For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.
The punishment for unworthy partaking
I. The punishment. Here are three steps to the grave: weakness, sickness, temporal death.
1. Learn that God inflieteth not the same punishment for all, but hath variety of correction. And the reason is, because there are divers degrees of men’s sins. God therefore doth not, like the unskilful empiries, prescribe the same for all, but wisely varieth His physic.
2. Let us, then, endeavour to amend, when God layeth His least judgment upon us. Let us humble ourselves under His hand when He layeth but His “little finger” upon us; for light punishments, neglected, will draw heavier upon us.
3. Let magistrates and men in authority mitigate or increase the punishment, according to the nature of the offence. For probable it is that those who were least offenders here were punished with weakness; the greater, with sickness; the greatest of all, with death temporal.
II. The cause.
1. All sicknesses of the body proceed from the sin of the soul. I am not ignorant of second causes; but the fountain of all these fountains is sin. And not only the sins which we have lately committed, but those which we have committed long ago (Job 13:26). Job being grey was punished for Job being green; Job in his autumn smarts for what he hath done in his spring. Do we, then, desire to lead our old age in health. I know of no better preservative than in our youth to keep our souls from sin.
2. But how came St. Paul to know that this sickness proceeded from the irreverent receiving of the sacrament, especially since they were guilty of four other grand sins? Since they were guilty of factious affecting of their ministers, going to law under pagan judges, suffering an incestuous person to live amongst them unpunished, denying of the resurrection of the body, why might not St. Paul think that any one or all of these might be the causes of this disease?
(1) Because this sin was the sin paramount. The others were felony, robbing God of His glory; this was high treason against the person of Christ, and so against God Himself. Learn we, then, though God of His goodness may be pleased graciously to pardon sins of an inferior nature and meaner alloy, yet He will not let him escape unpunished who irreverently receive the body and blood of His Son.
(2) Because the apostle perceived some resemblance betwixt the sin committed and the punishment inflicted. For, as a physician, when a disease puzzles all his rules of art to trace it to some natural cause, will be ready to put it down to poison, so St. Paul, seeing the Corinthians to be punished with a strange and unusual sickness, suspected that they had eaten some poisonous thing, and on inquiry he finds that it was the sacrament irreverently received: it being just with God to turn that which was appointed to be preservative for the soul, to prove poison to the body, being not received with due preparation. (T. Fuller, D.D.)
Judged, not condemned
I. “For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.”
1. Just then there was a more than average prevalence of disease and mortality, and Paul had authority to trace it to its source. Our Lord has solemnly warned us against drawing such inferences arbitrarily (Luke 13:1-5). We are prone to this sort of presumption. But here St. Paul was speaking in the Spirit, and was authorised to knit together a particular sin and punishment. And I cannot read in this record the “thus far and no farther.” I catch here the faint echo of the thought that God our Father has us all in His school, and is carrying on our education for a life beyond death by a direct providential dealing with us in the way of mental and bodily chastisement. “For this cause”--because of such and such a sin, with which the man would not deal for himself--“many are weak,” etc.
2. To some minds the idea of punishment may be repulsive and demoting. To me it is a thought of hope: it speaks of a living and personal God, not willing that I should perish. The chastening hand, St. Paul tells us, stops not short sometimes of taking the very life itself. There are even deaths which condemn not but only chastise the sinner.
3. Read it in its simplicity, and what comfort is here for some comfortless mourners! Let the Christian mother hush her agony over the grave of some soldier or sailor son taken away in the very dawn of manhood, with immature piety, and believe that still, for all that, the young life was taken, not in wrath, but in chastisement; taken, perhaps, that it might expand in a purer and a higher companionship.
II. Yet St. Paul goes on to teach us that even these judgments might be turned aside. “If we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.”
1. So unwillingly does God afflict, that, if the same end, which is our good, could be otherwise reached, it would be. It is our refusal to judge ourselves which, as it were, compels God to judge. Do it upon yourselves, and the rod drops from His hand.
