George MacDonald on "The Child In The Midst"

[JasonPratt]

I thought I would present an ongoing set of excerpts from 19th century orthodox universalist theologian George MacDonald, not so much on universalism (which rarely comes up in his sermons), but on Christian Living.

This the first excerpt from Sermon 1 (“The Child In The Midst”), of Volume 1 of Unspoken Sermons. I have included some minor formatting tweaks and pronoun clarifications. A free link to his original texts can be found here, in the Recommended Materials category of the forum.

The disciples had been disputing who should be the greatest, and the Lord wanted to show them that such a dispute had nothing whatever to do with the way things went in His kingdom.

Therefore, as a specimen of His subjects, He took a child and set him before them. It was not, it could not be, in virtue of the humanity of the child, but rather in virtue of his childhood, that this child was thus presented as representing a subject of the kingdom. It was not to show the scope but the nature of the kingdom.

Jesus told them they could not enter into the kingdom save by becoming little children–by humbling themselves. For the idea of ruling was excluded where childlikeness was the one essential quality.

It was to be no more who should rule, but who should serve; no more who should look down upon his fellows from the conquered heights of authority–even of sacred authority, but who should look up honouring humanity, and ministering unto it, so that humanity itself might at length be persuaded of its own honour as a temple of the living God.

It was to impress this lesson upon them that He showed them the child. Therefore, I repeat: the lesson lay in the childhood of the child.

[JasonPratt]

You’re very welcome, Buddy!

Continuing with excerpts from “The Child In The Midst”:

It is the recognition of the childhood as divine, that will show the disciple how vain is the strife after relative place or honour in the great kingdom.

For it is “In My name”. This means ‘as representing Me’; and, therefore, ‘as being like Me’.

Our Lord could not commission any one to be received in His name who could not more or less represent Him; for there would be untruth and unreason! Moreover, He had just been telling the disciples that they must become like this child.

So, when He tells them now to receive such a little child in His name, it must surely imply something in common between them all: something in which the child and Jesus meet; something in which the child and the disciples meet. What else can that be than the spiritual childhood?

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt from this sermon:

“In My name” does not mean “Because I will it”.

An arbitrary utterance of the will of our Lord would certainly find ten thousand to obey it, even to suffering–compared to every one that will be able to receive such a vital truth of His character as is contained in the words. But, it is not obedience alone that our Lord will have, but obedience to the truth–that is, to the Light of the World: truth beheld and known.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt:

“In My name”, if we take all we can find in it–the full meaning which alone will harmonize and make the passage a whole–involves a revelation from resemblance: from fitness to represent and so to reveal.

He who receives a child, then, in the name of Jesus, does so, perceiving wherein Jesus and the child are one: what is common to them.

He must not only see the ideal child in the child he receives–that reality of loveliness which constitutes true childhood–but must also perceive that the child is like Jesus; or rather, that the Lord is like the child, and may be embraced, yea, is embraced, by every heart childlike enough to embrace a child for the sake of his childness.

I do not say that therefore none but those who are thus conscious in the act partake of the blessing. But a special sense, a lofty knowledge of blessedness, belongs to the act of embracing a child as the visible likeness of the Lord Himself. For the blessedness is the perceiving of the truth–the blessing is the truth itself–the God-known truth: that the Lord has the heart of a child.

The man who perceives this, knows in himself that he is blessed–blessed, because this is true.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt:

What is the kingdom of Christ?

A rule of love, of truth–a rule of service.

The king is the chief servant in it. “The kings of the earth have dominion: it shall not be so among you.” “The Son of Man came to minister.” “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”

The great Workman is the great King, labouring for His own. So he that would be greatest among them, and come nearest to the King Himself, must be the servant of all.

It is like king like subject in the kingdom of heaven. No rule of force, as of one kind over another kind. It is the rule of kind, of nature, of deepest nature–of God.

