2. The substance of the commission is this : " Be ye reconciled to God." To sue for love, to beg that an enemy will put away his * Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Ca/iiterbv/ry, i. 408.
2o8 AMBASSADORS FOR CHRIST
enmity is the part of the inferior rather than of the superior, is the part of the offender rather than of the offended ; is the part of the vanquished rather than of the victor ; is the part, surely, not of the king but of the rebel. And yet here, in the sublime transcend- ing of all human precedent and pattern which characterizes the Divine dealing, we have the places of the suppliant and of the sup- plicated inverted, and Love upon the Throne bends down to ask of the rebel that lies powerless and sullen at His feet, and yet is not conquered until his heart be won, though his limbs be manacled, that he would put away all the bitterness out of his heart, and come back to the love and the grace which are ready to pour over him. "He that might the vengeance best have taken, finds out the remedy." He against whom we have transgressed prays us to be reconciled ; and the Infinite Love lowers Himself in the lowering which is, in another aspect, the climax of His exaltation, to pray the rebels to accept His amnesty.
Conceive a king with an overwhelming power — furnished with everything to command success, able, at any moment, to crush the rebellious force which had outraged him in every possible way — just on the eve of taking the most complete vengeance, at the very height of his supremacy, and in the moment of the surest con- fidence of his victory, sending forth a flag of truce to the enemy — and in the most suppliant and endearing terms, for no advantage of his own, but entirely for that enemy's sake — beseeching an embassy and a reconciliation. Conceive that the result of that proposition, if accepted, is nothing less than the elevation of that pardoned state, to all the privileges and dignities which its captor could bestow, even to the position of equality with his own dearest and most obedient children. Conceive that so dear was this reconciliation to that all-conquering monarch, that, to com- pass it, he spared not his dearest and his best, and that even when his well-beloved son had been murdered by the treachery of those to whom he was bearing the white flag of his father's clemency, still he continued to send forth more messengers with the same offers, and never ceased to use all the arguments, and to take on himself the suitor's part, as though he were the guilty one ! What an unparalleled passage that would be in the history of man ! And yet, what is that to the grandeur of this simple fact here set forth, " We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ,
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as though God were intreating by us : we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God " ?
^ I read the other day that a father in Watford last year was greatly troubled about his son, who had gone wrong, and who was now ill and despondent and wrote to him, very tremblingly and fearfully, as if to ask whether there was any hope. The father sent a telegram to him, and the telegram consisted of one word ; the one word was " Home," and it was signed " Father." Now the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is God's telegram to the sinful world, summed up in one word, " Home," and signed by one name, " Father." ^
3. The message is for all men. The supplement which stands in our Authorized Version in this text is a misleading and un- fortunate one. " As though God did beseech you " and " we pray you " unduly narrow the scope of the Apostolic message, and con- fuse the whole course of the Apostolic reasoning here. For he has been speaking of a world which is reconciled to God, and he finds a consequence of that reconciliation of the world in the fact that he and his fellow-preachers are entrusted with the word of reconciliation. The scope of their message, then, can be no narrower than the scope of the reconciliation ; and, inasmuch as that is world-wide, the beseeching must be co-extensive therewith, and must cover the whole ground of humanity. It is a universal message that is set forth here. The Corinthians, to whom St. Paul was speaking, are, by his hypothesis, already reconciled to God, and the message which he has in trust for them is given in the subsequent words : " We then, as workers together with God, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain." But the message, the pleading of the Divine heart, " be ye recon- conciled to God," is a pleading that reaches over the whole range of a reconciled world.
^ In 1854, when the British fleet was lying in Nagasaki Bay, the Japanese Government was extremely anxious that we should not land, and General Wakasa was appointed to watch the fleet and to prevent the British troops from landing. It happened that, as he rowed about the bay in fulfilment of his duty, some careless sailor on one of those English men-of-war had dropped his New Testament overboard. Probably he cared very little for his New Testament and he parted with it without any regret.