Matthew 1:18-25

Chapter 2

Christ's Birth Always a Miracle The Garden of Eden the Perplexity of Joseph the Ministry of Dreams Review of the Chapter Genesis and Matthew Compared Matter Ordered: Man Educated the Moral Value of Time the Reason of Divine Delay the Two Beginnings Are One

Prayer

Almighty God, who can speak like thee? There is music in thy voice and there is infinite tenderness in every tone which thou dost breathe into the listening heart. Thy words are full of hope: thou dost bring a great brightness to shine upon our dark life, and in many a prophetic word thou dost cause us to forecast the morning and rejoice in the broad light of boundless day. Thou hast never withheld the word of hope from the race of mankind. In the hour of sadness and intolerable depression thou hast caused thy voice to be heard, promising that the light shall come and that the glory of the Lord shall fill the earth. We bless thee that we have seen the fulfilment of thy promises: we live in the cloudless noontide: Jesus Christ thy Son, our Saviour, has come in all the plenitude of his redeeming power, and after his descent upon us there can be no more night on earth. May we receive him as men receive the light who have been long waiting for it: worn out, wearied, and sleep-bound, we rejoice when thou dost come to us with rest, security, and peace. We rejoice when the light calls us to renewed duty and to rekindled hope. May the Sou of the Father, the Prince of Peace, the King of kings and Lord of lords be born again in our hearts every day. May our breasts be the Bethlehem of his incarnation, and may our life be the sphere of his illuminating and redeeming ministry.

For his great glad words we bless thee: they are sweeter to our taste than honey, yea than the honeycomb. For his simple but infinite sayings that touch our whole life how can we praise thee enough? We live upon them as upon living bread sent down from heaven; they are our joy and song, they are our strength and security, they are the answer to every hard question, they are the light which turns every mystery into a blessing. We assemble around his cross, we see the tragedy of his suffering, we feel the meaning of his agony it was for us he thus endured the cursed tree, he was delivered for our offences, he suffered, the Just for the unjust. Evermore draw us away with infinite constraint of love from the foolish delusion that we could have saved ourselves, bind us with ever deepening and ever purifying loyalty to Jesus Christ, our only Saviour, infinite in his redeeming power.

We need this gospel all our life long, but specially in hours of agony when our sin is heavy upon us and our remorse doth eat as a canker and our conscience is as a flaming fire within us, and all life gathers itself up into an unanswerable accusation. Then may we hide ourselves in thy wounded side, Messiah, Son of God. We humbly implore thee to guide us during our life. It is a life that is reckoned in days: behold it is in the power of man to tell us how many breaths there are in our seventy years. We count our small life by its single respirations we know not that we may ever draw another breath. Our house is built half over the grave, and at any time the other half may be engulfed in the great tomb. Help us then to live wisely, with sobriety of heart, with dignity of purpose, with obedience of will, having no will or mind of our own, but seeking to live thy will and to breathe all thy purpose. Thou didst make us and not we ourselves: we are thine, we are not our own, therefore would we resign to thee that which never belonged to us, and our prayer would sum itself up in this one desire, namely, not my will but thine be done.

Thou hast clothed us with great and terrible power; thou hast enabled us to blaspheme thy name; thou hast so made us that we can curse thee to thy face; thou hast given us that power, almost divine, which enables us to lift ourselves up in haughty pride and daring, so that we may challenge thy supremacy. We have played the actor well; our hypocrisy has been a life-long success; we have spoken the language of selfishness with the accent of sacrifice; we have hidden the gems and the garments we have stolen, and our wealth is a great theft. Behold our life lies naked before thee, a throbbing, black, horrible lie. Our prayers are aggravations, and our piety but a refined sin. O thou who hast the atoning blood, the riven heart, out of which alone there streams the river that can cleanse the defilement of mankind let us know the cleansing power of that precious blood.