2. St. Paul carefully guards against the idea of any self-infliction of suffering, by varying the word when he speaks of our judging. To “judge” becomes then not to punish, but simply to discern. To “judge” ourselves is to look ourselves through and through, so as to distinguish between the precious and the vile.
3. Do not look upon this duty with repugnance. God and you are on one side in the matter. He bids you to do what is necessary for yourself in the way of judging, and so to answer the one purpose, which is that of your not being left in self-deceit.
4. Many shrink from this self-intuition from the dread of long and difficult processes. Will they just bethink themselves of that fountain opened for sin and uncleanness?
III. The final cause of that judging which is chastening--“That we should not be condemned with the world.” Weakness and sickness--even the last sleep itself--all have this merciful character within the Church of Jesus Christ. They are to prevent the everlasting “damnation.” Nothing short of apostasy, the wilful and obstinate “standing away from the living God,” can throw a man back out of the Church of the Divine chastisement into the Cosmos of the Divine condemnation. (Dean Vaughan.)
The punishment of unworthy receivers
Now, the verse that I have read to you is a part of that use of terror which the apostle makes against the unworthy receivers of the sacrament; and it contains God’s severe punishment against those that come unworthily: wherein note three things. First, the cause of their punishment, which is the unworthy eating of the communion: for this cause many are sick and weak among you, and many are fallen asleep. Secondly, the punishment inflicted for this sin--weakness, sickness, and mortality. Thirdly, there is the delinquents, which are you, Corinthians: many are sick and weak among you, and in them all others that come unpreparedly to the sacrament. Whence we may observe this point of instruction: that God doth most severely punish the unworthy receivers of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. He punished the Corinthians here with sickness, weakness, fevers, pestilence, death temporal, and God knows how many with death eternal. Now the reason why the Lord doth so severely punish both with temporal judgments and with spiritual curses the unworthy receivers of the sacrament, is, in regard of the author of the sacrament, who is Christ; and that not only as He was man, but Christ as He was God did institute the same. When the Lord delivered the Law upon Mount Sinai, He commanded the people to sanctify themselves; yea, if a beast did but touch the mountain, he must die for the same, even be stoned to death, or thrust through with a dart (Hebrews 12:1-29.). Much more, then, now, when the Lord doth deliver the gospel, especially the groundwork and masterpiece thereof, the Lord Jesus Christ, and that in the most blessed manner that ever God exhibited Himself unto man; how much more doth God require purity and holiness, that all such as come to receive the Lord Jesus Christ in the blessed sacrament should be sanctified, purging their hearts, and cleansing their souls from all their sin and uncleanness! The second reason is in regard of the matter of the sacrament, which is Christ also; who, as He was the efficient cause, so in regard of sacramental relation He is the matter of the communion (1 Corinthians 10:16). Now the better matter anything is of, the more heinous is the defilement of it. A master will not be so angry for casting his earthen vessels into the mire as he will be for casting his rich jewels. A third reason is in regard of the form of the sacrament, which is Christ too. If thou shouldest clip the king’s coin, I will say that thou art a traitor. Oh, what a traitor art thou, then, yea, accursed traitor in the account of God and Christ, if thou clippest His holy communion, if thou clip it of thy examination and due preparation, and so come hand over head, not regarding so holy an ordinance: thou sinnest against the court of heaven. The last reason is in regard of the end of the sacrament, which is Christ also. Is it so, then, that the Lord doth so severely punish the unworthy receiver of the sacrament? Take notice, then, from whence cometh all sickness, weakness, and mortality, and the reason why the Lord doth send so many kind of sorrows, crosses, and miseries upon men; namely, because of the unworthy receiving of the Lord’s Supper. And, beloved, we shall never see the Lord take away His judgments here from the earth until we betake ourselves to a more diligent and holy receiving of the sacrament. Many there be that expound these words in a spiritual sense; many are sick and weak, and many are fallen asleep, that is to say, many have their consciences seared, and their hearts hardened, etc.; and this is true also, that because men come unpreparedly, they have their hearts hardened, and their consciences seared, and their soul plagued with many spiritual plagues. But it is as true also in temporal judgments. King Belshazzar, that abused but the holy vessels of the temple, and the cups thereof, what a small plague befel him for it (Daniel 5:27-28). Wherefore let us take heed of unprepared coming to the sacrament; for God will not hold such guiltless. And now to conclude: As the Cherubim stood before Paradise with a naked sword to keep Adam out, that he might not enter and so eat of the Tree of Life, so I bring with me the sword of God, to run it up to the hilt in the heart of every ungodly man, every rebellious and impenitent sinner that dares presume to rush upon this holy ordinance of God with a polluted heart. (W. Fenner.)
