RESPONSIBILITY OF OFFICE
‘Let another take his office.’
Psalms 109:8
It is not too much to say that, save in the Athanasian Creed itself, nowhere have Christian people found more widespread spiritual difficulty than in what are commonly known as the Imprecatory Psalms, and even among these none is equal to the psalm whence the text is taken. How are we to understand them; how, especially when we are told to forgive as we would be forgiven, can we, in Christian churches, take them on our lips? The explanations are various. Good Bishop Hall, in his desire for an explanation, would alter the optative to the future. In the case before us this is undoubtedly the natural conclusion. Whether in accord with a wish or not, the fact was plain: when an office was once forfeited or lost another must take it.
And are there no ways in which the prophecy may appeal to us? Let us see.
I. The temporary character of office.—In one sense it must—temporariness. We are here but a short time. God buries His workmen, but He carries on His work. Some day your medical practice, or your profession, or your business, or your shop, or your clerkship, or your church office, or your own particular work, will be held by some one else. Another name will be painted up outside. The wind will pass over you, and your place, like that of the flower of the field, shall know you no more. The time comes when the door of earthly opportunity shall be shut, and to each of us in turn the inevitable sentence must go forth, ‘Let another take his office.’
II. Unfitness for office.—But if this is the common law over which human control is not, there are other senses in which the answer must rest with ourselves. There are offices held by people manifestly unfit—the square man, as the old saying goes, in the round hole. Our English Charles I, the French Louis XVI, a succession of Russian Czars, who can assert that nothing but harm was done by deposition, in filling their position by others? How much good would be done if people who are in unsuitable positions everywhere could have the gentle word of release spoken, passing them to suitable spheres and letting others take their office! But more often unfitness lies in deliberate fault rather than in actual misfortune. We are not fit for noble tasks because we make no effort. It is God’s inexorable law that office is taken from those who misuse it. Office does not mean the title, or the name, or the tinsel, or the outward show, but it means the inward reality, and the striving after the spiritual and the practical ideal within. The profession does not make the man, but it is the man that makes the profession. And where men, or countries, or churches have failed the Parable of the Talents teaches us that lost opportunity is given to others.
III. ‘Hold fast that which thou hast.’—Yes, there is one tiny place in God’s Church and universe which no one can fill so well as ourselves. Let me ask each one. Your office is to stand as a disciple of the Master, as a member of the Divine kingdom. Are you conscious of it? Have you ever realised at all that your work here is not only your own selfish or individual salvation, but it is the service and the salvation of other souls? ‘Let no man,’ St. John says, ‘take thy crown.’ We must either go forward or backward. We must grow stronger or grow weaker, for there is no standing still. We must be either for God or against what is holy. Are we each fulfilling our Divine office as a servant of God? Weak in ourselves, we may be strong in Jesus Christ.
Rev. Dr. Darlington.