The Greatness of Faith

“Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” — Matt. xv. 2S.

These are evidently the words of one who is yielding, one who, after some reluctance, is giving way. If we knew nothing about their connection, if we merely heard them by themselves, we should seem to see a closed hand opening and letting go something which it had been holding fast. And such reluctance, as we well know, is of many kinds. One man withholds that which he might bestow because he wants to make his gift seem more valuable; another because he wants to bind the receiver more closely to himself; another because he thinks that what he has to give has not yet been sufficiently deserved or earned; another because he thinks it will not be used in the best way. When these considerations have been over-

1 Preached at St. Michael’s Church, Chester Square, London, Sunday afternoon, loth June 1SS3.

come, then the closed hand opens, and the gift is given.

You remember the story from which the words are taken. Jesus has travelled outside of the regions of the Jews, and there has come to him a Canaanitish woman asking Him to cure her poor afflicted daughter. He has hesitated and remonstrated, but at last she overcomes Him with her urgency, and He yields to her, saying, “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” It would be possible to give reasons, which no doubt would be true ones, for Christ’s reluctance. Each one of those which I suggested might apply; but I cannot but think that the truest and simplest way to look at this beautiful story, which I wish to study with you this afternoon, is to consider it as a record of the spiritual necessities of Jesus. The idea which seems to me to be in it is this, that Jesus gave the woman what she wanted just as soon as it was possible for Him to give it; and that, just as soon as it was possible for Him to give it, in some true sense He had to give it, it was impossible for Him to refuse it any longer. He was not holding it, as it were, behind His back, watching her face to sec when was the best moment to give it to her. He was telling her of a genuine impossibility when He said,” I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house via.] THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. 159

of Israel.” He could not give her what she wanted then; but when by her belief in Him she had crossed the line and become spiritually one of His people, then the impossibility was removed, and we may even say, I think, that He could not help helping her.

All through the record of mercies and the miracles of Jesus there runs a certain subtle tone which puzzles us. He who is so powerful and merciful gives us still a strange impression of holding His mercy and power under some strange conditions which limit and restrict their use. He who is so free is evidently bound by chains too fine for us to see. I need not remind you that there were some villages where He could do no mighty works because there He found no faith. “Whatsoever ye ask believing ye shall receive,” He says, as if there were some other condition besides His own great love which must decide whether any special prayer should find its answer. When the needy men and women come to Him we find ourselves watching to see which of them He will relieve, and we are sure as we watch that it is not any mere whim of His which will decide; there is some law which binds Him with necessity. Surely everybody who has read the Gospel at all sympathetically has felt this. I seem to hear, as I read, the sound of a great sea of might and mercy shut in behind necessities which it cannot disobey; I seem to hear it clamouring to escape and give itself away along long stretches of the wall which shuts it in; and then I seem to see it bursting forth rejoicingly where some great gate is flung wide open and it may go forth unhindered to its work of blessing. So seems to me the story of the power and love of Jesus held fast under the conditions of the faith of men.

Christ is too truly man like us, and we are too truly man like Christ, for us not to have seen in our actions glimpses of the same necessity under which He acted. We too act for our fellow-men under the perpetual conditions of their faith. Who of us that has ever tried to help his brethren has not come to places where he can use both of th< pse words of Jesus, where he can say sometimes, “I can do no work here because of this unbelief,” and sometimes, “Great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” Some regions there are in which it seems as if every power of use and helpfulness that we ever possessed were gone, or at least for the time were walled up and buried; other regions there arc where, almost without our will, the best that is in us leaps to the gate and hurries out to help some need which has summoned it with a peculiar desire and capacity of being helped.

