Gooding, David: 2 - Scandalously Irreligious!

I suppose it is the easiest of im- impression of all for us to gain of Jesus Christ of Nazareth that he must have been an exceedingly religious young man. For after all, for the last two thousand years, it has been the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth in which we have built ourselves religious buildings all over the face of Europe, from the stately cathedral down to the corrugated iron mission hall. In his name too, men in their thousands have engaged in religious exercises, such as the singing of hymns and the praying of prayers. In his name we have put on the most sumptuous ceremonies, sacraments of baptism and of Holy Communion. His name too is the name we invoke, do we not? And men have invoked it for many centuries to spread some kind of aura of decency over our birth and our marriage and our funeral. Even our calendar is punctuated still in nineteen sixty six with holidays that have their origin in religious festivals, and again those religious festivals are held in the name of Jesus. It is therefore, I say, perhaps the easiest of all impressions to gain for any who live in this modern world that Jesus Christ of Nazareth must have been exceedingly religious. And of course, in some part, in some very great part, the impression is true when we examine this, our modern impression, against the historical documents. The Jesus of history, so we are told, was a most regular attender at the religious festivals of his nation, and often went up to Jerusalem city expressly for the purpose of attending religious festivals. Likewise, he seems to have been a frequent visitor at the regular weekly meeting of the Sanhedrin, which was our, the ancient Jewish equivalent of going to church or chapel in our modern parlance. Moreover, in his own work, he went out of his way, it seems, to honor the ceremonies that the national religion in Judea, uh, kept. For instance, we are told by one historian that when he cured a leper, he sent that leper along to the priest, the local priest, that the priest might be able to examine him and perform all those ceremonial and religious ablutions through which priests were, uh, uh, accustomed to put cleansed lepers, if they ever came across any, in addition to those that our Lord sent them. And on one occasion, we read very strong language that our Lord, seeing the temple at Jerusalem desecrated, not only cleansed it, but forbade anybody so much as to carry a vessel through the temple. Such was his tremendous respect for a building that had been set apart for the worship of God, a building which he called my father's house. And yet, on the other hand, it would be very easy for these superficial facts to obscure from us who live in this modern world that the contemporaries of our Lord Jesus Christ found him shockingly irreligious. And many of them held that his teaching was so utterly perverse that if they had allowed him to continue, he would have overthrown the whole fabric of true religion. There was a more than a little reason, and not just mad opposition, in the charge that many of the religious leaders leveled deliberately against him, that so far from being a genuinely religious man, he was of the devil. The animosity aroused was not simply, uh, to be explained that they were the leaders of one religion, and Jesus Christ had come along and started another religion. Though it is true, of course, that rival religions have been a curse in this world and a source of almost endless bitterness and strife. Do we not all know that some of the bloodiest and the bitterest wars have been, and perhaps still are, fought over religious controversies. But if we examine the r- the records carefully, it was not simply that the, uh, leaders of the religion of Judaism found in Christ a possible opponent of their own particular brand of religion, and therefore were against him. It was rather that he gave them good grounds, at least superficially, uh, viewed, good grounds for thinking that he was a perverter of true religion in whatever form you will find it. Therefore, they went so far as to say the man was driven by an unclean and unholy spirit. I want to examine the ground o- o- o- of those reactions on the part of his contemporaries, so that I may follow out the thesis that I announced last week, that we are examining the commonly held views of Jesus Christ, commonly held in this modern day, against the background of the actual historical records. There was, uh, of course, then, in the first place, that animosity that our Lord drew down upon him by attacking the abuses of religion. I put it first, uh, because in my estimation, this is the least of all the causes. For whereas it is an uncomfortable thing, admittedly, if a man comes along and exposes the fact that we are indulging in abuses, it is uncomfortable. We don't like the man. Even if we agree that his criticism is justified, we find it is a slur upon our own character that we've been content ourselves to jog along with these abuses and haven't felt strongly