282. The Royal Exile

The Royal Exile

Isa_53:4 : ’93Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.’94

Far up and far back in the history of heaven there came a period when its most illustrious citizen was about to absent himself. He was not going to sail from beach to beach; we have often done that; he was not going to put out from one hemisphere to another hemisphere; many of us have done that; but he was to sail from world to world, the spaces unexplored and the immensities untraveled. No world had ever hailed heaven, and heaven had never hailed any other world. I think that the windows and the balconies were thronged, and that the pearline beach was crowded with those who had come to see him sail out the harbor of light into the oceans beyond. Out and out and out, and on and on and on, and down and down and down he sped, until one night with only one to greet him he arrived. His disembarkation so unpretending, so quiet that it was not known on earth until the excitement in the cloud gave intimation to the Bethlehem rustics that something grand and glorious had happened. Who comes there? From what port did he sail? Why was this the place of his destination? I question the shepherds. I question the camel drivers. I question the angels. I have found out.

He was an exile. But the world has had plenty of exiles. Abraham an exile from Ur of Chaldee, John an exile from Ephesus, Kosciusco an exile from Poland, Mazzini an exile from Rome, Emmet an ex-ile from Ireland, Victor Hugo an exile from France, Kossuth an exile from Hungary. But this one of whom I speak to-day had such resounding farewell and came into such chilling reception, for not even a hostler went out with his lantern to help him in, that he is more to be celebrated than any other expatriated one of earth or heaven.

First, I remark that Christ was an imperial exile. He got down off a throne. He took off a tiara. He closed a palace gate behind him. His family were princes and princesses. Vashti was turned out of the throne room by Ahasuerus. David was dethroned by Absalom’92s infamy. The five kings were hurled into a cavern by Joshua’92s courage. Some of the Henrys of England and some of the Louis of France were jostled on their thrones by discontented subjects. But Christ was never more honored or more popular, or more loved than the day he left heaven. Australian exile, once very severe for English criminals; Siberian exile, once very severe for Russian political offenders; but Christ turned himself out from throne-room into sheep-pen, and down from the top to the bottom. He was not pushed off. He was not manacled for foreign transportation. He was not put out because they no more wanted him in celestial domain, but by choice departing and descending into an exile five times as long as that of Napoleon at St. Helena, and a thousand times worse, the one exile suffering for that he had destroyed nations, the other exile suffering, because he came to save a world. An imperial exile. King Eternal! ’93Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne.’94

But I go further and tell you he was an exile on a barren island. This world is one of the smallest islands of light in the ocean of immensity. Other stellar kingdoms are many thousand times larger than this. Christ came to this small Patmos of a world. When exiles are sent out they are generally sent to regions that are sandy, or cold, or hot’97some Dry Tortugas of disagreeableness. Christ came as an exile to a world scorched with heats, and bitten with cold, to deserts simoon swept, to a howling wilderness. It was seemingly the back dooryard of the universe. Yea, Christ came to the poorest part of this barren island of a world. Asia Minor, with its intense summers unfit for the residence of a foreigner, and in the rainy season unfit for the residence of a foreigner. Christ came not to such a land as America or England, or France, or Germany, but to a land one-third of the year drowned, another third of the year burned up, and only one-third of the year tolerable. Oh, it was the barren island of a world. Barren enough for Christ, for it gave such small worship, and such inadequate affection, and such little gratitude. Imperial exile on the barren island of a world!

I go further and tell you that he was an exile in a hostile country. Turkey not so much against Russia, France not so much against Germany as this earth against Christ. It took him in through the door of a stable. It thrust him out at the point of a spear. The Roman government against him with every bayonet of its army, and every decision of its courts, and every beak of its war eagles. For years after his arrival, the only question was how best to put him out. Herod hated him, the high priest hated him, the Pharisees hated him, Judas Iscariot hated him, Gestas, the dying thief, hated him. The whole earth seemingly turned into a detective to watch his steps. And yet he faced this ferocity. Notice that most of Christ’92s wounds were in front. Some scourging on the shoulders, but the most of Christ’92s wounds in front. He was not on retreat when he expired. Face to face with the world’92s ferocity. Face to face with the world’92s sin. Face to face with the world’92s woe. His eye on the raging countenances of his foaming antagonists when he expired. When the cavalry officer roweled his steed so that he might come nearer up and see the tortured visage of the suffering exile, Christ saw it. When the hammer was lifted for his feet, and when the reed was raised to strike deeper down the spikes of thorn, Christ watched the whole procedure. When his hands were fastened to the cross they were wide open still with benediction. Mind you, his head was not fastened; he could look to the right and he could look to the left, and he could look up and he could look down. He saw when the spikes had been driven home and the hard, round, iron heads of them were in the palms of his hands; he saw them as plainly as you ever saw anything in the palms of your hands. No ether, no chloroform, no merciful an’e6sthetic to dull or stupefy, but wide awake. He saw the obscuration of the heavens, the unbalancing of the rocks, the countenances quivering with rage and the cachination diabolic. Oh, it was the hostile, as well as the barren island of a world.

