The Church's Widowhood
“And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.” — Luke xviii. 3.
Without entering at length on an exposition of this parable, in either of its aspects, practical or prophetical, we may say this much, that it sets before us, under the figure of a widow, — a feeble and injured widow, — the true character and standing of the Church of God on earth, during the present age. In numbers she is few, — a mere election, a gathering out, no more; in power, slender; in honour, little set by; in alliances, little courted, nay, shunned; in relative position, unfit to sway the world’s counsels; in political and social influence, save as the salt of the earth, incapable of what man calls great achievements or overawing combinations, seeing she is scattered and divided among all kingdoms; and that, not like some vast network of electrical wires encompassing the globe, and capable, by its union of parts, to act with simultaneous force upon the nations, but only like the separate dew-drops, which, though many and pure, and fitted to cheer the blossom on which they rest, have no power to turn the rock into a garden, or to make the wilderness blossom as the rose.
That such is the case, nay, that such must he the case, appears from such things as these: —
(1.) The Father s purpose concerning her. — That purpose has great things in store for her, in the ages to come; but at present her lot is to be weakness, poverty, hardship, and the endurance of wrong. Through much tribulation she must enter the kingdom. It is not the purpose of God that she should be numerous, or powerful, or honourable; but, like her Head, disesteemed, rejected, despised, treated oftentimes as the offscouring of all things. Her success is not to be measured by the extent to which she has been able to overawe, or to attract, or to dazzle the world, — to disarm its enmity, or to purchase its friendship; but simply, and only, by the manner in which she has been enabled to fulfil the Father’s will; to manifest her sympathies with the Father’s purpose; to be faithful to her calling and character; to testify for him whose blood has bought her, and to be separate from the evil that is in “this present evil world.”
(2.) Her conformity to her Lord. — He is her pattern, not merely as to character, but as to the whole course of life. In him she learns what her lot on earth is to be. He the rejected one, even among his own, she must be rejected too. He the hated one, she must be hated too. Better treatment than he met with, she is not entitled to expect; nor should she wish to have. Union with him in reigning is her hope; union with him in suffering is her experience here. Conformity to him in holy glory hereafter is what she looks for; conformity to him in shame and sorrow now, is what she knows to be her lot. She feels that she could not be the true Bride of a suffering Bridegroom, if her path below were one all smiles and sunshine.
(3.) Her standing by faith. — It is the world’s unbelief that so specially makes it the world; so it is the Church’s faith that makes her what she is, the Church. All that she can say for herself is what the apostle did for himself and the saints of his day, “We have known and believed the love that God hath to us.” Her connection with the testimony of God, with him of whom it speaks, and with the glory to which it points, is one simply of faith. It was faith in that record which first drew her out of the world, and which still keeps her separate from it. As one believing in a kingdom yet to come, she shakes herself free from the entanglements of time. She becomes a stranger here, having no continuing city, but satisfied with the tent of the desert, till she reach the city of habitation. The faith which realises the unseen and the eternal, displaces, both in her vision and in her heart, the things seen and temporal.
(4.) The condition of the world out of which she is called. — It is an evil world. It lieth in wickedness; and her calling is to come out from it, and, like Noah, to condemn it. All belonging to that world is evil, and what has she to do with it? Satan is its prince and god, and what has she to do with him? It crucified her Lord, what can she have to do with it? Her mission is not to transform the world into the Church, but to be God’s instrument in taking out of it a people for his glory. In such a world, how can she be other than a stranger? In its cities, how can she be other than a sojourner? She has nothing in common with it. All is uncongenial.
(5.) Her prospects. — She is an heir of God, and a joint heir with Christ Jesus. An everlasting kingdom, an unfading crown, an eternal weight of glory, — these are her prospects. What has she then to do with a world where all these are unrecognised, nay, despised or disowned? As the Bride of Christ, what sympathy can there be in her bosom, with the vanities of a world so vain as this? It doth not yet, indeed, appear what she shall be; but she knows that, when he shall appear, she shall be like him, for she shall see him as he is; and having this hope in him, she purines herself, even as he is pure.
The Church, then, is thus, of necessity, a widow. Hence, while the Spirit of God uses various figures to describe her, they all, more or less, point to some such forlorn and helpless condition. Whether she is spoken of as a pilgrim, or a stranger, or an orphan, or a little flock, or a lily amongst thorns, still the leading thought is the same. In her orphanage, or strangership, or widowhood, she still moves before us as the separated, rejected, lonely one, in the midst of an unfriendly world, that far outnumbers her, and that feels itself strangely incommoded and made uncomfortable by the presence of one who sets light by all the precious and pleasurable things of earth, having her eye and her heart fixed upon something more glorious, of which the world knows nothing.
