Notes of a sermon preached by, the Rev. C. E, Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin, Sunday evening, December 19. Text, St. John! XII, 20-23. "Now there were certain Greeks among them that went up to worship at the feast; these, therefore, came to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him saying, ' Sir, we would see Jesus'. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew, and Andrew cometh and Philip, and they tell Jesus. And Jesus an-swored them saying, 'The hour is come that the Son of Man should be glorified.'
No wonder that Jesus was glad, "delighted" as we say in ordinary conversation, when He heard that some Greeks wanted to see Him. There have been people who have wondered whether He pew much about the Greeks. Ther€ seems an idea in many minds that in the days of Jesus people lived without "knowing anything, about the rest of the world. That is—foolish. Jesus was able to know about the Greeks as easily as an Englishman knows about French people. Men did not live tied up in sacks in those days any more than they do to-day. Philip came from a cosmopolitan-place called Bethsaida which was much like Tientsin and Shanghai, a place where you could meet men of all kinds of races. That was no doubt why the Greeks applied to Philip. And Jesus was glad. A thrill of future success ran through Him when He heard that Greeks had been inquiring for an introduction to Him. Even He felt the joy of success; 'The hour is came that the Son of Man should be glorified." No wonder He was glad. In a book entitled "The debt of civilization to the Greeks," Professor Mahaffy, the great Greek scholar, says people ask, "What have the Greeks done?' He answers, What have they not done? Supreme in poetry, in prose, in architecture, in sculpture; in. painting, in philosophy,. in science."" No wonder Jesus was glad. He saw the coming of a mighty harvest of souls into His Kingdom. I don't think there cani ever have been more than a few—say five or six—millions of Greeks living at the same time. Think of the population of modern nations. They run to scores of millions. Yet which of us has a roll of fame superior to the Greeks! Think of what Homer, Plate, Aristotle, to name only three, have meant to. the world. No wonder Jesus was glad and thanked His Father for this glimpse of} the coming dawn. i Unver s Natvran Law.
Now; this is an Advent Sunday when we Christians think of the, coming of the Son of God into the} world, His past, His present, coming.
Of course the thing that accounts for Christianity is the nature of Jesus Christ. He is the unique Son of God, divine as we are not.!"God was in Christ."
But as the late Dr. Gwatkin says, "As soon as the Gospel has fairly started it! works under natural law." This is! a very deep point that most of the people who complain about the! slow progress of Christianity forget. Seeing it pleased God to! reveal himself in a person and a history, his revelation must be subject to the handicaps that all] truth meets with in its travel through the world; and it depends on favouring circumstances as all truth does.
And Jesus was glad to see the! Greeks, because he knew that, under the guiding hand of His Father, the Greeks had been{ ordained to help to prepare the way for the coming of the Saviour of the world. I believe the whole of the previous history of the world focussed itself on the coming of the Christ and the Greeks were inspired and ordained to make a way ior Him. There is one great' preacher, who has a sermon on the use God made of the Greeks in this way. But he makes it negative He points out the errors and sins of the Greeks. This is Robertson of Brighton. But surely Jesus was not glad to see these Greeks because of their sins and short-! comings, their restlessness, world-lines and so on. It must surely have been their~virtues and solid; achievements that made Him; thank God for these few individuals of that great race, who had ex-! pressed a desire to see Him.
Let us now consider how wonder-! fully the Greeks prepared the way for Christ in spite of Paul's saying that the Gospel was "foolishness" to them.
PrepaRine THE
They created a civilization and: atmosphere in which the Gospel/ could readily and rapidly spread. The civilization of the Roman Empire was largely Greek. Two! things had made the world a very: Greek world. First the conquests of Alexander the Great. He Europeanized Asia' Minor. He had united East and West. There was' one type of civilization from France right through Europe and Asia to Bagdad. Paul was as much a Greek as a Jew. Wherever Paul went he found the same kind of life and mental atmosphere that he had been brought up in at Tarsus. Paul had a far easier missionary job than a British mission-! ary has in China, in an utterly alien civilization. We forget that, but it is so.
Then the Greeks had been great colonists. Marseilles, Naples and many other cities were founded by them. The Romans had conquered the world militarily, but. the Greeks had conquered it mentally and culturally. And one cannot but see the hand of God in this. Again, the success and influence of Christianity depends, under God, largely on a book and. on preaching. There are Christians who tell us that tha traditions of the Church are as important as the Bible for our knowledge of Jesus. Nonsense! Ask people who say that to' tell you one authentic fact about the Saviour that is not in the New Testament and they haven't one.
No: we are the people of—the book and the word of preaching. Our religion is a glorious story of the Son of God in His pilgrimage among us and God's Spirit is specially with us when we have sense enough to tell it and not waste our time maundering over the "social Gospel." And a book and preaching needed a universally understood language. The Apostles had to make Christianity a going, self-supporting concern in their own generation; they had no time to go to "language schools" to learn an awkward tongue. When Paul was converted he could start right in preaching Christ. Suppose that when Paul was converted he*had had to spend two years at a language school to learn Chinese before he could go out and preach; suppose he had had to learn that awful list of Chinese sounds, ai, a0, and so on, and the awful list_of Chinese radicals, and suppose Peter and the rest had had to waste their time learning a language uselessly crabbed Like Chinese, they would have been crippled; their lives half gone before they got to work. As it was they could start right in everywhere and be understood. Surely that was a divine providence, Paul had Corinth half converted before a modern missionary could give his first address. Why? Because Greek was almost universally understood; it was a far more universal language than French was in the eighteenth century.
The Old Testament had to be put into Greek in the third century C., for so many Jews were in Greek-speaking lands, and knew it better than Hebrew. Paul wrote ad' to the church at Rome in Greek. Peter wrote his Epistles in Greek. If this covering of the world by one language is not a case of Providence, what is? When written, the New Testament could circulate everywhere. No wonder Jesus thanked His Father when He heard that Greeks were seeking Him. Again, Christianity is as broad as the heavens; it is not just a ritual or an isolated doctrine about God. It is the divine life permeating alt the legitimate activities of man.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.