Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.MacDonald, George
Religion
Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.
MacDonald, George
Sermons, English -- 19th century
With this in view, I ask you to think how much God must know of which
we know nothing. Think what an abyss of truth was our Lord, out of
whose divine darkness, through that revealing countenance, that
uplifting voice, those hands whose tenderness has made us great, broke
all holy radiations of human significance. Think of his understanding,
imagination, heart, in which lay the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Must he not have known, felt, imagined, rejoiced in things that would
not be told in human words, could not be understood by human hearts?
Was he not always bringing forth out of the light inaccessible? Was not
his very human form a veil hung over the face of the truth that, even
in part by dimming the effulgence of the glory, it might reveal? What
could be conveyed must be thus conveyed: an infinite More must lie
behind. And even of those things that might be partially revealed to
men, could he talk to his Father and talk to his disciples in
altogether the same forms, in altogether the same words? Would what he
said to God on the mountain-tops, in the dim twilight or the gray dawn,
never be such that his disciples could have understood it no more than
the people, when the voice of God spoke to him from heaven, could
distinguish that voice from the inarticulate thunderings of the
element?
There is no attempt made to convey to us even the substance of the
battle of those forty days. Such a conflict of spirit as for forty days
absorbed all the human necessities of _The Man_ in the cares of the
Godhead could not be rendered into forms intelligible to us, or rather,
could not be in itself intelligible to us, and therefore could not take
any form of which we could lay hold. It is not till the end of those
forty days that the divine event begins to dawn out from the sacred
depths of the eternal thought, becomes human enough to be made to
appear, admits of utterance, becomes capable of being spoken in human
forms to the ears of men, though yet only in a dark saying, which he
that hath ears to hear may hear, and he that hath a heart to understand
may understand. For the mystery is not left behind, nor can the speech
be yet clear unto men.
At the same moment when the approaching event comes within human ken,
may from afar be dimly descried by the God-upheld intelligence, the
same humanity seizes on the Master, and he is an hungered. The first
sign that he has come back to us, that the strife is approaching its
human result, is his hunger. On what a sea of endless life do we float,
are our poor necessities sustained--not the poorest of them dissociated
from the divine! Emerging from the storms of the ocean of divine
thought and feeling into the shallower waters that lave the human
shore, bearing with him the treasures won in the strife, our Lord is
straightway an hungered; and from this moment the temptation is human,
and can be in some measure understood by us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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