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SERMON XII.

PALM SUNDAY.

66

PHILIPPIANS, ii. 8.

Being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”

WE are come near to that season, when those mighty things happened, of which the Epistle reminds us. It tells of the voluntary humiliation of the Son of God. Now this week it was, that His humiliation was completed.

Let us consider wherein it lay. It had three several stages. It consisted of Our Lord's Incarnation, His servitude, and His death. The first of these was by far the greatest of all. For that Our Lord should become man, was a far greater descent, than that when He was man He should suffer contempt and death. Contempt and death are man's natural portion; but to be conjoined to weak manhood is not natural to God. Therefore, to descend from the glory of heaven, to unite the

native majesty of His inconceivable Godhead to the infirmity of human flesh, was a far wider step than that other from the manger at Bethlehem to the cross. This service Our Lord mercifully undertook, that He might bring the glory and excellence of Godhead, and leaven therewith the whole lump of man's defiled being. All holiness must come from God, as well as all knowledge; and the only channel through which they come, is that man's nature of Christ Our Lord which He took, that He who was one with the Father, might be one also with us. This is the true Jacob's ladder, whereby heaven and earth are joined together.

And in this act we have the greatest instance of Our Lord's condescension, because it was the humiliation (if we may so express it) of His Godhead. The Godhead itself was so far humbled as to be one with our flesh. Whatever glory could be ascribed to Christ, when He came into this lower world; if all the earth had greeted Him as its head, if all mankind had bowed the knee before Him, had admitted His rule, had obeyed His commandments still it would not the less have been a humbling of His divine nature, that it should in any wise have been associated to our flesh. The event, then, which was revealed to the Blessed Virgin in the hour of the Annunciation, which that feast recalls to our thoughts, was the greatest of all acts of Our Lord's humiliation. The first step from heaven to earth was greater than

any by which it was succeeded. He was made

man.

And now comes the second step-Our Lord's servitude. When He made Himself of no reputation, it was by taking upon Him the form of a servant. He did not come in the pomp of worldly magnificence, clothing Himself with whatever glory belongs to this earth which He had made, He was not born into an house which possessed ancient wealth or present authority, but a lowly roof sheltered His cradle, and His Body was laid in an ordinary grave. And as this was the case in the first stage of His life, and in its last one, so in all which which went between. "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not."

And not only did the men whom He had made reject Him, but He seldom exercised His power even over the creatures, of whose existence He was the only cause. Though air and earth owed their being to Him, yet He consented to live upon their bounty, as though He were one of their common pensioners. Certain women who followed Him out of Galilee, "ministered unto Him of their substance." The wonderworking power, which He exerted so freely for the conviction of others, was never exerted for His own support. He employed no guard, though His effectual voice could at any moment have summoned twelve legions of angels to His aid. Wherefore should this be so? That Our Lord

might put on the

perfectness of that man's nature, which he shared with ourselves. "It became Him, by whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings." Had He called in the succour of that external power, of which He was never deprived, His man's being would not have trodden the perfect road of humanity. One effect indeed His Godhead must needs possess: through the union of that Divine perfection, of which He could not be destitute, manhood was in Him alone free from the weakness, and therefore from the sinfulness, which in all other cases belongs to it. But He did not resort to His divine power to ward off those assaults of pain, or hunger, or temptation, by which His manhood was attacked. "He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin."

And since He chose to tread the path of man's life in its completeness, it made little difference what path He chose. The paths of life, it is true, seem to us to be far removed but they all meet in the grave. One man has wealth, honour, health: sickness, want, and forgetfulness, are allotted to another but both must die. Death is the grand leveller. Men who owned the widest fields, take no more room than their neighbours in the grave. Now to a divine Being, a Being who is eternal, to whom a thousand years are as one day, how infinitely insignificant must be such shortlived dis

tinctions. All talents are valuable no doubt, if men use them for God's glory and their neighbours' good; but in themselves how infinitely insignificant they are. It was but a small thing, therefore, that He who stooped so wonderfully to be a man, should have stooped low enough to be a man of griefs. He took our common nature in its most usual form. He was a man of the people. Nay, he was poorest among the poor. He had not where to lay His head. His taking manhood at all was the humbling of His Divine nature, and as man He further stooped to be beholden to His brethren. "He took upon Him the form of a servant."

And yet there was one step more of humiliation, which is recorded in the text. "He became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross." "He hid not His face from shame and spitting." "In His humiliation His judgment was taken away." He was doomed by unjust judgment to a cruel and disgraceful death. He shared the portion of malefactors, as though He had been participator in their transgressions. This was the crowning act of all: the last stage in the history of His condescension. That He should have allowed His soul to be separated from His body, should have submitted to that awful and mysterious process which awaits us all, when the succours of reason fail, and the light of life burns down into its socket, and man's spirit is torn away

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