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The Unchanging Christ.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever. — Heb. xiii. 8.
1. The author of this Epistle wrote some thirty-five years after the crucifixion, almost at the climax of a time of change, when his fellow-Hebrews were isolated and disheartened. They had cast off the exclusive religion of the Temple with its splendid ritual and its ties of family and race, and instead had what must often have seemed the disappointing insignificance of Christian ceremonial and the separation from many an association both of personal love and of national patriotism. Persecution was surround- ing them : the gravest dangers, the most insistent terrors, seemed to be at hand. And the eschatological hope on which some may have built had not been fulfilled. Christ had not returned in glory; and there were no signs of His return or His triumph. The religious atmosphere of the Hebrew Christians was charged with doubt and disappointment and loneliness. It was at such a time that a teacher, a man of their own, with the love and in- spiration of the Old Covenant behind him, had the courage not only to point out that the Law was in its essence transitory and the Gospel the fulfilment of the whole purpose of God's creative act and man's historic development, but also to declare that the crucified Nazarene, made a shame among men, was the same through whom in the beginning the worlds were made, and who through all His suffering life on earth. His rejection and death, and the absence from His people which now tried their faith — yes, He was the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. If it is bold to say those words now, it was almost incredibly bold to say them then, when Christianity had won no great visible triumphs, but was embodied only in a small, despised, lonely sect.
2. The words of the text are not the words of a bigoted opponent of salutary change. They are not the great formula which
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is to disguise the little policy of mere obscurantism. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews must have sustained among his brethren the difficult and suspected role of a religious innovator. He was the author and advocate of a new theology. All this adds immensely to the significance of his declaration. He lays hold of the fixed factor in Christianity, that which is the indis- pensable postulate of every sound theology, and the verifying element in all theologies ; and he offers it as the justification of his novel teaching, and the palladium of Christian faith. The Temple, he tells his Jewish fellow-disciples, will perish ; all that the Temple symbolizes and enables will pass away: Jerusalem will be desolate, and the religion of national privilege, which has found its centre there, will come to an end ; but this demolition of sacred institutions and time-honoured traditions will not touch the core of their faith, nay, it will enable them to realize more truly what that core of their faith really is. They will find that the springs of spiritual life are in no system, but in the person of the Lord, in whom every system must find meaning, apart from whom all systems are nothing.
I.
A Changing World and an Unchanging Christ.
1. We scarcely need an inspired book to remind us of those laws of change which are written alike upon the earth and upon the firmament that overarches it. No wonder that Oriental mystics have come to look upon the things that address our senses as shows and phantasms, for we are never permitted to forget their transiency. How the face of the world has changed, and will still change ! Life is but a thin green strip that unites two unexplored deserts; that which lies behind is silence, and that which lies before is death. The solid stars are but shadows, and could we watch them long enough, they would vanish like the shadows which lie for a few brief hours across our streets. The suns in the vault of heaven are bubbles of gas on those mystic and unmeasured tides of force which flow through space, and were our life less ephemeral we should see them collapse and pass away. Li comparison with the fleeting phenomena which
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environ us, Christ is the enduring substance, the reality which pei'sists unchanged through all change. " They shall perish, but thou remainest."
By the very law of contrast, and by the need of finding sufficient reason for the changes, we are driven from the con- templation of the fleeting to the vision of the permanent. Blessed are they who, in a world of passing phenomena, penetrate to the still centre of rest, and looking over all the vacillations of the things that can be shaken, can turn to the Christ and say, " Thou who movest all things art Thyself unmoved ; Thou who changest all things, Thyself changest not." As the moon rises slow and silvery, with its broad shield, out of the fluctuations of the oceans, 80 the one radiant Figure of the all-sufficient and immutable Lover and Friend of our souls should rise for us out of the billows of life's tossing ocean, and come to us across the seas.
^ " The Same," Among the mediseval mystics that term was in use as a title for the Eternal. They called Him " the Same." They spoke of knowing " the Same," of taking refuge in " the Same." Amidst the restless drift and flux of phenomena they saw in God, and rightly saw, the anchorage they craved. And for us also, in the Son of God, eternal as the Father in His majesty and in His mercy, there is rest and refuge in the thought that He, this Lord Christ Jesus, now and for ever, is "the Same." 1