2 Corinthians 4:17-18

AN ESTIMATE OF SUFFERING

‘Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.’

2 Corinthians 4:17

The key to this passage, with its triumphant confidence, lies in the words ‘while we look.’ It was the Apostle’s gaze upward and onward which put the things present into their true focus. For all magnitudes are best measured by comparison. While we look at the Alps, the great cathedral at their base is dwarfed into insignificance. While we ponder on the stupendous wonders of the starry heavens, this world of ours seems but a speck. So was it with St. Paul. While he looked away from the seen and temporary and gazed at the eternal; while he turned from the trials of this brief life and thought upon the weight of glory, then the present, with its sorrows and suffering, appeared not worthy of comparison with the tremendous issues which the future disclosed.

I. St. Paul’s spiritual elevation was evidently the product of certain beliefs.

(a) He believed in immortality, and in the light of that belief he measured the significance of this present life.

(b) He had the conviction that his work was given to him by God. There was a consequent touch of the eternal in it all. He knew that his everyday life was of a piece with that unseen world of perfect glory into which his Lord had entered. The effect of this was to produce magnanimity, courage, power.

II. Was St. Paul right?—Can we vindicate his confidence, or was he but a dreamer? We may be quite assured that the good soldier did receive the crown of life, which to his dying eyes seemed ready to drop upon his brow. To doubt this would be to doubt God; but we have no voice from the unseen telling us it was so. Yet we may gain from other sources such proofs that his sacrifice was not in vain as may, to that extent, vindicate his splendid confidence. For had St. Paul seen what were then among the things unseen, and beheld the results which his labours and sufferings would secure even in this life; had he been able to catch the echoes which his life and work would awaken age after age, with what increased firmness would he have spoken of the lightness of his afflictions compared with the glorious consequences of his toil. For Christendom has been created by him more than by any mere man. As we look back on the two thousand years that have passed since the lonely and distressed man wrote this letter to Corinth, we can vindicate his estimate. For where are now the ‘things seen’—the wealth, pleasure, and power, for which men were then struggling after as the only things worth striving for? Verily, the ‘things seen’ were indeed temporary, but the unseen world of righteousness and of Christ is eternal. If St. Paul’s confidence has been vindicated even by the immortality of his work on earth, how infinitely more must it have been vindicated in that world in which he enjoys the blessedness of the saints in light!

III. This passage has much helpful teaching for ourselves, especially for those enduring suffering or sorrow. The estimate we form of these will depend on what we fix the eye upon. Our trials may be in themselves anything but light. It would be wrong to shut our eyes to their significance even if we could do so. St. Paul not only realised his trials, but he often dwells on them, and weighs them one by one as very real.

(a) The change of feeling is great when we change our point of view—or, as the Apostle puts it, ‘while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen.’ To the Christian who rises on the wings of faith above the pressure of what is close at hand, and thinks of the eternal, the sufferings of the present fall into their right place, and he will be able to say, however falteringly, ‘This is but for a moment; when I shall look back upon it all a thousand years hence it will appear like some passing trouble of infancy. It is also good to look at the magnitudes of existence in order to measure aright the value of our present aims and ambitions, and to consider what there is in them which will last. In that great future it will be of little consequence whether we are now rich or poor, famous or unknown. These are not the things which shall abide. But whether we are loving or selfish, pure or impure, serving God and our brother men or our own wills and our lusts and passions, these are the matters of real importance.

(b) It is only as we look upward and onward that our trials work for us ‘an exceeding weight of glory.’ Difficulty and trial have as little inherent power to benefit us as the wind has to benefit the ship; everything depends on the direction in which she is being steered; and whether the things of life shall work together for our good or not similarly depends on the objects we are following. They will work together for the highest good only when we love God, and are governed by the vision of the unseen and eternal.

(c) The encouragement these verses give for nobler living. The life of faith led by St. Paul ought to sound like a trumpet note stimulating to duty in an age when there are so many temptations to exchange the spiritual for the material.

Illustrations

(1) ‘It requires the power of the Holy Spirit to persuade the sensualist, the thoughtless trifler, the over-anxious man of business, that his pursuits are unsatisfactory and insufficient to make him happy, but there is one quality which pervades them all, which every one must acknowledge and feel to be true, they are short, they endure for a little while and then vanish away. Let this simple truth sink down into all your hearts, let the remembrance of it haunt your gayest and most thoughtless moments, and when you are eagerly pursuing your pleasures and feel your heart entwined with some earthly object, say within yourself: This is all but for a season, it is merely temporal; it may be agreeable to my earthly nature, but it may be taken from me in a moment, and then if I have loved these things that are seen, the things of this world, more than the things that are not seen, more than God and the truths of His religion, what will become of me, where shall I be?’

