ANATHEMA AND GRACE

’The salutation of me Paul with mine own hand. 22.  If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha. 23.  The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. 24.  My love be with you all in Christ Jesus.’—­1 COR. xvi. 21-24.

Terror and tenderness are strangely mingled in this parting salutation, which was added in the great characters shaped by Paul’s own hand, to the letter written by an amanuensis.  He has been obliged, throughout the whole epistle, to assume a tone of remonstrance abundantly mingled with irony and sarcasm and indignation.  He has had to rebuke the Corinthians for many faults, party spirit, lax morality, toleration of foul sins, grave abuses in their worship even at the Lord’s Supper, gross errors in opinion in the denial of the Resurrection.  And in this last solemn warning he traces all these vices to their fountainhead—­the defect of love to Jesus Christ—­and warns of their fatal issue.  ‘Let him be Anathema.’

But he will not leave these terrible words for his last.  The thunder is followed by gentle rain, and the sun glistens on the drops; ’The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.’  Nor for himself will he let the last impression be one of rebuke or even of warning.  He desires to show that his heart yearns over them all; so he gathers them all—­the partisans; the poor brother that has fallen into sin; the lax ones who, in their misplaced tenderness, had left him in his sin; the misguided reasoners who had struck the Resurrection out of the articles of the Christian creed—­he gathers them all into his final salutation, and he says, ’Take and share my love—­though I have had to rebuke—­amongst the whole of you.’

Is not that beautiful?  And does not the juxtaposition of such messages in this farewell go deeper than the revelation of Paul’s character?  May we not see, in these terrible and tender thoughts thus inextricably intertwined and braided together, a revelation of the true nature both of the terror and the tenderness of the Gospel which Paul preached?  It is from that point of view that I wish to look at them now.

I. I take first that thought—­the terror of the fate of the unloving.

Now, I must ask you for a moment’s attention in regard to these two untranslated words. Anathema Maran-atha.  The first thing to be noticed is that the latter of them stands independently of the former, and forms a sentence by itself, as I shall have to show you presently.  ‘Anathema’ means an offering, or a thing devoted; and its use in the New Testament arises from its use in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, where it is employed for persons and things that, in a peculiar sense, were set apart and devoted to God.  In the story of the conquest of Canaan, for instance, we read of Jericho and other places, persons, or things that were, as our version somewhat unfortunately renders