The subject of the verse, then, and that of which I wish to speak this afternoon is “The Power of viir.] THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. 161

Faith over Jesus.” We are always talking as if the highest natures and beings were the least subject to law. A great many good people seem to talk as if the world would be more splendid, clothed with a completer dignity, if it were not all bound by necessities which it cannot escape, if every star moved in the sky and every flower opened in the garden, not because it must, but because, by some extemporaneous whim, it chose to. And so men look to those whom they call their superiors, and think that their superiority and privilege consists in their escape from law. The labourer plods to his work early in the morning dusk and sees the rich man’s curtains still undrawn, and says, “Oh, if I were only rich like him, and could do as I pleased.” The boy takes his task at school, and dreams as he does it of the days when school shall be over and nobody shall any longer set him tasks. As we go on we find we are all wrong. The higher the nature the more imperative has grown the law. The rich man lying in his bed envies the labourer’s easy whistle under his window. The merchant calls the schoolboy free. He who must do only what a few of his fellow-men, who arc his special masters, can order him in formal commandment, and can enforce by stated penalties, has no conception of the perfect servantship of that life which has all men for its masters, and must 162 THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. [viii.

obey any one of them, no matter who he be, who speaks to it with that entire openness and power to be helped which we call faith.

I beg you to observe how definite and clear an idea there is here of the way in which Christ gives His mercies to mankind. Evidently there is some inequality in the distribution of them. Any man can see that. Men have always seen it. Christ makes some men good and brave and holy; other men He seems to leave untouched. Some men He saves; other men He seems to leave unsaved. Men have always seen that, and they have always tried to explain it. They have tried the explanation of election, and they have tried the explanation of desert. They have said, “Christ chooses to save these and chooses to leave those unsaved.” That explanation has not satisfied men; it has seemed too much to leave out man. Then they have said, “These men have deserved to be saved, and those men have not deserved it.” That explanation also has seemed insufficient. It has seemed too much to leave out Christ, or to bring Him in only a sort of bookkeeper and paymaster of the moral world. But still this other explanation remains. Christ saves all whom lie can save, all who arc savablc. Doing all that He can first to make men willing to receive Him, lie then at last is in the power of their willingness. This surely is an intelligible idea of Christ and of the way in which He treats mankind; this certainly lets us understand both of those words of His, which are but specimens of many other words that He said: “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost,” and “To as many as received Him gave He power to become the sons of God.” It will be good for us first to see, what I have already hinted, how widely prevalent the principle is which comes to its consummation in the giving of Himself by Christ to men. Everywhere faith, or the capacity of receiving, has a power to claim and command the thing which it needs. Nature would furnish us many an exhibition of the principle. You plant a healthy seed into the ground. The seed’s health consists simply in this, that it has the power of true relations to the soil you plant it in. And how these spring-days bear us witness that the soil acknowledges this power: no sooner does it feel the seed than it replies; it unlocks all its treasures of force; the little hungry black kernel is its master. “O seed, great is thy faith,” the ground seems to say; “be it unto thee even as thou wilt;” and so the miracle of growth begins. Or a human mind comes to an idea. What shall it be? Let us say the idea of cause and purpose running through and filling all creation. Clothe that idea in your imagination with consciousness; let it know what truth it carries in its heart; think of it as pondering to whom it shall deliver up that truth. There cannot any longer be a doubt when it has once found the mind that really sympathetically believes in it. It fills that mind with inspiration; it sends its force all through its action. Other minds touch it, and it gives them nothing. The man who in the most entire sympathy believes in the idea lives by it; all his movements become lofty, calm, fruitful with its influence. And so still more about a man. Why, it becomes a commonplace of all social life which is in the least thoughtful and observant, that no man gets anything out of a fellow-man unless in some degree, in some way, he believes in him. Here is a man whose life is full of business: his face, his hand, his name arc even-where; there is no movement in the community in which he docs not take a part; there is no cause in which his aid is not invoked. What is that man to you, a fellow-citizen of his, before whose eyes he is for ever standing out in some new manifestation of his energy? Does not everything depend upon whether you personally believe in him? Suppose that you do not; suppose that all his tireless

activity has only succeeded in impressing you with the conviction that he is a selfish, superficial busybody; suppose that, serinhow different his ways of working arc from yours, or finding yourself at variance with him about something concerning which you feel perfectly sure that you are right, you have come to believe that he is insincere; suppose that some blunder of his has seemed to you to show such essential rottenness that you cannot trust anything about him? What then? That man’s good, whatever good there may be in him, is shut up from you completely. He can do nothing for you; you can get nothing out of him. Some lessons, some suggestions from his life you may collect, but they will be to you only what they would have been if you had read them in a book or a newspaper. The man himself — not what he knows and says, but what he is — the man himself is as closely and tightly locked away from you as are the treasures in the bank’s vaults from the poor vagrant who sleeps at night on the bank steps or paces up and down its sidewalk.