I go further and tell you that this exile was far from home. It is ninety-five million miles from here to the sun, and all astronomers agree in saying that our solar system is only one of the small wheels of the great machinery of the universe turning around some one great centre, the centre so far distant it is beyond all imagination and calculation, and, if, as some think, that great centre in the distance is heaven, Christ came far from home when he came here. Have you ever thought of the homesickness of Christ? Some of you know what homesickness is when you have been only a few weeks absent from the domestic circle. Christ was thirty-three years away from home. Some of you feel homesickness when you are a hundred or a thousand miles away from the domestic circle. Christ was more millions of miles away from home than you could calculate if all your life you did nothing but calculate. You know what it is to be homesick even amid pleasurable surroundings, but Christ slept in huts, and he was athirst, and he was a-hungered, and he was on the way from being born in another man’92s barn to being buried in another man’92s grave. I have read how the Swiss when they are far away from their native country, at the sound of their national air, get so homesick that they fall into melancholy and sometimes they die under the homesickness. But oh, the homesickness of Christ. Poverty homesick for celestial riches. Persecution homesick for hosanna. Weariness homesick for rest. Homesick for angelic and archangelic companionship. Homesick to get out of the night and the storm and the world’92s execration. Homesickness will make a week seem as long as a month, and, it seems to me, that the three decades of Christ’92s residence on earth must have seemed to him almost interminable. You have often tried to measure the other pangs of Christ, but you have never tried to measure the magnitude and ponderosity of a Saviour’92s homesickness.

I take a step further and tell you that Christ was in an exile which he knew would end in assassination. Holman Hunt, the master painter, has a picture in which he represents Jesus Christ in the Nazarene carpenter shop. Around him are the saws, the hammers, the axes, the drills of carpentry. The picture represents Christ as rising from the carpenter’92s working bench and wearily stretching out his arms as one will after being in contracted or uncomfortable posture, and the light of that picture is so arranged that the arms of Christ wearily stretched forth, together with his body, throw on the wall the shadow of a cross. Oh, that shadow was on everything in Christ’92s lifetime. Shadow of a cross on the Bethlehem swaddling clothes. Shadow of a cross on the road over which the three fugitives fled into Egypt. Shadow of a cross on Lake Galilee, as Christ walked its mosaic floor of opal and emerald and crystal. Shadow of a cross on the road to Emmaus. Shadow of a cross on the brook Kedron, and door of temple, and on the side of Olivet. Shadow of a cross on sunrise and sunset. Constantine marching with his army saw just once a cross in the sky, but Christ saw the cross all the time.

On a rough journey we cheer ourselves with the fact that it will end in warm hospitality; but Christ knew that his rough path would end at a defoliaged tree without one leaf and only two branches, bearing fruit of such bitterness as no human lips had ever tasted. Oh, what an exile, starting in an infancy without any cradle, and ending in assassination. Thirst without water. Day without sunlight. The doom of a desperado, for more than angelic excellence.

Why that expatriation and that exile? Worldly good sometimes comes from worldly evil. The accidental glance of a sharp blade from a razor grinder’92s wheel put out the eye of Gambetta and excited sympathies which gained him an education and started him on a career that made his name more magnetic among Frenchmen than any other name in the last decade. Hawthorne turned out of the office of collector at Salem, went home in despair. His wife touched him on the shoulder and said, ’93Now is the time to write your book,’94 and his famous ’93Scarlet Letter’94 was the brilliant consequence. Worldly good sometimes comes from worldly evil. Then be not unbelieving when I tell you that from the greatest crime of all eternity and of the whole universe, the murder of the Son of God, there shall come results which shall eclipse all the grandeurs of eternity past and eternity to come. Christ an exile from heaven, opening the way for the deportation toward heaven, and to heaven, of all those who will accept the proffer. Atonement, a ship large enough to take all the passengers that will come aboard it.

In my boyhood, I often used to hear my father talk with enthusiasm of the Colonization Society which proposed to take all the colored population of America to Africa, and the most eloquent lips in the American Senate and in the American pulpit advocated that project, and there was something inspiriting about it. But how tame all that compared with Christ’92s work by which he proposed the colonization of the whole human race from earth into the free lands of heaven. Millions have already been shipped and other millions will make the magnificent passage.