It is by acting out her character, fully and consistently, that she honours God, and bears witness to Christ, and condemns the world, and testifies to the glory of the promised kingdom. It is thus, too, that she wins the eye of the heedless worldling, pointing upwards to the incorruptible crown, and bidding men set their affection on things above, and seek their treasure and their joy in heaven. It is her widowhood that is her testimony. It is her widow’s weeds, with which she dare not part, that make known beyond mistake, and yet without a voice, what she thinks of the world and the world’s ways; how she disesteems the world and the world’s joys; how thoroughly she has broken off from the world and the world’s companionships, and taken the true measure of its fascinating gaieties; how wide she deems the difference between herself and the children of time; how stedfastly she has set her face towards the kingdom; and how completely the King in his beauty has absorbed her soul, and displaced the poor objects of admiration or affection with which the world would seek to win her steps back to itself, and recover her heart to the dreams of creature-love and creature-beauty. How solemnly does her widow’s cry, “Avenge me of mine adversary,” — “How long, 0 Lord, how long!” — proclaim to the world a truth which it seems to have forgotten, that its King and Lord is absent; thus reminding it of the shade which that absence has thrown over creation, by telling of the blank which it has made in her own bosom, even though she knows that she is his, and that he is hers.
If, then, the Church forsake this position, and forego this character, she abandons her calling, she lowers her testimony, she destroys her usefulness, she becomes unfaithful to Christ, and, instead of preserving her purity, she becomes the mother of a spurious race of Christians, who are neither Christ’s nor the world’s; who think it possible to make the best ot both worlds; in whose features one can find few traces of resemblance to the great Exemplar; in whose constitution and habits one can discover none of those elements of power, and hardness, and endurance, which primitive days exhibited; in whose doings, or darings, or sacrifices, one can detect nothing of that zeal, and self-denial, and decision, which led one of other days to say, “I count not my life dear unto me, that I may finish my course with joy.”
A widow’s proper raiment, as well as her true ornaments, are her weeds. Gold, and silver, and precious stones, she has put off. They are the symbols of mirth, and gaiety, and triumph; and what has she to do with these, in the absence of her Lord, and in the midst of a world that disowns him? It is in her weeds that she passes along the world’s highway, as one who has little in common with it, whose sympathies have all gone upwards to One whom, having not seen, she loves. They speak of an absent Husband. They tell of faithful affection and constancy, as well as of indifference to all love save that of him whose memory she cherishes, and whose absence she mourns. They are expressive of indifference to the attractive scenes and objects of earth, not merely because of their uncongeniality, but because they cannot be truly enjoyed in separation from the Beloved One.
A Ci widow indeed’ is thus described by the apostle: — “She that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day’ (1 Tim. v. 5). But a mere widow in name is one who “liveth in pleasure,” and is thus “dead while she liveth.” The true Church of God is the former; the false church, the harlot -bride of Satan, is the latter; for she openly repudiates the name of widow, while she lays aside the weeds of widowhood, saying, “I sit as a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow;” decking herself all the while “in gold, and silver, and precious stones, and pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet” (Rev. xviii. 12).
This contrast between these two not only shews us the right standing of the one church, and the false and faithless character of the other, but it intimates this, that one of the church’s most subtile temptations will be to lose sight of, if not to disown, her widowhood, and to live, and act, and speak, as if she were well content with the world as it is, and had no consciousness of any blank, either within her or without.
The world loves not the faithful widow, and would fain seduce her to a second marriage, — a marriage with itself. Decked in costly array, it would admire her, and give her its willing fellowship. But dressed only in the widow’s mournful garb, it cannot tolerate her. Her faithfulness to her Lord condemns it. Her seclusion and separation rebuke it. Her continuing in supplication and prayers night and day it cannot away with. Her wistful eye, glancing eagerly upwards, as if to see the Unseen, and greet the absent One, is a continual reproof. The widow’s cry sorely disturbs the world’s peace, and, ringing nightly through its glittering halls of pleasure, turns all its music into discord.
Nor less does Satan dislike the widow’s weeds and the widow’s cry. For they remind him that his day is short, and that he who is to bind him in chains, and cast him out of his dominions, will soon be here. They torment him before his time. They proclaim the doom of his harlot-spouse, who sits now as queen, in that “one hour” when desolation shall overwhelm her (Rev. xviii. 19). They point to the glory of the now widowed church, in that day, when, instead of her attire of sackcloth, she shall be arrayed in the “fine linen, clean and white,” and, with her long-parted Husband restored to her embrace, she shall be exalted to the sovereignty of that very world where she has been treated as “the off-scouring of all things.”
The hostility of the world and its prince to the Church of God is not new. It is the ancient feud between the two “seeds” (Gen. iii. 15), which, in successive forms, and with varying intensity, each age has evolved. Compromise or inconsistency may modify this warfare; but ended it cannot be, save in the extinction of the one seed or the other. The world hopes to absorb the Church, and so to terminate the variance; but this absorption is what the true Church so greatly dreads, for by it she loses and her rival gains everything. It is an absorption, the root of which is unbelief, and the development of which is, at the best, the form of godliness without its power.