable pain.

Pilate's wife had a dream by day. If the chief priests and elders were busy in the morning, so the great God, watching over all, sent a day-dream upon a good woman. We lock up our dreams and make them night-visitants. God sends them at noon, closes the eye and makes an angel talk to us, shuts out the vulgar, visible world, and makes to pass before the mystical eyes of the soul a panorama of his purpose and meaning, and we come out of that trance with a new world swinging before our bewildered gaze. A dream is a lens through which we see into the bigger spaces and the ampler worlds. God speaks in visions of the night, in sudden appearances and disappearances, in marvellous contortions of circumstances which we had pronounced ordinary and regular.

Do not try to make your world less, try to make it bigger. There be those, indeed, victims of superstition, who have multiplied dreams of their own making, and brought the dream-part of our life into contempt; but God has used the dream, through every age of human history, and the vision of the night, singular circumstances, and flapping of wings in the air without any visible figure—and out of these have come strange issues and often beneficent endings. I will not therefore throw away any opportunity which history has given me of enlarging my outlook, and feeling that the world is bigger than that blue line that lies on the hills yonder, and which men call the horizon.

Mysterious Christ—saying nothing, yet speaking all the time: looking other people into speech, and maddening them by an unaccountable dumbness, making them play the fool because he will be no party to their base transactions. Rather be at peace than at war with such a man! Acquaint now thyself with him and be at peace, or he will bruise thee! No man can get the belter in battle of this Christ. He goes down that he may come up again with a fuller power. They who come out against him in battle are left dead upon the field of their choice. If this stone shall fall upon any man it will grind him to powder—if we fall upon it, in penitence and contrition and religious hopefulness, we shall be broken, but it will be the breaking which is the beginning and the seal of true and eternal healing. To this Christ I call all men. Why lift the little fist against him to have it bruised? Many there be who have struck at Christ, but he has wounded them to their destruction. Let us go to him, pray to him, confess everything to him, and there is room in that great heart of his for every one of us!