THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

VOLUME 1 and 2

4:17 thru 7:29

 

The Daily Study Bible Series

Revised Edition

 

 

WILLIAM BARCLAY

The Gospel of Matthew

William Barclay

 

 

Matthew 4:12

THE SON OF GOD GOES FORTH

 

Matthew 4:12-17

 

When Jesus heard that John had been delivered into the hands of the authorities, he withdrew into Galilee. He left Galilee and came and made his home in Capernaum, which is on the lake-side, in the districts of Zebulun and Naphtali. This was done that there might be fulfilled that which was spoken through Isaiah the prophet, when he said, “Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and a light has risen for those who sat in the land and in the shadow of death.” From that time Jesus began to proclaim his message and to say, “Repent, for the Kingdom of the Heavens has come near!”

 

Before very long disaster came to John. He was arrested and imprisoned in the dungeons of the Castle of Machaerus by Herod the king. His crime was that he had publicly denounced Herod for seducing his brother’s wife, and making her his own wife, after he had put away the wife he had. It is never safe to rebuke an eastern despot, and John’s courage brought him first imprisonment and then death. We shall come later to the details of that story which Matthew does not tell until Matthew 14:3-12.

 

For Jesus the time had come when he must go forth to his task.

 

Let us note what he did first of all. He left Nazareth and he took up residence in the town of Capernaum. There was a kind of symbolic finality in that move. In that moment Jesus left his home never again to return to live in it. It is as if he shut the door that lay behind him before he opened the door that stood in front of him. It was the clean cut between the old and the new. One chapter was ended and another had begun. Into life there come these moments of decision. It is always better to meet them with an even surgical cut than to vacillate undecided between two courses of action.

 

Let us note where Jesus went. He went into Galilee. When Jesus went into Galilee to begin his mission and his ministry, he knew what he was doing. Galilee was the most northerly district of Palestine. It stretched from the Litany River in the north to the Plain of Esdraelon in the south. On the west it did not reach the sea coast of the Mediterranean, because the coastal strip was in the possession of the Phoenicians. On the north-east it was bounded by Syria, and its eastern limit was the waters of the Sea of Galilee. Galilee was not large; it was only fifty miles from north to south, and twenty-five miles from east to west.

 

But, small as it was, Galilee was densely populated. It was by far the most fertile region of Palestine; its fertility was indeed phenomenal and proverbial. There was a saying that it was easier to raise a legion of olives in Galilee than it was to bring up one child in Judea. Josephus, who was at one time governor of the province, says, “It is throughout rich in soil and pasturage, producing every variety of tree, and inviting by its productiveness even those who have the least inclination for agriculture; it is everywhere tilled; no part is allowed to lie idle, and everywhere it is productive.” The result of this was that for its size Galilee had an enormous population. Josephus tells us that in it there were two hundred and four villages, none with a population of fewer than fifteen thousand people. So, then, Jesus began his mission in that part of Palestine where there were most people to hear him; he began his work in an area teeming with men to whom the gospel proclamation might be made.

 

But not only was Galilee a populous district; its people were people of a certain kind. Of all parts of Palestine Galilee was most open to new ideas. Josephus says of the Galileans, “They were ever fond of innovations, and by nature disposed to changes, and delighted in seditions.” They were ever ready to follow a leader and to begin an insurrection They were notoriously quick in temper and given to quarreling. Yet withal they were the most chivalrous of men. “the Galileans,” said Josephus, “have never been destitute of courage.” “Cowardice was never a characteristic of the Galileans.” “They were ever more anxious for honor than for gain.” The inborn characteristics of the Galileans were such as to make them most fertile ground for a new gospel to be preached to them.

 

This openness to new ideas was due to certain facts.

 

(i) The name Galilee comes from the Hebrew word galil  which means a circle. The full name of the area was Galilee of the Gentiles. Plummer wishes to take that to mean “heathenish Galilee.” But the phrase came from the fact that Galilee was literally surrounded by Gentiles. On the west, the Phoenicians were its neighbors. To the north and the east, there were the Syrians. And even to the south, there lay the territory of the Samaritans. Galilee was in fact the one part of Palestine that was inevitably in touch with non-Jewish influences and ideas. Galilee was bound to be open to new ideas in a way that no other part of Palestine was.

 

(ii) The great roads of the world passed through Galilee, as we saw when we were thinking of the town of Nazareth. The Way of the Sea led from Damascus through Galilee right down to Egypt and to Africa. The Road to the East led through Galilee away out to the frontiers. The traffic of the world passed through Galilee. Away in the south Judea is tucked into a corner, isolated and secluded. As it has been well said, “Judea is on the way to nowhere: Galilee is on the way to everywhere.” Judea could erect a fence and keep all foreign influence and all new ideas out; Galilee could never do that. Into Galilee the new ideas were bound to come.

 

(iii) Galilee’s geographical position had affected its history. Again and again it had been invaded and conquered, and the tides of the foreigners had often flowed over it and had sometimes engulfed it.

 

Originally it had been assigned to the tribes of Asher, Naphtali and Zebulun when the Israelites first came into the land (Joshua 9) but these tribes had never been completely successful in expelling the native Canaanite inhabitants, and from the beginning the population of Galilee was mixed. More than once foreign invasions from the north and east had swept down on it from Syria, and in the eighth century B.C. the Assyrians had engulfed it completely, the greater part of its population had been taken away into exile, and strangers had been settled in the land. Inevitably this brought a very large injection of foreign blood into Galilee.

 

From the eighth until the second century B.C. it had been largely in Gentile hands. When the Jews returned from exile under Nehemiah and Ezra, many of the Galileans came south to live in Jerusalem. In 164 B.C. Simon Maccabaeus chased the Syrians north from Galilee back to their own territory; and on his way back he took with him to Jerusalem the remnants of the Galileans who were left.

 

The most amazing thing of all is that in 104 B.C. Aristobulus reconquered Galilee for the Jewish nation, and proceeded forcibly to circumcise the inhabitants of Galilee, and thus to make them Jews whether they liked it or not. History had compelled Galilee to open its doors to new strains of blood and to new ideas and to new influences.

 

The natural characteristics of the Galileans, and the preparation of history had made Galilee the one place in all Palestine where a new teacher with a new message had any real chance of being heard, and it was there that Jesus began his mission and first announced his message.

 

THE HERALD OF GOD

 

Matthew 4:12-17 (continued)

 

Before we leave this passage there are certain other things which we must note.

 

It was to the town of Capernaum that Jesus went. The correct form of the name is Capharnaum. The form Capernaum does not occur at all until the fifth century A.D., but it is so fixed in our minds and memories that it would not be wise to try to change it.

 

There has been much argument about the site of Capernaum. Two places have been suggested. The commonest, and the likeliest identification is that Capernaum is Tell Hum, which is on the west side of the extreme north of the Sea of Galilee; the alternative, and the less likely, identification is that Capernaum is Khan Minyeh, which is about two and a half miles to the south-west of Tell Hum. In any event, there is now nothing but ruins left to show where Capernaum once stood.

 

It was Matthew’s habit to find in the Old Testament something which he could use as a prophecy about every event in Jesus’ life. He finds such a prophecy in Isaiah 9:1,2. In fact that is another of the prophecies which Matthew tears violently from its context and uses in his own extraordinary way. It is a prophecy which dates back to the reign of Pekah. In those days the northern parts of Palestine, including Galilee, had been despoiled by the invading armies of the Assyrians; and this was originally a prophecy of the deliverance which would some day come to these conquered territories. Matthew finds in it a prophecy which foretold of the light that Jesus was to bring.

 

Finally, Matthew gives us a brief one-sentence summary of the message which Jesus brought. The Authorized Version and Revised Standard Version both say that Jesus began to preach. The word preach  has come down in the world; it is all too unfortunately connected in the minds of many people with boredom. The word in Greek is kerussein, which is the word for a herald’s proclamation from a king. Kerux is the Greek word for herald, and the herald was the man who brought a message direct from the king.

 

This word tells us of certain characteristics of the preaching of Jesus and these are characteristics which should be in all preaching.

 

(i) The herald had in his voice a note of certainty. There was no doubt about his message; he did not come with perhapses and maybes and probably’s; he came with a definite message. Goethe had it: “Tell me of your certainties: I have doubts enough of my own.” Preaching is the proclamation of certainties, and a man cannot make others sure of that about which he himself is in doubt.

 

(ii) The herald had in his voice the note of authority. He was speaking for the king; he was laying down and announcing the king’s law, the king’s command, and the king’s decision. As was said of a great preacher, “he did not cloudily guess; he knew.” Preaching, as it has been put, is the application of prophetic authority to the present situation.

 

(iii) The herald’s message came from a source beyond himself; it came from the king. Preaching speaks from a source beyond the preacher. It is not the expression of one man’s personal opinions; it is the voice of God that Jesus spoke to men.

 

The message of Jesus consisted of a command which was the consequence of a new situation. “Repent!” he said. “Turn from your own ways, and turn to God. Lift your eyes from earth and look to heaven. Reverse your direction, and stop walking away from God and begin walking towards God.” That command had become urgently necessary because the reign of God was about to begin. Eternity had invaded time; God had invaded earth in Jesus Christ, and therefore it was of paramount importance that a man should choose the right side and the right direction.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 4:18

CHRIST CALLS THE FISHERMEN

 

Matthew 4:18-22

 

While he was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting their net into the sea, for they were fishermen. He said to them “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” They immediately left their nets and followed him. He went on from there and saw other two brothers, James, Zebedee’s son, and John, his brother. They were in the boat with Zebedee their father getting ready their nets for us. So he called them, they immediately left their boat and their father, and followed him.

 

All Galilee centered round the Sea of Galilee. It is thirteen miles long from north to south, and eight miles across from east to west. The Sea of Galilee is therefore small, and it is interesting to note that Luke, the Gentile, who had seen so much more of the world, never calls it the sea (thalassa), but always the lake (limne). It is the shape of an oval, wider at the top than at the bottom. It lies in that great rift in the earth’s surface in which the Jordan valley runs, and the surface of the Sea of Galilee is six hundred and eighty feet below sea level. The fact that it lies in this dip in the earth’s surface gives it a very warm climate, and makes the surrounding countryside phenomenally fertile. It is one of the loveliest lakes in the world. W. M. Thomson describes it: “Seen from any point of the surrounding heights it is a fine sheet of water—a burnished mirror set in a framework of rounded hills and rugged mountains, which rise and roll backward and upward to where Hermon hangs the picture against the blue vault of heaven.”

 

In the days of Josephus there were no fewer than nine populous cities on its shore. In the 1930’s, when H. V. Morton saw it, only Tiberias was left and it was little more than a village. Today it is the largest town in Galilee and steadily growing.

 

In the time of Jesus the Sea of Galilee was thick with fishing boats. Josephus on a certain expedition had no difficulty in assembling two hundred and forty fishing boats to set out from Tarichaea; but nowadays the fishermen are few and far between.

 

There were three methods of fishing. There was fishing by line.

 

There was fishing with the casting net. The casting net was circular, and might be as much as nine feet across. It was skillfully cast into the water from the land, or from the shallow water at the edge of the lake. It was weighted with pellets of lead round the circumference. It sank into the sea and surrounded the fishes; it was then drawn through the water as if the top of a bell tent were being drawn to land, and in it the fish were caught. That was the kind of net that Peter and Andrew, and James and John, were handling when Jesus saw them. Its name was the amphiblestron.

 

The drag net was used from a boat, or better from two boats. It was cast into the water with ropes at each of the four corners. It was weighted at the foot so that, as it were, it stood upright in the water. When the boats were rowed along with the net behind them, the effect was that the net became a great cone, and in the cone the fishes were caught and brought into the boat. This kind of net is the net in the parable of the dragnet; and is called the sagene.

 

So Jesus was walking by the lakeside; and as he walked he called Peter and Andrew, James and John. It is not to be thought that this was the first time that he had seen them, or they him. As John tells the story, at least some of them were already disciples of John the Baptist (John 1:35). No doubt they had already talked with Jesus and had already listened to him, but in this moment there came to them the challenge once and for all to throw in their lot with him.

 

The Greeks used to tell how Xenophon first met Socrates. Socrates met him in a narrow lane and barred his path with his stick. First of all Socrates asked him if he knew where he could buy this and that, and if he knew where this and that were made. Xenophon gave the required information. Then Socrates asked him, “Do you know where men are made good and virtuous?” “No,” said the young Xenophon. “Then,” said Socrates, “follow me and learn!”

 

Jesus, too, called on these fishermen to follow him. It is interesting to note what kind of men they were. They were not men of great scholarship, or influence, or wealth, or social background. They were not poor, they were simple working people with no great background, and certainly, anyone would have said, with no great future.

 

It was these ordinary men whom Jesus chose. Once there came to Socrates a very ordinary man called Aeschines. “ I am a poor man,” said Aeschines. “I have nothing else, but I give you myself.” “Do you not see,” said Socrates, “that you are giving me the most precious thing of all?” What Jesus needs is ordinary folk who will give him themselves. He can do anything with people like that.

 

Further these men were fishermen. It has been pointed out by many scholars that the good fisherman must possess these very qualities which will turn him into the good fishers of men.

 

(i) He must have patience. He must learn to wait patiently until the fish will take the bait. If he is restless and quick to move he will never make a fisherman. The good fisher of men will have need of patience. It is but rarely in preaching or in teaching that we will see quick results. We must learn to wait.

 

(ii) He must have perseverance. He must learn never to be discouraged, but always to try again. The good preacher and teacher must not be discouraged when nothing seems to happen. He must always be ready to try again.

 

(iii) He must have courage. As the old Greek said when he prayed for the protection of the gods: “My boat is so small and the sea is so large.” He must be ready to risk and to face the fury of the sea and of the gale. The good preacher and teacher must be well aware that there is always a danger in telling men the truth. The man who tells the truth, more often than not takes his reputation and his life in his hands.

 

(iv) he must have an eye for the right moment. The wise fisherman knows well that there are times when it is hopeless to fish. He knows when to cast and when not to cast. The good preacher and teacher chooses his moment. There are times when men will welcome the truth, and times when they will resent the truth. There are times when the truth will move them, and times when the truth will harden them in their opposition to the truth. The wise preacher and teacher knows that there is a time to speak and a time to be silent.

 

(v) He must fit the bait to the fish. One fish will rise to one bait and another to another. Paul said that he became all things to all men if by any chance he might win some. The wise preacher and teacher knows that the same approach will not win all men. He may even have to know and recognize his own limitations. He may have to discover that there are certain spheres in which he himself can work, and others in which he cannot.

 

(v) The wise fisherman must keep himself out of sight.  If he obtrudes his own presence, even his own shadow, the fish will certainly not bite. The wise preacher and teacher will always seek to present men, not with himself, but with Jesus Christ. his aim is to fix men’s eyes, not on himself, but on that figure beyond.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 4:23

THE METHODS OF THE MASTER

 

Matthew 4:23-25

 

Jesus made a circular tour of Galilee, teaching in the Synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom, and healing all kinds of diseases and ailments among the people: and the report of his activities went out all over Syria. So they brought to him all those who were ill, those who were in the grip of the most varied diseases and pains, those who were possessed by demons, those who were epileptics, and those who were paralyzed; and he healed them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, and from the Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judaea, and from beyond Jordan.

 

Jesus had chosen to begin his mission in Galilee, and we have seen how well-prepared Galilee was to receive the seed. Within Galilee Jesus chose to launch his campaign in the synagogues.

 

The synagogue was the most important institution in the life of any Jew. There was a difference between the synagogues and the Temple. There was only one Temple, the Temple in Jerusalem, but wherever there was the smallest colony of Jews there was a synagogue. The Temple existed solely for the offering of sacrifice; in it there was no preaching or teaching. The synagogue was essentially a teaching institution. The synagogues have been defined as “the popular religious universities of their day.” If a man had any religious teaching or religious ideas to disseminate, the synagogue was unquestionably the place to start.

 

Further, the synagogue service was such that it gave the new teacher his chance. In the synagogue service there were three parts. The first part consisted of prayers. The second part consisted of readings from the Law and from the Prophets, readings in which members of the congregation took part. The third part was the address. The important fact is that there was no one person to give the address. There was no such thing as a professional ministry. The president of the synagogue presided over the arrangements for the service. Any distinguished stranger could be asked to give the address, and anyone with a message to give might volunteer to give it; and, if the ruler or president of the synagogue judged him to be a fit person to speak, he was allowed to speak. Thus, at the beginning, the door of the synagogue and the pulpit of the synagogue were open to Jesus. He began in the synagogue because it was there he would find the most sincerely religious people of his day, and the way to speak to them was open to him. After the address there came a time for talk, and questions, and discussion. The synagogue was the ideal place in which to get a new teaching across to the people.

 

But not only did Jesus preach; he also healed the sick. It was little wonder that reports of what he was doing went out and people came crowding to hear him, and to see him, and to benefit from his pity.

 

They came from Syria. Syria was the great province of which Palestine was only a part. It stretched away to the north and the north-east with the great city of Damascus as its center. It so happens that one of the loveliest legends passed down to us by Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History 1:13) goes back to this time. The story goes that there was a king called Abgar, in Edessa, and he was ill. So, it is said, he wrote to Jesus: “Abgar, ruler of Edessa, to Jesus, the most excellent Savior, who has appeared in the country of Jerusalem—greeting. I have heard of you and of your cures, performed without medicine and without herb; for, it is said, you make the blind to see and the lame to walk, you cleanse the lepers, you cast out evil spirits and demons, you heal those afflicted with lingering diseases, and you raise the dead. Now, as I have heard all this about you, I have concluded that one of two things must be true; either, you are God, and having descended from heaven you do these things, or else, you are a son of God by what you do. I write to you, therefore, to ask you to come and cure the disease from which I am suffering. For I have heard that the Jews murmur against you, and devise evil things against you. Now, I have a very small but an excellent city which is large enough for both of us.” Jesus was said to have written back: “Blessed are you for having believed in me without seeing me. For it is written concerning me that those who have seen me will not believe in me, while they who have not seen me will believe and be saved. But, as to your request that I should come to you, I must fulfill all things here for which I have been sent, and, after fulfilling them, be taken up again to him who sent me. Yet, after I am taken up, I will send you one of my disciples to cure your disease, and to give life to you and to yours.” So, the legend goes on, Thaddeus went to Edessa and cured Abgar. It is only a legend, but it does show how men believed that even in distant Syria men had heard of Jesus and longed with all their hearts for the help and the healing which he alone could give.