about them. So that undoubtedly our Lord, uh, gathered to himself some animosity simply by pointing out abuses that anybody in his right mind would admit were abuses. Let me remind you, for instance, of the parable he told of the Good Samaritan. A lovely parable, but of course it had a sting in its tale. Remember the phrases in which he couched the parable. The poor man, set upon by thieves, was lying half dead upon the road, in his half-conscious moments, hoping that some help would come. When up the road, according to the parable, came not a commercial traveler, but a priest. And then a Levite. The types are chosen with deliberation. It could easily have been a fireman or a tax collector, couldn't it? But the author of the parable chose the terms deliberately. It was a priest and a Levite that came by, two exceedingly religious men, professionally religious men, and according to Jesus Christ, they passed by on the other side. The bystanders didn't fail to get the point. Looking at it dispassionately, I suppose we must agree that it is a danger into which religious people fall if they are not careful. Namely that they think that the singing of some hymns, the hearing of a few sermons, the attendance in a house of worship, these things are the performance of all that God requires of us. So easy to go and hear a sermon on moral, uh, values, and imagine that just by listening to the sermon we have fulfilled all our duty when it comes to moral values. In some parts of the world, it has been tragically easy for religion eventually to divorce itself completely from moral values. I speak not merely of Christian religion, but of all sorts of religion, so that religion becomes a sort of paying of rates and taxes to the divine, uh, uh, proprietor of the building in which we live. Our Lord... manfully... and very directly exposed that possibility. He was not saying that the priests and Levites were doing wrong things by engaging in their religious exercises, far from it. But he reminded all who so do that that by itself is not the discharge of their duty towards God and men, and must on no account be substituted for the fulfilling of our moral duty towards God and men. Then there was the notorious occasion when our Lord cleansed the temple. An occasion that caused more than the lifting of an eyebrow or two among the temple authorities. What would you say to somebody who entered into St. Paul's Cathedral and proceeded to turn out the selling of postcards and, and all the rest of things, uh, that are there for sale? What our Lord was driving at, I suppose in our heart of hearts, we all of us would agree to. He was disgusted at the use of religion as a means of making money. I need say no more upon it. I'm sure that all of us would agree that this is a perversion of religion. Religious societies perforce must have some money to go about their tasks. That we can see. Our Lord had no objection to the treasury in the temple where free will offerings were. What he did object to most strongly was the exploitation of religion as a means of making money. And as I say, we all agree. And if as Christians we are reminded, uh, by Muslims and Hindus, that somehow or other the Christian church in Europe has, in the course of s- centuries, collected so much treasure and money that it is one of the most highly powered financiers in Europe, then do we not feel the embarrassment of the, uh, observation and hasten to excuse ourselves? Wrathful as then they may have been on the spur of the moment, I would submit to you that this kind of attitude to religion must have really, in the end, have approved itself in the minds, even of those who were most deeply involved in his rebuke. Then there were his observations on religious ob- on religious ceremonies and customs. On several occasions, the historians tell us, our Lord was present on a Sabbath day in a synagogue when there was somebody in the congregation who desperately needed to be healed of some physical or mental infirmity. Now, this was quite an issue in those days because these particular people felt that in the name of God and religion, no work ought to be done on the Sabbath. It caused a, a very bitter storm when our Lord poo-pooed their ideas completely and said, look here, the Sabbath was made for man, and therefore anything that is humanitarian may be and should be done upon the Sabbath day. A set of regulations that instead of helping man, conveying to man that God is a God of love who cares for them, do the very reverse and represent God as a hard taskmaster who would bind burdens on people's back and make their lives a misery. Keep them in physical pain, nay indeed inflict physical, physical pain upon them. Such things were such so perversions of God's attitude to men that our Lord quite openly and strongly and vigorously exposed them. Perhaps his disgust was aroused most of all in this connection against those silly regulations with which sometimes religion has burdened itself. There was a famous occasion, do you remember? Is it Mark that tells us that our