For this royal exile I now bespeak the love and service of all the exiles, for, in one sense or the other, that includes all of us. The gates of this continent have been so widely opened that there are among us many voluntary exiles from other lands. Some of you are Scotchmen. I see it in your high cheek bones and in the glory that illumines your face when I mention the land of your nativity. Bonnie Scotland! Dear old kirk! Some of your ancestors sleeping in Greyfriars’92 churchyard, or by the deep lochs filled out of the pitchers of heaven, or under the heather sometimes so deep of color it makes one think of the blood of the Covenanters who signed their names for Christ, dipping their pens into the veins of their own arms opened for that purpose. How every fibre of your nature thrills as I mention the names of Robert Bruce, and the Campbells and Grizel Cochrane. I bespeak for this royal exile of my text the love and the service of all Scotch exiles.

Some of you are Englishmen. Your ancestry served the Lord. Have I not read of the sufferings of the Haymarket? and have I not seen in Oxford the very spot where Ridley and Latimer mounted the red chariot? Some of your ancestors heard George Whitefield preach, or heard Charles Wesley sing, or heard John Bunyan tell his dream of the celestial city, and the cathedrals under the shadow of which some of you were born had in their grandest organ roll the name of the Messiah. I bespeak for the royal exile of my sermon the love and the service of all English exiles.

Yes, some of you came from Ireland, the island of distress, over which hunger on a throne of human skeletons sat queen. All efforts at amelioration halted by massacre. Procession of famines, procession of martyrdoms marching from Northern Channel to Cape Clear, and from Irish Sea across to the Atlantic. An island not bounded as geographers tell us, but as every philanthropist knows’97bounded on the north and the south and the east and the west by woe which no human politics can alleviate and only Almighty God can assuage. Land of Goldsmith’92s rhythm, and Sheridan’92s wit, and O’92Connell’92s eloquence, and Edmund Burke’92s statesmanship, and O’92Brien’92s sacrifice. Another Patmos with its apocalypse of blood. Yet you cannot think of it to-day without having your eyes blinded with emotion, for there your ancestors sleep in graves, some of which they entered for lack of bread. For this royal exile of my sermon I bespeak the love and the service of all Irish exiles.

Some of you are from Germany, the land of Luther, and some are from Italy, the land of Garibaldi, and some are from France, the land of John Calvin, one of the three mighties of the glorious Reformation. Some are descendants of the Puritans, and they were exiles, and some are descendants of the Huguenots, and they were exiles, and some are descendants of the Holland refugees, and they were exiles. Some of you were born on the banks of the Yazoo, or the Savannah, and you are now living in New York. Some of you on the banks of the Kennebec, or at the foot of the Green Mountains, and you are far from home now. Some of you on the prairies of the West, or the tablelands, and you are here now.

Oh, how many of us far away from home. All of us exiles. This is not our home. Heaven is our home. Oh, I am so glad when the royal exile went back he left the gate ajar, or left it wide open. ’93Going home!’94 that is the dying exclamation of the majority of Christians. I have seen many Christians die. I think nine out of ten of them in the last moment say: ’93Going home.’94 Going home out of this banishment of sin and sorrow and sadness. Going home to join in the hilarities of our parents and our dear children who have already departed. Going home to Christ. Going home to God. Going home to stay. Where are your loved ones who died in Christ? You pity them. Ah, they ought to pity you. You are an exile far away from home. They are home. Oh, what a time it will be for you when the gatekeeper of heaven shall say: ’93Take off that rough sandal; the journey’92s ended. Put down that sabre; the battle’92s won. Put off that iron coat of mail and put on the robe of conqueror.’94 At that gate of triumph I leave you, only reciting three tender cantos translated from the Italian, if you ever heard anything sweeter, I never did:

’91Twas Whispered One Morning in Heaven,

How the Little Child Angel May,

In the Shade of the Great White Portal,

Sat Sorrowing Night and Day.

How She Said to the Stately Warden,

He of the Key and Bar,

’93O, Angel, Sweet Angel, I Pray You

Set the Beautiful Gates Ajar.

Only a Little, I Pray You,

Set the Beautiful Gates Ajar.

’93I Can Hear My Mother Weeping,

She Is Lonely, She Cannot See

A Glimmer of Light in the Darkness

When the Gates Shut After Me.

Oh, Turn Me the Key, Sweet Angel,

The Splendor Will Shine so Far.’94

But the Warden Answered, ’93I Dare Not

Set the Beautiful Gates Ajar;’94

Spoke Low, and Answered the Warden, ’93I Dare Not

Set the Beautiful Gates Ajar.’94

Then Up Rose Mary the Blessed,

Sweet Mary, the Mother of Christ,

Her Hand On the Hand of the Angel

She Laid, and Her Touch Sufficed.

Turned Was the Key in the Portal,

Fell Ringing the Golden Bar,

And Lo! In the Little Child’92s Fingers

Stood the Beautiful Gates Ajar;

In the Little Child’92s Angel Fingers

Stood the Beautiful Gates Ajar.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage