Gloria Crucis: addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907Beibitz, J. H. (Joseph Hugh)
Religion
Gloria Crucis: addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907
Beibitz, J. H. (Joseph Hugh)
Good Friday sermons; Holy Week sermons
1. But we do well to remind ourselves, at the very outset, that our aim
is not merely intellectual, but also practical. There is no real gain
arising from the knowledge of Christ's Mind and Will, save so far as that
knowledge enables us to make that Mind and Will our own mind and our own
will. _That_ is the very meaning of Christian discipleship. "Let this
mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."
2. The end thus set before us is one capable of attainment by all. The
individual, indeed, cannot hope to realise that end completely by
himself. The embodiment of Christ's Mind and Will is the supreme task
and the final achievement of the whole Body of Christ. The purpose of
the long development of the Church on earth is, that "we should _all_
(not _each_) arrive at a perfect man, at the measure of the stature of
the fulness of the Christ." The whole Church, the Body in its
completeness, is meant to reflect back in the eyes of the Father, the
moral glory of the Son of man. Each individual has been called into
membership in the Body, in order that he might reflect some one of the
scattered rays of that glory; might embody in himself one aspect of the
infinite perfection of the Son of man. So would each of us truly "come
to himself," realise all that he is capable of becoming.
That progress of the Body of Christ towards its goal is described by St.
Paul as being a growth of the Christ Himself. He is "at all points in
all men being fulfilled." There is a true and important sense in which
the Incarnation is as yet incomplete, in which the life-history of the
Church is its growing completeness. Our individual task is the
realisation in ourselves of that part of the Christ life which we,
individually, have been created to embody.
3. It will be useful to sum up the Character, the Mind and Will of
Christ, in a single phrase. Consider how He impressed His
contemporaries. What was it which they saw in Him, who knew Him best,
and had been united to Him by close ties of comradeship and discipleship?
In one word, what they saw was Sonship. "We beheld His glory, as of an
Only-Begotten from a Father." The Mind and Will of Christ are the
perfect realisation of the Divine Sonship in our humanity.
But what is the meaning of God's Fatherhood and man's sonship? The
ultimate truth of the relationship, the truth which underlies all such
conceptions as care, love, obedience, is community of nature. Our human
nature is really akin to the Divine. We are sons of God because our
spiritual life is of one piece with His as derived from it. Baptism
introduces no new element into our nature. By sacramental union with the
Only Begotten, the Ground and Archetype of all sonship, it enables us to
realise that which is in us, to actually become that which, potentially,
we are. It gives us "power to become children of God," to attain the
meaning of our manhood, to regain our true selves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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