Make the Men Sit Down

“And Jesus said, Make ‘he men sit down.” — JOHN vi. 10.

IT was on the farther side of the sea of Tiberias, a region which Christ seldom visited, a region which is to-day a wilderness. A multitude had followed the Lord across the water and were filling the empty place with crowd and clamor and confusion. Curiosity was all alive. What he had done last, what he would do next, was flying about in question and answer from mouth to mouth. The scene was full of movement. Every man was on his feet. Old friends were meeting. Christ’s adherents were eagerly pleading for him. The enemies of Christ were violently claiming’ that he was an impostor. Gestures were furious; words came fast; faces glowed; eyes sparkled; feet hurried back and forth. Such is the picture which seems to paint itself before us in the first verses of this sixth chapter of St.

And then there comes a change. The midday sun grows hot. Hunger and exhaustion takn possession of these excited frames. The need of rest overcomes the eagerness of action. And out of the midst of the flagging tumult comes the calm voice of Jesus, saying to his disciples who are closest to him, “Make the men sit down.” And the disciples pass here and there through the crowd, doing their Master’s will, until five thousand men are seated on the grass.

Then a new scene appears. Quiet has come in place of the noise; repose instead of action. Faces which just now were flushed and excited have grown calm. And, what is really at the heart of all, there is a change in the whole crowd’s activity. It has become receptive. It is waiting to be fed. Not only with the barley loaves and fishes. The presence of Christ is before it and it receives that. By-and-by the words of Christ fall on it and it receives them, until at last there begins to break forth from the seated ranks the declaration that they have indeed received him, and they whisper to one another, “This is indeed the prophet that should come into the world.”

This is the meaning which I find in the words of Jesus when he said to his disciples, “Make the men sit down.” It is the change from the active and restless to the receptive and quiet state, from the condition in which all the life was flowing outward in eager self-assertion, to the other condition in which the life was being influenced, that is, being flowed upon by the richer power which came forth from him.

If we let our thought separate one individual out of the multitude and dwell on him, we can feel what I am speaking of more clearly. Here is a man who has come down out of CajM-ni.-unn and crossed the lake and gone up after Jesus either as friend or He has wanted to say something, to do something, to utter himself. He has been eager, active, confident, vehement, By-and-by one of the disciples, John or Andrew or Bartholomew, has come to him as he was standing vehemently arguing, or as he was rushing hither and thither, shouting out his oracular judgments, and has said to him, “The Master bids you sit down and wait quietly until he feeds you.” Can you not see the change which comes over the man’s face? In a moment he finds himself silent in the presence of a great divine graciousness, a wis dom and power which is active for him. The sense of J)eing fed, of having another’s richness poured forth on him, takes possession of his soul. With the supply, the consciousness of needing to be fed grows deeper. Self-sufficiency, self-assertion fades away and is lost. Humility, docility, faith fills his whole nature. It is a new man that hardly knows th«> old. All this deepening and richening has come since the word of Jesus bade him sit down and lpe fed.

If I have made the suggestion of the story clear, then we may almost entirely leave the story and pass on to the subject of which I wish to speak to you this morning. It is the need which comes to men of simply being fed by God, of ceasing from forth-puttingness and self-assertion, and simply being receptive to the influences which come to them from divinity.

Before I really begin to speak about that subject, I am moved to take my congregation into my confidence. I am moved to tell them of how a minister feels very often, and of how I feel to-day, what a great danger there is of the wrong people taking the wrong sermons to themselves. A minister preaches a sermon on the need of visible activity and utterance, and very often the man whose life needs meditation and quiet self-study takes the sermon to him self, and rushes forth to even more of wild and super ficial action. Again the preacher preaches on the necessity and duty of quietude, and just the soul which needs to put forth in action the impulse which it has already quietly accumulated, plunges itself more profoundly into quiescent calm. We take each other’s medicines and often increase instead of healing our diseases. Many a time one wants not to take back a sermon he has preached, but to send quickly after it another which shall preach the other truth, and find the souls for which this, and not the first, was meant. I can only beg each of you to listen conscientiously to-day, and see whether what I shall say is meant for you.