 

Very naturally they came from Galilee, and the word about Jesus had spread south to Jerusalem and Judea also, and they came from there. They came from the land across the Jordan, which was known as Peraea, and which stretched from Pella in the North to Arabia Petra in the south. They came from the Decapolis. The Decapolis was a federation of ten independent Greek cities, all of which, except Scythopolis, were on the far side of the Jordan.

 

This list is symbolic, for in it we see not only the Jews but the Gentiles also coming to Jesus Christ for what he alone could give them. Already the ends of the earth are gathering to him.

 

THE ACTIVITIES OF JESUS

 

Matthew 4:23-25 (continued)

 

This passage is of great importance because it gives us in brief summary the three great activities of Jesus’ life.

 

(i) He came proclaiming the gospel, or, as the A. V. and RSV have it, he came preaching. Now, as we have already seen, preaching is the proclamation of certainties. Therefore, Jesus came to defeat men’s ignorance. He came to tell them the truth about God, to tell them that which by themselves they could never have found out. He came to put an end to guessing and to groping, and to show men what God is like.

 

(ii) He came teaching in the synagogues. What is the difference between teaching and preaching? Preaching is the uncompromising proclamation of certainties; teaching is the explanation of the meaning and the significance of them. Therefore, Jesus came to defeat men’s misunderstandings. There are times when men know the truth and misinterpret it They know the truth and draw the wrong conclusions from it. Jesus came to tell men the meaning of true religion.

 

(iii) He came healing all those who had need of healing. That is to say, Jesus came to defeat men’s pain. The important thing about Jesus is that he was not satisfied with simply telling men the truth in words; he came to turn that truth into deeds. Florence Allshorn, the great missionary teacher, said, “an ideal is never yours until it comes out of your finger tips.” The ideal is not yours until it is realized in action. Jesus realized his own teaching in deeds of help and healing.

 

Jesus came preaching that he might defeat all ignorance, he came teaching that he might defeat all misunderstandings.  He came healing that he might defeat all pain. We, too, must proclaim our certainties; we, too, must be ready to explain our faith; we, too, must turn the ideal into action and into deeds.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:1

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

 

As we have already seen, Matthew has a careful pattern in his gospel.

 

In his story of the baptism of Jesus he shows us Jesus realizing that the hour has struck, that the call to action has come, and that Jesus must go forth on his crusade. In his story of the Temptations he shows us Jesus deliberately choosing the method he will use to carry out his task, and deliberately rejecting methods which he knew to be against the will of God. If a man sets his hand to a great task, he needs his helpers, his assistants, his staff. So Matthew goes on to show us Jesus selecting the men who will be his fellow-workers.

 

But if helpers and assistants are to do their work intelligently and effectively, they must first have instruction. And now, in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew shows us Jesus instructing his disciples in the message which was his and which they were to take to men. In Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount this becomes even clearer. In Luke the Sermon on the Mount follows immediately after what we might call the official choosing of the Twelve (Luke 6:13 ff.).

 

For that reason one great scholar called the Sermon on the Mount “The Ordination Address to the Twelve” Just as a young minister has his task set out before him, when he is called to his first charge, so the Twelve received from Jesus their ordination address before they went out to their task. It is for that reason that other scholars have given other titles to the Sermon on the Mount. It has been called “The Compendium of Christ’s Doctrine,” “The Magna Charta of the Kingdom,” “The Manifesto of the King.” All are agreed that in the Sermon on the Mount we have the essence of the teaching of Jesus to the inner circle of his chosen men.

 

THE SUMMARY OF THE FAITH

 

In actual fact this is even truer than at first sight appears. We speak of the Sermon on the Mount as if it was one single sermon preached on one single occasion. But it is far more than that. There are good and compelling reasons for thinking that the Sermon on the Mount is far more than one sermon, that it is, in fact, a kind of epitome of all the sermons that Jesus ever preached.

 

(i) Anyone who heard it in its present form would be exhausted long before the end. There is far too much in it for one hearing. It is one thing to sit and read it, and to pause and linger as we read; it would be entirely another thing to listen to it for the first time in spoken words. We can read at our own pace and with a certain familiarity with the words; but to hear it in its present form for the first time would be to be dazzled with excess of light long before it was finished.

 

(ii) There are certain sections of the Sermon on the Mount which emerge, as it were, without warning; they have no connection with what goes before and no connection with what comes after. For instance, Matthew 5:31,32 and Matthew 7:7-11 are quite detached from their context. There is a certain disconnection in the Sermon on the Mount.

 

(iii) The most important point is this. Both Matthew and Luke give us a version of the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew’s version there are 107 verses. Of these 107 verses 29 are found all together in Luke 6:20-49; 47 have no parallel in Luke’s version; and 34 are found scattered all over Luke’s gospel in different contexts.

 

For instance, the simile of the salt is in Matthew  5:13 and in Luke 14:34,35; the simile of the lamp is in Matthew 5:15 and in Luke 8:16; the saying that no one jot or tittle of the law shall pass away is in Matthew 5:18 and in Luke 16:17. That is to say, passages which are consecutive in Matthew’s gospel appear in widely separated chapters in Luke’s gospel.

 

To take another example, the saying about the mote in our brother’s eye and the beam in our own is in Matthew 7:1-5 and in Luke 6:37-42; the passage in which Jesus bids men to ask and seek and find is in Matthew 7:7-12 and in Luke 11:9-13.

 

If we tabulate these things, the matter will become clear:

 

Matthew 5:13              =       Luke 14:34,35

Matthew 5:15              =       Luke 8:16

Matthew 5:18              =       Luke 16:17

Matthew 7:1-5              =       Luke 6:37-42

Matthew 7:7-12       =       Luke 11:9-13

 

Now, as we have seen, Matthew  is essentially the teaching gospel; it is Matthew’s characteristic that he collects the teaching of Jesus under certain great headings; and it is surely far more likely that Matthew collected Jesus’ teaching into one whole pattern, than that Luke took the pattern and broke it up and scattered the pieces all over his gospel. The Sermon on the Mount is not one single sermon which Jesus preached on one definite situation; it is the summary of his consistent teaching to his disciples. It has been suggested that, after Jesus definitely chose the Twelve, he may have taken them away into a quiet place for a week or even a longer period of time, and that, during that space, he taught them all the time, and the Sermon on the Mount is the distillation of that teaching.

 

MATTHEW’S INTRODUCTION

 

In point of fact Matthew’s introductory sentence goes a long way to make that clear.

 

“Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them.”

 

In that brief verse there are three clues to the real significance of the Sermon on the Mount.

 

(i) Jesus began to teach when he had sat down. When a Jewish Rabbi was teaching officially he sat to teach. We still speak of a professor’s chair; the Pope still speaks ex cathedra, from his seat. Often a Rabbi gave instruction when he was standing or strolling about; but his really official teaching was done when he had taken his seat. So, then, the very intimation that Jesus sat down to teach his disciples is the indication that this teaching is central and official.

 

(ii) Matthew goes on to say that when he had opened his mouth, he taught them. This phrase he opened his mouth  is not simply a decoratively roundabout way of saying he said. In Greek the phrase has a double significance. (a) In Greek it is used of a solemn, grave and dignified utterance. It is used, for instance, of the saying of an oracle. It is the natural preface for a most weighty saying. (b) It is used of a person’s utterance when he is really opening his heart and fully pouring out his mind. It is used of intimate teaching with no barriers between. Again the very use of this phrase indicates that the material in the Sermon on the Mount is no chance piece of teaching. It is the grave solemn utterance of the central things; it is the opening of Jesus’ heart and mind to the men who were to be his right-hand men in his task.

 

(iii) The Authorized Version has it that when Jesus had sat down, he opened his mouth and taught them saying. In Greek there are two past tenses of the verb. There is the aorist  tense, and the aorist tense expresses one particular action, done and completed in past time. In the sentence, “He shut the gate,” shut  would be an aorist in Greek because it describes one completed action in past time. There is the imperfect  tense, and the imperfect tense describes repeated, continuous, or habitual action in past time. In the sentence, “It was his custom to go to Church every Sunday,” in Greek it was his custom to go would be expressed by a single verb in the imperfect tense, because it describes continuous and often repeated action in the past.

 

Now the point is that in the Greek of this sentence, which we are studying, the verb taught is not an aorist, but an imperfect and therefore it describes repeated and habitual action, and the translation should be: “This is what he used to teach them.” Matthew has said as plainly as Greek will say it that the Sermon on the Mount is not one sermon of Jesus, given at one particular time and on one particular occasion; it is the essence of all that Jesus continuously and habitually taught his disciples.

 

The Sermon on the Mount is greater even than we think. Matthew in his introduction wishes us to see that it is the official teaching of Jesus; that it is the opening of Jesus’ whole mind to his disciples; that it is the summary of the teaching which Jesus habitually gave to his inner circle. The Sermon on the Mount is nothing less than the concentrated memory of many hours of heart to heart communion between the disciples and their Master.

 

As we study the Sermon on the Mount, we are going to set at the head of each of the beatitudes the translation of the Revised Standard Version; and then at the end of our study of each beatitude we shall see what the words mean in modern English.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:3

THE SUPREME BLESSEDNESS

 

Matthew 5:3

 

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 

Before we study each of the beatitudes in detail there are two general facts which we must note.

 

(i) It can be seen that every one of the beatitudes has precisely the same form. As they are commonly printed in our Bibles, each one of them in the Authorized Version has the word are printed in italic, or sloping, type. When a word appears in italics in the Authorized Version it means that in the Greek, or in the Hebrew, there is no equivalent word, and that that word has had to be added to bring out the meaning of the sentence.

 

This is to say that in the beatitudes there is no verb, there is no are. Why should that be? Jesus did not speak the beatitudes in Greek; he spoke them in Aramaic, which was the kind of Hebrew people spoke in his day. Aramaic and Hebrew have a very common kind of expression, which is in fact an exclamation and which means, “O the blessedness of'85” That expression (ashere  in the Hebrew) is very common in the Old Testament. For instance, the first Psalm begins in the Hebrew: “O the blessedness of the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly” (Psalm 1:1), that is the form in which Jesus first spoke the beatitudes. The beatitudes are not simple statements; they are exclamations: “O the blessedness of the poor in spirit!”

 

That is most important, for it means that the beatitudes are not pious hopes of what shall be; they are not glowing, but nebulous prophecies of some future bliss; they are congratulations on what is. The blessedness which belongs to the Christian is not a blessedness which is postponed to some future world of glory; it is a blessedness which exists here and now. It is not something into which the Christian will enter: it is something into which he has entered.

 

True, it will find its fullness and its consummation in the presence of God; but for all that it is a present reality to be enjoyed here and now. The beatitudes in effect say, “O the bliss of being a Christian! O the joy of following Christ! O the sheer happiness of knowing Jesus Christ as Master, Savior and Lord!” The very form of the beatitudes is the statement of the joyous thrill and the radiant gladness of the Christian life. In face of the beatitudes a gloom-encompassed Christianity is unthinkable.

 

(ii) The word blessed which is used in each of the beatitudes is a very special word. It is the Greek word makarios. Makarios  is the word which specially describes the gods. In Christianity there is a godlike joy.

 

The meaning of makarios can best be seen from one particular usage of it. The Greeks always called Cyprus he makaria (the feminine form of the adjective), which means The Happy Isle, and they did so because they believed that Cyprus was so lovely, so rich, and so fertile an island that a man would never need to go beyond its coastline to find the perfectly happy life. It had such a climate, such flowers and fruits and trees, such minerals, such natural resources that it contained within itself all the materials for perfect happiness.

 

Makarios then describes that joy which has its secret within itself, that joy which is serene and untouchable, and self-contained, that joy which is completely independent of all the chances and the changes of life. The English word happiness gives its own case away. It contains the root hap which means chance. Human happiness is something which is dependent on the chances and the changes of life, something which life may give and which life may also destroy. The Christian blessedness is completely untouchable and unassailable. “No one,” said Jesus, “will take your joy from you” (John 16:22). The beatitudes speak of that joy which seeks us through our pain, that joy which sorrow and loss, and pain and grief, are powerless to touch, that joy which shines through tears, and which nothing in life or death can take away.

 

The world can win its joys, and the world can equally well lose its joys. A change in fortune, a collapse in health, the failure of a plan, the disappointment of an ambition, even a change in the weather, can take away the fickle joy the world can give. But the Christian has the serene and untouchable joy which comes from walking for ever in the company and in the presence of Jesus Christ.

 

The greatness of the beatitudes is that they are not wistful glimpses of some future beauty; they are not even golden promises of some distant glory; they are triumphant shouts of bliss for a permanent joy that nothing in the world can ever take away.

 

THE BLISS OF THE DESTITUTE

 

Matthew 5:3 (continued)

 

It seems a surprising way to begin talking about happiness by saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” There are two ways in which we can come at the meaning of this word poor.

 

As we have them the beatitudes are in Greek, and the word that is used for poor is the word ptochos. In Greek there are two words for poor  There is the word penes. Penes describes a man who has to work for his living; it is defined by the Greeks as describing the man who is autodiakonos, that is, the man who serves his own needs with his own hands. Penes describes the working man, the man who has nothing superfluous, the man who is not rich, but who is not destitute either. But, as we have seen, it is not penes that is used in this beatitude, it is ptochos, which describes absolute and abject poverty. It is connected with the root ptossein, which means to crouch or to cower; and it describes the poverty which is beaten to its knees. As it has been said, penes describes the man who has nothing superfluous; ptochos describes the man who has nothing at all. So this beatitude becomes even more surprising. Blessed is the man who is abjectly and completely poverty-stricken. Blessed is the man who is absolutely destitute.

 

As we have also seen the beatitudes were not originally spoken in Greek, but in Aramaic. Now the Jews had a special way of using the word Poor. In Hebrew the word is ‘ani or ebion. These words in Hebrew underwent a four-stage development of meaning. (i) They began by meaning simply poor. (ii) They went on to mean, because poor, therefore having no influence or power, or help, or prestige. (iii) They went on to mean, because having no influence, therefore down-trodden and oppressed by men. (iv) Finally, they came to describe the man who, because he has no earthly resources whatever, puts his whole trust in God.

 

So in Hebrew the word poor was used to describe the humble and the helpless man who put his whole trust in God. It is thus that the Psalmist uses the word, when he writes, “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles” (Psalm 34:6). It is in fact true that in the Psalms the poor man, in this sense of the term, is the good man who is dear to God. “The hope of the poor shall not perish for ever.” (Psalm 9:18). God delivers the poor (Psalm 35:10). “In thy goodness, O God, thou didst provide for the needy” (Psalm 68:10). “He shall defend the cause of the poor of the people” (Psalm 72:4). “He raises up the needy out of affliction, and makes their families like flocks” (Psalm 107:41). “I will satisfy her poor with bread” (Psalm 132:15). In all these cases the poor man is the humble, helpless man who has put his trust in God.

 

Let us now take the two sides, the Greek and the Aramaic, and put them together. Ptochos describes the man who is absolutely destitute, the man who has nothing at all; ‘ani and ebion describe the poor, and humble, and helpless man who has put his whole trust in God. Therefore, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” means:

 

Blessed is the man who has realized his own utter helplessness, and who has put his whole trust in God.

 

If a man has realized his own utter helplessness, and has put his whole trust in God, there will enter into his life two things which are opposite sides of the same thing. He will become completely detached from things, for he will know that things have not got it in them to bring happiness or security; and he will become completely attached to God, for he will know that God alone can bring him help, and hope, and strength. The man who is poor in spirit is the man who has realized that things mean nothing, and that God means everything.

 

We must be careful not to think that this beatitude calls actual material poverty a good thing. Poverty is not a good thing. Jesus would never have called blessed a state where people live in slums and have not enough to eat, and where health rots because conditions are all against it. That kind of poverty it is the aim of the Christian gospel to remove. The poverty which is blessed is the poverty of spirit, when a man realizes his own utter lack of resources to meet life, and finds his help and strength in God.

 

Jesus says that to such a poverty belongs the Kingdom of Heaven. Why should that be so? If we take the two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer and set them together:

 

Thy Kingdom come.

They will be done in earth as it is in heaven,

 

we get the definition: the Kingdom of God is a society where God’s will is as perfectly done in earth as it is in heaven. That means that only he who does God’s will is a citizen of the Kingdom; and we can only do God’s will when we realize our own utter ignorance, our own utter inability to cope with life, and when we put our whole trust in God. Obedience is always founded on trust. The Kingdom of God is the possession of the poor in spirit, because the poor in spirit have realized their own utter helplessness without God, and have learned to trust and obey.

 

So then, the first beatitude means:

 

O THE BLISS OF THE MAN WHO HAS REALIZED HIS OWN UTTER HELPLESSNESS, AND WHO HAS PUT HIS WHOLE TRUST IN GOD, FOR THUS ALONE HE CAN RENDER TO GOD THAT PERFECT OBEDIENCE WHICH WILL MAKE HIM A CITIZEN OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN!

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:4

THE BLISS OF THE BROKEN HEART

 

Matthew 5:4

 

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

 

It is first of all to be noted about this beatitude that the Greek word for to mourn, used here, is the strongest word for mourning in the Greek language. It is the word which is used for mourning for the dead, for the passionate lament for one who was loved. In the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, it is the word which is used of Jacob’s grief when he believed that Joseph, his son, was dead (Genesis 37:34). It is defined as the kind of grief which takes such a hold on a man that it cannot be hid. It is not only the sorrow which brings an ache to the heart; it is the sorrow which brings an ache to the heart; it is the sorrow which brings the unrestrainable tears to the eyes. Here then indeed is an amazing kind of bliss:

 

Blessed is the man who mourns like one mourning for the dead.

 

There are three ways in which this beatitude can be taken.

 

(i) It can be taken quite literally: Blessed is the man who has endured the bitterest sorrow that life can bring. The Arabs have a proverb: “All sunshine makes a desert.” The land on which the sun always shines will soon become an arid place in which no fruit will grow. There are certain things which only the rains will produce; and certain experiences which only sorrow can beget.

 

Sorrow can do two things for us. it can show us, as nothing else can, the essential kindness of our fellow-men; and it can show us as nothing else can the comfort and the compassion of God. Many and many a man in the hour of his sorrow has discovered his fellow-men and his God as he never did before. When things go well it is possible to live for years on the surface of things; but when sorrow comes a man is driven to the deep things of life, and, if he accepts it aright, a new strength and beauty enter into his soul.

 

“I walked a mile with Pleasure,

She chattered all the way,

But left me none the wiser

For all she had to say.

 

I walked a mile with Sorrow,

And ne’er a word said she,

But, oh, the things I learned from her

When Sorrow walked with me!”

