23. The Worship Due to Christ

I. “He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Most High” (Luke i. 32). The homage we pay to any one is proportioned to his eminence and greatness. Christ Our Lord is great in every respect. 1. In His natures, the Divinity, and a most perfect and holy Humanity. 2. In His power, for He can do all that He desires in heaven and on earth. 3. In His qualities, which are the Divine Perfections, and the highest degree of all human virtues, splendour, beauty, benevolence, justice. 4. In His relations, to God first, as a Person of the Blessed Trinity, and then to creatures, as their King, Priest, Teacher, and as Son of a Virgin Mother. 5. In His activities, the internal ones of intellect and heart, and His external ones of miracles and beneficence. 6. In the variety of the sufferings of His Passion and their effects. 7. In His possessions, for all things are His. 8. In every place; in His Blessed Mother, at Bethlehem, in the lowliness of Nazareth even, in the temple, on the cross and in death, in His descent to hell, and on the right hand of His Father. 9. In every time; for before Abraham and the world were made He was. He was great in anticipation and prophecy, greater still abiding and working in His Church. 10. One thing remains, that He be magnified in you, and His greatness be shown in its effects on your life. “Now also shall Christ be magnified in my body” (Phil. i. 20). For this greatness He depends on your good-will.

II. “Wherefore also God hath exalted Him, and hath given Him a name that is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow” (Phil. ii. 9, 10). God has made Jesus to be served and venerated by every creature; and the veneration due to Him is that of supreme and divine adoration. He is God and Man together. If the Humanity were separable from the Divinity it would not be adorable with divine worship. But such subtlety of distinction is not allowable or possible. Jesus Christ is one person only; we cannot separate the divine and the human nature as if they were distinct entities, and pay a different kind of homage to each. Christ is to be venerated as “true God of true God” whether we consider Him in the divine nature as Son of God, or in the human nature as the Son of Man and the Son of Mary. In Him we adore the Divinity directly, and the Humanity by concomitance, as possessing the prerogatives of the one Divine Person who supports both natures. Our love and attachment are, however, elicited rather by the qualities exhibited in that nature “which we have seen with our eyes, which we have diligently looked upon, and our hands have handled” (1 John i. 1). Be careful to pay to Jesus in every way, in attitude, in thought, in word, the adoration which is His due.

III. Those who recognize the ineffable greatness and beauty of Our Lord will, like Moses, pay Him the homage of desiring earnestly to see His face. “If therefore I have found favour in Thy sight, show me Thy face that I may know Thee” (Ex. xxxiii. 13). They will picture Him in their imagination. They will love to have before their eyes something that will remind them constantly of Him. The representations of Him by statues or pictures, as an infant or as dying on the Cross, will be found on the walls of their houses, or in the open country, or worn upon their person, testifying to the faith, and love, and desire that are in them. The fullest representation of Christ is found in our brethren, who are His brethren, and especially in the poor, the abandoned and the suffering. We must recognize His lineaments in them, and even in our enemies; we must remember that what we do to them He considers as done to Himself, and that so we can testify our homage and love towards Him, and make Him a return for what He has done for us. Let this thought guide you in all your relations with your fellow-men.