We put ourselves and one another confidently and affectionately into thine hands: deal with us as thou dost see best: keep us here or send us yonder as may be right in thy sight, not in ours. Make our house larger and multiply our estate greatly, or diminish both and send us into blankness and poverty, if it be for our soul's health. Grant unto our counsels and devices great success and abundant honour, or drive them all back again into our open windows that they may be ours without result, if so be our life may thereby be saved.

Pity us in our distresses, laugh not at us from the heavens derisively when we try to climb and then ignominiously fall, but lift us with strong and healing hands and set us where thou wouldst have us be, and not our will but thine be done, again and again we say. We have no better prayer: it is not ours, it is thy Son's. Amen.

Matthew 1:18-25 .

18. Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary (probably an orphan, as her parents are not mentioned) was espoused (for a whole year during which the bride and bridegroom elect did not meet) to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.

19. Then Joseph her husband (so called among the Jews from the moment of betrothal), being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.

20. But while he thought (was distracted and perplexed) on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived (begotten) in her is of the Holy Ghost.

21. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS (not yet a specially sacred name); for he shall save his people from their sins.

22. Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying:

23. Behold, a virgin [ ἡ παρθένος the virgin, or "even a virgin"] shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

24. Then Joseph, being raised from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife:

25. And knew her not till she had brought forth her first-born son: and he called his name JESUS.

From this time human history takes a new departure. How otherwise would you have Christ come? You suggest a difficulty or two as to the acceptance of the story we have read: will you be good enough to suggest another story by which we shall escape all difficulty, the object being to bring into the human race a man different from all other men, and yet a Saviour and Redeemer of all mankind? How will you escape difficulty in carrying out that grand design? It is not enough for us to criticise the method by which Jesus Christ was declared to have come into the world; we ought to go one step further if we can, and that is to suggest a method which would have been clear of every difficulty, and which yet would have obviously covered the whole ground and accomplished the one supreme design. We are awaiting suggestions; as soon as the right ones come we shall know them: we cannot mistake true music, we shall know whether the wind comes along the earth and brings the earth's dust with it, or whether it comes resoundingly from the heavens and brings with it voices and utterances of the upper and better world. Observe what had to be done: a Redeemer like ourselves in all points had to be introduced into the race, and yet so unlike us as to be wholly separate from sinners. Put that problem distinctly before your mind, and answer how it could have been accomplished as a grand historical success, except on the basis which is laid down in the Evangelic narrative.

Wherever Christ is born it is a miracle. When he is born in us it is by a miraculous conception. You do not suppose that a man becomes a Christian by some simple and obvious method which anybody can suggest and which any mind can fathom and understand? When Christ is born in your heart and mine, precisely the same operation is gone through as is indicated in this opening chapter of the gospel. It is an unexpected event, it is an event brought about by the overshadowing and ministry of the Holy Ghost. It is associated with ineffable joy, it enlists the co-operation of the angels in lifting up our gladness to its true pitch of utterance. The language of the gospel is only romantic and intellectually distressing to those who bring to bear upon it nothing but the effort of an unassisted mind. Regarded sympathetically, seized emotionally, read in the light of our own individual experience, no other language can so adequately and correctly set forth the infinite wonder and the ineffable emotion as that which we find in the gospel story. Moreover, it is in the line of the divine development, it is in harmony with the creation of the first Adam: out of the dust was brought the man, out of the man was brought the woman, out of the woman was brought the Son, out of the Son is brought the Church, which is his body, the glory of his ministry, the conquest of his almighty arm. It is all one line, beginning in the dust, ending where God ends, a development historical, gradual, sequential, complete. In very deed, great is the mystery of godliness.

