Two Aspects of Christian Death
For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. A.V.
For I am already being poured out upon the altar as a drink-offering, and the season of my departure is upon me. We have already, in our last study, glanced at the first of these two clauses, mainly with a view to its place in the argument to Timothy’s heart: ‘for I am already being poured out.’ Let us devote the present chapter directly to it, along with the complementary clause which follows. Let us think of these words about Christian death spoken by this great Christian close to his end. They have much to say not for an apostolic martyr only but for us also, the rank and file of what is yet, down to its least notable genuine member, ‘one army of the living God.’
i. ‘I am being poured out as a drink-offering.’ Such to St. Paul was his impending death. For him, to be sure, the phrase had a dread particular fitness; when his death came it would come by the sword; the red torrent would flow, like the wine of the altar bowl, drenching the holocaust, enriching the sacrificial fume. But we need not bind the whole truth of the phrase to such a solemn literalism. Every devoted life, if it is really devoted, a word which means so much more than
Two Aspects of Christian Death
devout, is a sacrifice offered on the altar of love 2 Tim. iv. to the God of our salvation, ‘a living sacrifice,’ as St. Paul long before (Rom. xii. 1) had called it. And when that life, devoted to the last, reaches its climax in a death full of surrender to the will of God, the blood may not literally be shed, yet spiritually the death is none the less a libation which enriches all the antecedent toil and pain. John sinking to sleep on his bed at Ephesus as truly ‘poured himself out’ as Paul did when he knelt to die at the Three Fountains outside the gate of Rome. Bede, lying down after his life’s long work in his cloister-school at Jarrow, ‘poured himself out’ as truly, though in a far different way, as Hus did in the fire at Constance. To all these saints life was ‘a living sacrifice’ even unto death. So their death, their last outpouring of the vital power, yielded up to their God, was the libation upon the sacrifice.
May it be ours, through our Master’s grace, so to be faithful even unto the libation. May we, in Hin, ‘yield to the Lord with simple heart’ not only our full energies but also ‘ourselves, our souls and ‘bodies,’ when they are weak and worn with mortal exercise. We adore His will; and that will may ordain that they should be ‘yielded’ to Him rather as passive under pain or paralysis than as working on still, in some measure, in their decline. But however, by His grace, ‘the spirit shall be willing’ to maintain its happy surrender even to the last, even till we ‘are being poured out.’
ii, Then we have here another aspect of thedeathof The the servant of the Lord: ‘the season of my departure U™ooring. nN
2 Tim. iv. is upon me.’ The word rendered ‘departure,’
‘Crossing
the Bar.’
analisis, is the Greek original of our ‘analysis.’ An analysis means a setting free, a detachment, a separation of things or thoughts from one another. The original noun here, like the kindred verb in Phil. i. 23, denotes the undoing of a connexion, as it were the untying of a cord, the weighing of an anchor, so as to set the voyager free to seek the further shore. To the Philippians, in that earlier day, St. Paul had owned that his ‘desire’ was ‘to unmoor, and to be with Christ’ (Phil. i. 23), And here the desire is about to become fact; ‘ the season of his unmooring is upon him.’
It was no light thing, we may be sure, when this realization of that desire ‘came’ actually on.’ It is nature, not sin, to shrink from death as death. The greatest saints, in their Lord’s own words (Joh. xxi. 20), when they come to die, are ‘carried whither they would not’; they are living men, embodied spirits; they would rather ‘not be unclothed, but clothed upon’ (2 Cor. v. 4). But then there is the glorious other side, which filled St. Paul when he wrote Phil. i. 23, and which surely rose in conquering greatness before him now. The death which in one aspect was a last sacrifice was, in another, that delightful moment when the friendly flood heaves beneath the freed keel, and the prow is set straight and finally towards the shore of Homs, and the Pilot stands on board, at length ‘seen face to face.’ And lo, as He takes the helm, ‘immediately the ship is at the land whither they go’ (Joh. vi. 21).