Luke 21:5,6

THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST

‘And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, He said, As for these things which ye behold, the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.’

Luke 21:5

This discourse of our Lord is one of the most difficult for us to follow and apply, and yet it has made a vivid impression on the imagination of the world. It may be worth while therefore to try reverently to gather what was in our Lord’s mind when He spoke—what was transitory, what was permanent. It is impossible to leave on one side a matter of such vital importance as the final destiny of the world, and the promised Presence or coming of Christ. We notice at once these two things.

I. The transitory and the permanent.—First that, as, in an exhibition of dissolving views, one scene melts imperceptibly into another, so that at a given time we hardly know what is before us, so here a great deal of our Lord’s words refer to an immediate, local catastrophe of tremendous importance to His hearers—the fall of Jerusalem. And then His words dissolve, melt almost imperceptibly into another scene—the end of the world, His own Second Coming, and the dread phenomena which will precede and accompany it—the one event being connected with the other as that which symbolises with that which is symbolised.

II. The coming of Christ.—Secondly, we must remember and realise that there are certain images in Holy Scripture which cannot be reproduced pictorially, nor represented in human language. Our Blessed Lord Himself seems to say that a full knowledge of what is meant by the Day of Judgment, and when it will be, is impossible to the human understanding. But there is a bright side to final judgment. We are apt to forget this. In spite of the imagery of flame and earthquake, of wrath on sinners, of shame and endless doom, the idea which most strongly impressed itself on the early Church was the Presence of Christ, the victory of Christ, the coming and permanent reign of Christ.

III. The Presence of Christ.—His Presence! It is what they so longed to see. How impatient they were for it, how they hurried forward in imagination the slow winding up of the ages. ‘O thou enemy,’ they would say, ‘destructions are come to a perpetual end,’ and Christ is coming. His will be a great Presence. This is a side of the Judgment Day of which we think too little, one which surely has power to diminish much of our fear.

IV. What has the Presence been to us?—As we look back over life we each of us can see what the Presence, the coming of Christ has been to us. ‘Thy song shall be of mercy and judgment.’ Life has had its destructions. God nips off those things that we valued—youth, health, strength, and vigour—in order to develop the life of saintliness, the life of union with Himself. If you would meet your Judge with trembling hope, if you would rejoice in His Presence with exceeding great joy, go and tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King; go and proclaim the paradox of welcome: ‘Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together before the Lord, for He cometh to judge the earth.’

—Rev. Canon Newbolt.

Illustration

‘In the dark days of the Catacombs, where they found Christ in the mystic Eucharistic Presence on the altar which covered the bones of some friend or some earlier martyr who had laid down his life for Christ, the Presence was a hurried and a fleeting one, to be followed too often by dark days of persecution and anguish. It was so difficult for them to keep Christ’s Presence with them in its living beauty. Think of them as they walked through the heathen city, with its consecrated sin, and its sights and sounds of shame, which formed part of the religion of the heathenism which surrounded them. We, too, do we not know how difficult it is to retain the Presence of Christ? How difficult we find it to breathe for any time the rarified air of heaven! We fall asleep on the Mount of Transfiguration; we are dazed and stupefied in the hour of mysteries, when the atoning agony of Gethsemane and Calvary is revealed to us. The Presence of Christ—it lingers, perhaps, as a memory infrequent and glorious in those “days of the Son of Man,” when heaven seemed nearer to us, and the veil of the sacraments was thinner, and temptation less obtrusive, and sin less persistent, the Presence of Christ always and everywhere, in a time when there should be neither day nor night, but one day. This was the conception that swallowed up all others in the loving heart of the Christians as they talked of that coming of Christ which was a Presence joyful and abiding.’