Lord and his disciples were caught eating a meal without having first washed their hands, which offended some of the religionists of his day. They held it a very important rite and ceremony that before you ate your food, you should wash your hands. There's no way you would find, of course, in the Old Testament, it was a thing that religion had invented for itself. And with utter unconcern, whether people were offended or otherwise, we are told, he ridiculed the whole thing and tiraded against it. Wash your hands indeed, he said. And what use is that? We leave aside the germicidal, uh, uh, uh, uh, properties of soap. We're thinking now i- i- in religious contexts. Not only is it useless, says our Lord, to do anything for a man, its danger is that it beclouds the man's vision and stops him from seeing that there are far more important things that he needs to attend to. You wash your hands before lunch? Very good. But the things that really defile a man, said our Lord, are the things that come out s- out from a man's heart. These things defile a man. Lust, evil thought, hate, jealousy, narrowness of mind. These things defile a man. And taking soap and water to them is so absurd as to be trifling. And any ceremony, external ceremony, that makes a man somehow feel more religiously comfortable when all the time his deepest moral needs have not been touched, nor has his conscience been touched as to his need for personal repentance. These are not only useless, they are dangerous. And I fancy our Lord, were he here, would remind us of the same danger of any religious ceremony that makes a man feel that somehow he has in better standing with God, if it hasn't meant that the man has been called upon to examine his heart and his conscience and confess his sin and get right with God. But these, uh, four instances that I have made, I would count as the least of the reasons why our Lord was regarded as, uh, an irreligious man in his day. Or can we not all, I repeat, see the rightness of his objections and must we not admit that what he was attacking is not religion, really, but, um, the abuses to which religion is sometimes put? We come to a deeper level, more subtle and more penetrating. When we observe those comments that our Lord made and the parables he told, that have for their burden this, that religion is not enough, even in the realm where many consider it to be altogether sufficient. It is obvious to us all, is it not, that religion by itself is not enough if you are thinking of your duty to your fellow man, not enough to sing hymns with the priest and the Levite and attend church. You must get down, cross the side of the road, and help somehow or other to lift that fallen man and minister to his physical as well as his spiritual needs. Religion is not enough if you take religion to mean the singing of hymns and the, uh, observance of, uh, of religious ceremonies. That we can see. It is altogether a more powerful charge that religion is not even enough. When we come to our personal relation with God. For we commonly use religious ceremonies, do we not? Their symbols as a means of cultivating what we might call our personal relations with God. Those intimacies. Those fellowships for which the human soul craves when it approaches God. Therefore, to have our Lord suggesting that religion in this sense, all those ceremonies, those symbols, those festivals, which man has invented to make his way into personal experience of God, are, when all is said and done, of themselves totally insufficient and inadequate. If If not not on times, somewhat dangerous. May I recall you the incident that the historian and evangelist Saint John records in his gospel? As one illustration to the point. The Jews, so John tells us, had been celebrating one of their most colorful religious festivals of the whole year, what is technically called the Feast of Tabernacles. It was a beautiful ceremony. It lasted for some days. It was colorful. It was imaginative. It would evoke, uh, the deepest feelings in anybody's breasts. The aesthetics were marvelous. And what is more, lest you should understand me, let me hasten to point out that the large portion of this festival was, so the Old Testament tells us, a festival and a ceremony which God himself had ordained. Yet, so we're told, on the last great day, with this festival reached its climax, indeed, just as it had reached its climax, a voice was heard, raised rather loud in the temple court amidst the crowd saying, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. Caiaphas didn't miss its implications. There was, we are told, a very hurried meeting of the Sanhedrin after that. I must confess I would give anything, almost, to be able to eavesdrop on that committee meeting. The language that crossed the floor, perhaps, however, was not always edifying. Caiaphas and Annas and the chief priests generally were absolutely livid. They put on the show of the year. And to have one of these trumped up street corner preachers daring to interrupt, and in full view and hearing of the