If, then, to enter into this kingdom, we must become children, the spirit of children must be its pervading spirit throughout, from lowly subject to lowliest king.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt:

The lesson added by St Luke to the presentation of the child is: “For he that is least among you all, the same shall be great.” And St Matthew says: “Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Hence the sign that passes between king and subject. The subject kneels in homage to the kings of the earth; but the heavenly King takes His subject in His arms. This is the sign of the kingdom between them. This is the all-pervading relation of the kingdom.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt:

To receive the child because God receives it, or for its humanity, is one thing; to receive it because it is like God, or for its childhood, is another.

The former will do little to destroy ambition. Alone it might argue only a wider scope to it!–because it admits all men to the arena of the strife.

But the latter strikes at the very root of emulation. As soon as even service is done for the honour and not for the service-sake, the doer is that moment outside the kingdom.

But when we receive the child in the name of Christ, the very childhood that we receive to our arms is humanity. We love its humanity in its childhood, for childhood is the deepest heart of humanity–its divine heart; and so in the name of the child we receive all humanity.

Therefore, although the lesson is not about humanity, but about childhood, it returns upon our race, and we receive our race with wider arms and deeper heart.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt:

If there is in heaven a picture of that wonderful teaching, doubtless we shall see represented in it a dim childhood shining from the faces of all that group of disciples–of which the centre is the Son of God with a child in His arms.

The childhood, dim in the faces of the men, must be shining trustfully clear in the face of the child.

But in the face of the Lord Himself, the childhood will be triumphant!–all His wisdom, all His truth upholding that radiant serenity of faith in His Father.

Verily, O Lord, this childhood is life! Verily, O Lord, when Thy tenderness shall have made the world great, then, children like Thee, will all men smile in the face of the great God!

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt:

“He that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me.”

To receive a child in the name of God is to receive God Himself. How to receive Him? As alone He can be received: by knowing Him as He is. To know Him is to have Him in us.

And that we may know Him, let us now receive this revelation of Him, in the words of our Lord Himself. Here is the argument of highest import founded upon the teaching of our master in the utterance before us.

God is represented in Jesus, for that God is like Jesus. Jesus is represented in the child, for that Jesus is like the child. Therefore God is represented in the child, for that He is like the child.

God is child-like.

In the true vision of this fact lies the receiving of God in the child.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt:

Let me then ask: do you believe in the Incarnation? And if you do, let me ask further: Was Jesus ever less divine than God?

I answer for you, Never. He was lower, but never less divine.

Was He not a child then? You may answer, “Yes, but not like other children.” I ask, “Did He not look like other children?” If He looked like them and was not like them, the whole was a deception, a masquerade at best.

I say He was a child, whatever more He might also be. God is man, and infinitely more. Our Lord became flesh, but did not become man. He took on Him the form of man: He was man already.

And He was, is, and ever shall be divinely childlike. He could never have been a child if He would ever have ceased to be a child, for in Him the transient found nothing. Childhood belongs to the divine nature.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt (I missed Monday):

Obedience, then, is as divine as Will, Service as divine as Rule.

How?

Because they are one in their nature; they are both a doing of the truth. The love in them is the same. The Fatherhood and the Sonship are one, save that the Fatherhood looks down lovingly, and the Sonship looks up lovingly.

Love is all. And God is all in all! He is ever seeking to get down to us–to be the Divine Man to us. And we are ever saying, “That be far from Thee, Lord!” We are careful, in our unbelief, over the divine dignity, of which He is too grand to think.

Better pleasing to God, it needs little daring to say, is the audacity of Job, who, rushing into His presence, and flinging the door of His presence-chamber to the wall, like a troubled, it may be angry, but yet faithful child, calls aloud in the ear of Him whose perfect Fatherhood he has yet to learn: “Am I a sea or a whale, that Thou settest a watch over me?”

