SERMON I.

ELEMENTS OF A RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT.

(FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT.)

ST. MATT. xxi. 10.

And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this?

Tis natural to ask why the account of Christ's entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday should be read as the Gospel for Advent Sunday. At first sight it looks like a misapplication of the Evangelical history. In Advent we are thinking of the two extreme points, if we may so term them, of our Lord's relationship to us; of His coming to take our nature upon Him eighteen centuries and a half ago, and of His coming to judge us hereafter. But lo! we suddenly find ourselves in the very midst of His earthly Life-at its very crisis. He has just wrought His greatest recorded miracle, and He is consciously on His way to die. What is the connection, we ask, between this entry into Jerusalem and either of Christ's Advents-whether His past coming to take our nature upon Him of His Virgin Mother, or His still future Advent in the clouds of heaven as Judge of the quick and dead? Is the connection more than a fanciful one, and might it not have been better, as is the case with other Churches of Christendom,1 to have chosen the Gospel for to-day from some passage in which our Lord describes His second coming, as He does in the Gospel for next Sunday?

This is, perhaps, what we think. But these old Liturgical arrangements were originally made by people who knew very

In the Roman Missal the Gospel for the First Sunday in Advent is St. Luke xxi. 25-33, which is used in the English Prayer-book on the following Sunday. The Prayer-book follows the Sarum Missal.

ADV. SERMS.]

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well what they were about; they have been continued to our day, because they have been found, by the experience of some thirteen or fourteen centuries, to have a deep lesson for the human soul. They are not often interfered with now without loss. It may be questioned whether we are the men to improve upon the works of the great masters of the Christian life; nor do we make the attempt, even on a small scale, in our new lectionaries and revised Prayer-books, without bungling into crude mistakes, which another age will criticize sharply and justly, in the light of an older and deeper mastery of spiritual things. This Gospel has been chosen for to-day because Advent-time brings before us two truths, not one. If we were only thinking of the first coming of the Divine Saviour into the world, or only of His coming to judgment, passages of Scripture describing either of those momentous events would have been obviously appropriate. But, to do justice to the solemn time on which we enter to-day, we want to keep the two truths clearly before the eye of the soul. And, therefore, here we have a history in which they meet; a repetition, as it were, of our Lord's first coming to His own, when His own received Him not; an anticipation of His coming to judgment, "when every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him."2

3

For His entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was certainly an act of grace. It was a last opportunity of embracing the Gospel, of learning Who and what He was, and what He had to teach, and what He, and He alone, could do for those who would listen to Him to any real purpose. The offer which He made to His countrymen at large, by being born of a Jewish mother and under the Law; the offer which He made and makes to all mankind, by taking our nature upon Him and coming among us as one of ourselves ;-this offer He repeats on a smaller scale, but, if we may so put it, in an intenser way, by this entry into Jerusalem. His entry was indeed a day of grace to the otherwise doomed city; a last but supreme opportunity, on which previous errors, perversenesses, cruelties, might be redressed by a free acceptance and pardon. It was to Jerusalem what the dawn of the Nativity was to mankind at large; it was a day of grace, in which God's Blessed Son showed the light of His countenance, and was merciful to the people of His ancient choice. If it was a day of grace, it was also a day of judgment. Judgment means originally, in the 1 St. John i. II. 2 Rev. i. 7. 3 Gal. iv. 4. + Phil. ii. 7.

sacred language, separation; separation is the first step in judgment. It is so in the things of this world. To decide on relative degrees of merit is, from the necessity of the case, to separate this man from that, this class from that. To criticize in art or in literature is to say that this or that statue, or painting, or book belongs to this or that degree of excellence or of demerit. To award prizes in a school is to separate between those who gain and those who lose them. To deliver a verdict in a court of justice is to distinguish between innocence and guilt. Separation is the very first step in any process of judgment; and separation was the order of the day when our Lord entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He seemed to be, or to be about to be, on His trial; but in reality He was Judge, and His seeming judges were in the dock before His tribunal. They it was who were, of their own free will and motion, separating themselves at His approach into opposite classes; taking their sides almost involuntarily, and so writing themselves down in the Eternal Book as His enemies or His worshippers. It was, in very truth, a day of judgment; only the Judge was not in His robes, and the parties before Him had for the minute scrambled on to the material seat of judgment, and were apparently "they that ought to speak."1 The point, however, upon which St. Matthew insists, is that when Christ entered Jerusalem "all" the city was moved. He says "all the city." It can have been no ordinary occasion which produced this effect. It is comparatively easy to interest a single class, a profession, a coterie of thinkers, a political party. Local interests will move those who live in particular districts; mercantile interests those who are engaged in particular lines of business; literary interests those who are devoted to special departments of study; political interests those who are engaged in public life, or have devoted time and thought to the mastery of public questions. But what is the sort of interest that can move all ages, all classes, all characters, in a great and varied community? Certainly we may witness something of the kind when a great sorrow, such as the death of a popular prince or minister, or a great loss, such as defeat in war, or a deadly pestilence, or a famine, or revolutionary violence, or a vast conflagration, falls upon a country or a capital. But, even in these rare cases, the interest is distributed unequally; the loss, or sense of loss, falls with a very varying weight of incidence on different classes: there are always some who have