congregation, just at that critical moment, to suggest that the ceremonies that had been offered were not everything that possibly a man could wish for. They counted it a studied insult. And Caiaphas and company pressed the Sanhedrin to start seeking the man's blood. You can understand them, I submit. How would you care for a street corner preacher at the climax of the mass to get up and talk in such terms. If any man thirst, he said, obviously implying and deliberately implying that that whole week's round of religious ceremonies could, with many people, leave them unsatisfied. There was, our Lord said, a better way to God. There was a better something available for men, a nearer approach than symbol and ceremony. If that were so, then our Lord would not hesitate in telling men so. He was not saying that symbol and ceremony are wrong. He believed both had been appointed by God. But he was saying that it is possible to, for a man to stop at the external ceremony, to see no further than the symbol, and miss those realities of which the symbol speaks. He was saying more, that it is possible for a man to imagine that the performance of the ceremony, the going through of the symbol is all there is. In both of which cases, a man must in the end be left unfilled and unsatisfied. Only a relation of persons to persons can possibly satisfy a person. And I rather fancy that if our Lord were here in present time, he would constantly remind us of the same thing. He would point to our Christian ceremonies of baptism and the Holy Communion. And certainly he would not say these things are wrong, any more than he said the Jewish ceremonies were wrong. Both were and are God-given. But what he would say, and I'm sure say in as loud a voice in our public places as originally he said it in the temple, would be in the first place, that it is a tremendous pity to start merely content with the symbol and the ceremony, and not get beyond both to the spiritual reality of which they speak. And I fancy he would warn us of the danger of imagining that somehow these Christian ceremonies and symbols have some virtue in and of themselves, so that having gone through them, you are ex opere operato, as the theologians say, just by having performed the ceremony, somehow better. We must guard against that. Did not our Lord express himself thus? That at the last, when the master of the house rises up and shuts to the door, there shall be some standing outside who had expected to be inside. But against all their entreaties, they are permanently excluded. Because they sought God not in the right way, and were content with things that were short of reality and were only symbols. Have we not eaten and drunken in thy presence, Lord? And hast thou not taught in our streets? What a vivid commentary the words are upon religious symbolism. What a warning they are, lest we take religious symbols and rest content therewith, and fail to come at the reality to which they were meant to point. Our Lord's reply to those people was, as you may remember, depart from me, I never knew you. Not to be understood as meaning I didn't know you existed, for our Lord in his omniscience knows everybody who exists. But to be understood in the deeper meaning of that term, I never knew you. I never had deep and intimate and personal relations with you. And only deep and personal relations between a soul and that soul's savior are sufficient to open the door of heaven and God's paradise to men. And then, if I might continue in that same strain for a moment, you will remember how our Lord on times accused religion of getting its proportions so terribly wrong. There were those, for instance, who tithed mint and rue. And our Lord didn't complain. These things you ought to have done, he said, according to your ancient religious code. But in doing those small things, they overlooked the mercy of God and the justice of God. Sad lack of proportion in their religious exercise. Or will you remember that famous conversation that our Lord had with a Samaritan woman, uh, uh, sitting on a well, uh, in a village called Sychar? It is the historian John that, uh, records the incident. So vivid it was and so true to life that I beg to remind you of it in detail. Our Lord came and sat on the well. He wanted a glass of water. He'd been walking in the sun in the middle of the day in the Middle East. And when this woman came to draw water, he asked her for a cup of water. Ordinary social act that one might expect for one's fellow human being. He didn't get the water. The woman nearly fell over with astonishment that he, being a Jew, should ask to drink of her who was a Samaritan. Because religion, I'm afraid religion, had carved such a deep chasm between those two communities that lived in that little land. Palestine isn't a very big land. It's even smaller if you take out from it the northern part of Galilee and just leave yourself Judea and Samaria. The number of people living in it was not overlarge. And yet in that far off day, that tiny little land was divided to its very roots