There is a danger then for many men, if not for all, in the .perpetual outgo of energy which so much of our life involves. Life is made up of tasks and problems. How soon they meet us. How constantly they are with us all our days. “Come and do this,” the world says to the little child, hardly more than a

230 Make the Men Si, 1

l.aliy, holding out to him some of its crude mar which needs to be transformed into some other shape. “Come and see what you think of this,” sin again, holding up some hard and knotty problem, and bidding hioi exercise his ingenious intellect upon it. It is one process of education, the calling out of powers by their use. It is the tendency of all the practical necessities of life, the constant outward movement of activity. “All is going out, nothing is coming in;” is not that the dismay and the despair liich settles down upon many an experience as it attains to middle life? Existence comes to feel to many of us like a great river, which is always flowing with unbroken force downward to the sea. It never stops. It is always pushing its waters outward. It gives the sea no chance to flow up into it. So is the ever energetic life of one whose sole idea is to exert influence, to make himself felt in some result. How often the river must long to pause. How often it must be come aware that its impetuous rush is losing for it the richness of the great deep salt sea. How often the busy life of man becomes aware that somewhere, round it there is richness which it does not get be cause it opens outward only, and not inward. How often it desires to pause and grow receptive, and take into itself the richness which it now is keeping out. All this perhaps sounds very strange to some of us, this statement of the need of rest and receptivity. It will be good for us to stop a moment and rememluit there are races, and then- have been times to which it has been anything but strange, to which it has been the most familiar truth of life. You open the record of the Fourth Century and it is full of the pictures of hermits sitting on rough mountain sides, or beside the great silent river of Egypt, just listening for the voice of God. You let your boat drop quietly down the Ganges to-day, and along its banks the silent figures sit like carved brown statues, hour after hour, day after day, with eyes open and fixed on vacancy, clearing themselves of all thought, emotion and desire, that being emptied of sel£ they may see God. Tile most populous religion of the world to-day is that which flows out from the sacred seat, under the sacred tree at Gaya, where Buddha sat for six years silent, receptive, until the great illumination came. The East believes only too readily what the West finds it so very hard to realize and accept, that no life is complete which does not sometimes sit trustfully waiting to be fed by God.

Are there not times enough in all our western lives,»in all our lives, simply because and so far as they are human lives, when this same necessity bears witness of itself to us all? The days of childhood, before action has begun; the days of old age, when action is over; in both of those times the soul is sitting before God. Childhood is full of wonder and expectancy. Sitting at the father’s knee, looking up into his face, that is its truest picture. Old age is not at its best if it is simply retrospective. It has travelled across the continent and stands upon the border of the great Pacific Sea. It feels the leagues of weary delightful journeying behind it, but its face, as it waits upon the seashore, is towards the west, and not towards the east. God is speaking to it out of the awful emptiness of the ocean and the unknown ric-hness of the lands beyond. The same is true of a great dismay, a great discovery, a great sorrow or a great joy. Can we find a truer description of that which has taken place some day, in the homes of all of you into whose faces I am looking now, than is included in the figure which I used a while ago? Some day the headlong current of your life was stopped. The river ceased to flow. The waves stood still, and then the ocean which the flowing of the river had kept out, poured up and in, and there were sacreder emotions in the old channels, and deeper hopes and fears beating upon the well-worn banks. The day when your great bereavement came — the day when the neighbors knew that death was in your house — the day when joy, with that subtle look of the possibility of deep pain which is always in her eyes, came to your door and knocked, in tho» first splendor of the rising sun — the day when being weak and ill you did not go to your business, and the streets which you knew so well seemed strange to you as you looked out of the window: those were the days when God was feeding you. You lost the sense of being one who was to act, and you were one to whom God was to do something. You were for the time all oriental then.