 

(ii) Some people have taken this beatitude to mean:

 

Blessed are those who are desperately sorry for the sorrow and the suffering of this world.

 

When we were thinking of the first beatitude we saw that is it always right to be detached from things, but it is never right to be detached from people. This world would have been a very much poorer place, if there had not been those who cared intensely about the sorrows and the sufferings of  others.

 

Lord Shaftesbury probably did more for ordinary working men and women and for little children than any social reformer ever did. It all began very simply When he was a boy at Harrow, he was going along the street one day, and he met a pauper’s funeral. The coffin was a shoddy, ill-made box. It was on a hand-barrow. The barrow was being pushed by a quartet of men who were drunk; and as they pushed the barrow along, they were singing ribald songs, and joking and jesting among themselves. As they pushed the barrow up the hill the box, which was the coffin, fell off the barrow and burst open. Some people would have thought the whole business a good joke; some would have turned away in fastidious disgust; some would have shrugged their shoulders and would have felt that it had nothing to do with them, although it might be a pity that such things should happen. The young Shaftesbury saw it and said to himself, “When I grow up, I’m going to give my life to see that things like that don’t happen.” So he dedicated his life to caring for others.

 

Christianity is caring. This beatitude does mean: Blessed is the man who cares intensely for the sufferings, and for the sorrows, and for the needs of others.

 

(iii) No doubt both these thoughts are in this beatitude, but its main thought undoubtedly is: Blessed is the man who is desperately sorry for his own sin and his own unworthiness.

 

As we have seen, the very first word of the message of Jesus was, “Repent!” No man can repent unless he is sorry for his sins. The thing which really changes men is when they suddenly come up against something which opens their eyes to what sin is and to what sin does. A boy or a girl may go his or her own way, and may never think of effects and consequences; and then some day something happens and that boy or girl sees the stricken look in a father'’ or a mother's eye’s; and suddenly sin is seen for what it is.

 

That is what the Cross does for us. As we look at the Cross, we are bound to say, “That is what sin can do. Sin can take the loveliest life in all the world and smash it on a Cross.” One of the great functions of the Cross is to open the eyes of men and women to the horror of sin. And when a man sees sin in all its horror he cannot do anything else but experience intense sorrow for his sin.

 

Christianity begins with a sense of sin. Blessed is the man who is intensely sorry for his sin, the man who is heart-broken for what his sin has done to God and to Jesus Christ, the man who sees the Cross and who is appalled by the havoc wrought by sin.

 

It is the man who has that experience who will indeed be comforted; for the experience is what we call penitence, and the broken and the contrite heart God will never despise (Psalm 51:17). The way to the joy of forgiveness is through the desperate sorrow of the broken heart.

 

The real meaning of the second beatitude is:

 

O THE BLISS OF THE MAN WHOSE HEART IS BROKEN FOR THE WORLD’S SUFFERING AND FOR HIS OWN SIN, FOR OUT OF HIS SORROW HE WILL FIND THE JOY OF GOD!

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:5

THE BLISS OF THE GOD-CONTROLLED LIFE

 

Matthew 5:5

 

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

 

In our modern English idiom the word meek is hardly one of the honorable words of life. Nowadays it carries with it an idea of spinelessness, and subservience, and mean-spiritedness. It paints the picture of a submissive and ineffective creature. But it so happens that the word meek-in Greek praus-was one of the great Greek ethical words.

 

Aristotle has a great deal to say about the quality of meekness (praotes). It was Aristotle’s fixed method to define every virtue as the mean between two extremes. On the one hand there was the extreme of excess; on the other hand there was the extreme of defect; and in between there was the virtue itself, the happy medium. To take an example, on the one extreme there is the spendthrift; on the other extreme there is the miser; and in between there is the generous man.

 

Aristotle defines meekness, praotes, as the mean between orgilotes, which means excessive anger,  and aorgesia, which means excessive angerlessness. Praotes, meekness, as Aristotle saw it, is the happy medium between too much and too little anger. And so the first possible translation of this beatitude is:

 

Blessed is the man who is always angry at the right time, and never angry at the wrong time.

 

If we ask what the right time and the wrong time are, we may say as a general rule for life that it is never right to be angry for any insult or injury done to ourselves; that is something that no Christian must ever resent; but that it is often right to be angry at injuries done to other people. Selfish anger is always a sin; selfless anger can be one of the great moral dynamics of the world.

 

But the word praus has a second Greek usage. It is the regular word for an animal which has been domesticated, which has been trained to obey the word of command, which has learned to answer to the reins. It is the word for an animal which has learned to accept control. So the second possible translation of this beatitude is:

 

Blessed is the man who has every instinct, every impulse, every passion under control. Blessed is the man who is entirely self-controlled.

 

The moment we have stated that, we see that it needs a change. It is not so much the blessing of the man who is self-controlled, for such complete self-control is beyond human capacity; rather, it is the blessing of the man who is completely God-controlled, for only in his service do we find our perfect freedom, and in doing his will our peace.

 

But there is still a third possible side from which we may approach this beatitude. The Greeks always contrasted the quality which they called  praotes, and which the Authorized Version translates meekness, with the quality which they called hupselokardia, which means lofty-heartedness. In praotes there is the true humility which banishes all pride.

 

Without humility a man cannot learn, for the first step to learning is the realization of our own ignorance. Quintilian, the great Roman teacher of oratory, said of certain of his scholars, “They would no doubt be excellent students, if they were not already convinced of their own knowledge.: No one can teach the man who knows it all already. Without humility there can be no such thing as love, for the very beginning of love is a sense of unworthiness. Without humility there can be no true religion, for all true religion begins with a realization of our own weakness and of our need for God. Man reaches only true manhood when he is always conscious that he is the creature and that God is the Creator, and that without God he can do nothing.

 

Praotes describes humility, the acceptance of the necessity to learn and of the necessity to be forgiven. It describes man’s only proper attitude to God. So then, the third possible translation of this beatitude is:

 

Blessed is the man who has the humility to know his own ignorance, his own weakness, and his own need.

 

It is this meekness, Jesus says, which will inherit the earth. It is the fact of history that it has always been the men with this gift of self-control, the men with their passions, and instincts, and impulses under discipline, who have been great. Numbers says of Moses, the greatest leader and the greatest law-giver the world has ever seen: "Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3). Moses was no milk and water character; he was no spineless creature; he could be blazingly angry; but he was a man whose anger was on the leash, only to be released when the time was right. The writer of Proverbs has it: “He that rules his spirit is better than he who takes a city.” (Proverbs 16:32).

 

It was the lack of that very quality which ruined Alexander the Great, who, in a fit of uncontrolled temper in the middle of a drunken debauch, hurled a spear at his best friend and killed him. No man can lead others until he has mastered himself; no man can serve others until he has subjected himself; no man can be in control of others until he has learned to control himself. But the man who gives himself into the complete control of God will gain this meekness which will indeed enable him to inherit the earth.

 

It is clear that this word praus means far more than the English word meek now means; it is, in fact, clear that there is no one English word which will translate it, although perhaps the word gentle comes nearest to it. The full translation of this third beatitude must read:

 

O THE BLISS OF THE MAN WHO IS ALWAYS ANGRY AT THE RIGHT TIME AND NEVER ANGRY AT THE WRONG TIME, WHO HAS EVERY INSTINCT, AND IMPULSE, AND PASSION UNDER CONTROL BECAUSE HE HIMSELF IS GOD-CONTROLLED, WHO HAS THE HUMILITY TO REALISE HIS OWN IGNORANCE AND HIS OWN WEAKNESS, FOR SUCH A MAN IS A KING AMONG MEN!

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:6

THE BLISS OF THE STARVING SPIRIT

 

Matthew 5:6

 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

 

Words do not exist in isolation; they exist against a back-ground of experience and of thought; and the meaning of any word is conditioned by the background of the person who speaks it. That is particularly true of this beatitude. It would convey to those who heard it for the first time an impression quite different from the impression which it conveys to us.

 

The fact is that very few of us in modern conditions of life know what it is to be really hungry or really thirsty. In the ancient world it was very different. A working man’s wage was the equivalent of three pence a day, and, even making every allowance for the difference in the purchasing power of money, no man ever got fat on that wage. A working man in Palestine ate meat only once a week, and in Palestine the working man and the day laborer were never far from the border-line of real hunger and actual starvation.

 

It was still more so in the case of thirst. It was not possible for the vast majority of people to turn a tap and find the clear, cold water pouring into their house. A man might be on a journey, and in the midst of it the hot wind which brought the sand-storm might begin to blow. There was nothing for him to do but to wrap his head in his burnoose and turn his back to the wind, and wait, while the swirling sand filled his nostrils and his throat until he was likely to suffocate, and until he was parched with an imperious thirst. In the conditions of modern western life there is no parallel at all to that.

 

So, then, the hunger which this beatitude describes is no genteel hunger which could be satisfied with a mid-morning snack; the thirst of which it speaks is no thirst which could be slaked with a cup of coffee or an iced drink. It is the hunger of  the man who is starving for food, and the thirst of the man who will die unless he drinks.

 

Since that is so this beatitude is in reality a question and a challenge. In effect it demands, “How much do you want goodness? Do you want it as much as a starving man wants food, and as much as a man dying of thirst wants water? “How intense is our desire for goodness?

 

Most people have an instinctive desire for goodness, but that desire is wistful and nebulous rather than sharp and intense; and when the moment of decision comes they are not prepared to make the effort and the sacrifice which real goodness demands. Most people suffer from what Robert Louis Stevenson called “the malady of not wanting.” It would obviously make the biggest difference in the world if we desired goodness more than anything else.

 

When we approach this beatitude from that side it is the most demanding, and indeed the most frightening, of them all. But not only is it the most demanding beatitude; in its own way it is also the most comforting. At the back of it there is the meaning that the man who is blessed is not necessarily the man who achieves this goodness, but the man who longs for it with his whole heart. If blessedness came only to him who achieved then none would be blessed. But blessedness comes to the man who, in spite of failures and failings, still clutches to him the passionate love of the highest.

 

H. G. Wells somewhere said, “A man may be a bad musician and yet be passionately in love with music.” Robert Louis Stevenson spoke of even those who have sunk to the lowest depths” clutching the remnants of virtue to them in the brothel and on the scaffold.” Sir Norman Birkett, the famous lawyer and judge, once, speaking of the criminals with whom he had come in contact in his work, spoke of the inextinguishable something in every man. Goodness, “the implacable hunter,” is always at their heels. The worst of men is “condemned to some kind of nobility.”

 

The true wonder of man is not that he is a sinner, but that even in his sin he is haunted by goodness, that even in the mud he can never wholly forget the stars. David had always wished to build the Temple of God; he never achieved that ambition; it was denied and forbidden him; but God said to him, “You did well that it was in your heart” (1 Kings 8:18). In his mercy God judges us, not only by our achievements, but also by our dreams. Even if a man never attains goodness, if to the end of the day he is still hungering and thirsting for it, he is not shut out from blessedness.

 

There is one further point in this beatitude, a point which only emerges in the Greek. It is a rule of Greek grammar that verbs of hungering and thirsting are followed by the genitive case. The genitive case is the case which, in English, is expressed by the word of; of the man is the genitive case. The genitive which follows verbs of hungering and thirsting in Greek is called the partitive genitive, that is the genitive of the part. The idea is this. The Greek said, “I hunger for of bread.” It was some bread he desired, a part of the bread, not the whole loaf. The Greek said, “I thirst for of water.” It was some water he desired, a drink of water, not all the water in the tank.

 

But in this beatitude, most unusually, righteousness is in the direct accusative, and not in the normal genitive. Now, when verbs of hungering and thirsting in Greek take the accusative instead of the genitive, the meaning is that the hunger and the thirst is for the whole thing. To say I hunger for bread in the accusative means, I want the whole loaf. To say I thirst for water in the accusative means, I want the whole pitcher. There the correct translation is:

 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for the whole of righteousness, for complete righteousness.

 

That is in fact what people seldom do. They are content with a part of righteousness. A man, for instance, may be a good man in the sense that, however hard one tried, one could not pin a moral fault on to him. His honesty, his morality, his respectability are beyond question; but it may be that no one could go to that man and weep out a sorry story on his breast; he would freeze, if one tried to do so. There can be a goodness which is accompanied with a hardness, a censoriousness, a lack of sympathy. Such a goodness is a partial goodness.

 

On the other hand a man may have all kinds of faults; he may drink, and swear, and gamble, and lose his temper; and yet, if any one is in trouble, he would give him the last penny out of his pocket and the very coat off his back. Again that is a partial goodness.

 

This beatitude says, it is not enough to be satisfied with a partial goodness. Blessed is the man who hungers and thirsts for the goodness which is total. Neither an icy faultlessness nor a faulty warm-heartedness is enough.

 

So, then, the translation of the fourth beatitude could run:

 

O THE BLISS OF THE MAN WHO LONGS FOR TOTAL RIGHTEOUSNESS AS A STARVING MAN LONGS FOR FOOD, AND A MAN PERISHING OF THIRST LONGS FOR WATER, FOR THAT MAN WILL BE TRULY SATISFIED!

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:7

THE BLISS OF PERFECT SYMPATHY

 

Matthew 5:7

 

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

 

Even as it stands this is surely a great saying; and it is the statement of a principle which runs all through the New Testament. The New Testament is insistent that to be forgiven we must be forgiving. As James had it: “For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy” (James 2:13). Jesus finishes the story of the unforgiving debtor with the warning: “So also my heavenly Father will do to everyone of you; if you do not forgive your brother from your heart” (Matthew 18:35). The Lord’s Prayer is followed by the two verses which explain and underline the petition, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors”. “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:12,14,15). It is the consistent teaching of the New Testament that indeed only the merciful shall receive mercy.

 

But there is even more to this beatitude than that. The Greek word for merciful is eleemon. But, as we have repeatedly seen, the Greek of the New Testament as we possess it goes back to an original Hebrew and Aramaic. The Hebrew word for mercy is chesedh; and it is an untranslatable word. It does not mean only to sympathize with a person in the popular sense of the term; it does not mean simply to feel sorry for someone in trouble. Chesedh, mercy, means the ability to get right inside the other person’s skin until we can see things with his eyes, think things with his mind, and feel things with his feelings.

 

Clearly this is much more than an emotional wave of pity; clearly this demands a quite deliberate effort of the mind and of the will. It denotes a sympathy which is not given, as it were, from outside, but which comes from a deliberate identification with the other person, until we see things as he sees them, and feel things as he feels them. This is sympathy in the literal sense of the word. Sympathy is derived from two Greek words, syn which means together with, and paschein which means to experience or to suffer. Sympathy means experiencing things together with the other person, literally going through what he is going through.

 

This is precisely what many people do not even try to do. Most people are so concerned with their own feelings that they are not much concerned with the feelings of anyone else. When they are sorry for someone, it is, as it were, from the outside; they do not make the deliberate effort to get inside the other person’s mind and heart, until they see and feel things as he sees and feels them.

 

If we did make this deliberate attempt, and if we did achieve this identification with the other person, it would obviously make a very great difference.

 

(i) It would save us from being kind in the wrong way. There is one outstanding example of insensitive and mistaken kindness in the New Testament. It is in the story of Jesus’ visit to the house of Martha and Mary at Bethany (Luke 10:38-42). When Jesus paid that visit, the Cross was only a few days ahead. All that he wanted was an opportunity for so short a time to rest and to relax, and to lay down the terrible tension of living.

 

Martha loved Jesus; he was her most honored guest; and because she loved him she would provide the best meal the house could supply. She bustled and scurried here and there with the clatter of dishes and the clash of pans; and every moment was torture to the tense nerves of Jesus. All he wanted was quiet.

 

Martha meant to be kind, but she could hardly have been more cruel. But Mary understood that Jesus wished only for peace. So often when we wish to be kind the kindness has to be given in our way, and the other person has to put up with it whether he likes it or not. Our kindness would be doubly kind, and would be saved from much quite unintentional unkindness, if we would only make the effort to get inside the other person.

 

(ii) It would make forgiveness, and it would make tolerance ever so much easier. There is one principle in life which we often forget—there is always a reason why a person thinks and acts as he does, and if we knew that reason, it would be so much easier to understand and to sympathize and to forgive. If a person thinks, as we see it, mistakenly ,he may have come through experiences, he may have a heritage which has made him think as he does. If a person is irritable and discourteous, he may be worried or he may be in pain. If a person treats us badly, it may be because there is some idea in his mind which is quite mistaken.

 

Truly, as the French proverb has it, “To know all is to forgive all,” but we will never know all until we make the deliberate attempt to get inside the other person’s mind and heart.

 

(iii) In the last analysis, is not that what God did in Jesus Christ? In Jesus Christ, in the most literal sense, God got inside the skin of men. He came as a man; he came seeing things with men’s eyes, feeling things with men’s feelings, thinking things with men’s minds. God knows what life is like, because God came right inside life.

 

Queen Victoria was a close friend of Principal and Mrs. Tulloch of St. Andrews. Prince Albert died and Victoria was left alone. Just at the same time Principal Tulloch died and Mrs. Tulloch was left alone. All unannounced Queen Victoria came to call on Mrs. Tulloch when she was resting on a couch in her room. When the Queen was announced Mrs. Tulloch struggled to rise quickly from the couch and to curtsey. The Queen stepped forward: “My dear,” she said, “don’t rise. I am not coming to you today as the queen to a subject, but as one women who has lost her husband to another.”

 

That is just what God did; he came to men, not as the remote, detached, isolated, majestic God; but as a man. The supreme instance of mercy, chesedh, is the coming of God in Jesus Christ.

 

It is only those who show this mercy who will receive it. This is true on the human side, for it is the great truth of life that in other people we see the reflection of ourselves. If we are detached and disinterested in them, they will be detached and disinterested in us. If they see that we care, their hearts will respond in caring. It is supremely true on the divine side, for he who shows this mercy has become nothing less than like God.

 

So the translation of the fifth beatitude might read:

 

O THE BLISS OF THE MAN WHO GETS RIGHT INSIDE OTHER PEOPLE, UNTIL HE CAN SEE WITH THEIR EYES, THINK WITH THEIR THOUGHTS, FEEL WITH THEIR FEELINGS, FOR HE WHO DOES THAT WILL FIND OTHERS DO THE SAME FOR HIM, AND WILLKNOW THAT THAT IS WHAT GOD IN JESUS CHRIST HAS DONE!

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:8

THE BLISS OF THE CLEAN HEART

 

Matthew 5:8

 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

 

Here is the beatitude which demands that every man who reads it should stop, and think, and examine himself.