over a religious quarrel that had become so bitter that no Samaritan would ever expect a Jew to ask a drink of water. And had a Jew been accosted by a Samaritan, he might have been so rude, if not to put a bullet through him, then to spit in his face. What was it all about? Well, it was about a dispute as where men ought to worship. What was the right religion to follow? Curiously enough, these, uh, two different sects, they based all their beliefs on the same Bible. It is an amazing thing, isn't it, how people can be based on the same Bible and come to such different conclusions. So it was then. The Samaritans said that they based everything on the, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. The Jews, uh, claimed the very same belief. They based all theirs on the, um, uh, Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. They claimed to be worshiping the same God. But the bitterness was absolutely incredible. It turned on this, where ought you to worship? In that place or this place? Now, there were good historical reasons why men ought to have worshipped in Jerusalem. Nor does our Lord overlook them. He points out, in fact, to the Samaritan woman that the Old Testament had commanded them to worship in Jerusalem, and that indeed God had laid down that rule in the kindness of his heart to spare those primitive people being led away into idolatry. But for the Jews, who technically were in the right, to allow this thing to blow up into such great proportions, till it became like a vast mountain in people's mind whenever they thought of religion, this was tragic and indeed blameworthy. For you see, when our Lord began to talk to that woman about what are, after all, the basic issues of true religion, we'll observe at once how this unhappy controversy completely filled her mind and obscured from her what our Lord was trying to say. Said our Lord, you know, my good woman, if you knew, uh, who I was, and if you knew the gift of God and the gift that God is waiting to give men, you would have asked me, and I would give you this living water. Some further conversation following, the woman replies, oh, you're religious. Ah. Ah, well, you know, you say, don't you, you're a Jew. You say that Jerusalem is, uh, where men ought to worship. Yes. Now, for our part, I was brought up a Samaritan, and our fathers have always worshipped in this mountain. And the unspoken implication is that my religion is as good as yours anyway, and I'm not having you come here trying to foist your religion upon me. My denomination is as good as yours. What a modern ring it has. And how we too stand condemned, or would be if that same Jesus Christ were here now, for allowing it to spread in the minds of men that the basic thing about religion, the all important thing, is in what church you worship. Important as may be the historical reasons behind all these vexed questions. We do ourself an injury if we allow this to get out of proportion. The main thing about religion is certainly not your denomination or where you worship, and who is right and who is wrong. The main thing, let our Lord tell us is, have I received this gift that God is willing to give? If thou knewest the gift of God and who it is that says to thee, give me to drink, you would have asked of him, and he would give you living water. The main thing about my worship, after all, is not where I worship, but how. God is spirit, said our Lord. Stands to reason that true worship is not a matter of geography, nor the shape of your building, nor indeed the order of your service. God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. But come, how will a man do that unless he has first received God's Holy Spirit and knows within himself that God has given him a gift that comes bubbling up like a healthy brook. Because he has come to know God personally. Because he has indeed received God's Holy Spirit. And now spontaneously loves God. And wants to talk to God. And wants to tell God how much God and his salvation mean to him. If this latter be lacking, what an empty farce it is. What a dangerous farce it is to hold to these religious debates about the rightness or wrongness of this and that particular denomination. But I want to come in my last moments to what, in my estimation, was the most shocking thing of all that Jesus Christ said. Not shocking, perhaps, in our ears, but shocking in the ears of his contemporaries. For none of these things hitherto mentioned, would our- would the religious leaders of his day have accused him of blasphemy. But for the things that I'm now going to mention, they outright and immediately and without hesitation denounced it all straightforward blasphemy. I refer to our Lord's revolutionary teaching, that salvation, that acceptance with God, does not depend upon a man's good works or his moral behavior. Does not depend upon a man's striving, even less so upon a man's religious observances, but that salvation and acceptance with God depends solely upon a man's repentance and faith in Jesus Christ our Lord, and that salvation