How sacred and rich afterwards become the rooms where such experiences have taken place. The stream may start again and push the intrusive ocean once more back into its bed, but the river-channel can never quite forget its overflow. The house may go back to its commorp uses, and its doors open and shut upon the comers and goers of ordinary life, but it will never be quite the same that it was before the day on which the unseen presence filled it. It can never be perfectly secular again. This is the way in which the new houses which are so crude and raw when we move into them mellow and ripen as the years go on; as the earth which is so harsh and earthly in the glare of noontide, is softened and richened by the ever-returning dusk of morning and evening, in which it seems as if it once had been, and might again be, heaven.

I want you to notice, with regard to this blessedness of a pause in the outflowing energy of life, that it applies not merely to what we call our secular occupations, but to our sacred and religious ones as well. Indeed it often seems as if there were a sense t in which it might be said that nothing so tended to keep God out of our lives as work for God done in a wrong and superficial spirit. This is one of the places where 1 am most anxious that the right people should take my sermon to themselves, and .dot the wrong ones. The Scripture reader, the Sunday School teacher, the Evangelist, the minister, the working layman, all of them I am sure have felt how religious work tries to push out religious thought and to kill the soul’s receptivity. Thought made practical, turned into duty, tends to become like air turned into wind. That which was the most

Make the Afcn Sit Down.

vie Ming and penetrable of all substances, becomes the most impenetrable. There is no man -whom I should less hope to teach the <l<-eper spirituul truth, or to lead into the tenderest communion with Go”d, than the man who with a hard set doctrine of salvation is most intensely devoted to the salvation of his fellow-men. The disciples as well as the stragglers from Capernaum — perhaps the busy disciples more than anybody else in all the crowd — must have needed Christ’s call to sit down and be fed. The more earnestly you are at work for Jesus, the more you need times when what you are doing for him passes totally out of your mind, and the only thing worth thinking of seems to be what He is doing for you. That is the real meaning of the days of discouragement and self-contempt which come to all of us, 0 fellow laborers for the Lord.

More precious then perhaps to one kind of worker than to another, but yet precious always and to all, are the days or moments when the flow of the river slackens, and the ocean pours itself up into the stream. I wish that I could speak effectively to all the busy young men here, and make them value those moments in their lives. None of you young men are so busy that you are always the slaves of your trades or business. You have your evenings. You have your Sundays. You have stray moments and hall-hours here and there. You have y«>ur sickness now and then. Make them times for the nal

ing of your minds and souls. Have asso< and friends outside of the limits of your own profession, as able and intelligent young men as you can find, to whom life means other things from what it means to you, and who can help you to enlarge its meaning for yourself. Be interested in some pursuit which will take you into quite unfamiliar fields. Make yourself at home in the Public Library, that great organ-forest of sweet and solemn and inspiring sounds, which will speak to us if we come and sit and are hungry for its music. Let the country, when you can, scatter the cobwebs of the city out of your brain and send you back to its richer life refreshed and simplified. Above all, let the peace of God, the peace of trust ‘and love, the peace of religion, flow in upon your consciousness the moment that business care gives it a moment’s freedom. Whenever necessary thought of self gives way for an hour, O how good it is if the thought of the Father instantly, with out waiting to be summoned, takes possession of the child.

And now it is time for us to see whether we can not go a little deeper into our subject than we have gone thus far. I should do little credit to your thoughtfulness if I did not believe that you had felt the difficulty in what I have been saying. I have pointed out how the active life needs oftentimes to stop and sit down and become receptive. That is all true enough; but if we state it as the sum of the whole matter, we feel its imperfection. It makes a spotted and spasmodic life, a life which is forever expecting alternations of exhaustion and repair. “Go on,” it seems to say, “live for awhile your outgoing life, and then, when that has gone on long enough, stop and accumulate new strength, and then start out and use it,” and so go on, “getting and spending;” and so you will surely in the end, “lay waste your powers.” It makes spiritual supply almost like the dinner for which you leave your workshop, only to hasten back to the place of toil again when the hurried meal is done.

There must be something better than that. The question inevitably rises in the mind of any active thinking man, Is it not possible instead of working and resting, to rest in working, so that in the very act which exhauets, I shall get my renewal and supply? How good that would be! That would make the feeding of life by God, the divine supply of life, to be not like the eating of a dinner, which is exceptional and an interruption of the life, but like the breathing of the vital air which is going on all the time, and is not done deliberately, or as a special act, but does itself, as it were, by the movement of those same lungs which the exercise of labor sets in motion.

