THE PURCHASED CHURCH
‘The Church of God, which He hath purchased with His own blood.’
Taking the Bible as our one sure light upon the Cross, standing at the point of sight where prophets, evangelists, and apostles stood, and where their Master stood Himself, we venture humbly but with resolve to say that
I. The Cross of Jesus was the divine index to man of the evil of his sin, of the cost and effort necessary to enable the forgiveness of God to deal fully with that sin, and of the Love which, in order that such forgiveness might be our blessed portion, delivered up its Best-Beloved to die.
II. The Cross tells us irrefragably of the Life, risen and eternal, of the Crucified.—It calls us joyfully to a living Jesus, to be joined by simplest faith to Him in His life, that we may reap all the merits and all the peace of His finished sacrifice, and may daily live with a life which is ‘Christ in us, the hope of glory.’
Bishop H. C. G. Moule.
Illustration
‘What a wonder, in the Christian Creed, is the glory of the Cross! Did it ever occur to us to think what a paradox it is? It would be so easy to conceive, beforehand, that some other symbol or sign than the Cross should have distinguished the Church and cause of Jesus Christ. Why not the Palm of victory? Why not the Crown of universal empire? Why not the Sun, risen with healing in his wings? Why not the mystic Tongues and Flames of pentecostal mission? As a fact, the Cross is the immemorial and universal heraldry of the Christian, and of the Church.’
(SECOND OUTLINE)
OUR UNHAPPY DIVISIONS
We should measure the world, and our own love or fear of it, its praises, censures, rewards, and punishments, by the plumb-line of the Cross; and it is well that we should regard the divisions of Christendom from the standpoint of the Cross; look at them with the light thrown upon them in the Passion; measure them in the spirit of those splendid words: ‘The Church of God, which He hath purchased with His own Blood.’
I. Is the spirit of division rebuked from the Cross?—Was the outward as well as the inward unity of the Church an object or desire with Jesus in His Passion? Notice most briefly only three points:—
(a) First, the prayer of consecration of our great High Priest, on the very steps of the throne of the Cross. It is a prayer for the unity of the Church. Our Master was not indifferent to the losses of disunion. He was not unmindful of the blessings and gains of unity. ‘Neither pray I for these alone,’ the Apostles, the disciples, the little flock, ‘but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word. That they all may be one.’ Our Lord went to His Cross with an intense yearning for the unity of the Church which He was about to purchase with His own Blood.
(b) The measure of the unity of the faithful was to be found in the awful unapproachable oneness existing in the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. ‘That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us … I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one.’ The unity of the Church was meant to be an outward expression of the unity of heaven, nay, of the very unity of God.
(c) Once more our Master prayed that His Church might be one in order that the world might believe in His own Divine Mission, and in the Father’s love for the Church—‘That they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me. That they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them, as Thou has loved Me.’ The mission of Christ in history is disbelieved and disowned in consequence of the divisions of Christendom. Men cannot believe that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world when the instrument for extending that mission speaks with so many and scarcely harmonious voices. Neither can they believe in the love of God for His Church, ‘That Thou hast loved them, as Thou hast loved Me,’ when the subject of the infinite charity of God seems to be so feeble an exponent of charity within itself, and consequently so impoverished a witness of the Divine charity to the world. ‘Thou hast loved them,’ therefore they must perforce love each other, and live, and pray, and work together with one mind in the house of God.
II. Suffer one or two closing words of counsel and hope.
(a) Ever remember that the divisions of Christendom are entirely contrary to the will of God. They are the result of the sinfulness and impatience of man, and are no slight contribution to the measure of the world’s sin, which nailed Jesus to His cross.
(b) To labour for peace, to labour and to pray, is to place ourselves on the side of God, to help to secure that most sacred unity for which Christ wrestled on the eve of His Passion, to aid in restoring to the distracted Church that gift of peace which it must be His will to restore, but for which we are not ready as yet.
(c) Deplore and forsake that spirit of self-will, the fruitful cause of so much disunion and so many misunderstandings. We carry our self-will and our self-love into our religion and almost every act of it. It asserts its presence too often in our worship of God, our work for God, our interpretation of the will of God. Self-will is too often the substitute for God’s will. Wilfulness spoils too often the glory of Catholic worship, it mars the harmony of the Catholic life.
(d) Above all, continue to pray for the visible reunion of the Church, for the healing of the wounds of Christendom. To pray thus very humbly and very hopefully is to carry on the prayer which was first uttered on the confines of Gethsemane; it is to impose a limit upon the reign of sin, it is to anticipate the hour when the divisions of Christendom are seen to be only a painful but Divinely permitted incident in the life of the Church which had a beginning in time—which has passed through her trials and her cleansing fires, and is now a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, but holy and without blemish. The true spouse of Jesus Christ—the mystical bride adorned for her Husband.
Rev. C. W. H. Baker.