is therefore a gift, not to be striven after with religious discipline, but to be received as a bankrupt receives his discharge and receives from a kindly friend a new lot of capital to set up in business again. And that because it is a gift, and because it does not depend upon our strivings or upon our merit, a man may not only receive this gift in this life, but he may be utterly sure that he has the gift. It was this kind of teaching that secured for our Lord the reputation of being a blasphemer. I quote some of the incidents. You will gather from them, though they are few, from what might be quoted, how extensively our Lord taught this, and what importance he attached to it. And indeed, en courant, so to speak, we shall observe what storms of protest it aroused. First of all, there were those people that did not like the idea of eleventh-hour hour conversions, of actual rogues and vagabonds and worse, coming and staging some kind of what they called repentance and faith and being accepted and told they were saved. And our Lord answered them, did he not? In the parable that we have come to call the parable of the prodigal son. A parable in which we commonly dwell upon the large-heartedness of the father who forgave the son when he came home, and in so doing we do well, of course. But the parable, as all our Lord's parables, has its sting in its tale, and the figure we should notice is not the father, nor yet the prodigal son, so much as the elder brother whose reactions fill the last verses of the parable. He came home and heard all this dancing, the symphony and the orchestra going indoors, inquired what he meant, was told that his younger brother, that dissolute rake of a chap, had come home and his father had received him. Turned away in perfect disgust. His father came out and pleaded with him. He refused to have anything to do with it. Let's not hasten too hard to condemn him. Could we not think up of some reasons why he should have taken that attitude? I think I could put some in his mouth. I call it, says he, a putting a premium upon sin and dissolution. It is encouraging immorality and lax living. Here I am, he said to his father, and I've served you these many years, and I get nothing. If a little vagabond has gone off with harlots and lived it up, now comes back and stages some kind of, uh, repentance, you call it, don't you, or conversion or something, and you received him and made a tremendous fuss. Well, I'm not interested, I tell you. I don't believe in that kind of conversion. I believe in a man's honestly pegging away at his religion and being sound in his citizenship. I'm very distrustful of these fly boys who, when they find it doesn't pay, attend some conversion meetings and come back. Let's all go on to the judgment power and take what is our due. And let the rape get what he deserves. Let the honest religious man that has denied himself these ungodly pleasures and tried to discipline his life be recognized for the meritorious fellow he is at the end. So we never heard anything similar in modern parlance. What was the fatal flaw in that elder brother's attitude? This, I suggest, a fatal flaw that shows that his religion is not the true type, much as it might con- con- uh co- commend itself to those of us who rank respectability very high. Says he to his father, Father, I have served you these many years, and I got nothing for it. I didn't even get so much as a kid. An observation that must have cut his father to the very heart. Is that why the elder brother served him? He was serving all this year for what he got out of it, was he? He was indeed, and that's why he objected when the other chap had gone off and had a jolly good time and could come back without deserving and be thus blessed. Totally unfair, he says. I've been working the hardest I could do, and I get nothing, and he gets everything. Ah. This was an exceedingly illuminating observation of our Lord. So easily does religion come to tell us that we are to be good, if I might put it crudely, so that we shall merit God's heaven. Sad perversion of religion, that. God's heaven isn't for sale. God's love isn't to be merited. God is not in business. What would you think of a mother who sold her love to her children for the coin of their good behavior? Indeed not, this is tragic. God is not intending to fill his heaven with people that are good for what they get out of it. Not even if what they get out of it is God's own heaven. This is altogether the wrong reason for being good and attending to my religious observations and striving after moral perfection, that I'm doing it for what I get out of it in the term of God's acceptance, in the term of heaven. God wants people who are good for the sake of being good, are good and try to please him, though they expect to get nothing out of it by pleasing him, and please him because they want to please him. And the other kind of thing is a second best that God determines not to have. It must be that if God is going to receive us, he will not receive us on the grounds of