Human history then, I repeat, breaks away into a new line at this point, namely, the 18th verse of the first chapter of the gospel by Matthew. The great exception takes place here. From this moment human history has an upward direction, and focalises itself in a personality hitherto but dimly indicated by the voice of often enigmatical prophecy. There are such distinct points of departure in your life and mine. The point of departure, therefore, given by the Evangelist, ought not to startle us as though it had no analogy or confirmation in human experience. I object to the law which says that it can receive nothing that has not a counterpart in human consciousness and experience, because human consciousness and experience may yet have themselves to enlarge: they have not reached the highest and last point of their own development. On the other hand, I would call attention to the fact that there are a great many things within human consciousness and experience which are not distinctly recognised as being there. Why recoil from the first chapter of the book of Genesis or the first chapter of the gospel by Matthew? If I regard these chapters in a merely literal and verbal way, I am filled with distress. If I regard them sympathetically, and in the light of what takes place in the dim sanctuary of my own consciousness, I understand them every whit. That subtle old serpent, the devil, has talked to me. I do not ask the naturalist to tell me whether, by the conformation of the serpent's mouth, it was possible for the serpent to practise the utterance of articulate language: that is the question of a mountebank. The serpent has spoken with fatal eloquence to every man amongst us. Object to the figure, if you like, but the grim, stern, damning fact remains. And as to the tree in the midst of the garden, and the fiery, flaming sword and guarding cherubim, I know them. It is impossible to get back to the lost chance, it is impossible to sponge out one spot of crime, it is impossible to find the way to the tree we have once despoiled. To try it is to fight with fire, and the fire roots itself in the inextinguishable furnaces of the divine anger.

And in very deed, if I go further back still, and think of man being shaped out of the dust, I know it: I feel the dust, I feel the Deity too. I know it must have been out of the deepest dust of the earth some parts of my nature were made, and I also know that there burns within me a fire which only God could have lighted. Observe, therefore, that I do not go back with the grammarian and the pedantic etymologist and ask those teachers to be kind enough to explain to me the opening chapters of Genesis or the opening chapters of human life in any of its grand beginnings and developings. I go down there alone, all silent, all wondering, and myself is the best annotation. So it is with this opening chapter of the gospel of Matthew. Jesus Christ is born in me, and a new departure is taken in my life by processes which can never be explained in words. In your development from infancy to spiritual manhood there comes in the story this all-separating "NOW." When did it enter? You cannot tell. The chronometer has not yet been made that indicates these millionths of seconds in which great divine ministrations accomplish themselves in births that have no deaths. Have we passed from death unto life? Has Christ been born in us the hope of glory?

Read the chapter still further until you see the wonderful union in Christ of the human and the divine the human on the mother's side, the divine as indicated by the mysterious operation of the Holy Ghost. This was no imaginary Mary. This literal history was required in order to vindicate her memory from the charge of her being a merely dramatic woman. She was real, like ourselves, one of us; she lived the common human life, wept the common human tears, enjoyed the same enjoyments that fall to our lot: there is enough said about her in the gospels to prove the pure human nature of the woman, and little enough said about her not to magnify her into a feminine god. She is here long enough to be seen, understood, spoken about, attested, initialled by every witness that knows human nature, and behold she is gone! The mother of Emmanuel must not remain too long; she must be before my eye long enough for me to know that she is Mary, and none other: not a theatrical woman or a paper minister, conceived by the wild imagination of a delirious theology, but a WOMAN, a sister, a friend, a sufferer, a loving one and then she must go, and I cannot tell how. Buried without a funeral, buried without a grave, buried without an epitaph gone, and the eye cannot follow the swift movement of her translation.

As for the operation of the Holy Ghost, it begins and ends in the word miracle. Yet it, too, is a miracle which has its correspondence in our own nature. I cannot tell the source of my prayers. When I pray with you, it is not I praying, it is a voice I never heard before in that same tone. When I close my eyes to lead you upward, is it by some utterance I have committed to memory, some paragraphs I have formulated in the library, some sentences I have caught and detained as friends? God forbid. It is a birth of the Holy Ghost. The poor words, half dumb, and trembling through and through with a throb of conscious weakness, may be partly mine, but the thing they labour to say I know not. Can you tell me the genesis, and give me the roots and starting fibres of all the purposes that have distinguished your life and made it as a flame of sacred fire, burning upward unto the heavens? You can rehearse to me the history of your commerce, and even that you can give in some instances only in part, for you know not whence the brightest suggestions came. You can tell me somewhat of the outward history of your life and body during the day as to where you have been and partly what you have seen; but even then the story is remarkable mainly for its incompleteness. Behind, and around, and above there are forces and ministries which have entered as living factors in all you have done, for which you have no name forces that have broken your thigh in the night's wrestling, but left you in the morning with a nobler name.