(2) ‘We do not admit that to live mainly for the unseen world is to inflict damage—upon the whole and in the long run—on man’s life in this. The case is in part parallel to that which many a parent encounters in the matter of education. The parent sometimes grudges the years that are spent at school and at college, when his boy might be earning his bread and perhaps doing something for the family. But if the boy is worth his salt the delay will justify itself. The larger cultivation of the mind will bring with it in due time its full reward—in wider views of life, in keener and more practised faculties, in a power of acting with and upon other men that could not otherwise have been secured.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE WITNESS OF THE SAINTS

The familiarity of these words conceals their real boldness from us. They challenge our normal and unreflecting way of looking at life. The things which are seen, in the midst of which we live and move, seem to us to be vivid, substantial, real; the things which are unseen, of which we only catch rare visions, seem to be unsubstantial, unreal, illusive. Yet our deepest conscience tells us, when we think in quiet moments, that the converse is really true, that the things which are seen pass away, and that the things which are unseen endure. We know that we cannot rightly estimate human life and character in history by outward things, by visible successes, by actual results, but only by the witness which it gives to inward ideals. As to ourselves, our conscience tells us we must look, not without, but within. All my thought, all my struggle, all I could not be, all men ignored in me, is my worth to God. The one life which we know to have been true is that Life which sacrificed the things which were seen on the Cross of failure in loyal witness to the things which are unseen.

We all know of men and women who have lived, and of triumphs which have been won in the world which is seen; we know, too, of the sharing of toil and of effort of those who have themselves manifestly risen above their struggles, and it has been as if there had been a tranquil secret which had upheld and uplifted them, through their constant communion with the Unseen. Such lives are of unspeakable value; they preserve the truth of our travelling condition, that here ‘we have no abiding city.’ They have been helped from making the mistake, so pitifully natural, of surrendering to the claim of the visible present their birthright to the unseen eternal.

As the years pass we have the greater need of the great memory which is thus given to us. Let me point out three ways in which the legacy of good lives points to our particular need.

I. We have need of the profound sense of reverence.—Blinded by the development of material comforts, perplexed by the atmosphere of discussion and of controversy, it is hard to realise of this our life that from the great deep of God to the great deep of God it goes. It is a help to such a realisation to remember lives which were penetrated through and through with the self-abasing reverence of God.

II. We need the witness to the supreme fact of the Incarnation.—All over the world the ground is clearing for a great issue between a vague Christianity, warmed by admiration for Christ, and a Christianity which is to declare that in Him was God Almighty made manifest, and through Him man was raised to communion with God. In India and China, in lands of the past and of the future, Christianity is asked to part with the doctrine of the Incarnation. Just as in the fourth century when this attack was made, when the temptation assails the Church, it will be a help to many to remember that the greatest intellect of the nineteenth century [Mr. Gladstone] resolutely placed himself with Athanasius. It was the inspiration of his politics. His faith in the honour of humanity, in the truth and the justice of the instincts of the people, sprang from the Incarnation, and it was the inspiration of his personal life that through all his desires and ambitions there was the presence and the comradeship of God in Christ.

III. There is a third lesson, and that is the stern reality of sin.—‘What is the greatest need of the century?’ Mr. Gladstone was asked on one occasion. ‘The sense of sin,’ he replied. Unless there is the sense of sin, the whole edifice of redeeming grace, the home of so many deep and high expectations of the human race, dissolves into a dream. Man cannot long for a Saviour without he feels the need of a Saviour, unless he feels the sense of sin. We need to remember the necessity for a realisation of sin and of the need of pardon as being the primary essential in the things which are unseen.

Deep reverence, trust in the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, humble penitence, all springing up into the ardent joy of a real faith, this is the threefold message. May we thus learn ‘to look not on the things which are seen, but on the things which are unseen, which are eternal.’

—Archbishop Lang.