our religious merit, nor upon the grounds of our moral strife. He will receive us, one and all, solely on the ground that he loves us, when we none of us deserve to be loved, and is prepared to forgive us, though none of us can possibly deserve to be forgiven, and that he will spread the board of his heavenly welcome, paid for not by our efforts, but by the sufferings of his son, which alone can pay God and atone for human sin. Elder brother or younger vagabond, if in the end we are to be saved, we must come not on the ground of our religious strivings, but as bankrupts to receive a free salvation. Another parable that our Lord told carried the matter much deeper, aroused a good deal more indignation, of course. That famous parable that you will remember of the Pharisee and the tax gatherer who went up into the temple to pray. Their prayers proceeded in this kind of language from the Pharisee, God, I thank thee that I'm better than everybody else. Look at my religious observance, tithing and fasting, and the way I kept at it. I thank thee that I'm better than that other fellow. And the tax gatherer's prayer, a sob, a disgusted sob, disgusted with himself, as he would not so much as dare to lift his eyes to heaven, saying, God be merciful to me, the sinner. This, of course, poked the wound even more deeply. For if the parable of the prodigal son was aimed to tell us that prodigals can indeed rightly be welcomed home, though they have been dissolute hitherto, so long as they repent, and when they are welcomed home, God will make a fuss over them and grant them his full salvation. This parable seemed to go further and say that not only is the repentant rascal saved, but the good religious man is not saved, but is altogether rejected. That, as you may see, seemed to turn the religious world utterly topsy-turvy. A magnanimous religious man might say, well, so long as I feel pretty sure that my performance will gain me salvation in the end, I don't mind perhaps if God is merciful on the other chap who didn't do so well. But to be told that the other chap who didn't do so well, so be it, he trusts Christ, will be saved, and the religious man who did exceedingly well, as it would appear, will be positively rejected. This seems so ludicrously blasphemous, so calculated to undermine all moral effort. But the Pharisees and religious, uh, uh, religionists in general hardened in their enmity towards this novel preacher. And yet do our no- do not our consciences approve his teaching as right? He was not denouncing moral effort, of course not. But if it comes to a question of comparisons, such as that Pharisee instituted, Lord, I'm better than that other man, well, let a moment's reflection teach us common sense. If I stand in my laziness upon the earth, and my friend with much, uh, labor climbs to the top of Mount Everest, and you compare him with me, behold how far higher than me he is. But then if you compare the both, the both of us with the man in the moon, then the distance by which he is higher than me shrinks to insignificance. So insignificant that it isn't worth mentioning. Compare men among themselves, and this man is better than the other man. Compare both before the holiness of God, and the holiness of God towers so high above both that the difference between the two men is insignificant utterly. No man that has ever caught sight of the holiness of God will ever again murmur about his superiority to another fellow man. Both are bankrupt. Both have mud on their feet. Both are unfit for God's presence and his holiness. And it ill becomes any man to chatter in the presence of God about his being better than his fellow man. And then you will see another fatal flaw. Says our Lord, that Pharisee, trusted in himself that he was righteous. And that is, as you see, the very opposite of true religion. For true religion, thoroughly analyzed, is not a matter of the performance of certain ceremonies, it is the matter of a personal relation. It is the interlocking of a man's personality with Christ. By that man's deliberate receiving of a person. It is a union of spirits. The Bible, uh, describes it on the analogy of a marriage. And true salvation is a man coming to this relationship with a person in which, of necessity, his faith, his look is altogether away from himself, and his trust is in another. The man whose religion has led him to trust in himself has severed that relationship where it is most vital. It is incipient idolatry. It is a man seeking to come before God on his own merit, instead of owning that anything good he has comes solely and only from God, and that he hangs upon God as a ma- babe hangs upon its mother's breast. Indeed, the Bible gives us to understand that the fate of the unregenerate at last has that as one of its most fearful ingredients. Men who have gone through life trusting in themselves, have never come to true relationship with that other, which is Jesus Christ, and have gone off into eternity, isolated little islands of personality, untouched and unconnected. By the life-giving