 

The Greek word for pure is katharos, and it has a variety of usages, all of which have something to add to the meaning of this beatitude for the Christian life.

 

(i) Originally it simply meant clean, and could, for instance, be used of soiled clothes which have been washed clean.

 

(ii) It is regularly used for corn which has been winnowed or sifted and cleansed of all chaff. In the same way it is used of an army which has been purged of all discontented, cowardly, unwilling and inefficient soldiers, and which is a force composed solely of first-class fighting men.

 

(iii) It very commonly appears in company with another Greek adjective—akeratos. Akeratos can be used of milk or wine which is unadulterated with water, or of metal which has in it no tinge of alloy.

 

So, then, the basic meaning of katharos is unmixed, unadulterated, unalloyed. That is why this beatitude is so demanding a beatitude. It could be translated:

 

Blessed is the man whose motives are always entirely unmixed, for that man shall see God.

 

It is very seldom indeed that we do even our finest actions from absolutely unmixed motives. If we give generously and liberally to some good cause, it may be that there lingers in the depths of our hearts some contentment in basking in the sunshine of our own self-approval, some pleasure in the praise and thanks and credit which we will receive. If we do some fine thing, which demands some sacrifice from us, it may well be that we are not altogether free from the feeling that men will see something heroic in us and that we may regard ourselves as martyrs. Even a preacher at his most sincere is not altogether free from the danger of self-satisfaction in having preached a good sermon. Was it not John Bunyan who was once told by someone that he had preached well that day, and who answered sadly, “The devil already told me that as I was coming down the pulpit steps”?

 

This beatitude demands from us the most exacting self-examination. Is our work done from motives of service or from motives of pay? Is our service given from selfless motives or from motives of self-display? Is the work we do in Church done for Christ or for our own prestige? Is our Church-going an attempt to meet God or a fulfilling of an habitual and conventional respectability? Are even our prayer and our Bible reading engaged upon with the sincere desire to company with God or because it gives us a pleasant feeling of superiority to do these things? Is our religion a thing in which we are conscious of nothing so much as the need of God within our hearts, or a thing in which we have comfortable thoughts of our own piety? To examine one’s own motives is a daunting and a shaming thing, for there are few things in this world that even the best of us do with completely unmixed motives.

 

Jesus went on to say that only the pure in heart will see God. It is one of the simple facts of life that we see only what we are able to see; and that is true not only in the physical sense; it is also true in every other possible sense.

 

If the ordinary person goes out on a night of stars, he sees only a host of pinpoints of light in the sky; he sees what he is fit to see. But in that same sky the astronomer will call the stars and the planets by their names, and will move amongst them as his friends; and from that same sky the navigator could find the means to bring his ship across the trackless seas to the desired haven.

 

The ordinary person can walk along a country road, and see by the hedgerows nothing but a tangle of weeds and wild flowers and grasses. The trained botanist would see this and that, and call if by name and know its use; and he might even see something of infinite value and rarity because he had eyes to see.

 

Put two men into a room filled with ancient pictures. A man with no knowledge and no skill could not tell an old master from a worthless daub, whereas a trained art critic might well discern a picture worth thousands of pounds in a collection which someone else might dismiss as junk.

 

There are people with filthy minds who can see in any situation material for a prurient snigger and a soiled jest. In every sphere of life we see what we are able to see.

 

So, says Jesus, it is only the pure in heart who shall see God. It is a warning thing to remember that, as by God’s grace we keep our hearts clean, or as by human lust we soil them, we are either fitting or unfitting ourselves some day to see God.

 

So, then, this sixth beatitude might read:

 

O THE BLISS OF THE MAN WHOSE MOTIVES ARE ABSOLUTELY PURE, FOR THAT MAN WIL SOME DAY BE ABLE TO SEE GOD!

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:9

THE BLISS OF BRING MEN TOGETHER

 

Matthew 5:9

 

Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called sons of God.

 

We must begin our study of this beatitude by investigating certain matters of meaning in it.

 

(i) First, there is the word peace. In Greek the word is eirene, and in Hebrew it is shalom. In Hebrew peace is never only a negative state; it never means only the absence of trouble; in Hebrew peace always means everything which makes for a man’s highest good.. In the east when one man says to another, Salaam—which is the same word—he does not mean that he wishes for the other man only the absence of evil things; he wishes for him the presence of all good things. In the Bible peace means not only freedom from all trouble; it means enjoyment of all good.

 

(ii) Second, it must carefully be noted what the beatitude is saying. The blessing is on the Peace-makers, not necessarily on the peace-lovers. It very often happens that if a man loves peace in the wrong way, he succeeds in making trouble and not peace. We may, for instance, allow a threatening and dangerous situation to develop, and our defense is that for peace’s sake we do not want to take any action. There is many a person who thinks that he is loving peace, when in fact he is piling up trouble for the future, because he refuses to face the situation and to take the action which the situation demands. The peace which the Bible calls blessed does not come from the evasion of issues; it comes from facing them, dealing with them, and conquering them. What this beatitude demands is not the passive acceptance of things because we are afraid of the trouble of doing anything about them, but the active facing of things, and the making of peace, even when the way to peace is through struggle.

 

(iii) The Authorized Version says that the peace-makers shall be called the children of God; the Greek more literally is that the peace-makers will be called the sons (huioi) of God. this is a typical Hebrew way of expression. Hebrew is not rich in adjectives, and often when Hebrew wishes to describe something, it uses, not an adjective, but the phrase son of'85plus an abstract noun. Hence a man may be called a son of peace instead of a peaceful man. Barnabas is called a son of consolation instead of a consoling and comforting man. This beatitude says: Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the sons of God; what it means is: Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be doing a God-like work. The man who makes peace is engaged on the very work which the God of peace is doing (Romans 15:33; 2 Corinthians 13:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:23; Hebrews 13:20).

 

The meaning of this beatitude has been sought along three main lines.

 

(i) It has been suggested that, since shalom means everything which makes for a man’s highest good, this beatitude means: Blessed are those who make this world a better place for all men to live in. Abraham Lincoln once said: “Die when I may, I would like it to be said of me, that I always pulled up a weed and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.” This then would be the beatitude of those who have lifted the world a little further on.

 

(ii) Most of the early scholars of the Church took this beatitude in a purely spiritual sense, and held that it meant: Blesses is the man who makes peace in his own heart and in his own soul. In every one of us there is an inner conflict between good and evil; we are always tugged in two directions at once; every man is at least to some extent a walking civil war. Happy indeed is the man who has won through to inner peace, in which the inner warfare is over, and his whole heart is given to God.

 

(iii) But there is another meaning for this word peace. It is a meaning on which the Jewish Rabbis loved to dwell, and it is almost certainly the meaning which Jesus had in his mind. The Jewish Rabbis held that the highest task which a man can perform is to establish right relationships between man and man. That is what Jesus means.

 

There are people who are always storm-centers of trouble and bitterness and strife. Wherever they are they are either involved in quarrels themselves or the cause of quarrels between others. They are trouble-makers. There are people like that in almost every society and every Church, and such people are doing the devil’s own work. On the other hand—thank God—there are people in whose presence bitterness cannot live, people who bridge the gulfs, and heal the breaches, and sweeten the bitternesses. Such people are doing a godlike work, for it is the great purpose of God to bring peace between men and himself, and between man and man. The man who divides men is doing the devil’s work; the man who unites men is doing God’s work.

 

So, then, this beatitude might read:

 

O THE BLISS OF THOSE WHO PRODUCE RIGHT RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN MAN AND MAN, FOR THEY ARE DOING A GODLIKE WORK!

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:10

THE BLISS OF THE SUFFERER FOR CHRIST

 

Matthew 5:10-12

 

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 

“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

 

One of the outstanding qualities of Jesus was his sheer honesty. He never left men in any doubt what would happen to them if they chose to follow him. he was clear that he had come “not to make life easy, but to make men great.”

 

It is hard for us to realize what the first Christians had to suffer. Every department of their life was disrupted.

 

(i) Their Christianity might well disrupt their work. Suppose a man was a stone-mason. That seems a harmless enough occupation. But suppose his firm received a contract to build a temple to one of the heathen gods, what was that man to do? Suppose a man was a tailor, and suppose his firm was asked to  produce robes for the heathen priests, what was that man to do? In a situation such as that in which the early Christians found themselves there was hardly any job in which a man might not find a conflict between his business interests and his loyalty to Jesus Christ.

 

The Church was in no doubt where a man’s duty lay. More than a hundred years after this a man came to Tertullian with this very problem. He told of his business difficulties. He ended by saying, “What can I do? I mist live!” “Must you?” said Tertullian. If it came to a choice between a loyalty and a living, the real Christian never hesitated to choose loyalty.

 

(ii) Their Christianity would certainly disrupt their social life. In the ancient world most feasts were held in the temple of some god. In very few sacrifices was the whole animal burned upon the altar. It might be that only a few hairs from the forehead of the beast were burned as a symbolic sacrifice.  Part of the meat went to the priests as their perquisite; and part of the meat was returned to the worshipper. With his share he made a feast for his friends and his relations. One of the gods most commonly worshipped was Serapis. And when the invitations to the feast went out, they would read:

 

“I invite you to dine with me at the table of our Lord Serapis.”

 

Could a Christian share in a feast held in the temple of a heathen god? Even an ordinary meal in an ordinary house began with a libation, a cup of wine, poured out in honor of the gods. It was like grace before meat. Could a Christian become a sharer in a heathen act of worship like that? Again the Christian answer was clear. The Christian must cut himself off from his fellows rather than by his presence give approval to such a thing. A man had to be prepared to be lonely in order to be a Christian.

 

(iii) Worst of all, their Christianity was liable to disrupt their home life. It happened again and again that one member of a family became a Christian while the others did not. A wife might become a Christian while her husband did not. A son or a daughter might become a Christian while the rest of the family did not. Immediately there was a split in the family. Often the door was shut for ever in the face of the one who had accepted Christ.

 

Christianity often came to send, not peace, but a sword which divided families in two. It was literally true that a man might have to love Christ more than he loved father or mother, wife, or brother or sister. Christianity often involved in those days a choice between a man’s nearest and dearest and Jesus Christ.

 

Still further, the penalties which a Christian had to suffer were terrible beyond description. All the world knows of the Christians who were flung to the lions or burned at the stake; but these were kindly deaths. Nero wrapped the Christians in pitch and set them alight, and used them as living torches to light his gardens. He sewed them in the skins of wild animals and set his hunting dogs upon them to tear them to death. They were tortured on the rack; they were scraped with pincers; molten lead was poured hissing upon them; red hot brass plates were affixed to the tenderest parts of their bodies; eyes were torn out; parts of their bodies were cut off and roasted before their eyes;  their hands and feet were burned while cold water was poured over them to lengthen the agony. These things are not pleasant to think about, but these are the things a man had to be prepared for, if he took his stand with Christ.

 

We may well ask why the Romans persecuted the Christians. It seems an extraordinary thing that anyone living a Christian life should seem a fit victim for persecution and death. There were two reasons.

 

(i) There were certain slanders which were spread abroad about the Christians, slanders for which the Jews were in no small measure responsible. (a) The Christians were accused of cannibalism. The words of the Last Supper—“This is my body.”: “this cup is the New Testament in my blood”—were taken and twisted into a story that the Christians sacrificed a child and ate the flesh. (b) The Christians were accused of immoral practices, and their meetings were said to be orgies of lust. The Christian weekly meeting was called the Agape, the Love Feast; and the name was grossly misinterpreted. Christians greeted each other with the kiss of peace; and the kiss of peace became a ground on which to build the slanderous accusations. (c) The Christians were accused of being incendiaries. It is true that they spoke of the coming end of the world, and they clothed their message in the apocalyptic pictures of the end of the world in flames. Their slanderers took these words and twisted them into threats of political and revolutionary incendiarism. (d) The Christians were accused of tampering with family relationships. Christianity did in fact split families as we have seen; and so Christianity was represented as something which divided man and wife, and disrupted the home. There were slanders enough waiting to be invented by malicious-minded men.

 

(ii) But the great ground of persecution was in fact political. Let us think of the situation. The Roman Empire included almost the whole known world, from Britain to the Euphrates, and from Germany to North Africa. How could that vast amalgam of peoples be somehow welded into one? Where could a unifying principle be found? At first it was found in the worship of the goddess Roma, the spirit of Rome. This was a worship which the provincial peoples were happy to give, for Rome had brought them peace and good government, and civil order and justice. The roads were cleared of brigands and the seas of pirates; the despots and tyrants had been banished by impartial Roman justice. The provincial was very willing to sacrifice to the spirit of the Empire which had done so much for him.

 

But this worship of Roma took a further step. There was one man who personified the Empire, one man in whom Roma might be felt to be incarnated, and that was the Emperor; and so the Emperor came to be regarded as a god, and divine honors came to be paid to him, and temples were raised to his divinity. The Roman government did not begin this worship; at first, in fact, it did all it could to discourage it. Claudius, the Emperor, said that he deprecated divine honors being paid to any human being. But as the years went on the Roman government saw in this Emperor-worship the one thing which could unify the vast Empire of Rome; here was the one center on which they all could come together. So, in the end, the worship of the Emperor became, not voluntary, but compulsory. Once a year a man had to go and burn a pinch of incense to the godhead of Caesar and say, “Caesar is Lord.” And that is precisely what the Christians refused to do. For them Jesus Christ was the Lord, and to no man would they give that title which belonged to Christ.

 

It can be seen at once that Caesar-worship was far more a test of political loyalty than anything else. In actual fact when a man had burned his pinch of incense he received a certificate, a libellus, to say that he had done so, and then he could go and worship any god he liked, so long as his worship did not interfere with public order and decency. The Christians refused to conform. Confronted with the choice, “Caesar or Christ?” they uncompromisingly chose Christ. They utterly refused to compromise. The result was that, however good a man, however fine a citizen a Christian was, he was automatically an outlaw. In the vast Empire Rome could not afford pockets of disloyalty, and that is exactly what every Christian congregation appeared to the Roman authorities to be. A poet has spoken of

 

“The panting, huddled flock whose crime was Christ.”

 

The only crime of the Christian was that he set Christ above Caesar; and for that supreme loyalty the Christians died in their thousands, and faced torture for the sake of the lonely supremacy of Jesus Christ.

 

THE BLISS OF THE BLOOD-STAINED WAY

 

Matthew 5:10-12 (continued)

 

When we see how persecution arose, we are in a position to see the real glory of the martyr’s way. It may seem an extraordinary thing to talk about the bliss of the persecuted; but for him who had eyes to see beyond the immediate present, and a mind to understand the greatness of the issues involved, there must have been a glory in that blood-stained way.

 

(i) To have to suffer persecution was an opportunity to show one’s loyalty to Jesus Christ. One of the most famous of all the martyrs was Polycarp, the aged bishop of Smyrna. The mob dragged him to the tribunal of the Roman magistrate. He was given the inevitable choice—sacrifice to the godhead of Caesar or die. “Eighty and six years,” came the immortal reply, “have I served Christ, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” So they brought him to the stake, and he prayed his last prayer: “O Lord God Almighty, the Father of thy well-beloved and ever-blessed son, by whom we have received the knowledge of thee'85I thank thee that thou hast graciously thought me worthy of this day and of this hour.” Here was the supreme opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Jesus Christ.

 

In the First World War Rupert Brooke, the poet, was one of those who died too young. Before he went out to the battle he wrote:

 

“Now God be thanked who has matched us with his hour.”

 

There are so many of us who have never in our lives made anything like a real sacrifice for Jesus Christ. The moment when Christianity seems likely to cost us something is the moment when it is open to us to demonstrate our loyalty to Jesus Christ in a way that all the world can see.

 

(ii) To have to suffer persecution is, as Jesus himself said, the way to walk the same road as the prophets, and the saints, and the martyrs have walked. To suffer for the right is to gain a share in a great succession. The man who has to suffer something for his faith can throw back his head and say,

 

“Brothers, we are treading where saints have trod.”

 

(iii) To have to suffer persecution is to share in the great occasion. There is always something thrilling in even being present on the great occasion, in being there when something memorable and crucial is happening. There is an even greater thrill in having a share, however, small, in the actual action. That is the feeling about which Shakespeare wrote so unforgettably in Henry the Fifth in the words he put into Henry’s mouth before the battle of Agincourt:

 

“He that shall live this day and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his friends,

And say, ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian;”

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’

. . . . . .

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here ,

And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

 

When a man is called on to suffer something for his Christianity that is always a crucial moment; it is the great occasion; it is the clash between the world and Christ; it is a moment in the drama of eternity. To have a share in such a moment is not a penalty but a glory. “Rejoice at such a moment,” says Jesus, “and be glad.” The word for be glad  is from the verb agalliasthai which has been derived from two Greek words which mean to leap exceedingly. It is the joy which leaps for joy. As it has been put, it is the joy of the climber who has reached the summit, and who leaps for joy that the mountain path is conquered.

 

(iv) To suffer persecution is to make things easier for those who are to follow. Today we enjoy the blessing of liberty because men in the past were willing to buy it for us at the cost of blood, and sweat, and tears. They made it easier for us, and by a steadfast and immovable witness for Christ we may make it easier for others who are still to come.

 

In the great Boulder Dam scheme in America men lost their lives in that project which was to turn a dust-bowl into fertile land. When the scheme was completed, the names of those who had died were put on a tablet and the tablet was put into the great wall of the dam, and on it there was the inscription: “These died that the desert might rejoice and blossom as the rose.”

 

The man who fights his battle for Christ will always make things easier for those who follow after. For them there will be one less struggle to be encountered on the way.

 

(v) Still further, no man ever suffers persecution alone; if a man is called upon to bear material loss, the failure of friends, slander, loneliness, even the death of love, for his principles, he will not be left alone. Christ will be nearer to him than at any other time.

 

The old story in Daniel tells how Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were thrown into the furnace heated seven times hot because of their refusal to move from their loyalty to God. The courtiers watched. “Did we not cast three men, bound, into the fire?” they asked. The reply was that it was indeed so. Then came the astonished answer, “but I see four men, loose, walking in the midst of the fire and they are not hurt; and the appearnace of the fourth is like a son of the gods” (Daniel 3:19-25).

 

As Browning had it in Christmas Eve and Easter Day:

 

“I was born sickly, poor and mean,

A slave; no misery could screen

The holders of the pearl of price

From Caesar’s envy; therefore twice

I fought with beasts, and three times saw

My children suffer by his law;

At last my own release was earned;

I was some time in being burned,

But at the close a Hand came through

The fire above my head, and drew

My soul to Christ, whom now I see.