Let us see whether we can make this plain. Here is a man who, we may say, is engaged in a wholly secular employment. He is a merchant selling goods. At the same time he is a distinctly and devoutly Christian man. He loves Christ, and knows that he must have Christ for his helper and his friend. But all the day he is completely busy at his store. He knows how his life always is outgoing Ho longs for something to come in, something diviner and more spiritual. What can he do? Once in awhile he turns aside. He shuts the door. He leaves the business to take care of itself. As truly as if he went into a desert cave, he goes apart. He makes his Sunday genuinely sacred. He consecrates his hour of prayer. What happens then? The blessing surely comes. The ocean hears the stopping of the stream, and knows its opportunity. God comes and feeds the docile and expectant life, and it goes back to counting-house and counter, stronger, purer, greater. That is very good. The man will sell goods more nobly for the peace of God which he has gained in the desert. But just suppose that he did not have to go to the desert for the peace. Suppose that he could have not merely used devoutness, and faith, and piety in the store, but actually gained them there. Suppose that in the compass of one single specific mercantile transaction, there could actually have been present the two sides of this man, one alert, watchful, active, standing on its feet; the other humble, hungry, receptive, sitting down in the very compass of that action before God: would not that surely have been better? Would it not have brought the food nearer to the hunger? Would it not have kept the man’s unity, which it is one of the worst tendencies of life to divide and lose? Would it not have made his business sacred and his devotion intensely practical at once?

And then is an ordinary business action possibly large enough to be thus at the same time the exercise of the merchant’s activity and also the medium through which God feeds the merchant’s soul? Be fore we give an answer to that question, we must stop and force ourselves to remember that a whole act includes its motive. An act of yours is not sim ply the thing you do. It is also the reason why y«»u do it. Make the conception of the act as large as that, and then I think it certainly may include all that I said. Why are you selling your goods? If with out falsehood you can say, (l Because it is my duty, in order that I may maintain my family and serve my generation and honor God by usefulness,” then certainly the act opens itself and becomes a Church. It is the house of God. It is the gate of heaven. God is there in that act; and your soul doing its work for Him, is humbly in His presence; and the soul can not be humbly in the presence of God without being receptive of Him. In every act consciously and devoutly done for God’s sake, God gives himself to the soul and feeds it, in the act; not after it and in re ward of it, but in it.

What is the reason then that our ordinary actions are not able to do this, at the same time to exercise the actor’s power and to be the medium through which God can feed the actor’s soul? Is it not simply that our ordinary act is not complete? It is not the whole act. It is only the body of act, and not the soul. It is the form of the act, without the motive. That is the reason why it is too small to hold this in flowing force as well as the outgoing influence. Make your most simple act complete; do your most common daily duty from its divinest motive, and wrhat a change will come! Still your life will need days of ‘retirement, when it will shut the gates upon the noisy whirl of action and be alone with God. But it will not be upon them that it will mostly depend for spiritual nourishment. They will be like great exceptional banquets and extraordinary feasts of grace. The daily bread of spiritual life, the ordinary feeding of the soul on God, which really makes its sustenance, will be in the perpetual doing of the works of life for Him. The real sitting down to be fed will be mysteriously identical with the most eager and energetic standing on the feet to do His will!

Behold the meeting of the effective and the receptive life. I told about the East all given to contemplation and the waiting for the coming God, and of the West, all full of self-reliance and the stir of action. The Ganges and the Mississippi, what different scenes of human life they see! We might have seen in the same way how between two centuries of the same race’s history, or between two men in the same century, or between two moods of the same man, there lies this picturesque and striking difference. One is energetic, forever sending out force upon the world. The other is receptive, always irinking in influence from God. Such differences there will always be. But behind and beneath all such differences, there will always be this other truth, that in each single race, or age, or man, or act, if the fullest life were there, the effective and the receptive capacities would each be present, and the two would minister to one another. The Ganges and the Mississippi, in the complete world, lill have subterranean communication with c-ach other, and the two together will unite to make glad the city of God. Rest and action in the experience of the completest soul are not antagonistic; they are hardly distinct from one another. Action is the most refreshing rest, and rest is in some sense the most effective action to the soul that lives on complete dependence and obedience to God.