Savior. And I come to my last point. We all say that our Lord commented that the publican, the tax gatherer, went down to his house justified. And you say, can it really mean that the man knew he was justified, knew he was right with God? Surely a man cannot be sure until the final day. He cannot be sure he's saved, can he, till the final day? Here we reach the, perhaps the most revolutionary of our Lord's teachings. Of course he would have told you a man can know, and indeed must know. Did he not say to the paralytic, son, thy sins are forgiven thee? Blasphemy, retorted the scribes and theologians. A man cannot know. But indeed he can. But you all say this is horrible antinomianism. Surely the whole point of religion is that we are kept on our tiptoe because we cannot anticipate the final. No man may anticipate the final judgment, surely. But that is precisely what our Lord taught, and that in so many words a man must do and can do. Can do, because indeed to his startled contemporaries, our Lord informed them that I, Jesus of Nazareth, am to be the judge at the final judge. And hearing my verdict now, you may be certain my verdict then will be the same. And in memorable words, he informed us how we may anticipate that final judgment and be certain here on earth what the judge will say at the last. Said he thus, a man who listens to my word and puts his faith in him that sent me has here and now eternal life and shall never in fact come into judgment, but has already passed over out of that state of death into which a man is born physically, into the possession of eternal life that puts him right with God, has already passed over and knows it in this present life. How can it be? Because I am the judge, said our Lord, and the Father judges no man but has committed all judgment to me. The reaction was that some took up stones to stone him. And others believed and were saved. But at least we can say this of those who stoned him, that they saw the point. They now saw that there was something different, as different as heaven is from earth, between the performance of religious ceremony and this experience of being received by Christ and receiving Christ, receiving the gift of his Holy Spirit and forgiveness of sins, and the certainty here in this life that we are right with God, and that we shall never be lost. A vast difference. You may say, if you like, with those that sto- stoned Jesus Christ, that his ideas were nonsensical and blasphemous. For indeed, if they are not right, they are blasphemous. But of course, if you so say, you must abandon all profession of being a Christian. You will say it's impossible, surely, because if a man knew he was saved, it would lead to the most terrible and blameworthy laxity of life. Not so, sir. I leave with you the parable that our, the, the incident which took place in Simon's house, when a woman off the streets, a common bit of baggage, came in and sobbed her way to repentance and faith at the fa- Savior's feet. And the religious people, as usual, objected to such conversions. They said a little bit of superficial emotionalism, you know, but from now the nasty undertones of sex about this somewhere, that this woman should be handling the feet of the Savior. What we like is nice conservative religion. You'll soon see what will happen to this woman. Hm. Says she's saved, doesn't she? And here this Nazarene telling her her sins are forgiven. What utter rot! She'll go back to her own trade very soon, you'll see. Said our Lord to Simon. Simon, if there were two men that owed, uh, one a large sum of money and another a considerable sum of money, and they had nothing to pay with, and their creditor forgave them. What do you think would be the reaction? They would love him. In gratitude? I suppose so, said Simon. Which would love him the more? Oh, the man who'd been forgiven most, said Simon. And I ask you, on your own terms, to look at this woman. What's happened to her? When's this devotion to me, and when's this love of me? Simon, this is evidence that woman has been forgiven. And our Lord and his apostles tell us this at length, that this is how true Christianity works, that when people have been forgiven free and know they have eternal life and shall never come into judgment, because another, namely Jesus Christ, suffered for their sins and paid the debt of their sin when he died upon a cross, and they go free, entirely free, and know it, then there springs up such a well of gratitude in them that makes them want, in spite of all their fumbling failures, to please that savior. And is the mainspring of a life of developing holiness. But Simon, said our Lord, looking at your attitude to me, your ice cold formality, and in all the rigmarole of your religious observances, Simon, is there any evidence in your life that you are forgiven? For I've not yet noticed very many sparks of that affection and devotion towards God and his son that spring from and are the evidence of a heart that has entered into the joy, gladness of personal contact with Jesus Christ.