For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.--
Self-judgment
I. There is in us a capacity of judging ourselves. We can overlook our own acts and feelings; we can pronounce sentence upon them. It would be no mercy, but a great degradation, if we were excused from this jurisdiction.
II. The Lord will not excuse us from it. He takes the office which we abdicate. He judges when we will not judge.
III. This capacity is blunted by censoriousness.
1. The besetting sin of the Corinthians was that of judging others. They were ever determining that this man was not so wise or so spiritual as themselves. And on this very account they could not judge themselves; the faculty lost its edge; it exhausted itself in unprofitable, unlawful efforts. It was ever busy looking outward for motes; the consciousness of the beam within became continually less alive.
2. Most of us are agreed that we live in a critical rather than in a creative age. Politicians, artists, religious men, all: alike are critics; some censors of their predecessors as well as of their contemporaries. And just as it was with the Corinthians, we have lost to a very great degree the power of judging ourselves.
IV. How it may be restored (verse 32).
1. Much is said in pulpits about the blessed effects of God’s discipline upon men. Some of the very best are constrained to say, “Suffering has brought forth an amount of evil in us which we did not know there was in us before.” And thanks be to God it did! Now you know Him and yourselves a little better than you did before, For it is this revelation of what is dark in us which drives us to His Light. God’s judgments are not mere punishments, but are meant to awaken in us that slumbering faculty without which we are not truly men, because we are not truly showing forth the image of God. He comes amongst us that our criticism may be turned to a more practical and glorious service, that we may not “be condemned with the world.”
2. What is the condemnation from which this judgment rescues us? The world, considered as apart from God, is condemned to a very hopeless kind of darkness. Its members cannot see any light which should guide their own footsteps, for they confess no light but what proceeds from themselves. All God’s chastisements, therefore, are to purge the Church of its worldly elements, not by making if, censorious and exclusive (for there are essentially worldly elements), but by making each man see in himself all the evil which he has detected in his brother. (F. D. Maurice, M.A.)
God’s judgment and our judgment
I. The purpose of God’s judgments. Paul’s words imply two great propositions.
1. God’s chastisements are judgments. A most strange assertion, on the ordinary acceptation of judgments as special interferences of Providence to punish some special evil! But if the word means to discern between good and evil, then this strange assertion becomes merely a statement of the result which afflictions ever produce in the heart and conscience of a Christian: they make us discern the good and the evil, the fleshly and the spiritual in our own selves, as we never saw them before. Many a man in the quiet days of sickness and pain has found a light searching him, and separating the true from the false. It is ever in the whirlwind and darkness of adversity that we learn to say with him of old, “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee; wherefore I abhor myself in dust and ashes.”
2. The design of God’s judgment is to save us from condemnation. The spirit of the world is the choice of darkness rather than light, therefore to be condemned with the world is to be left in ever-deepening blindness to all the light and glory of God. That doom of being given up to one’s self, and being ruined by the secret idolatries and evils of self, is the doom into which every one of us would fall if God’s chastisements, which are judgments, did not deliver us from its peril.
(1) Sometimes He breaks the concealed idol of the heart. We did not know it was an idol until it had gone.
(2) Sometimes He permits us to have our own way, and allows us to discover its vanity.