(THIRD OUTLINE)

PROFILE OR FULL FACE

The world is divided apparently into two hostile camps. There are those whom we may call eternalists, and there are those whom we may call temporalists, and they say, ‘We never can meet. We must belong to either one camp or the other; we are enemies rather than friends and neighbours.’ And there is the mischief, there is where the harm has been done, and Christianity has been so much misunderstood, and people who do not see what we are making for have been given a distaste and a disrelish for the spiritual.

I. The profile of Christianity.

(a) The eternalists.—There are the eternalists. We cannot do without them. They have seen the unseen. They have had a secret whispered to them that has altered the whole tone and meaning of their life. They are very beautiful in their lives. They have seen something of the Christ, but it is a profile and Christianity is full-faced. Therefore, too, they lack something that the temporalist can and must teach them. They become unpractical because they do not see both sides of the face of Christianity. Living in the unseen, they remind us of what we should otherwise forget. God multiply their number exceedingly, only let them learn from looking at the other side of the face of Christianity. Christianity, like the Christ, is both Divine and human, and the temporalists have something that they have seen if they are in earnest, which is necessary, that the full-faced Christ may be embraced by the individual soul.

(b) The temporalists.—There are, of course, the temporalists who sneer at all that is unseen and eternal, that do not believe in the very existence of a clever Christian. The man who disbelieves and sneers at the unseen because it is unseen is scarcely worth dealing with. But there are hundreds of men and women who are facing the temporal who say, ‘God has placed me in the temporal; I have to get my living in the temporal. The seen, it is awful, it is close, it presses upon me. Does it all belong to man, does it all belong to evil?’ And to the temporalist we say in the name of Christianity, ‘Yes, you are right. You are living in the temporal. You have seen the profile of the Christ, you have seen one side of the face of Christianity, but there is more for you to see. There is something that you may learn from the eternalist, if only you will shake hands together and be friends instead of deadly foes.’

II. The full face of Christianity.—We say to both, ‘There is a third camp, a third position, and it is to be found in a full-faced Christianity. It is the Christianity of the Nicene Creed, that reminds us that God is the Maker of all things, visible and invisible, the temporal and the eternal, the seen and the unseen; that God loves the temporal; that at the Incarnation He threw His mantle over the seen and the earthly, the sphere of your life and of my life. God is the God of the streets as well as of the churches. God is the God of the present as well as of the future. The temporal and the eternal were never meant to be pitted one against the other, but the temporal is like a road leading to the eternal, and we must keep the road in good repair if we would ever get to our journey’s end.’ So, again, we would say to the eternalist, ‘Now, do not undervalue the temporal, do not frighten people away from religion and away from Christianity by underestimating the forces of the seen, the life that God has yoked you to live in.’ The temporal has an ethical value of its own, and we cannot afford to lose it. And to the temporalist we say this, ‘Look beyond.’ The temporal and the eternal are meant to be in apposition, not in opposition. The things that are seen and the things that are unseen both belong to God, and both find their place in a full-faced Christianity.

—Rev. Canon Holmes.

Illustrations

(1) ‘There was an old motto of Charles 5 that he was fond of in the latter part of his life as when he was in active work: Plus ultra, he would say, plus ultra, more beyond. There is more beyond the temporal, there is more beyond that which we can explain by the seen, by that which surrounds us. Plus ultra, we would say to you. Look at Christianity as a full-faced picture, both sides of the face, the eternal and the temporal, and your life will be full of meaning and it will be full of joy.’

(2) ‘This is what the English people of days gone by have set before us to-day as something to be aimed at. Take some great expression such as ‘the Court of St. James’s.’ You see how it combines the eternal and the temporal. There is the world at its height. There is the expenditure of money, of wealth, there is the Court; but there in that name we are reminded that it was held in a place dedicated to St. James, a place wherein was a hospital where lepers were cared for and tended. Still we keep the name, still must we keep the idea. Again, St. Stephen’s, Westminster. There is the House of Commons, there is the business of the nation transacted day by day as Parliament meets, but it is all on a spot where once there was a chapel which King Stephen dedicated to his namesake, the proto-martyr, St. Stephen, ever combining the eternal and the temporal. Or Americans may like to be reminded how their country, too, will ever preach the same lesson as the English nation preaches. Go back in thought to the day when Columbus discovered that new land. What is the first thing he does? He plants a wooden cross on the soil that he first pressed his foot upon, and there he kneels down and dedicates that new land to the holy Saviour, and in the name San Salvador, or “the holy Saviour,” you have the combination of an eternal truth with an earthly fact.’