Sergius, a brother, writes for me

This testimony on the wall—

For me, I have forgot it all.”

 

When a man has to suffer something for his faith, that is the way to the closest possible companionship with Christ.

 

There remains only one question to ask—why is this persecution so inevitable? It is inevitable because the Church, when it really is the Church, is bound to be the conscience of the nation and the conscience of society. Where there is good the Church must praise; where there is evil the Church must condemn—and inevitably men will try to silence the troublesome voice of conscience. It is not the duty of the individual Christian habitually to find fault, to criticize, to condemn, but it may well be that his every action is a silent condemnation of the unchristian lives of others, and he will not escape their hatred.

 

It is not likely that death awaits us because of our loyalty to the Christian faith. But insult awaits the man who insists on Christian honor. Mockery awaits the man who practices Christian love and Christian forgiveness. Actual persecution may well await the Christian in industry who insists on doing an honest days’ work. Christ still needs his witnesses; he needs those who are prepared, not so much to die for him, as to live for him. The Christian struggle and the Christian glory still exist.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:13

THE SALT OF THE EARTH

 

Matthew 5:13

 

“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.”

 

When Jesus said this, he provided men with an expression which has become the greatest compliment that can be paid to any man. When we wish to stress someone’s solid worth and usefulness, we say of him, “People like that are the salt of the earth.”

 

In the ancient world salt was highly valued. The Greeks called salt divine (theion). In a phrase, which in Latin is a kind of jingle, the Romans said, “There is nothing more useful than sun and salt.” (Nil utilius sole et sale.) In the time of Jesus salt was connected in people’s minds with three special qualities.

 

(i) Salt was connected with purity. No doubt its glistening whiteness made the connection easy. The Romans said that salt was the purest of all things, because it came from the purest of all things, the sun and the sea. Salt was indeed the most primitive of all offerings to the gods, and to the end of the day the Jewish sacrifices were offered with salt. So then, if the Christian is to be the salt of the earth he must be an example of purity.

 

One of the characteristics of the world in which we live is the lowering of standards. Standards of honesty, standards of diligence in work, standards of conscientiousness, moral standards, all tend to be lowered. The Christian must be the person who holds aloft the standard of absolute purity in speech, in conduct, and even in thought. A certain writer dedicated a book to J. Y Simpson:” who makes the best seem easily credible.” No Christian can depart from the standards of strict honesty. No Christian can think lightly of the lowering of moral standards in a world where the streets of every great city provide their deliberate enticements to sin. No Christian can allow himself the tarnished and suggestive jests which are so often part of social conversation. The Christian cannot withdraw from the world, but he must, as James said, keep himself “unstained from the world” (James 1:27).

 

(ii) In the ancient world salt was the commonest of all preservatives. It was used to keep things from going bad, and to hold putrefaction at bay. Plutarch has a strange way of putting that. He says that meat is a dead body and part of a dead body, and will, if left to itself, go bad; but salt preserves it and keeps it fresh, and is therefore like a new soul inserted into a dead body.

 

So then salt preserves from corruption. If the Christian is to be the salt of the earth, he must have a certain antiseptic influence on life.

 

We all know that there are certain people in whose company it is easy to be good; and that also there are certain people in whose company it is easy for standards to be relaxed. There are certain people in whose presence a soiled story would be readily told, and there are other people to whom no one would dream of telling such a tale. The Christian must be the cleansing antiseptic in any society in which he happens to be; he must be the person who by his presence defeats corruption and makes it easier for others to be good.

 

(iii) But the greatest and the most obvious quality of salt is that salt lends flavor to things. Food without salt is a sadly insipid and even a sickening thing. Christianity is to life what salt is to food. Christianity lends flavor to life.

 

The tragedy is that so often people have connected Christianity with precisely the opposite. They have connected Christianity with that which takes the flavor out of life. Swinburne had it:

 

“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray from Thy breath.”

 

Even after Constantine had made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, there came to the throne another Emperor called Julian, who wished to put the clock back and to bring back the old gods. His complaint, as Ibsen puts it, was:

 

“Have you looked at these Christians closely? Hollow-eyed, pale-cheeked, flat-breasted all; they brood their lives away, unspurred by ambition: the sun shines for them, but they do not see it: the earth offers them its fullness, but they desire it not; all their desire is to renounce and to suffer that they may come to die.”

 

As Julian saw it, Christianity took the vividness out of life.

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “I might have entered the ministry if certain clergymen I knew had not looked and acted so much like undertakers.” Robert Louis Stevenson once entered in his diary, as if he was recording an extraordinary phenomenon, “I have been to Church to-day, and am not depressed.”

 

Men need to discover the lost radiance of the Christian faith. In a worried world, the Christian should be the only man who remains serene. In a depressed world, the Christian should be the only man who remains full of the joy of life. There should be a sheer sparkle about the Christian but too often he dresses like a mourner at a funeral, and talks like a spectre at a feast. Wherever he is, if he is to be the salt of the earth, the Christian must be the diffuser of joy.

 

Jesus went on to say that, if the salt had become insipid, it was fit only to be thrown out and trodden on by men. This is difficult, because salt does not lose its flavor and its saltness. E. F. F. Bishop in his book Jesus of Palestine cites a very likely explanation given by Miss F. E. Newton. In Palestine the ordinary oven is out of doors and is built of stone on a base of tiles. In such ovens “in order to retain the heat a thick bed of salt is laid under the tiled floor. After a certain length of time the salt perishes. The tiles are taken up, the salt removed and thrown on the road outside the door of the oven'85It has lost its power to heat the tiles and it is thrown out.” That may well be the picture here.

 

But the essential point remains whatever the picture, and it is a point which the New Testament makes and remakes again and again—uselessness invites disaster. If a Christina is not fulfilling his purpose as a Christian, then he is on the way to disaster. We are meant to be the salt of the earth, and if we do not bring to life the purity, the antiseptic power, the radiance that we ought, then we invite disaster.

 

It remains to be noted that sometimes the early Church made a very strange use of this text. In the synagogue, among the Jews, there was a custom that, if a Jew became an apostate and then returned to the faith, before he was received back into the synagogue, he must in penitence lie across the door of the synagogue and invite people to trample upon him as they entered. In certain places the Christian Church took over that custom, and a Christian who had been ejected by discipline from the Church, was compelled, before he was received back, to lie at the door of the Church and to invite people as they entered, “Trample upon me who am the salt which as lost its savor.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:15

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

 

Matthew 5:14,15

 

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.

 

It may well be said that this is the greatest compliment that was ever paid to the individual Christian, for in it Jesus commands the Christian to be what he himself claimed to be. Jesus said, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:5). When Jesus commanded his followers to be the lights of the world, he demanded nothing less than that they should be like himself.

 

When Jesus spoke these words, he was using an expression which was quite familiar to the Jews who heard it for the first time. They themselves spoke of Jerusalem as “a light to the Gentiles,” and a famous Rabbi was often called “a lamp of Israel.” But the way in which the Jews used this expression will give us a key to the way in which Jesus also used it.

 

Of one thing the Jews were very sure—no man kindled his own light. Jerusalem was indeed a light to the Gentiles, but “God lit Israel’s lamp.” The light with which the nation or the man of God shone was a borrowed light. It must be so with the Christian. It is not the demand of Jesus that we should, as it were, produce our own light. The radiance which shines from the Christian comes from the presence of Christ within the Christian’s heart. We often speak about a radiant bride, but the radiance which shines from her comes from the love which has been born within her heart.

 

When Jesus said that the Christian must be the light of the world, what did he mean?

 

(i) A light is first and foremost something which is meant to be seen. The houses in Palestine were very dark with only one little circular window perhaps not more than eighteen inches across. The lamp was like a sauce-boat filled with oil with the wick floating in it. It was not so easy to rekindle a lamp in the days before matches existed. Normally the lamp stood on the lampstand which would be no more than a roughly shaped branch of wood: but when people went out, for safety’s sake, they took the lamp from its stand, and put it under an earthen bushel measure, so that it might burn without risk until they came back. The primary duty of the light of the lamp was to be seen.

 

So, then, Christianity is something which is meant to be seen. As someone has well said, “There can be no such thing as secret discipleship, for either the secrecy destroys the discipleship, or the discipleship destroys the secrecy.” A man’s Christianity should be perfectly visible to all men.

 

Further, this Christianity should not be visible only within the Church. A Christianity whose effects stop at the church door is not much use to anyone. It should be even more visible in the ordinary activities of the world. Our Christianity should be visible in the way we treat a shop assistant across the counter, in the way we order a meal in a restaurant, in the way we treat our employees or serve our employer, in the way we play a game or drive or park a motor car, in the daily language we use, in the daily literature we read. A Christian should be just as much a Christian in the factory, the workshop, the shipyard, the mine, the schoolroom, the surgery, the kitchen, the golf course, the playing field as he is in church . Jesus did not say, “You are the light of the Church”; he said, “You are the light of the world,” and in a man’s life in the world his Christianity should be evident to all.

 

(ii) A light is a guide. On the estuary of any river we may see the line of lights which marks the channel for the ships to sail in safely. We know how difficult even the city streets were when there were no lights. A light is something to make clear the way.

 

So then a Christian must make the way clear to others. That is to say, A Christian must of necessity be an example. One of the things which this world needs more than anything else is people who are prepared to be foci of goodness.. Suppose there is a group of people, and suppose it is suggested that some questionable thing should be done. Unless someone makes his protest the thing will be done. But if someone rises and says, “I will not be a party to that,” another and another and another will rise to say, “Neither will I.” But, had they not been given the lead, they would have remained silent.

 

There are many people in this world who have not the moral strength and courage to take a stand by themselves, but if someone gives them a lead, they will follow; if they have someone strong enough to lean on, they will do the right thing. It is the Christian’s duty to take the stand which the weaker brother will support, to give the lead which those with less courage will follow. The world needs its guiding lights; there are people waiting and longing for a lead to take the stand and to do the thing which they do not dare by themselves.

 

(iii) A light can often be a warning light. A light is often the warning which tells us to halt when there is danger ahead.

 

It is sometimes the Christian’s duty to bring to his fellowmen the necessary warning. That is often difficult, and it is often hard to do it in a way which will not do more harm than good; but one of the most poignant tragedies in life is for someone, especially a young person, to come and say to us, “I would never have been in the situation in which I now find myself, if you had only spoken in time.”

 

It was aid of Florence Allshorn, the famous teacher and principal, that if she ever had occasion to rebuke her students, she did it “with her arm round about them.” If our warnings are given, not in anger, not in irritation, not in criticism, not in condemnation, not in the desire to hurt, but in love, they will be effective.

 

The light which can be seen, the light which warns, the light which guides, these are the lights which the Christian must be.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:16

SHINING FOR GOD

 

Matthew 5:16

 

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

 

There are two most important things here.

 

(i) Men are to see our good deeds. In Greek there are two words for good. There is the word agathos which simply defines a thing as good in quality; there is kalos which means that a things is not only good, but that it is also winsome and beautiful and attractive. The word which is used here is kalos.

 

The good deeds of the Christian must be not only good; they must be also attractive. There must be a certain winsomeness in Christian goodness. The tragedy of so much so-called goodness is that in it there is an element of hardness and coldness and austerity. There is a goodness which attracts and a goodness which repels. There is a charm in true Christian goodness which makes it a lovely thing.

 

(ii) It is further to be noted that our good deeds ought to draw attention, not to ourselves, but to God. This saying of Jesus is a total prohibition of what someone has called “theatrical goodness.”

 

At a conference at which D. L. Moody was present there were also present some young people who took their Christian faith very seriously. One night they held an all night prayer meeting. As they were leaving it in the morning they met Moody, and he asked them what they had been doing. They told him; and then they went on: “Mr. Moody, see how our faces shine.” Moody answered very gently: “Moses wist not that his face shone.” That goodness which is conscious, which draws attention to itself, is not the Christian goodness.

 

One of the old historians wrote of Henry the Fifth after the Battle of Agincourt: “Neither would he suffer any ditties to be made and sung by the minstrels of his glorious victory, for that he would wholly have the praise and thanks altogether given to God.” The Christian never thinks of what he has dome, but of what God has enabled him to do. He never seeks to draw the eyes of men to himself, but always to direct them to God. So long as men are thinking of the praise, the thanks, the prestige which they will get for what they have done, they have not really even begun on the Christian way.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:17

THE ETERNAL LAW

 

Matthew 5:17-20

 

Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to destroy them but to fulfill them. This is the truth I tell you—until the heaven and the earth shall pass away, the smallest part of any letter shall not pass away from the Law, until all things in it shall be performed. So then, whoever will break one of the least of these commandments, and will teach others to do so, shall be called least in the Kingdom of the Heavens; but whoever will do them and will teach others to do them, he will be called great in the Kingdom of the Heavens. For I tell you, that you will certainly not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, unless your righteousness goes beyond that of the Scribes and Pharisees.

 

At first reading it might well be held that this is the most astonishing statement that Jesus made in the whole Sermon on the Mount. In this statement Jesus lays down the eternal character of the Law; and yet Paul can say, “Christ is the end of the Law” (Romans 10:4).

 

Again and again Jesus broke what the Jews called the Law. He did not observe the handwashings that the Law laid down; he healed sick people on the Sabbath, although the Law forbade such healings; he was in fact condemned and crucified as a law-breaker; and yet here he seems to speak of the Law with a veneration and a reverence that no Rabbi or Pharisee could exceed. The smallest letter—the letter which the Authorized Version calls the jot—was the Hebrew letter iodh. In form it was like an apostrophe—‘--; not even a letter not much bigger than a dot was to pass away. The smallest part of the letter—what the Authorized Version calls the tittle—is what we call the serif, the little projecting part at the foot of a letter, the little line at each side of the foot of, for example, the letter 1. Jesus seems to lay it down that the law is so sacred that not the smallest detail of it will ever pass away.

 

Some people have been so puzzled by this saying that they have come to the conclusion that Jesus could not have said it. They have suggested that, since Matthew  is the most Jewish of the gospels, and since Matthew wrote it specially to convince Jews, this is a saying which Matthew put into Jesus’ mouth, and that this is not a saying of Jesus at all. But that is a weak argument, for this is a saying which is indeed so unlikely that no one would have invented it; it is so unlikely a saying that Jesus must have said it; and when we come to see what it really means, we will see it is inevitable that Jesus should have said it.

 

The Jews used the expression The Law in four different ways. (I) They used it to mean the Ten Commandments. (ii) They used it to mean the first five books of the Bible. That part of the Bible which is known as the Pentateuch—which literally means The Five Rolls—was to the Jew The Law par excellence and was to them by far the most important part of the Bible. (iii) They used the phrase The Law and the prophets to mean the whole of Scripture; they used it as a comprehensive description of what we would call the whole Old Testament. (iv) They used it to mean the Oral or the Scribal Law.

 

In the time of Jesus it was the last meaning which was commonest; and it was in fact this Scribal Law which both Jesus and Paul so utterly condemned. What, then, was this Scribal Law?

 

In the Old Testament itself we find very few rules and regulations; what we do find are great, broad principles which a man must himself take and interpret under God’s guidance, and apply to the individual situations in life. In the Ten Commandments we find no rules and regulations at all; they are each one of them great principles out of which a man must find his own rules for life. To the later Jews these great principles did not seem enough. They held that the Law was divine, and that in it God had said his last word, and that therefore everything must be in it, If a thing was not in the Law explicitly it must be there implicitly. They therefore argued that out of the Law it must be possible to deduce a rule and a regulation for every possible situation in life. So there arose a race of men called the Scribes who made it the business of their lives to reduce the great principles of the Law to literally thousands upon thousands of rules and regulations.

 

We may best see this in action. The Law lays it down that the Sabbath Day is to be kept holy, and that on it no work is to be done. That is a great principle. But the Jewish legalists had a passion for definition. So they asked: What is work?

 

All kinds of things were classified as work. For instance, to carry a burden on the Sabbath Day is to work. But next a burden has to be defined. So the Scribal Law lays it down that a burden is “food equal in weight to a dried fig, enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put upon a wound, oil enough to anoint a small member, water enough to moisten an eye-salve, paper enough to write a customs house notice upon, ink enough to write two letters of the alphabet, reed enough to make a pen”—and so on endlessly. So they spent endless hours arguing whether a man could or could not lift a lamp from one place to another on the Sabbath, whether a tailor committed a sin if he went out with a needle in his robe, whether a woman might wear a brooch or false hair, even if a man might go out on the Sabbath with artificial teeth or an artificial limb, if a man might lift his child on the Sabbath Day. These things to them were the essence of religion. Their religion was a legalism of petty rules and regulations.

 

To write was to work on the Sabbath. But writing has to be defined. So the definition runs: “He who writes two letters of the alphabet with his right or with his left hand, whether of one kind or of two kinds, if they are written with different inks or in different languages, is guilty. Even if he should write two letters from forgetfulness, he is guilty, whether he has written them with ink or with paint, red chalk, vitriol, or anything which makes a permanent mark. Also he that writes on two walls that form an angle, or on two tablets of his account book so that they can be read together is guilty'85But, if anyone writes with dark fluid, with fruit juice, or in the dust of the road, or in sand, of in anything which does not make a permanent mark, he is not guilty'85.If he writes one letter on the ground, and one on the wall of the house, or on two pages of a book, so that they cannot be read together, he is not guilty.” That is a typical passage from the Scribal Law; and that is what the orthodox Jew regarded as true religion and the true service of God.

 

To heal was to work on the Sabbath. Obviously this has to be defined. Healing was allowed when there was danger to life, and especially in troubles of the ear, nose and throat; but even then, steps could be taken only to keep the patient from becoming worse; no steps might be taken to make him get any better. So a plain bandage might be put on a wound, but no ointment; plain wadding might be put into a sore ear, but not medicated wadding.

 

The Scribes were the men who worked out these rules and regulations. The Pharisees, whose name means The Separated Ones, were the men who had separated themselves from all the ordinary activities of life to keep all these rules and regulations.

 

We can see the length to which this went from the following facts. For many generations this Scribal Law was never written down; it was the oral law, and it was handed down in the memory of generations of Scribes. In the middle of the third century A.D. a summary of it was made and codified. That summary is known as the Mishnah; it contains sixty-three tractates on various subjects of the Law, and in English makes a book of almost eight hundred pages. Later Jewish scholarship busied itself with making commentaries to explain the Mishnah. These commentaries are known as the Talmuds. Of the Jerusalem Talmud there are twelve printed volumes; and of the Babylonian Talmud there are sixty printed volumes.