There are few features in the life of Jesus which impress me more than this: the way in which his work and his growth, his effective and receptive life went on together. What he did for man and what his Father did for him, were not separate parts of his life. They were enfolded in the same experiences. True, there were times when he withdrew himself, and, leaving all activity behind, lay on the mountain days and nights, passive before his Father, waiting to be more completely filled with him. But those W«TO rare, exceptional occasions. The ordinary dependence upon God was perfectly expressed by those words to his disciples, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me!” When he gave the Sermon on tin-Mount, when he calmed the tempest on the lake, when he raised Lazarus from the dead, we do not doulit that both processes were going on, enfolded in the completeness of each of those actions. He was saving the world, and he was becoming more perfectly his Father’s Son at once. And at the last, what is it that makes the perfect wonder of the cross? Is it not the double assurance that in those agonies, under that darkness, the world is being redeemed and the Son of Man is being glorified, both at once. The “It is finished” told of the completion of his nature and the completion of his work together. Nay, it is even more intimate than that. The completion of His nature was the completion of his work, and the completion of his work was the completion of his nature. He could not have completely been the Son of God without saving the world, and he could not have completely saved the world without being completely the Son of God.

So labor and patience, activity and the growth which comes by passive suffering, ought always to make one single total life. Some of you will remember how in the old church at Innsbruck, among the magnificent bronze people who stand about the tornb of the Emperor Maximilian, is the great Godfrey of Boulogne, the illustrious crusader. Upon his head he wears his helmet, and on the helmet rests a crown of thorns. The strange conjunction may mean many things. No doubt the crown of thorns is meant to represent the sacred cause, the rescue of the place of the Lord’s crucifixion and burial, for which the soldier fought. But is not such a union of symbols a perpetual picture? The helmet and the crown of thorns! Activity and suffering, fighting and growing, the putting forth of energy and the drinking in of strength; these two were represented not as coming in by turns, not as chasing one another into and out of the life, but as abiding together, making

one temper, filling one character. The helmet and the crown of thorns worn together on the consecrated head, that makes the noble, useful, growing life.

Is not this essentially the great promise which is given us about the eternal blessedness? We are told of heaven, that there is no temple there to which the worshippers go up. There will be no turning aside to refresh the exhausted reverence and faith and love; no special feast times in the everlasting festival, but in the very acts of service the souls, all afire with love for Him they serve, shall drink His love and wisdom into their open natures. “His servants shall serve him, and his name shall be in their foreheads.” The effective life and the receptive life are one. No sweep of arm that does some work for God but harvests also some more of the truth of God, and sweeps it into the treasury of the life.

We must anticipate heaven, and make earth as like to it as possible.

May not two lessons come to us out of what I have said to-day?

The first is this. Seek your life’s nourishment in your life’s work. Do not think that after you have bought or sold or studied or taught, you will go into your closet and open your Bible and repair the damage and the loss which your day’s life has left you. Do those things certainly, but also insist that your buying or selling or studying or teaching shall itsolf make you brave, patient, pure and holy! Do not let your occupation pass you by, and only leave you the basest and poorest of its benefits, the money with which it fills your purse. Compel it to give up to you the charity and faith and character and godliness which it has at its heart, which it hides charily, but which it must give to you if you insist upon it and are able to receive it.

The other lesson is: Make your most restful contemplation and your most receptive listening at the lips of God, not to be mere spiritual luxuries, but to be forms and modes of action. Make them acts. Let them call your powers into play. Let them be not listless, but full of vigor. Let them anticipate work for God and service of his children so earnestly and eagerly, that they themselves shall be work and service.

He who learns these lessons lives a life as deep as the ocean and as powerful. There is no tedium or fretiulness for him. His life catches the quality of the life of God. He works while it is called to day, and yet he has already reached the rest which remaineth for God’s people. Such lives may God help us to live.