This is the reason why a disbelieving life becomes a barren life. You know how very common it has grown for men to think it a sign of wisdom and profound experience to distrust their fellow-men. The reason why one dreads to see a temper such as that increase is that the nature which distrusts gets nothing from the men in whom it disbelieves. One of the reasons why youth is the growing and accumulating period of life, the period in which harvests of truth and hope and character arc gathered in, is that youth naturally and instinctively believes. By and by the man grows up, and then, distrusting his fellow- men, he walks over their hidden riches as the ignorant traveller walks over an unopened mine. Oh, my dear friends, young men and old, try to respect and trust just as far as you can the men with whom you most profoundly disagree, for so only can you get from them the peculiar riches which they have to give you. A staunch and settled Conservative, who is never going to be anything but a Conservative, if he respects the ability and honesty of some stout Radical, keeps open a channel through which something of what value there possibly may be in the Radical’s Radicalism may flow into him. The Radical who honours a Conservative gets something of what value there may possibly be in his Conservatism. The more men you honour the more cisterns you have to draw from. Men of other parties, other Churches, other trades than your own, must acknowledge the demand which your faith makes on them, and give you whatever each of them may have worth the giving.

And if we stand not upon the side of the receiver but upon the side of the giver, the same truth is full of force. You want to give your intelligence, your thought, your wisdom, such as it is, to the vni.] THE GREATNESS OF FAITH. 167

little circle in which God has set you to live. It is not conceit that prompts you; it is a real desire to be useful. How necessary it is that at the very outset you should know our truth — that it is only to faith that such gifts can be given. Men and women are standing everywhere, all over the world, urging their advice and experience upon other people who do not believe in them. These other people have nothing against them; they do not hate them or despise them; but they have no faith in them. Faith is a positive thing, not merely negative. Not to disbelieve in a man is something very different from, very far short of, believing in him. Such men trying to enlighten and help other men who have no faith in them are like suns without atmospheres. No matter how bright they shine, the world which they want to enlighten gets no light from them. You must build the atmosphere before you can send down the light. You must win men’s faith before you can do anything to make them wise or happy. Therefore it is that the mere amount of a man’s intellectual power or the mere degree of truth in a man’s doctrine is never a complete test or assurance of the power he will have over other men. A crazy chatterer or a blatant infidel will make the whole world listen and fill men with his folly if he can only make men believe in him; while

Wisdom herself may cry aloud in the chief place of concourse and no man hear, and the whole crowd go away as foolish as it came. If you really want to help your fellow-men, you must not merely have in you what would do them good if they should take it from you, but you must be such a man that they can take it from you. The snow must melt upon the mountain and come down in a spring torrent, before its richness can make the valley rich. And yet in every age there are cold, hard, unsympathetic wise men standing up aloof, like snow-banks on the hill-tops, conscious of the locked-up fertility in them, and wondering that their wisdom does not save the world.

I think that in such thoughts as these there comes out more clearly than any deliberate definition can embody it what is meant by faith. The best things in this world can be defined only by a description of their result. No man can tell me what the sunlight is except by what it does. The essence of life is utterly inexplicable; the action of life all men can sec. And so of faith. Faith as I have talked of it to you to-day is such a relation of one being to another higher being as opens the higher being’s nature to the lower, and makes a ready gift of the higher to the lower possible. “Ah, then,” says the dogmatist, “I see that I was right. Faith is a proper understanding, a true idea, a correct creed. You must have that before the being higher than yourself can give himself to you.” And then the sentimentalist cries, “No, I was right; faith must be feeling. Love and trust your superior, and he can help you.” And yet another man, the moralist, says, “Was not I right? Is not faith simply obedience? Do your master’s will, and he will put his nature into you.” And as they all speak, anybody who has really got hold of the great truth sees how partial they all are, sees that faith is something greater than they each describe it, sees that it must include and must outgo them all: for I may know all the facts about a man, and yet his nature stand shut tight against me; and I may love and trust a man so foolishly and superficially and sillily, that he can do nothing for me; and I may follow a man’s footsteps, and be in no more real communion with him than his dog. Sometimes all these unite, and something else, indefinable but absolutely recognisable, is added to them — something which comes in as additional to everything that can be defined in the substance of a friendship — and then, and not till then, the gates are opened and the lower nature becomes wise with the wisdom, strong with the strength, of the higher, lives by its life, judges with its judgment, knows with its knowledge. The power of that union, the complete and open resting of the life that depends on the life that supplies, that is faith.