 

To the strict orthodox Jew, in the time of Jesus, religion, serving God, was a matter of keeping thousands of legalistic rules and regulations; they regarded these petty rules and regulations as literally matters of life and death and eternal destiny. Clearly Jesus did not mean that no one of these rules and regulations was to pass away; repeatedly he broke them himself; and repeatedly he condemned them; that is certainly not what Jesus meant by the Law, for that is the kind of law that both Jesus and Paul condemned.

 

THE ESSENCE OF THE LAW

 

Matthew 5:17-20 (continued)

 

What then did Jesus mean by the Law? He said that he had not come to destroy the Law, but to fulfill the Law. That is to say, he came really to bring out the real meaning of the Law. What was the real meaning of the Law? Even behind the Scribal and Oral Law there was one great principle which the Scribes and the Pharisees had imperfectly grasped. The one great principle was that in all things a man must seek God’s will, and that, when he knows it, he must dedicate his whole life to the obeying of it. The Scribes and Pharisees were right in seeking God’s will, and profoundly right in dedicating their lives to obeying it; they were wrong in finding that will in their man-made hordes of rules and regulations.

 

What then is the real principle behind the whole Law, that principle which Jesus came to fulfill, the true meaning of which he came to show?

 

When we look at the Ten Commandments, which are the essence and the foundation of all law, we can see that their whole meaning can be summed up in one word—respect, or even better, reverence. Reverence for God and for the name of God, reverence for God’s day, respect for parents, respect for life, respect for property, respect for personality, respect for the truth and for another person’s good name, respect for oneself so that wrong desires may never master us—these are the fundamental principles behind the Ten Commandments, principles of reverence for God, and respect for our fellow men and for ourselves. Without them there can be no such thing as law. On them all law is based.

 

That reverence and that respect Jesus came to fulfill. He came to show men in actual life what reverence for God and respect for men are like. .Justice, said the Greeks, consists in giving to God and to men that which is their due. Jesus came to show men in actual life what it means to give to God the reverence and to men the respect which are their due.

 

That reverence and respect which are the basis of the Ten Commandments can never pass away; they are the permanent stuff of man’s relationship to God and to his fellow-men.

 

THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL

 

Matthew 5:17-20 (continued)

 

When Jesus spoke as he did about the Law and the Gospel, he was implicitly laying down certain broad principles.

 

(i) He was saying that there is a definite continuation between the past and the present. We must never look on life as a kind of battle between the past and the present. The present grows out of the past.

 

After Dunkirk, in the Second World War, there was a tendency on all hands to look for someone to blame for the disaster which had befallen the British forces, and there were many who wished to enter into bitter recriminations with those who had guided things in the past. At that time Mr. Winston Churchill, as he then was, said a very wise thing: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

 

There had to be the Law before the Gospel could come. Men had to learn the difference between right and wrong; men had to learn their own human inability to cope with the demands of the law, and to respond to the commands of God; men had to learn a sense of sin and unworthiness and inadequacy. Men blame the past for many things—and often rightly—but it is equally, and even more, necessary to acknowledge our debt to the past. As Jesus saw it, it is man’s duty neither to forget nor to attempt to destroy the past, but to build upon the foundation of the past. We have entered into other men’s labors, and we must so labor that other men will enter into ours.

 

(ii) In this passage Jesus definitely warns men not to think that Christianity is easy. Men might say, “Christ is the end of the law; now I can do what I like.” Men might think that all the duties, all the responsibilities, all the demands are gone. But it is Jesus’ warning that the righteousness of the Christian must exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. What did he mean by that?

 

The motive under which the Scribes and Pharisees lived was the motive of law; their one aim and desire was to satisfy the demands of the Law. Now, at least theoretically, it is perfectly possible to satisfy the demands of the law; in once sense there can come a time when a man can say, “I have done all that the law demands; my duty is discharged; the law has no more claim on me.” But the motive under which the Christian lives is the motive of love; the Christian’s one desire is to show his wondering gratitude for the love wherewith God had loved him in Jesus Christ. Now, it is not even theoretically possible to satisfy the claims of love. If we love someone with all our hearts, we are bound to feel that if we gave them a lifetime’s service and adoration, if we offered them the sun and the moon and the stars, we would still not have offered enough. For love the whole realm of nature is an offering far too small.

 

The Jew aimed to satisfy the law of God; and to the demands of law there is always a limit. The Christian aims to show his gratitude for the love of God; and to the claims of love there is no limit in time or in eternity. Jesus set before men, not the law of God, but the love of God. Long ago Augustine said that the Christian life could be summed up in the one phrase: “Love God, and do what you like.” But when we realize how God has loved us, the one desire of life is to answer to that love, and that is the greatest task in all the world, for it presents a man with a task the like of which the man who thinks in terms of law never dreams of, and with an obligation more binding than the obligation to any law.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:21

THE NEW AUTHORITY

 

Matthew 5:21-48

 

 

This section of the teaching of Jesus is one of the most important in the whole new Testament. Before we deal with it in detail, there are certain general things about it which we must note.

 

In it Jesus speaks with an authority which no other man had ever dreamed of assuming: the authority which Jesus assumed always amazed those who came into contact with him. Right at the beginning of his ministry, after he had been teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum, it is said of his hearers: “They were astonished at his teaching; for he taught them as one who had authority and not as their Scribes” (Matthew 7:28,29).

 

It is difficult for us to realize just how shocking a thing this authority of Jesus must have seemed to the Jews who listened to him. To the Jew the Law was absolutely holy and absolutely divine; it is impossible to exaggerate the place that the Law had in their reverence. “The Law,” said Aristeas, “is holy and has been given by God.” “Only Moses’ decrees,” said Philo, “are everlasting, unchangeable and unshakable, as signed by nature herself with her seal.” The Rabbis said, “those who deny that the Law is from heaven have no part in the world to come.” They said, “Even if one says that the Law is from God with the exception of this or that verse, which Moses, not God, spoke from his own mouth, then there applies to him the judgment. He has despised the word of the Lord: he has shown the irreverence which merits the destruction of the soul.” The first act of every synagogue service was the taking of the rolls of the Law from the ark in which they were stored, and the carrying of them round the congregation, that the congregation might show their reverence for them.

 

That is what the Jews thought of the Law; and now no fewer than five times (Matthew 5:21,27,33,38,43) Jesus quotes the Law, only to contradict it, and to substitute a teaching of his own. He claimed the right to point out the inadequacies of the most sacred writings in the world, and to correct them out of his own wisdom. The Greeks defined exousia, authority, as “the power to add and the power to take away at will.” Jesus claimed that power even with regard to that which the Jews believed to be the unchanging and unchangeable word of God. Nor did Jesus argue about this, or seek in any way to justify himself for so doing, or seek to prove his right to do so. He calmly and without question assumed that right.

 

No one had ever heard anything like this before. The great Jewish teachers had always had characteristic phrases in their teaching. The characteristic phrase of the prophet was: “thus saith the Lord.” He claimed no personal authority at all; his only claim was that what he spoke God had told him. The characteristic phrase of the Scribe and the Rabbi was: “there is a teaching that'85.” The Scribe or the Rabbi never dared to express even an opinion of his own unless he could buttress it with supporting quotations from the great teachers of the past. Independence was the last quality that he would claim. But to Jesus a statement required no authority other than the fact that he made it. He was his own authority.

 

Clearly one of two things must be true—either Jesus was mad, or he was unique; either he was a megalomaniac or else he was the son of God. No ordinary person would dare claim to take and overturn that which up to his coming had been regarded as the eternal word of God.

 

The amazing thing about authority is that it is self-evidencing. No sooner does a man begin to teach than we know at once whether or not he has the right to teach. Authority is like an atmosphere about a man. He does not need to claim it; he either has it, or he has not.

 

Orchestras which played under Toscanini, the master conductor, said that as soon as he mounted the rostrum they could feel a wave of authority flowing from him. Julian Duguid tells how he once crossed the Atlantic in the same ship as Sir Wilfred Grenfell; and he says that when Grenfell came into one of the ship’s public rooms, he could tell (without even looking round) that he had entered the room, for a wave of authority went out from the man. It was supremely so with Jesus.

 

Jesus took the highest wisdom of men and corrected it, because he was who he was. He did not need to argue; it was sufficient for him to speak. No one can honestly face Jesus and honestly listen to him without feeling that this is God’s last word beside which all other words are inadequate, and all other wisdom out of date.

 

THE NEW STANDARD

 

Matthew 5:21-48 (continued)

 

But startling as was Jesus’ accent of authority, the standard which he put before men was more startling yet. Jesus said that in God’s sight it was not only the man who committed murder who was guilty; the man who was angry with his brother was also guilty and liable to judgment. It was not only the man who committed adultery who was guilty; the man who allowed the unclean desire to settle in his heart was also guilty.

 

Here was something which was entirely new, something which men have not yet fully grasped. It was Jesus’ teaching that it was not enough not to commit murder; the only thing sufficient was never even to wish to commit murder. It was Jesus’ teaching that it was not enough not to commit adultery; the only thing sufficient was never even to wish to commit adultery.

 

It may be that we have never struck a man; but who can say that he never wished  to strike a man? It may be that we have never committed adultery; but who can say that he has never experienced the desire for the forbidden thing? It was Jesus’ teaching that thoughts are just as important as deeds, and that it is not enough not to commit a sin; the only things that is enough is not to wish to commit it. It was Jesus’ teaching that a man is not judged only by his deeds, but is judged even more by the desires which never emerged in deeds. By the world’s standards a man is a good man, if he never does a forbidden thing. The world is not concerned to judge his thoughts. By Jesus’ standards a man is not a good man until he never even desires to do a forbidden thing. Jesus is intensely concerned with a man’s thoughts. Three things emerge from this.

 

(i) Jesus was profoundly right, for Jesus’ way is the only way to safety and to security. To some extent every man is a split personality. There is part of him which is attracted to good, and part of him which is attracted to evil. So long as a man is like that, an inner battle is going on inside him. One voice is inciting him to take the forbidden thing; the other voice if forbidding him to take it.

 

Plato likened the soul to a charioteer whose task it was to drive two horses. The one horse was gentle and biddable and obedient to the reins and to the word of command; the other horse was wild and untamed and rebellious. The name of the one horse was reason; the name of the other was passion. Life is always a conflict between the demands of the passions and the control of the reason. The reason is the leash which keeps the passions in check. But, a leash may snap at any time. Self-control may be for a moment off it guard—and then what may happen? So long as there is this inner tension, this inner conflict, life must be insecure. In such circumstances there can be no such things as safety. The only way to safety, Jesus said, is to eradicate the desire for the forbidden thing for ever. Then and then alone life is safe.

 

(ii) If that be so, then God alone can judge men. We see only a man’s outward actions; God alone sees the secret of his heart. And there will be many a man, whose outward actions are a model of rectitude, whose inward thoughts stand condemned before God. There is many a man who can stand the judgment of men, which is bound to be a judgment of externals, but whose goodness collapses before the all-seeing eye of God.

 

(iii) And if that be so, it means that every one of us is in default; for there is none who can stand this judgment of God. Even if we have lived a life of outward moral perfection, there is none who can say that he never experienced the forbidden desire for the wrong things. For the inner perfection the only thing that is enough for a man to say is that he himself is dead and Christ lives in him. “I have been crucified with Christ,” said Paul. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:19,20)

 

The new standard kills all pride, and forces us to Jesus Christ who alone can enable us to rise to that standard which he himself has set before us.

 

THE FORBIDDEN ANGER

 

Matthew 5:21,22

 

You have heard that it was said by the people of the old days: You shall not kill; and whoever kills is liable to the judgment court. But I say unto you that everyone who is angry with his brother is liable to the judgment court; and he who says to his brother,  “you brainless one!” is liable to judgment in the supreme court; and he who says to his brother, “You fool!” is liable to be cast into the Gehenna of fire.

 

Here is the first example of the new standard which Jesus takes. The ancient law had laid it down: “You shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13); but Jesus lays it down that even anger against a brother is forbidden. In the Authorized Version the man who is condemned is the man who is angry with his brother without a cause. But the words without a cause are not found in any of the great manuscripts, and this is nothing less than a total prohibition of anger. It is not enough not to strike a man; the only thing that is enough is not even to wish to strike him; not even to have a hard feeling against him within the heart.

 

In this passage Jesus is arguing as a Rabbi might argue. He is showing that he was skillful in using the debating methods which the wise men of his time were in the habit of using. There is in this passage a neat gradation of anger, and an answering neat graduation of punishment.

 

(i) There is first the man who is angry with his brother. The verb here used is orgizesthai. In Greek there are two words for anger. There is thumos, which was described as being like the flame which comes from dried straw. It is the anger which quickly blazes up and which just as quickly dies down. It is an anger which rises speedily and which just as speedily passes. There is orge, which was described as anger become inveterate. It is the long-lived anger; it is the anger of the man who nurses his wrath to keep it warm; it is the anger over which a person broods, and which he will not allow to die.

 

That anger is liable to the judgment court. The judgment court is the local village council which dispensed justice. That court was composed of the local village elders, and varied in number from three in villages of fewer than one hundred and fifty inhabitants, to seven in larger towns and twenty-three in still bigger cities.

 

So, then, Jesus condemns all selfish anger. The Bible is clear that anger is forbidden. “the anger of man,” said James, “does not work the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). Paul orders his people to put off all “anger, wrath, malice, slander” (Colossians 3:8). Even the highest pagan thought saw the folly of anger. Cicero said that when anger entered into the scene “nothing could be done rightly and nothing sensibly.” In a vivid phrase Seneca called anger “a brief insanity.”

 

So Jesus forbids for ever the anger which broods, the anger which will not forget, the anger which refuses to be pacified, the anger which seeks revenge. If we are to obey Jesus, all anger must be banished from life, and especially that anger which lingers too long. It is a warning thing to remember that no man can call himself a Christian and lose his temper because of any personal wrong which he has suffered.

 

(ii) Then Jesus goes on to speak of two cases where anger turns into insulting words. The Jewish teachers forbade such anger and such words. They spoke of “oppression in words,” and of “the sin of insult.” They had a saying, “Three classes go down to Gehenna and return not—the adulterer, he who puts his neighbor openly to shame, and he who gives his neighbor an insulting name.” Anger in a man’s heart, and anger in a man’s speech are equally forbidden.

 

WORDS OF INSULT

 

Matthew 5:21,22 (continued)

 

First of all, the man who calls his brother Raca is condemned. Raca is an almost untranslatable word, because it describes a tone of voice more than anything else. Its whole accent of contempt. To call a man Raca was to call him a brainless idiot, a silly fool, an empty-headed blunderer. It is the word of one who despises another with an arrogant contempt.

 

There is a Rabbinic tale of a certain Rabbi, Simon be Eleazar. He was coming from his teacher’s house, and he was feeling uplifted at the thought of his own scholarship and erudition and goodness. A very ill-favored passer-by gave him a greeting. The rabbi did not return the greeting, but said, "You Raca! How ugly you are! Are all the men of your town as ugly as you?” “That,” said the passer-by, “I do not know. Go and tell the Maker who created me how ugly is the creature he has made.” So there the sin of contempt was rebuked.

 

The sin of contempt is liable to an even severer judgment. It is liable to the judgment of the Sanhedrin (sunedrion), the supreme court of the Jews. This of course is not to be taken literally. It is as if Jesus said: “The sin of inveterate anger is bad; the sin of contempt is worse.”

 

There is no sin quite so unchristian as the sin of contempt. There is a contempt which comes from pride of birth, and snobbery is in truth an ugly thing. There is a contempt which comes from position and from money, and pride in material things is also an ugly thing. There is a contempt which comes from knowledge, and of all snobberies intellectual snobbery is the hardest to understand, for now wise man was ever impressed with anything else than his own ignorance. We should never look with contempt on any man for whom Christ died.

 

(iii) Then Jesus goes on to speak of the man who calls his brother moros. Moros also means fool, but the man who is moros is the man who is a moral fool. He is the man who is playing the fool. The Psalmist spoke of the fool who has said in his heart that there is no God (Psalm 14:1). Such a man was a moral fool, a man who lived an immoral life, and who in wishful thinking said that there was no God. To call a man moros was not to criticize his mental ability; it was to cast aspersions on his moral character; it was to take his name and reputation from him, and to brand him as a loose-living and immoral person.

 

So Jesus says that he who destroys his brother’s name and reputation is liable to the severest judgment of all, the judgment of the fire of Gehenna.

 

Gehenna is a word with a history; often the Revised Standard Version translates it hell. The word was very commonly used by the Jews (Matthew 5:22, 29, 30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43,45,47; Luke12:5; James 3:6). It really means the Valley of Hinnom. The Valley of Hinnom is a valley to the south-west of Jerusalem. It was notorious as the place where Ahaz had introduced into Israel the fire worship of the heathen God Molech, to whom little children were burned in the fire. “He burned incense in the valley of the son of Hinnom, and burned his sons as an offering” (2 Chronicles 28:3). Josiah, the reforming king, had stamped out that worship, and had ordered that the valley should be for ever after an accursed place. “He defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech” (2 Kings 23:10). In the consequence of this the Valley of Hinnom became the place where the refuse of Jerusalem was cast out and destroyed. It was a kind of public incinerator. Always the fire smoldered in it, and a pall of thick smoke lay over it, and it bred a loathsome kind of worm which was hard to kill (Mark 9:44-48). So Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, became identified in people’s minds with all that was accursed and filthy, the place where useless and evil things were destroyed That is why it became a synonym for the place of God’s destroying power, for hell.

 

So, then, Jesus insists that the gravest thing of all is to destroy a man’s reputation and to take his good name away. No punishment is too severe for the malicious tale-bearer, or the gossip over the teacups which murders people’s reputations. Such conduct, in the most literal sense, is a hell-deserving sin.

 

As we have said, all these gradations of punishment are not to be taken literally. What Jesus is saying here is this: “In the old days men condemned murder; and truly murder is for ever wrong. But I tell you that no only are a man’s outward actions under judgment; his inmost thoughts are also under the scrutiny and the judgment of God. Long-lasting anger is bad; contemptuous speaking is worse, and the careless or the malicious talk which destroys a man’s good name is worst of all.” The man who is the slave of anger, the man who speaks in the accent of contempt, the man who destroys another’s good name, may never have committed a murder in action, but he is a murderer at heart.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:24

THE INSURMOUNTABLE BARRIER

 

Matthew 5:23,24

 

So, then, if you bring your gift to the altar, and if you there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go, and first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

 

When Jesus said this, he was doing no more than recall the Jews to a principle which they well knew and ought never to have forgotten. The idea behind sacrifice was quite simple. If a man did a wrong thing, that action disturbed the relationship between him and God, and the sacrifice was meant to be the cure which restored that relationship.