Let us dare, then, to climb the height of divine truth to which this utterance of our Lord would lead us.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt:

Does it not lead us up hither: that the devotion of God to His creatures is perfect?–that He does not think about Himself but about them?–that, indeed, He wants nothing for Himself, but finds His blessedness in the outgoing of blessedness.

He gives himself to us–shall not we give ourselves to Him? Shall we not give ourselves to each other whom He loves?

In this, then, is God like the child: that he is simply and altogether our friend, our father–our more than friend, father, and mother–our infinite love-perfect God!

Grand and strong beyond all that human imagination can conceive of poet-thinking and kingly action, He is delicate beyond all that human tenderness can conceive of husband or wife, homely beyond all that human heart can conceive of father or mother. The deepest, purest love of a woman has its well-spring in Him! He has not two thoughts about us! With Him, all is simplicity of purpose and meaning and effort and end!–namely, that we should be as He is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness!

It is so plain that any one may see it! Every one ought to see it! Every one shall see it!! It must be so! He is utterly true and good to us!–nor shall anything withstand his will.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt:

How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities! Nearly all of them represent Him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand He is, and making it the business of His being and the end of His universe to keep up His glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take His name in vain.

They would not allow this, perhaps; but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this.

Brothers, have you found our king? There He is!–kissing little children and saying they are like God! There He is!–at table with the head of a fisherman lying on His bosom; and somewhat heavy at heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand Him well.

The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were–no, not a truer, for the other is false, but–a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s excerpt (one of my favorites ):

The God Who is ever uttering Himself in the changeful profusions of nature; Who takes millions of years to form a soul that shall understand Him and be blessed; Who never needs to be, and never is, in haste; Who welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return for seed He has sown upon the old fallows of eternity; Who rejoices in the response of a faltering moment to the age-long cry of His wisdom in the streets; the God of music, of painting, of building, the Lord of Hosts, the God of mountains and oceans; Whose laws go forth from one unseen point of wisdom, and thither return without an atom of loss; the God of history working in time unto Christianity; this God is the God of little children, and He alone can be perfectly, abandonedly simple and devoted.

Our longing desires can no more exhaust the fulness of the treasures of the Godhead, than our imagination can touch their measure. Of Him not a thought, not a joy, not a hope of one of His creatures can pass unseen; and while one of them remains unsatisfied, He is not Lord over all.

[JasonPratt]

Today’s entry (running a bit behind due to Easter weekend, understandably I hope. Happy Easter!! )

Therefore, with angels and with archangels, with the spirits of the just made perfect, with the little children of the kingdom, yea, with the Lord Himself, and for all them that know Him not: we praise and magnify and laud His name in itself, saying Our Father!

We do not draw back for that we are unworthy, nor even for that we are hard-hearted and care not for the good. For it is His childlikeness that makes Him our God and Father. The perfection of His relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defects, all our evils; for our childhood is born of His fatherhood.

That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge, because Thou art my home.”

[JasonPratt]

Final entry for this sermon from George MacDonald

The man who can pray such a prayer will know better than any other, that God is not mocked; that He is not a man that He should repent; that tears and entreaties will not work on Him to the breach of one of His laws; that for God to give a man because the man asked for it that which was not in harmony with His laws of truth and right, would be to damn the man–to cast him into the outer darkness. And the man who can pray such a prayer knows, that out of that prison the childlike, imperturbable God will let no man come till he has paid the uttermost farthing.

And if the man does forget this, the God to whom he belongs does not forget it, does not forget him. Life is no series of chances with a few providences sprinkled between to keep up a justly failing belief!–but one providence of God; and the man shall not live long before life itself shall remind him–it may be in agony of soul–of that which he has forgotten.

When he prays for comfort, the answer may come in dismay and terror and the turning aside of the Father’s countenance; for Love itself will, for love’s sake, turn the countenance away from that which is not lovely; and so the man will have to read, written upon the dark wall of his imprisoned conscience, the words, awful and glorious:

“Our God is a consuming fire!”