1 Ps. xii. 4.

not much to lose, or who do not feel much, and who are at least tranquil amid the prevailing agitation. That which moves a whole community to its depths, is that which touches man as man; not man as a capitalist, not man as a citizen or a subject, not man as belonging to this class or to that, but man as a being who has a consciousness of his mighty destiny; who knows that he is here for a few years and upon trial; who feels the solemnity, the pressure, of life in his soul and conscience; who has a perpetual presentiment of coming death and of the world beyond it.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem all were moved, because Jesus, by His very Presence and bearing, spoke to the souls of all. The power of His Presence was felt in very different ways, but universally. But the movement which it occasioned was very far indeed from being always a movement in the right direction. Truth is too strong to be without effect. But it repels when it does not attract: it exacts either the homage of love or at least as a rule-the homage of animosity. The remarkable thing in Jerusalem was that, according to St. Matthew, there was no class of persons who were or professed to be indifferent. We know how large a body of persons in different classes of society make this profession in London. They profess really not to care about religion; they stand outside it with folded arms, or they occupy themselves with other matters, letting those who have a religious taste follow it as they please. Whether at bottom they are really indifferent whether such a thing as bonâ fide indifference towards religion is possible-may very well be questioned. It is, of course, possible to be unconcerned in a subject the claims of which have never really been brought before you; but when this has been done, the profession of indifference is generally the veil of a scarcely disguised opposition. Jerusalem, at any rate, was small enough in point of population for every one to know something about the significance of Christ's entry, and we may without difficulty catalogue the elements of which the movement which it created was made up.

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I.

First of all, we may take it for granted that a main element in the general excitement would have been curiosity. Crowds of Galilæan pilgrims to the great festival were arriving in their caravans, day by day, with reports of the beneficent miracles

of Jesus, of the startling nature of His teaching, of the vast influence which He had exerted among the simple, straightforward people of the northern province. "Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee was already a name known more or less to every inhabitant of Palestine who took any interest whatever in questions of the day; and there were, as was to be expected, wild stories afloat, such as gather round every distinguished man-stories which are produced by, and which stimulate, the general interest. Nor was Jesus unknown in Jerusalem itself. Only in the preceding September, at the Feast of Tabernacles, He had worked a miracle on a man born blind, which had become the subject of a special and strict investigation before a committee of the great council, or Sanhedrin; and this inquiry had notoriously failed to shake the evidence of the person who had been its subject.

After a

short journey into Galilee, He had again appeared in Jerusalem at the end of December, during the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple, when an attempt had been made on His life, in consequence of His clear assertion of a claim to be a Divine Person.3 But since that date an event had occurred which had raised the feeling of the capital to the highest pitch of excitement. At the village of Bethany, not quite three quarters of an hour's walk from the city gate, and only just hidden by a spur of the hill known as the Mount of Olives, Jesus had raised from the dead, nay, from the very putrefaction of the tomb, the body of Lazarus, who belonged to a well-known family in the place. This miracle had excited great attention; and when, six days before the Passover, on His return to Bethany, Jesus, as it would seem, by way of acknowledgment, was entertained by the villagers at the house of Simon the leper, St. John says that a large number of Jews came out from the city expressly to see Lazarus, who was present at this entertainment. Lazarus had returned to his family, not from a distant colony, but from that other mysterious world, of which in this life we can know so little while we long to know so much. "Much people of the Jews therefore knew that he was there: and they came not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom He had raised from the dead." 5

Much of the interest which is felt on the subject of religion in all ages belongs, in one way or another, to the impulse of curiosity. If a man is moderately intelligent; if he is alive to 1 St. Matt. xxi. II. 2 St. John ix. 13-16. 3 Ibid. x. 31.

4 Ibid. xi. 43, 44.

5 Ibid. xii. 9.