(3) Sometimes He prevents man’s will from ever being fulfilled. This is the meaning of the chastening judgments of God. Let us accept it heartily and broadly, even when we cannot trace it. Let us not limit it to individuals. It is true of nations, and has been true of this England of ours again and again. It is true of Churches; hence the meaning of chastenings as the response to the most earnest prayers: it is God’s method of revealing the hindrances to their growth, of manifesting the impediments to their spiritual power.
II. The necessity of self-judgment. Two questions meet us here--
1. If God be judging us why are we bound to judge ourselves? Because--
(1) Every chastening is a voice of mercy calling us to exercise the faculty of judgment which God has given us.
(2) Past sorrow and disappointment revealed the secrecy of the heart’s life, and the necessity for guarding that life.
(3) If we let our wonderful inner life go unwatched, we shall need continued and repeated chastisements.
2. How is this work to be accomplished? Paul implies that we have the faculty of judgment, but dare not use it; God chastens thus that He may awaken it. In trust on His education let us judge ourselves.
(1) Let us bring our spirits into His light by prayer--one flash of that light may reveal to us the meaning of our lives.
(2) Guard the springs of action--the beginnings of sin. Let a man slothfully allow himself to move in a path that is dubious, and which he fears to examine, and God will hedge in his way with thorns, and send him deep desolate sorrow, that he may not be “condemned with the world.”
III. The blessings which self-judgment would bring.
1. Confidence. But does not self-searching create doubt, and wither the energy of action? Not when exercised in the trust that God will reveal us to ourselves. “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”
2. Insight into God’s truth and love (verse 28).
(1) Those Corinthians are asleep because they did not judge themselves--asleep to all the beauty of the Christian sacrament. If we let our spirits go unwatched the beauty and power of sacraments will fade.
(2) Let us believe that God is testing us; that Christ’s light is dwelling in us; and in that belief guide our spirits and guard them; then, all God’s works will become a sacrament of love and glory! (E. L. Hull, B.A.)
Self-scrutiny
Let us consider the difficulty, the advantages, and the means of forming a correct estimate of ourselves.
I. The difficulty. The portions of our character, which it most concerns us to understand aright, are, the extent of our powers, and the motives of our conduct. But on these subjects everything conspires to deceive us.
1. No man, in the first place, can come to the examination of himself with perfect impartiality. His wishes are all necessarily engaged on his own side.
2. We can always find excuses for ourselves, which no other person can suspect. Frivolous as the apology may be, it appears satisfactory, because, while no one knows its existence, no one can dispute its value.
3. Few men venture to inform us of our real character. We are flattered, even from our cradles.
4. We fondly imagine that no one can know us as well as we know ourselves, and that every man is interested to depreciate, even when he knows, the worth of another. Hence, when reproved, it is much more easy to conclude that we have been misrepresented by envy, or misunderstood by prejudice, than to believe in our ignorance, incapacity, or guilt. Nothing, also, more directly tends to swell into extravagance a man’s opinion of his moral or intellectual worth, than to find that his innocence has, in any instance, been falsely accused, or his powers inadequately estimated.
II. The advantages.
1. An intimate knowledge of ourselves is absolutely necessary to the security and improvement of our virtue and holiness.
2. The knowledge of ourselves would preserve us from much of the calumny, the censure, and the contempt of others.
3. A man who knows himself will know more of others, than one who boasts of studying mankind by mixing with all their follies and vices.
4. Self-knowledge will preserve us from being deceived by flattery, or overborne by unmerited censure.
5. He who examines himself will learn to profit by instruction.
6. If we will judge ourselves, we shall not be judged, at least, by the Judge of heaven and earth; that is, we shall not be unprepared for the judgment-seat of Christ.
III. The means by which this knowledge may be attained.
1. Suspect yourselves. Do not be afraid of doing yourselves injustice. When you suspect, watch your conduct; and detect, if you can, your predominant motives. Depend upon it, you will struggle hard to deceive yourselves. Compare yourselves, then, with the Word of God, and with one another.
2. But, above all, look up to the Father of lights, lay yourself open to the eye of almighty mercy, and cry, “Lord, who can understand his errors? cleanse Thou me from secret faults.” (J. S. Buckminster.)