 

But two most important things have to be noted. First, it was never held that sacrifice could atone for deliberate sin, for what the Jews called “the sin of a high hand.” If a man committed a sin unawares, if he was swept into sin in a moment of passion when self-control broke, then sacrifice was effective; but if a man deliberately, defiantly, callously and open-eyed committed sin, then sacrifice was powerless to atone.

 

Second, to be effective, sacrifice had to include confession of sin and true penitence; and true penitence involved the attempt to rectify any consequences sin might have had. The great Day of Atonement was held to make atonement for the sins of the whole nation, but the Jews were quite clear that not even the sacrifice of the Day of Atonement could avail for a man unless he was first reconciled to his neighbor. The breach between man and God could not be healed until the breach between man and man was healed. If a man was making a sin-offering, for instance, to atone for a theft, the offering was held to be completely unavailing until the thing stolen had been restored; and, if it was discovered that the thing had not been restored, then the sacrifice had to be destroyed as unclean and burned outside the Temple. The Jews were quite clear that a man had to do his utmost to put things right himself before he could be right with God.

 

In some sense sacrifice was substitutionary. The symbol of this was that, as the victim was about to be sacrificed, the worshipper placed his hands upon the beast’s head, and pressed them down upon it, as if to transfer his own guilt to it. As he did so he said, “I entreat, O Lord; I have sinned, I have done perversely, I have rebelled; I have committed'85(here the sacrificer specified his sins); but I return in penitence, and let this be for my covering.

 

If any sacrifice was to be valid, confession and restoration were involved. The picture which Jesus is painting is very vivid. The worshipper, of course, did not make his own sacrifice; he brought it to the priest who offered it on his behalf. The worshipper has entered the Temple; he has passed through its series of courts, the Court of the Gentiles, the Court of the Women, the Court of the Men. Beyond that there lay the Court of the Priests into which the layman could not go. The worshipper is standing at the rail, ready to hand over his victim to the priest; his hands are on it to confess; and then he remembers his breach with his brother, the wrong done to his brother; if his sacrifice is to avail, he must go back and mend that breach and undo that wrong, or nothing can happen.

 

Jesus is quite clear about this basic fact—we cannot be right with God until we are right with men; we cannot hope for forgiveness until we have confessed our sin, not only to God, but also to men, and until we have done our best to remove the practical consequences of it. We sometimes wonder why there is a barrier between us and God; we sometimes wonder why our prayers seem unavailing. The reason may well be that we ourselves have erected that barrier, through being at variance with our fellow-men, or because we have wronged someone and have done nothing to put things right.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:26

MAKE PEACE IN TIME

 

Matthew 5:25,26

 

Get on to good terms again with your opponent, while you are still on the road with him, in case your opponent hands you over to the judge, and the judge hands you over to the court officer, and you be cast into prison. This is the truth I tell you—if that happens, you certainly will not come out until you have paid the last farthing.

 

Here Jesus is giving the most practical advise; he is telling men to get trouble sorted out in time, before it piles up still worse trouble for the future.

 

Jesus draws a picture of two opponents on their way together to the law courts; and he tells them to get things settled and straightened out before they reach the court, for, if they do not, and the law takes its course, there will be still worse trouble for one of them at least in the days to come.

 

The picture of two opponents on the way to court together seems to us very strange, and indeed rather improbable. But in the ancient world it often happened.

 

Under Greek law there was a process of arrest called apagoge, which means summary arrest. In it the plaintiff himself arrested the defendant. He caught him by his robe at the throat, and held the robe in such a way that, if the man struggled, he would strangle himself. Obviously the causes for which such an arrest was legal were very few and the malefactor had to be caught red-handed.

 

The crimes for which a man might be summarily arrested by anyone in this way were thieving, clothes-stealing (clothes-stealers were the curse of the public baths in ancient Greece), picking pockets, house-breaking and kidnapping (the kidnapping of specially gifted and accomplished slaves was very common). Further, a man might be summarily arrested if he was discovered to be exercising the rights of a citizen when he has been disfranchised, or if he returned to his state or city after being exiled. In view of this custom it was by no means uncommon to see a plaintiff and a defendant on their way to court together in a Greek city.

 

Clearly it is much more likely that Jesus would be thinking in terms of Jewish law; and this situation was by no means impossible under Jewish law. This is obviously a case of debt, for, if peace is not made, the last farthing will have to be paid. Such cases were settled by the local council of elders, A time was appointed when plaintiff and defendant had to appear together; in any small town or village there was every likelihood of them finding themselves on the way to the court together. When a man was adjudged guilty, he was handed over to the court officer. Matthew calls the officer the huperetes; Luke calls him, in his version of the saying, by the more common term, praktor (Luke 12:58,59). It was the duty of the court officer to see that the penalty was duly paid, and, if it was not paid, he had the power to imprison the defaulter, until it was paid. It is no doubt of that situation that Jesus was thinking. Jesus’ advice may mean one of two things.

 

(i) It may be a piece of most practical advice. Again and again it is the experience of life that, if a quarrel, or a difference, or a dispute is not healed immediately, it can go on breeding worse and worse trouble as time goes on. Bitterness breeds bitterness. It has often happened that a quarrel between two people has descended to their families, and has been inherited by future generations, and has in the end succeeded in splitting a church or a society in two.

 

If at the very beginning one of the parties had had the grace to apologize or to admit fault, a grievous situation need never have arisen. If ever we are at variance with someone else, we must get the situation put right straight away. I may mean that we must be humble enough to confess that we were wrong and make apology; it may mean that, even if we were in the right, we have to take the first step towards healing the breach. When personal relations go wrong, in nine cases out of ten immediate action will mend them; but if that immediate action is not taken, they will continue to deteriorate, and the bitterness will spread in an ever-widening circle.

 

(ii) It may be that in Jesus’ mind there was something more ultimate than this. It may be that he is saying, “Put things right with your fellow-men, while life lasts, for some day—you know not when—life will finish, and you will go to stand before God, the final Judge of all.” The greatest of all Jewish days was the Day of Atonement. Its sacrifices were held to atone for sin known and unknown; but even this day had its limitations. The Talmud clearly lays it down: “The Day of Atonement does atone for the offenses between man and God. The Day of Atonement does not atone for the offenses between a man and his neighbor, unless the man has first put things right with his neighbor.” Here again we have the basic fact—a man cannot be right with God unless he is right with his fellow-men. A man must so live that the end will find him at peace with all men.

 

It may well be that we do not need to choose between these two interpretations of this saying of Jesus. It may well be that both were in his mind, and that what Jesus is saying is: “If you want happiness in time, and happiness in eternity, never leave an unreconciled quarrel or an unhealed breach between yourself and your brother man. Act immediately to remove the barriers which anger has raised.”

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:28

THE FORBIDDEN DESIRE

 

Matthew 5:27,28

 

You have heard that it has been said: You must no commit adultery. But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman in such a way as to waken within himself forbidden desires for her has already committed adultery with her within his heart.

 

Here is Jesus’ second example of the new standard. The Law laid it down: You shall not commit adultery (Exodus 20:14). So serious a view did the Jewish teachers take of adultery that the guilty parties could be punished by nothing less than death (Leviticus 20:10); but once again Jesus lays it down that not only the forbidden action, but also the forbidden thought is guilty in the sight of God.

 

It is necessary that we should understand what Jesus is saying here. He is not speaking of the natural, normal desire, which is part of human instinct and human nature. According to the literal meaning of the Greek the man who is condemned is the man who looks at a woman with the deliberate intention of lusting after her. The man who is condemned is the man who deliberately uses his eyes to awaken his lust, the man who looks in such a way that passion is awakened and desire deliberately stimulated.

 

The Jewish Rabbis well knew the way in which the eyes can be used to stimulate the wrong desire. They had their sayings. “The eyes and the hand are the two brokers of sin.” “Eye and heart are the two handmaids of sin.” “Passions lodge only in him who sees.” “Woe to him who goes after his eyes for they are adulterous!” As someone has said, “There is an internal desire of which adultery is only the fruit.”

 

In a tempting world there are many things which are deliberately designed to excite desire, books, pictures, plays, even advertisements. The man  whom Jesus here condemns is the man who deliberately uses his eyes to stimulate his desires; the man who finds a strange delight in things which waken the desire for the forbidden thing. To the pure all things are pure. But the man whose heart is defiled can look at any scene and find something in it titillate and excite the wrong desire.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:30

 

THE SURGICAL CURE

 

Matthew 5:29,30

 

If your right eye proves a stumbling-block to you, tear it out and throw it away from you; for it is better that one part of your body should be destroyed, than that your whole body should go away to Gehenna. If your right hand proves a stumbling-block to you, cut if off and throw it away from you; for it is better for you that one part of your body should be destroyed than that your whole body should go away to Gehenna.

 

Here Jesus makes a great and a surgical demand: he insists that anything which is a cause of, or a seduction to, sin should be completely cut out of life.

 

The word he uses for a stumbling-block is interesting. It is the word skandalon. Skandalon is a form of the word skandalethron, which means the bait-stick in a trap. It was the stick or arm on which the bait was fixed and which operated the trap to catch the animal lured to its own destruction. So the word came to mean anything which causes a man’s destruction.

 

Behind it there are two pictures. First, there is the picture of a hidden stone in a path against which a man may stumble, or of a cord stretched across a path, deliberately put there to make a man trip. Second, there is the picture of a pit dug in the ground and deceptively covered over with a thin layer of branches or of turf, and so arranged that, when the unwary traveler sets his foot on it, he is immediately thrown into the pit. The skandalon, the stumbling-block is something which trips a man up, something which sends him crashing to destruction, something which lures him to his own ruin.

 

Of course, the words of Jesus are not to be taken with a crude literalism. What they mean is that anything which helps to seduce us to sin is to be ruthlessly rooted out of life. If there is a habit which can be seduction to evil, if there is an association which can be the cause of wrongdoing, if there is a pleasure which could turn out to be our ruin, then that thing must be surgically excised from our life.

 

Coming as it does immediately after the passage which deals with forbidden thoughts and desires, this passage compels us to ask: How shall we free ourselves from these unclean desires and defiling thoughts? It is the fact of experience that thoughts and pictures come unbidden into our minds, and it is the hardest thing on earth to shut the door to them.

 

There is one way in which these forbidden thoughts and desires cannot be dealt with—and that is to sit down and to say, I will not think of these things. The more we say, I will not think of such and such a thing, the more our thoughts are in fact concentrated on it.

 

The outstanding example in history of the wrong way to deal with such thoughts and desires was the hermits and the monks in the desert in the time of the early Church. They were men who wished to free themselves from all earthly things, and especially of the desires of the body. To do so they went away into the Egyptian desert with the idea of living alone and thinking of nothing but God.

 

The most famous of them all was Saint Anthony. He lived the hermit’s life; he fasted; he did without sleep; he tortured his body. For thirty-five years he lived in the desert, and these thirty-five years were a non-stop battle, without respite, with his temptations. The story is told in his biography. “First of all the devil tried to lead him away from discipline, whispering to him the remembrance of his wealth, cares for his sister, claims of kindred, love of money, love of glory, the various pleasures of the table, and the other relaxations of life, and, at last, the difficulty of virtue and the labor of it'85The one would suggest foul thoughts, and the other counter them with prayers; the one fire him with lust, the other, as one who seemed to blush, fortify his body with prayers, faith and fasting. The devil one night even took upon him the shape of a woman, and imitated all her acts simply to beguile Anthony.” So for thirty-five years the struggle went on.

 

The plain fact is that, if ever anyone was asking for trouble, Anthony and his friends were. It is the inevitable law of human nature that the more a man says he will not think of something, the more that something will present itself to his thoughts. There are only two ways to defeat the forbidden thoughts.

 

The first way is by Christian action. The best way to defeat such thoughts is to do something, to fill life so full with Christian labor and Christian service that there is no time for these thoughts to enter in; to think so much of others that in the end we entirely forget ourselves; to rid ourselves of a diseased and morbid introspection by concentrating not on ourselves but on other people. The real cure for evil thoughts is good action.

 

The second way is to fill the mind with good thoughts. There is a famous scene in Barrie’s Peter Pan. Peter is in the children’s bedroom; they have seen him fly; and they wish to fly too. They have tried it from the floor and they have tried it from  the beds and the result is failure. “How do you do it?” John asked. And Peter answered: “You just think lovely, wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.” The only way to defeat evil thoughts is to begin to think of something else.

 

If any man is harassed by thoughts of the forbidden and unclean things, he will certainly never defeat the evil things by withdrawing from life and saying, I will not think of these things. He can do so only by plunging into Christian action and Christian thought. He will never do it by trying to save his own life; he can do it only by flinging his life away for others.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:32

THE BOND WHICH MUST NOT BE BROKEN

 

1. Marriage amongst the Jews

 

Matthew 5:31,32

 

It has been said: Let every man who divorces his wife give her a bill of divorcement. But I say to you that every one who divorces his wife for any other cause than fornication causes her to commit adultery; and anyone who marries a woman who has been so divorced himself commits adultery.

 

When Jesus laid down this law for marriage he laid it down against a very definite situation. There is no time in history when the marriage bond stood in greater peril of destruction than in the days when Christianity first came into this world. At that time the world was in danger of witnessing the almost total break-up of marriage and the collapse of the home.

 

Christianity had a double background. It had the background of the Jewish world, and of the world of the Romans and the Greeks. Let us look at Jesus’ teaching against these two backgrounds.

 

Theoretically no nation ever had a higher ideal of marriage than the Jew had. Marriage was a sacred duty which a man was bound to undertake. He might delay or abstain from marriage for only one reason—to devote his whole time to the study of the Law. If a man refused to marry and to beget children he was said to have broken the positive commandment which bade men to be fruitful and to multiply, and he was said to have “lessened the image of God in the world,” and “to have slain his posterity.”

 

Ideally the Jew abhorred divorce. The voice of God had said, “I hate divorce” (Malachi  2:16). The Rabbis had the loveliest sayings. “We find that God is long-suffering to every sin except the sin-of unchastity.” “Unchastity causes the glory of God to depart.” “Every Jew must surrender his life rather than commit idolatry, murder or adultery.” “The very altar sheds tears when a man divorces the wife of his youth.”

 

The tragedy was that practice fell so far short of the ideal. One thing vitiated the whole marriage relationship. The woman in the eyes of the law was a thing. She was at the absolute disposal of her father or of her husband. She had virtually no legal rights at all. To all intents and purposes a woman could not divorce her husband for any reason, and a man could divorce his wife for any cause at all. “A woman,” said the Rabbinic law,” may be divorced with or without her will; but a man only with his will.”

 

The matter was complicated by the fact that the Jewish law of divorce was very simple in its expression and very debatable in its meaning. It is stated in Deuteronomy 24:1: “When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house.” The process of divorce was extremely simple. The bill of divorcement simply ran:

 

“Let this be from me thy writ of divorce and letter of dismissal and deed of liberation, that thou mayest marry whosoever man thou wilt.”

 

All that had to be done was to hand that document to the woman in the presence of two witnesses and she stood divorced.

 

Clearly the crux of this matter lies in the interpretation of the phrase some indecendy.  In all matters of Jewish law there were two schools. There was the school of Shammai, which was the strict, severe, austere school; and there was the school of Hillel which was the liberal, broad-minded, generous school. Shammai and his school defined some indecency as meaning unchastity and nothing but unchastity. “Let a wife be as mischievous as the wife of Ahab,” they said, “she cannot be divorced except for adultery.” To the school of Shammai there was no possible ground of divorce except only adultery and unchastity. On the other hand the school of Hillel defined some indecency in the widest possible way. They said that it meant that a man could divorce his wife if she spoiled his dinner by putting too much salt in his food, if she went in public with her head uncovered, if she talked with men in the streets, if she was a brawling woman, if she spoke disrespectfully of her husband’s parents in his presence, if she was troublesome or quarrel some. A certain Rabbi Akiba said that the phrase, if she find no favor in his sight, meant that a man might divorce his wife if he found a woman whom he considered to be more attractive than she.

 

Human nature being such as it is, it is easy to see which school would have the greater influence. In the time of Jesus divorce had grown easier and easier, so that a situation had arisen in which girls were actually unwilling to marry, because marriage was so insecure.

 

When Jesus said this, he was not speaking as some theoretical idealist; he was speaking as a practical reformer. He was seeking to deal with a situation in which the structure of family life was collapsing, and in which national morals were becoming ever more lax.

 

THE BOND THAT CANNOT BE BROKEN

 

2. Marriage amongst the Greeks

 

Matthew 5:31,32 (continued)

 

We have seen the state of marriage in Palestine in the time of Jesus, but the day was soon to come when Christianity would go out far beyond Palestine, and it is necessary that we should look at the state of marriage in that wider world into which the teachings of Christianity were to go.

 

First then, let us look at marriage amongst the Greeks. Two things vitiated the marriage situation in the Greek world.

 

A. W. Verrall, the great classical scholar, said that one of the chief diseases from which ancient civilization died was a low view of woman. The first thing which wrecked the marriage situation among the Greeks was the fact that relationships outside marriage carried no stigma whatsoever, and were in fact the accepted and the expected thing. Such relationships brought not the slightest discredit; they were part of the ordinary routine of life. Demosthenes laid it down as the accepted practice of life: “We have courtesans for the sake of pleasure; we have concubines for the sake of daily cohabitation; we have wives for the purpose of having children legitimately, and of having a faithful guardian for all our household affairs.” In later days, when Greek ideas had penetrated into, and had ruined Roman morality, Cicero in his speech. In defense of Caelius says, “If there is anyone who thinks that young men should be absolutely forbidden the love of courtesans he is indeed extremely severe. I am not able to deny the principle that he sates. But he is at variance, not only with the license of his own age, but also from the customs and concessions of our ancestors. When indeed was this not done? When did anyone every find fault with it? When was permission denied? When was it that that which is now lawful was not lawful?” It is Cicero’s plea, as it was the statement of Demosthenes, that relationships outside marriage were the ordinary and the conventional thing. The Greek view of marriage was an extraordinary paradox. The Greek demanded that the respectable woman should live such a life of seclusion that she could never even appear on the street alone, and that she did not even have her meals in the apartments of the men. She had no part even in social life. From his wife the Greek demanded the most complete moral purity; for himself he demanded the utmost immoral license. To put it bluntly, the Greeks married a wife for domestic security, but found their pleasure elsewhere. Even Socrates said, “Is there anyone to whom you entrust more serious matters than to your wife, and is there anyone to whom you talk less?” Verus, the colleague of Marcus Aurelius in the imperial power, was blamed by his wife for associating with other women. His answer was that she must remember that the name of wife was a title of dignity, not of pleasure.

