1 Corinthians 16:22

CHRISTIAN UNITY

‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran=atha.’

1 Corinthians 16:22

It is not against men who labour under a theological mistake that St. Paul launched his threat, but ‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha.’ That is the one unpardonable heresy—to know what the Lord Jesus Christ has done and is, and not to love Him. With that man no communion may be held, however exact his creed may be.

I. It is not that the English Church thinks little of orthodoxy; nothing can be more alien to her temper than laxity concerning the truth; she considers accurate doctrine as important as a holy life and dogmatic study to be the strong meat of living souls. And yet the acceptance of orthodoxy is not the main teaching of the Church. After telling us that none can be saved without keeping undefined the Catholic faith, she goes on to tell us what the Christian faith consists of—that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity. The most faultless set of propositions on the relations of the Divine Persons do not constitute a Catholic creed; but dogma must hush us into worship. And so the English Church writes out a summum Theologiæ, and throws out all who do not accept it; she teaches all to love and rejoice in Christ.

II. We begin then at the right end when we persuade men first and foremost to love God, and to bear patiently with them until they come, under the power of this love, to the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which the Church sees in Him. Men have tried too long to unite men on the basis of the identity of thought first and foremost. The time is surely come to unite them on the ground of a common worship. Who is there who with all his heart and unfeignedly worships the Lord Jesus Christ, bursting out with that cry, ‘Master, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel’? Who is there who, when he feels Christ near, falls prostrate in body and spirit, because he knows himself unworthy of the presence, and is yet rooted to the spot, because his love is the master of his fear, though his satisfaction and desire and love is mingled with alarm and fear and sense of unworthiness? Who is there feels his heart swell within him with joy and hope at the name of Jesus? Who is there that looks for the least motion of the finger of Christ to guide him, and who, when he sees the way whence his beloved Lord has pointed him, would pass all obstacles rather than disobey Christ by turning back? That is the man to whom every Churchman’s heart will go out as St. Paul’s did when he said, ‘Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity.’ Oh, why should there be a barricade to sunder such a man from us because he believes a few things more or a few things less than we do, or uses practices which we should not feel at liberty to use, or fears to use some which we think it right and necessary for us to use? Is not our Christian love, our love to Jesus Christ Himself, and therefore to each other, strong enough yet to bear down all these barriers and sweep them away? Dogmas we must have; but Christ died for unity, and that unity can never be promoted except through recognising one another’s devotion, and bearing with one another’s opinions, and best of all by kneeling together, living memorials of His death and passion, knowing that He is alive and among us, and that we are fed on earth with the healthy robustness of the Spirit, eating side by side, and without defilement.

III. Oh, for more love of Christ—how soon would our sins disappear! ‘Oh, to love Him,’ as À Kempis says, ‘as well as any creature can love Him. To be without Him is punishment enough.’ ‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha,’ St. Paul says. Blessed Apostle, I cannot imagine that Gospel spirit could prompt him to deliver these words as a wish or prayer, or as a curse even, on any enemy of Christ. ‘May not this form of curse be an Apostolic rhetoric?’ asks another saint. Is not the truest interpretation of this: ‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, he is Anathema Maran-atha—cursed creature’? The chilling of that blessed passion within his breast is the saddest curse, the ‘death of deaths.’ And saintly Herbert, casting about for some terrible imprecation upon himself if he ceased to love Christ, bursts out: ‘Oh, my dear God, let me not love Thee if I love Thee not.’

—Rev. Professor A. J. Mason.

Illustration

‘ “If these persons be Christians in their lives, and Christians in their practices,” cries holy Jeremy Taylor in his greatest work; “if they acknowledge the Eternal Son of God for their Master and their Lord, and live in all relations as becomes persons making such professions—why should we slight these persons who love God, whom God loves, who are partakers of Christ, who dwell in Christ and Christ in them, because their understandings have not been brought up like ours? They have not met the same books or the same company, or are not so wise, or are wiser—that is, for some reason or other for which I do not understand or blame, they do not believe as I do.” ’