In deep distress sometimes, sometimes in the most perfect and entire calmness, sometimes in the full current of most busy life, sometimes, as if it were the crown and sum of living, on the death-bed, when the snapping of old ties is like the cracking of the winter ice at the approach of spring-time, — at any time, in any place, wherever God wills, whenever the man’s soul is ready, the gates open slowly or suddenly; the soul has faith in God; and God is given to the soul. The whole of life until that comes is but a growth, a struggle, a reaching-out to that. Life is but the mere shell of life until it comes. Life is faith. To believe in God is to be filled with Him, to enter into life eternal, and to have it enter into us.

But I must come back from what I hope has not seemed a wandering from the spiritual substance of my text to its words. I lure was this woman whose faith had such a power over Jesus that lie could not resist it. I hope that we have got some glimpse of what that means. The secret of it all to me is this — Jesus was the manifestation of God. God, with His power and love, was, so to speak, humanly manifest in Jesus. That human form, walking with self-witnessing evidence of divinity there among men, was not merely the declaration of God’s love and power; it was God’s love and power actually here. Now when this woman, by some such comprehensive action as I was just trying to describe, believed in Him, she was really claiming that in that human manifestation of God she in virtue of her humanity had a true part and might press a true claim. It is almost like this. It is almost as if a reservoir of water were established in a thirsty city for the city’s use, and some citizen of that city came and said, “I have a right to some of it; give me my share.” And his claim was allowed by the servant in whose charge the reservoir was placed; allowed, because he was one of those to whom the water belonged. So this woman said to Christ, “I in my human need have a right to you, who are the love of God humanly manifest.” And Christ replied, “Indeed you have, and that claim of yours is itself the assurance of your right. No man can claim me so and not have me. Such a claim opens the channels between your life and mine, and what there is in me must flow into you.” Something as real, as essential, as natural, as inevitable as that seems to me to be in His words when He says, “Great is thy faith: be it unto thee as thou wilt.” When He said to His disciples these other deep words, “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me,” He really was teaching the same truth. There is a natural eternal relationship and openness between the life of man and the life of God. To have that openness closed is unbelief; to have that openness wide open is faith; and faith is health and life.

It is only with this truth, I think, that we can get and keep any true hold of the vast and bewildering idea of God’s care for all His creatures, with all their small and separate lives. How hard it is for us to keep that truth, even while we feel that life would be worth very little to us if we did not have it. And what makes it so hard for us to hold appears to me to be the artificial conception which we have of the connection between God and His creatures. We talk about God’s remembering us, as if it were a special effort, a laying hold by His great mind of something outside of Himself, which He determined to remember. But if we could only know how truly we belong to God, it would be different. God’s remembrance of us is the natural claiming of our life by Him as true part of his own. When the spring comes, the oak-tree with its thousands upon thousands of leaves blossoms all over. The great heart of the oak-tree remembers every remotest tip of even* farthest branch, and sends to each the message and the power of new life. And yet we do not think of the heart of the oak-tree as if it were burdened with such multitudinous remembrance, or as if it were any harder work for it to make a million leaves than it would be to make one. It is simply the thrill of the common life translated into these million forms. The great heart beats, and wherever the channels of a common life are standing open the rich blood flows, and out on every tip the green leaf springs. Somewhat in that way it seems to me that we may think of God’s remembrance of His million children. In some hut to-day some poor sick sufferer is wearing the hours out in agony, longing for the evening as all last night he longed for the morning which seemed as if it would never come. Or in some obscure shop to-day some insignificant workman is doing some bit of faithful and useful but unnoticed work. You do not hesitate to speak to each of them and say, “God remembers you. He never forgets you for a moment.” But how can you represent to your spiritual imagination, or, what is harder still, to theirs, the fact of that remembrance? It must be by the realisation of an open channel of continuous and common life between God and that patient sufferer, that toilsome worker. They arc far-off leaves on the great tree of His life; far-off, and yet as near to the beating of His heart as