Such is the work of the Holy Ghost. It is not to be settled in language. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof; thou canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit. We prove our birth, we do not explain it. I cannot tell you how I came to be; the Lord help every one of us to vindicate his being by temper pure as fire, by love noble as sacrifice!

There was one man who looked on with great wonder. All the ages have crowded around that man, and, so to speak, have thronged him into an infinite multitude, all looking on with the same amazement, all distracted by the same perplexity. Joseph knew not what angel was coming to him along the crooked lines of his mental distraction. We seem to be born to misunderstand everything that is at all great and noble: we cannot understand ourselves, we can give but foolish answers to all the great questions which relate to our own being and our own destiny. No man yet ever satisfied his friend fully and left him in the position in which he could ask no question or suggest no doubt regarding any movement in life which was really tragical, involving suffering when that suffering might have been escaped. You are looking at your life as a great perplexity. God delights in our embarrassments: you cannot see how this knot can be untied, and you feel that it would be impious to attempt to cut it. Be in no haste. I have had a thousand knots like that in my life. When I touched them my fingers were too soft to get hold of the lines that bound them together in hardness. When I have called for steel, I have been guilty consciously of a coward's trick, and the angel has said, "Do not cut it: let it alone: the answer of all things is not yet; in due time that knot shall prove itself to be part of the strange but ever beneficent ministry of the divine and Holy Father."

A most remarkable reason is given why the name should be called Jesus. Referring to the 21st verse, you will find that the reason is, "for he shall save his people from their sins." Christ is the only man known in history who was born with specific and exclusive reference to the sins of the human family. He does not come into the race with a small programme. The world had sickened at its heart of programmes an inch long; in its intolerable soreness of soul it could not have endured another. Make way: here is a man who is going to remove the dust from our house windows. We are glad to see him. Make way again: here is a man who is going to remove the dust from our doorstep. Welcome to him also. Again and again make way for a thousand men, each of whom has a short purpose and a superficial programme. So far as they go we bid each a cordial welcome. But when all the thousand have done their little work, and have gone away from our door, we feel that ANOTHER must come with some fuller purpose, with some grander ministry. I thank all men who have done anything for me, but there is a fire in me that is burning up my life who is to put that out? For all temporary mitigations of suffering I am thankful, but there is an asp biting my soul and I am dying of its injected poison. Who can touch a mind diseased? This Son of Mary, Son of God, comes with the avowed purpose of doing this very thing I want to have done. By so much, therefore, as he even seems to rise to the dignity of the occasion, I hail him, for he has caught the genius of my malady perhaps he may bring with him the one remedy. If he had made light of my disease, I should have run away from him, for he had not then understood me. If he had come with light and jaunty words upon his lips, I should have called him liar, and found the evidence in his tone. But when he meets me he says the case is grave, the case is fatal, the disease is sin, the malady is in the soul, the blood is tainted, the life is rotten, the burden is grievous. I say to him, as a mere man, "Sir, thou understandest me: what is the answer to all this suffering?" And when he says "Blood" I feel that we are grappling with a Man that has at all events the right words. Let him prove them then will he be the crowned Saviour of the race, and his name shall be worn by no thief, but by himself only, every other Jesus forgotten in him whose surname is Christ.