The judge within
If the question be asked, How can a presumed criminal be his own judge? the answer lies in the constitution of the human soul. Every man has within him a faculty which discharges by turns all the offices of a court of justice. Conscience is the counsel for the prosecution; it collects the evidences of guilt, sets them out, weighs their value, marshals them in their separate and collective strength, urges the conclusion to which they point. But conscience is also the counsel for the defence. Although outside the court, it stands by no means alone. It is assisted, often to its great embarrassment, by three uninvited and very importunate junior counsel, who are very nearly relate to each other--self-love, and self-conceit, and self-assertion. But yet, even on the side of the defence, conscience may sometimes have something honest and substantial to urge against the prima facie aspect of the case for the prosecution. And then, having concluded the case for the prosecution and the case for the defendant, conscience weighs out and balances the conflicting statements by a debate within itself after the fashion of a jury, as though it had many voices, but a single mind, And, once more, conscience, being thus warder, and counsel on both sides, and jury, cloths itself at last in the higher majesty of justice, ascends the seat of judgment, and pronounces the sentence of the Divine law; and when that sentence is a sentence of condemnation, and has been clearly uttered within the soul, the soul knows no peace until it has sought and found some certificate of pardon from the supreme Authority which conscience represents. Self-judgment in the sense recommended by the apostle is not as easy a process as might at first appear. It has several obstacles, several enemies to encounter who have long made themselves at home in human nature, who are certain to do their best against it. And of these the first is a want of entire sincerity, and this involves a charge, the justice of which will be always disputed, but especially when it is made against the temper and disposition of men of our own time; for, probably, there is one thing on which we pride ourselves as characterising us more than the generations who have preceded us--it is that we are the devotees of truth. It might seem that we had taken as our own the old Homeric motto, “Let us have light, even if we perish in it,” so strong is this passion for truth, so seemingly noble, so far-reaching, so actively at work in all directions, whether of public or of private life, around us! But is our passion for truth equally ardent in all directions?--is there not one quarter in which we shrink from indulging it? Is it not often the case that while we are eager to know everything, even the worst, about public affairs and the affairs of our neighbours, about persons high in state, and about our humblest acquaintances, there is one state of affairs, and there is one person about which the great majority of us is often content to be very ignorant indeed? A second enemy to a true self-judgment is moral cowardice. Observe, I say moral cowardice--a very different thing from physical. The man who could head a storming party without a minute’s hesitation is not always willing to meet his true self. If the truth is to be told, are not a great many of us like those country folk who are afraid of crossing a churchyard path after nightfall, lest they should see a ghost behind a tombstone? Our consciences are but cemeteries, in which dead memories are buried close to or upon each other in forgotten confusion. Some of you may have noticed an account of the conduct of a distinguished and learned Englishman who nearly lost his life in Egypt a short time ago. He was travelling in order to prosecute his favourite studies, and was returning to his boat on the Nile, after examining some antiquities in the neighbourhood, when he trod by chance on a cerastes--a snake of the species one of which, nineteen centuries ago, ended the life of the fallen Cleopatra. When he felt that he had been bitten, and a moment’s glance had shown him the deadly reptile, he lost not a moment in making his way to the boat, which was, happily, only a few yards distant. He called for a hot iron, and then, with his own hands, he applied it to the wound, holding it there until he had burnt out the poisoned flesh down to the very bone. “Had you acted with less decision,” so said a distinguished physician to him on his return to Cairo, “your life must have been forfeited.” With matters of conscience we, it seems, are less capable of heroism, though a great deal more is really at stake. A third enemy to a true self-judgment is the lack of perseverance. As we are constantly being tempted, and often yielding more or less to temptation, we should be constantly bringing ourselves to the bar of conscience, which is the bar of God. Unless we take care, the determination to persevere, to be true to ourselves, is likely to become weaker and more intermittent as our natural faculties decay with the progress of time. Much will take place within which will never have been reviewed on this side the grave. There have been sovereigns of earthly realms--such as the Roman Emperor Hadrian, and the Caliph Haroun Alraschid--whose senses of the responsibility of empire have been