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any leaf on all the tree. He remembers them as the heart remembers the finger-tips to which it sends the blood. He gives them Himself because they are His in such profound reality that they are more than His, they are really He. If any doubt about Him, issuing from them, stops up the channel so that He cannot get to them, He waits behind the hindrance, behind the doubt, and tries to get it away, and feels the withering of the unbelieving, unfed leaf as if a true part of Himself were dying. And when the obstacle gives way, and the doubt is broken and the path is once more open, it is almost with a shout which we can hear that the life-blood leaps to its work again; and the sufferer wins new strength, and the worker wins new courage, by what it calls the renewed remembrance of God, but what is really the soul’s renewed claim, which gives God once more the power to show His never-changed, ever unchangeable remembrance.

Through all that I have said to-day there runs one truth which I cannot state too simply and strongly, as my time draws near its close. I want to make you feel it and know it if I can. It is the necessary power that the weaker has over the stronger, the lower over the higher. It is a power which develops as all life grows higher, and which comes to its completeness when we get up into the region where man has to do with God. The lowest conditions of life hardly know it at all. Think of the masteries that are strongest and most imperative in two communities at the opposite extremes of social life. Into a village of savages comes some ruffian, more big and brutal than any other who is there, stronger in limb, bolder in arrogant courage; and all the savage village owns him as its master; all its people are at his feet in admiration and obedience; what he bids them they will do. Then turn to the other extreme. In some civilised village of England and America there is heard the cry of a suffering infant, the story of some wrong done to a little child comes to men’s pitying ears, and all the village is stirred and will not rest until the wrong be righted, and the little child relieved. That little child with its woes is the master of those strong and busy men; his cry of pain summons them from their work as a bugle calls the soldiers to the field.

This power of weakness over strength comes to perfection in Jesus. Could there be a more complete picture of it than shines out in His own story of the shepherd and the sheep. The shepherd has folded his ninety-and-nine; everything is safe and strong and prosperous; he stands with his hand upon the sheepfold gate; and then, just as he seems all wrapped up in the satisfaction and completeness of the sight, there comes, so light that no ear except his can hear it, the cry of one poor lost sheep off in the mountains, and it summons him with an irresistible challenge, and his staff is in his hand instantly, and he turns his back on everything else to be the slave of that one lost sheep till it is found. What a wonderful and everlasting and universal story that parable is!

Oh, my dear friends, we have not entered into Christ’s salvation, He has not rescued and redeemed us into His own divine life, until that which was true of Him is also true of us. Do we know as He knew this power of the weakest? Are our ears quick as His were to hear through every tumult the far-away cry of any poor human soul that needs us? Are our hearts quick as his was to own the right which that cry has to our instant attention and obedience? If they arc not, our life is very poor. For we arc fed through our obediences; and he who only knows what it is to obey those who are stronger than himself, he who has never felt the impcriousness of the need which cries up to him out of some depth of want or pain, has missed one-half, the largest and richest half, of the nourishment and enrichment which God provided for his human life.

We may dare to believe that in this service of weakness, this obedience to need, this submission of His power to the demands of His feeblest brethren, Christ our Lord found part of the development of His divine consciousness. Every beggar whom He met was a king to Him. Let us not think for a moment that that was something which belonged only to the days when He was here upon the earth. It is true still. When you and I are weak, Christ in a true sense owns the claim of our weakness and comes to serve us with His love. Behold, how this transfigures life! The times that make us weakest and that force our weakness most upon us, and make us most know how weak we are, those are our coronation times. The days of sickness, days of temptation, days of doubt, days of discouragement, days of bereavement and of the aching loneliness which comes when the strong voice is silent and the dear face is gone, these are the days when Christ sees most clear the crown of our need upon our foreheads, and comes to serve us with His love.

Faith is the king’s knowledge of his own kingship. A weak man who has no faith in Christ is a king who does not know his own royalty. But the soul which in its need cries out and claims its need’s dominion — the soul that dares to take the prerogative of its own feebleness and cry

N aloud, “Come to me, O Christ, for I need Thee,” finds itself justified. Its bold and humble cry is honoured and answered instantly; instantly by its side the answer comes: “Great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?”