All that we have now read was done in fulfilment of prophecy. God does not work extemporaneously, the suddenness of his movements is only apparent; every word he says comes up from eternity around the birth-place of Jesus Christ. There assembled the prophets and the minstrels of ancient time. "All this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet." The prophets were misunderstood men; they seemed to sing a song which found an entrance into no heart. Their forecasts were met with derisive laughter, their vaticinations were but the plaints of a disordered and unbalanced mind, and many a time, wrapping their mantles around them, travel-stained, they lay down, saying, "Would God the prophetic afflatus had never moved me to speech." Prophets always suffer. It is a crucifixion to be born before your time. Happy he who speaks the language of the day: popular as a god is he. The man who projects himself by divine energy through centuries ahead, dies a thousand deaths. The prophets suffered for us: Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and the mighty tribe of men who never spake to their own day, but shot their thunder voices across the ages, died for us. They have their reward. I cannot think of them as dead dust, scattered upon the winds and going to make up some other man's grave, and there an end of them. I must, following the instinct of justice and nobleness of compensation, think of them as seeing the triumphs they predicted, and turning into songs all the tears and woes that afflicted them during their misunderstood ministry.

Joseph was put to sleep by God, and was talked to through the medium of a dream. It is God's old plan: He puts us into a deep sleep, and behold when we come out of it, there is the beautiful companionship of our life standing before us, or there is the great answer to a small difficulty that turned our life into a sharp pain, or there is the way out of an entanglement difficult as a labyrinth, puzzling as a thicket, devised by all the cunning cruelty of our worst enemies. Sometimes I have done as you have; many a time fallen off into sleep, quite unable to do the work that was pressing upon me. A refreshing slumber has blessed the brain, has wound it up in every energy and force, and the awakening has been as a resurrection, and we have gone to the work that defied us, and lo, in the hands recovered by sleep there has been cunning enough to lift the burden, or to dispel the difficulty, and we, who had fainted in weariness, rejoiced in a renewed and apparently inexhaustible strength.

We are most alone when we are asleep. God loves to speak to us in our loneliness. We are more spiritual when we are are asleep than when we are awake. When I am awake I have to do with all this world; I am lost and dazed amid countless eyes that are watching; I am struck by a million wonders that challenge my attention; my ears are filled with countless noises that fall upon one another and make rough tumult in my soul. God says to me, "Come into the darkness, and I will close thine eyelids and speak to thee alone." If you ask me if I believe in dreams, taking the word dream in its wholeness, I say no: if you ask me if I believe in particular dreams, I say yes. Who would give up his dream life? In the dream life we are larger than in our waking hours. In dream I float through the air by easy and pleasant levitation; I move across difficulties I dare not encounter when I am awake. In dreams I step from star to star and cross the horizon at a bound. I know that these things appear to me in alight almost laughable when I awake, yet in my better thinking I get out of them hints, hints that startle me, make me think of possibilities which never come within the dull routine of life, and which have no place in the reckonings of the book-makers.

Thank God for sleep, thank God for dreams, thank God for every ministry that gets you out of your littleness. If any minister of God in any church can charm you away from your counter and your desk, and make you feel even for one moment that the universe is larger than you had supposed it to be, go and hear that man: he is your soul's true friend. If by tone of the voice, if by vehemence of appeal, if by tender ness of prayer, he can turn you to an upward look, he is God's minister to your soul. Love him, honour him. You may disagree with him in many of his words, some of his propositions you may be quite unable to accept from an intellectual point of view; again and again he may provoke you into controversy by statements that appear to you either rash or irreconcilable; but by as much as he has the power to make you look up and see God's wonders in the heavens, and to excite in you a desire to be broader and nobler than you are, is he the anointed minister of God to you, and should be received as such. I read the books that make me larger, I follow the authors that tell me of bigger things than I have yet seen, I love the souls that lure me into sleep that is enriched with dreaming, that extends the horizon, and doubles the stars, and heightens the sky in which they shine. From such companionship I return saying, "I have seen heaven's gate open to-day, and there are lines in this universe that were never dreamed of before in my philosophy."

Thus, then, Jesus Christ comes into the world. We have now, from time to time, to follow him in his wondrous ministry. I will not attempt to prove the miracle of the incarnation by any verbal argument, but I will ask him to meet us here morning by morning, and to vindicate, by the eloquence of his own speech and the marvellousness of his own action, the claim that is set up for him in this chapter that he is at once the Son of Mary and the begotten of the Holy Ghost.