such as to compel them to do more than official duty would prescribe, to inspect their dominions and to visit their subjects as far as they could personally, perhaps in disguise, and so to relieve distress and to encourage meritorious efforts, and to correct injustice, and to promote well-being and prosperity, and thus to strengthen the defences of the Empire, and remove the motives to insurrection and disorder. And if a man, as a Christian, should be absolute ruler within and over his own body, if his conscience is true, he best self-governs as well as reigns if it does not hold its office merely at the good pleasure of a democracy of passions, each of which is playing for its own hand, and which collectively may proclaim a republic:in the soul to-morrow morning, and send their present ruler about his business--no doubt with a pension. If, I say, a triumph of all the forces of moral disorder is not to take place within the human soul, its ruler must be constantly inspecting it, constantly judging it, that he may finish his royal course with joy, and arrest the stern judgment that must else await him by thus constantly anticipating it. The motive for this self-judgment follows--“We should not be judged if we would judge ourselves.” Does this mean that a man who deals truly and severely with himself may always expect to escape human criticism? This is only very partially true. It is true, no doubt, that so far as we judge ourselves in matters which affect our intercourse with others, endeavouring to bring that intercourse into strict accord with the principles and the terms of the law of Christ, we shall diminish the opportunities for hostile criticism on this score. In this sense self-judgment brings with it in this world its own reward. In whatever degree we cultivate self-discipline--the sincere, pure, humble, kindly, patient temper which is prescribed by the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ--in that degree we diminish the friction with our brother men in the struggle of our own common life, and so we escape the judgments which such friction provokes. But it does not follow that those who judge themselves severely are thereby always excepted from the unfavourable judgments of other men, for a very large number of men not only pass judgments upon the words and acts of others of which they can take some sort of cognisance, but also, and, strange to say, with equal confidence, upon the motive and secret characters of others, of which, from the nature of the case, they can have no real knowledge whatever. Added to which the great majority of men resent, perhaps almost unconsciously, a higher standard of life and conduct than their own. When one of the greatest of the heathen set himself to consider what would happen if a really perfect man were to appear upon the earth, his decision was an unconscious prophecy. “Men,” he said, “would put such a man to death.” Men who are not themselves holy are impatient of holiness, and pass hard judgments, if they can do nothing more, on those who aim at it; and thus it has happened that all the great servants of God, although judging themselves severely, have been again and again judged by their fellowmen with much greater severity. So it has been with nearly all the finest characters in the Church of Christ. They have passed their lives constantly under a storm of calumny and insult, and only when they have left the world have they been recognised as having been what they were. Nor is this wonderful in the case of those who at their very best only approached perfection, if it was also true in His case who alone was perfect. A man, then, who judges himself severely cannot on that account expect to disarm human judgments; but he may do much more: he may anticipate, and by anticipating he may arrest, the judgments of God, for the judgments of God light not on all sinners, but only on unrepentant sinners; and self-judgment is the effect and expression of penitence--it is the effort of the soul to be true to the highest law of its own being, which is also the law of its Creator. Self-judgment shows us what we are. It does not of itself enable us to become other than we are; it does not of itself confer pardon for the past or strength to do better in the time to come. It bids us look out of and beyond ourselves to a Divine compassion which is also a Divine justice, which, if we will, we can, by that complete and whole-hearted adhesion of the soul to truth, which the Bible calls faith, make in reality and for ever our own. It makes a man pray at once more intelligently and more earnestly--more intelligently because when he has had himself up for a strict judicial investigation at the bar of his conscience he knows what he needs, not in a vague way, but in detail, and precisely instead of complaining to God in general terms of the corruption of his fallen nature--a complaint which makes him in his own estimate not worse than any of his neighbours--he lays his finger upon certain acts of evil which he, and he only, so far as he knows, has committed. He prays as for his life, and when his prayer is crowned with victory he understands what he owes to having judged himself honestly, and how, having judged himself, he will not, through God’s mercy, be judged as an unrepentant sinner at the last. (Canon Liddon.)