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SERMON XX.

MONDAY IN PASSION WEEK.

[Preached at Northallerton on Monday in Passion week, 1828.]

Matthew xxi. 18, 19.

In the morning, as He returned into the city, He hungered, and when He saw a fig-tree in the way, He came to it, and found nothing thereon but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever; and presently the fig-tree withered away.

PURSUANT to the plan which I submitted to you yesterday, we are to direct our attention this morning to the events which occurred on the fourth day before the passover, on which our Lord was put to death. As the week which we now keep holy is called PASSION WEEK; and as the services of the Church direct us more particularly to the sufferings of our Lord, some surprise may possibly be excited that I should dwell at such length upon the last actions of the life of Christ, and not upon the agonies of the garden of Gethsemane, the pains

of His cross, and the sorrows of His death. My reason is this not only do we hear in the course of the week, the relation of His apprehension, His crucifixion, and His death, from the narrative of each of the Evangelists-not only too do we appropriate one particular day to the contemplation of the sad moment when He commended His suffering spirit to His Father; but there is so much of wisdom-of propriety-and of every imaginable excellence in the various actions which marked the last few days of the ministry of Christ, that we obtain from an examination of them new proofs of His divinity, and become more and more confirmed in our conviction of the one great truth, which I am so desirous to impress upon you, that Christ was the willing sacrifice; and, therefore, the acceptable atonement for the sins of the world. Our reflections upon the death of Christ may be said to be in some measure of the same nature with our reflections upon the loss of our private friends. We remember them more affectionately, we lament them more deeply, in proportion as we reflect upon the virtues of their lives, or their affection towards ourselves. So also shall we commemorate, with more heartfelt emotion, the dying hour of our blessed Lord, if we first employ our leisure in contemplating the loveliness of His character, and the proofs of His unbounded mercy.

The present day, the fourth before the crucifixion, was distinguished by fewer events than yesterday, and fewer instructions than, as I shall shew

you, were delivered as on to-morrow. The first event was that which I have read to you in this passage from St. Matthew, the withering of the barren fig-tree--the others were the second casting out of the buyers and sellers from the temple, and the continued plotting of the Scribes, the Pharisees, and the chiefs of the people, to accomplish His destruction. The two last of these have been already considered. In confining ourselves, therefore, to the first, I shall endeavour to point out to you the design which our Lord had in view, in pronouncing this remarkable sentence-the conclusions we may derive from our contemplation are submitted to us in that sublime passage of Isaiah, which has been read in the service of the day.

Let us first inquire what was the design of our Lord in pronouncing that sentence upon the figtree, under which it withered away. It cannot be necessary that I should attempt to prove to you, that our Saviour could not have acted from any inferior motive: there must have been some useful object proposed by this action; and that object must have been connected with the particular instruction which He intended to impress upon the people, before He was taken from among them. Now the instruction which He was endeavouring to enforce upon the Jews, was this-that if they continued to reject Him-their long promised Messiah—and to bring forth no fruits of repentance, their Church and their state should both be in

volved in one hopeless ruin. The principal question, therefore, which we have to consider is, whether this lesson could be impressed upon the Jewish people, by the miraculous withering of this tree?

To enable us to answer this question, we must take into consideration the custom which then prevailed among the Jews-which is every where to be found in Scripture-and which still exists among us, and every other people, to a greater or less degree. The custom to which I allude, is this-the expressing spiritual ideas in language which is derived from visible objects—and especially from those which abound in the country, the mountains, and the fields. Thus the ancient prophets, when they speak of the anger of Jehovah, describe Him as threshing out the Heathen, and trampling them beneath His feet'. He scatters His enemies like chaff upon the mountains. He treads

them down, as the grapes are trodden in the winepress. Now, of all the visible objects which are most commonly used to describe spiritual objects -the most usual is, the emblem of a vine, and of a vineyard, as representing the Church of GodThou, oh God, broughtest a vine out of Egypt that is, the Jewish Church-what more could be done for my vineyard that I have not done? that is, "what more could have been done for my people

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4.

3 Lam. i. 15.

"to induce them to obey my commandments?" And so I might multiply many instances. Now, in the New Testament, we find that the same mode of expression is used by our Lord after He had been speaking of the destruction of the tower of Siloam, which fell at Jerusalem. He assures the people of Jerusalem, that unless they repented, they should perish in the same manner; and He then goes on to relate this parable as applicable to the subject before him: A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard. Now, we know that the vineyard meant the whole kingdom or Church of Israel, and as our Lord had been speaking of Jerusalem only, and applied His parable to that city, we may infer that by the fig tree in this parable, He denoted the city of Jerusalem. These three years I come, says the parable, seeking fruit upon this fig tree; and the ministry of Christ continued three years; cut it down. The fig-tree, however, was to be spared another season, as Jerusalem was; and it was only to be cut down at the last, if it did not produce fruit in its season. Having then compared Jerusalem to the fig-tree in a former parable, the appearance of that tree which He passed on this fourth morning before the passover, was so emblematical of the condition of the Jewish people, that He only completed the parallel by pronouncing that destruction upon it which He had before predicted in His parable.—As He was hungry,

6 Luke xiii. 6,

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