 

So, then, in Greece an extraordinary situation arose. The Temple of Aphrodite at Corinth had a thousand priestesses, who were sacred courtesans; they came down to the streets of  Corinth at evening time so that it became a proverb: “Not every man can afford a journey to Corinth.” This amazing alliance of religion with prostitution can bee seen in an almost incredible way in the fact that Solon was the first to allow the introduction of prostitutes into Athens and the building of brothels, and with the profits of the brothels a new temple was built to Aphrodite the goddess of love. The Greeks saw nothing wrong in the building of a temple with the proceeds of prostitution.

 

But apart altogether from the practice of common prostitution there arose in Greece an amazing class of women called the hetairai. They were the mistresses of famous men; they were easily the most cultured and socially accomplished women of their day; their homes were nothing less than salons; and many of their names go down in history with as much fame as the great men with whom they associated. Thais was the hetaira  of Alexander the Great; on Alexander’s death she married Ptolemy, and became the mother of the Egyptian royal family. Aspasia was the hetaira of Pericles, perhaps the greatest ruler and orator Athens ever had; and it is said that she taught Pericles his oratory and wrote his speeches for him. Epicurus, the famous philosopher, had his equally famous Leotinium. Socrates had his Diotima. The way in which these women were regarded can be seen from the visit that Socrates paid to Theodota, as Xenophone tells of it. He went to see if she was as beautiful as she was said to be. He talked kindly to her; he told her that she must shut the door against the insolent; that she must care for her lovers in their sicknesses, and rejoice with them when honor came to them, and she must tenderly love those who gave their love to her.

 

Here, then, in Greece we see a whole social system based on relationships outside marriage; we see that these relationships were accepted as natural and normal, and not in the least blameworthy; we see that these relationships could, in fact, become the dominant thing in a man’s life. We see an amazing situation in which Greek men kept their wives absolutely secluded in a compulsory purity, while they themselves found their real pleasure and their real life in relationships outside marriage.

 

The second thing which vitiated the situation in Greece was that divorce required no legal process whatsoever. All that a man had to do was to dismiss his wife in the presence of two witnesses. The one saving clause was that he must return her dowry intact.

 

It is easy to see what an incredible novelty the Christian teaching regarding chastity and fidelity in marriage was in a civilization like that.

 

THE BOND THAT CANNOT BE BROKEN

 

3. Marriage amongst the Romans

 

Matthew 5:31,32 (continued)

 

The history of the development of the marriage situation amongst the Romans is the history of tragedy. The whole of Roman religion and society was originally founded on the home. The basis of the Roman commonwealth was the patria potestas, the father’s power; the father had literally the power of life and death over his family. A Roman son never came of age so long as his father was alive. He might be a consul; he might have reached the highest honor and office the state could offer but so long as his father was alive he was still within his father’s power.

 

To the Roman the home was everything. The Roman matron was not secluded like her Greek counterpart. She took her full part in life. “Marriage,” said Modestinus, the Latin jurist, “is a life-long fellowship of all divine and human rights.” Prostitutes, of course, there were, but they were held in contempt and to associate with them was dishonorable. There was, for instance, a Roman magistrate who was assaulted in a house of ill-fame, and who refused to prosecute or go to law about the case, because to do so would have been to admit that he had been in such a place. So high was the standard of Roman morality that for the first five hundred years of the Roman commonwealth there was not one single recorded case of divorce. The first man to divorce his wife was Spurius Carvilius Ruga in the year 234 B.C., and he did so because she was childless and he desired a child.

 

Then there came the Greeks. In the military and the imperial sense Rome conquered Greece; but in the moral and the social sense Greece conquered Rome. By the second century B.C. Greek morals had begun to infiltrate into Rome, and the descent was catastrophic. Divorce became as common as marriage. Seneca speaks of women who were married to be divorced and who were divorced to be married. He tells of women who identified the years not by the names of the consuls, but by the names of their husbands. Juvenal writes: “Is one husband enough for Iberina? Sooner will you prevail upon her to be content with one eye.” He cites the case of a woman who had eight husbands in five years. Marital cites the case of a woman who had ten husbands. A Roman orator, Metillus Numidicus, made an extraordinary speech: “If, Romans, it were possible to love without wives, we would be free from trouble; but since it is the law of nature that we can neither live pleasantly with them, nor at all without them, we must take thought for the continuance of the race rather than for our own brief pleasure.” Marriage had become nothing more than an unfortunate necessity. There was a cynical Roman jest: “Marriage brings only two happy days—the day when the husband first clasps his wife to his breast, and the day when he lays her in the tomb.”

 

To such a pass did things come that special taxes were levied on the unmarried, and the unmarried were prohibited from entering into inheritances. Special privileges were given to those who had children, for children were regarded as a disaster. The very law was manipulated in an attempt to rescue the necessary institution of marriage.

 

There lay the Roman tragedy, what Lecky called “that outburst of ungovernable and almost frantic depravity which followed upon the contact with Greece.” Again it is easy to see with what a shock the ancient world must have heard the demands of Christian chastity.

 

We shall leave the discussion of the ideal of Christian marriage until we come to Matthew 19:3-9. At the present we must simply note that with Christianity there had come into the world an ideal of chastity of which men did not dream.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:33

A WORD IS A PLEDGE

 

Matthew 5:33-37

 

You have heard that it was said by the people of the old days: You shall not take an oath falsely, but you shall pay your oath in full to the Lord. But I say to you: Do not swear at all, neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God, nor by the earth, for it is the footstool of his feet, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King, nor by your head, for you cannot make one hair black or white. When you say, Yes, let it be yes; and when you say, No, let it be no. Anything which goes beyond that has its source in evil.

 

One of the strange things about the Sermon on the Mount is the number of occasions when Jesus was recalling to the Jews that which they already knew. The Jewish teachers had always insisted on the paramount obligation of telling the truth. “The world stands fast on three things, on justice, on truth, and on peace.” “four persons are shut out from the presence of God—the scoffer, the hypocrite, the liar, and the retailer of slander.” “One who has given his word and who changes it is as bad as an idolater.” The school of Shammai was so wedded to the truth that they forbade the ordinary courteous politenesses of society, as, for instance, when a bride was complimented for her charming appearance when in fact she was plain.

 

Still more did the Jewish teachers insist on the truth, if the truth had been guaranteed by an oath. Repeatedly that principle is laid down in the New Testament. The commandment has it: “You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain” (Exodus 20:7). That commandment has nothing to do with swearing in the sense of using bad language; it condemns the man who swears that something is true, or who makes some promise, in the name of God, and who has taken the oath falsely. “When a man vows a vow to the Lord, or swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge, he shall not break his word” (Numbers 30:2). “When you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not be slack to pay it; for the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and it would be sin in you” (Deuteronomy 23:21,22).

 

But in the time of Jesus there were two unsatisfactory things about taking oaths.

 

The first was what might be called frivolous swearing, taking an oath where no oath was necessary or proper. It had become far too common a custom to introduce a statement by saying, “By thy life,” or, “By my head,” or, “May I never see the comfort of Israel if'85” The Rabbis laid it down that to use any form of oath in a simple statement like: “That is an olive tree,” was sinful and wrong. “The yes of the righteous is yes,” they said, “and their no is no.”

 

There is still need of warning here. Far too often people use the most sacred language in the most meaningless way. They take the sacred names upon their lips in the most thoughtless and irreverent way. The sacred names should be kept for sacred things.

 

The second Jewish custom was in some ways even worse than that; it might be called evasive swearing. The Jews divided oaths into two classes, those which were absolutely binding and those which were not. Any oath which contained the name of God was absolutely binding; any oath which succeeded in evading the name of God was held not to be binding. The result was that if a man swore by the name of God in any form, he would rigidly keep that oath; but if he swore by heaven, or by earth, or by Jerusalem, or by his head, he felt quite free to break that oath. The result was that evasion had been brought to a fine art.

 

The idea behind this was that, if God’s name was used, God became a partner in the transaction; whereas if God’s name was not used, God had nothing to do with the transaction. The principle which Jesus lays down is quite clear. In effect Jesus is saying that, so far from having to make God a partner in any transaction, no man can keep God out of any transaction. God is already there. The heaven is the throne of God; the earth is the footstool of God; Jerusalem is the city of God; a man’s head does not belong to him; he cannot even make a hair white or black; his life is God’s; there is nothing in the world which does not belong to God; and, therefore, whether God is actually named in so many words or not, does not matter. God is there already.

 

Here is a great eternal truth. Life cannot be divided into compartments in some of which God is involved and in others of which he is not involved; there cannot be one kind of language in the Church and another kind of language in the shipyard or the factory or the office; there cannot be on e kind of standard of conduct in the Church and another kind of standard in the business world. The fact is that God does not need to be invited into certain departments of life, and kept out of others. He is everywhere, all through life and every activity of life. He hears not only the words which are spoken in his name; he hears all words; and there cannot be any such thing as a form of words which evades bringing God into a transaction. We will regard all promises as sacred, if we remember that all promises are made in the presence of God.

 

THE END OF OATHS

 

Matthew 5:33-37 (continued)

 

This passage concludes with the commandment that when a man has to say yes, he should say yes, and nothing more; and when he has to say no, he should say, and nothing more.

 

The ideal is that a man should never need an oath to buttress or guarantee the truth of anything he may say. The man’s character should make an oath completely unnecessary. His guarantee and his witness should lie in what he is himself. Socrates, the great Greek teacher and orator, said, “A man must lead a life which will gain more confidence in him than ever an oath can do.” Clement of Alexandria insisted that Christians must lead such a life and demonstrate such a character that no one will ever dream of asking an oath from them. The ideal society is one in which no man’s word will ever need an oath to guarantee its truth, and no man’s promise ever need an oath to guarantee its fulfilling.

 

Does this saying of Jesus then forbid a man to take an oath anywhere—for instance, in the witness box? There have been two sets of people who completely refused all oaths. There were the Essenes, an ancient sect of the Jews. Josephus writes of them: “They are eminent for fidelity and are ministers of peace. Whatsoever they say also is firmer than an oath. Swearing is avoided by them and they esteem it worse than perjury. For they say that he who cannot be believed without swearing is already condemned.”

 

There were, and still are, the Quakers. The Quakers will not in any situation submit to taking an oath.  The utmost length to which George Fox would go was to use the word Verily. He writes: “I never wronged man or woman in all that time [the time that he worked in business]. While I was in that service, I used in my dealings the word Verily, and it was a common saying. ‘If George Fox says Verily, there is no altering him.’”

 

In the ancient days the Essenes would not in any circumstances take an oath, and to this day the Quakers are the same.

 

Are they correct in taking this line in this matter? There were occasions when Paul as it were, put himself upon oath. “I call God to witness against me,” he writes to the Corinthians, “It was to spare you that I refrained from coming to Corinth” (2 Corinthians 1:23). “Now the things that I write unto you,” he writes tot he Galatians, “In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie! (Galatians 1:20). On these occasions Paul is putting himself on oath. Jesus himself did not protest at being put on oath. At his trial before the High Priest, the High Priest said to him: “I adjure you by the living God—I put you on oath by God himself—tell us if you are the Christ, the son of God” (Matthew 26:63). What then is the situation?

 

Let us look at the last part of this verse. The Revised Standard Version has it that a man must answer simply yes or no, “anything more than this comes from evil.” What does that mean? It can mean one of two things.

 

(a) If it is necessary to take an oath from a man, that necessity arises from the evil that is in man. If there was no evil in man, no oath would be necessary. That is to say, the fact that it is sometimes necessary to make a man take an oath is a demonstration of the evil in Christless human nature.

 

(b) The fact that it is necessary to put men on oath on certain occasions arise from the fact that this is an evil world. In a perfect world, in a world which was the Kingdom of God, no taking of oaths would ever be necessary. It is necessary only because of the evil of the world.

 

What Jesus is saying is this—the truly good man will never need to take an oath; the truth of his sayings and the reality of his promises need no such guarantee. But the fact that oaths are still sometimes necessary is the proof that men are not good men and that this is not a good world.

 

So, then, this saying of Jesus leaves two obligations upon us. It leaves upon us the obligation to make ourselves such that men will so see our transparent goodness that they will never ask an oath from us; and it leaves upon us the obligation to seek to make this world such a world that falsehood and infidelity will be so eliminated from it that the necessity for oaths will be abolished.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:38

THE ANCIENT LAW

 

Matthew 5:38-42

 

You have heard that it has been said: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you not to resist evil; but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also; and if anyone wishes to obtain judgment against you for your tunic, give him your cloak also; and if anyone impresses you into the public service to go a mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who asks you, and do not turn away from him who wishes to borrow from you.

 

Few passages of the New Testament have more of the essence of the Christian ethic in them than this one. here is the characteristic ethic of the Christian life, and the conduct which should distinguish the Christian from other men.

 

Jesus begins by citing the oldest law in the world—an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. That law is known as the Lex Talionis, and it may be described as the law of tit for tat. It appears in the earliest known code of laws, the Code of Hammurabi, who reigned in Babylon from 2285 to 2242 B.C. The Code of Hammurabi makes a curious distinction between the gentleman and the workman. “If a man has caused the loss of a gentleman’s eye, his eye one shall cause to be lost. If he has shattered a gentleman’s limb, one shall shatter his limb. If he has caused a poor man to lose his eye, or shattered a poor man’s limb, he shall pay one mina of silver'85If he has made the tooth of a man who is his equal fall out, one shall make his tooth fall out. If he has made the tooth of a poor man fall out, he shall pay one third of a mina of silver.” The principle is clear and apparently simple—if a man has inflicted an injury on any person, an equivalent injury shall be inflicted upon him.

 

That law became part and parcel of the ethic of the Old Testament. In the Old Testament we find it laid down no fewer than three times. “If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exodus 21:23-25). “When a man causes a disfigurement in his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; as he has disfigured a man, he shall be disfigured” (Leviticus 24:19,20). “Your eye shall not pity; it shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Deuteronomy 19:21). These laws are often quoted as amongst the blood thirsty, savage and merciless laws of the Old Testament; but before we begin to criticize certain things must be noted.

 

(i) The Lex Talionis, the law of tit for tat, so far from being a savage and bloodthirsty law, is in fact the beginning of mercy. Its original aim was definitely the limitation of vengeance. In the very earliest days the vendetta and the blood feud were characteristic of tribal society. If a man of one tribe injured a man of another tribe, then at once all the members of the tribe of the injured man were out to take vengeance on all the members of the tribe of the man who committed the injury; and the vengeance desired was nothing less than death. This law deliberately limits vengeance. It lays it down that only the man who committed the injury must be punished, and his punishment must be no more than the equivalent of the injury he has inflicted and the damage he has done. Seen against its historical setting this is not a savage law, but a law of mercy.

 

(ii) Further, this was never a law which gave a private individual the right to extract vengeance; it was always a law which laid down how a judge  in the law court must assess punishment and penalty (cp. Deuteronomy 19:18). This law was never intended to give the individual person the right to indulge even in the vengeance of tit for tat. It was always intended as a guide for a judge in the assessment of the penalty which any violent or unjust deed must receive.

 

(iii) Still further, this law was never, at least in any even semi-civilized society, carried out literally. The Jewish jurists argued rightly that to carry it out literally might in fact be the reverse of justice, because it obviously might involve the displacement of a good eye or a good tooth for a bad eye or a bad tooth. And very soon the injury done was assessed at a money value; and the Jewish law in the tractate Baba Kamma carefully lays down how the damage is to be assessed. If a man has injured another, he is liable on five counts—for injury, for pain, for healing, for loss of time, for indignity suffered. In regard to injury, the injured man is looked on as a salve to be sold in the market place. His value before and after the injury was assessed, and the man responsible for the injury had to pay the difference. He was responsible for the loss in value of the man injured. In regard to pain, it was estimated how much money a man would accept to be willing to undergo the pain of the injury inflicted, and the man responsible for the injury had to pay that sum. In regard to healing, the injurer had to pay all the expenses of the necessary medical attention, until a complete cure had been effected. In regard to loss of time, the injurer had to pay compensation for the wages lost while the injured man was unable to work, and he had also to pay compensation if the injured man had held a well paid position, and was now, in consequence of the injury, fit for less well rewarded work. In regard to indignity, the injurer had to pay damages for the humiliation and indignity which the injury had inflected. In actual practice the type of compensation which the Lex Talionis  laid down is strangely modern.

 

(iv) And most important of all, it must be remembered that the Lex Talionis is by no means the whole of Old Testament ethics. There are glimpses and even splendors of mercy in the Old Testament. “You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people” (Leviticus 19:18). “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink” (Proverbs 25:21). “Do not say, I will do to him as he has done to me” (Proverbs 24:29). “Let him give his cheek to the smiter; he be filled with insults” (Lamentations 3:20). There is abundant mercy in the Old Testament too.

 

So, then, ancient ethics were based on the law of tit for tat. It is true that the law was a law of mercy; it is true that it was a law for a judge and not for a private individual; it is true that it was never literally carried out; it is true that there were accents of mercy speaking at the same time. But Jesus obliterated the very principle of that law, because retaliation, however controlled and restricted, has no place in the Christian life.

 

THE END OF RESENTMENT AND OF RETALIATION

 

Matthew 5:38-42 (continued)

 

So, then, for the Christian Jesus abolishes the old law of limited vengeance and introduces the new spirit of non-resentment and of non-retaliation. He goes on to take three examples of the Christian spirit in operation. To take these examples with a crude and un-understanding literalism is completely to miss their point. It is therefore very necessary to understand what Jesus is saying.

 

(i) He says that if anyone smites us on the right cheek we must turn to him the other cheek also. There is far more there than meets the eye, far more than a mere matter of blows on the face.

 

Suppose a right-handed man is standing in front of another man, and suppose he wants to slap the other man on the right cheek, how must he do it? Unless he goes through the most complicated contortions, and unless he empties the blow of all force, he can hit the other man’s cheek only in one way—with the back of his hand. Now according to Jewish Rabbinic law to hit a man with the back of the hand was twice as insulting as to hit him with the flat of the hand. So, then, what Jesus is saying is this: “Even if a man should direct at you the most deadly and calculated insult, you must on no account retaliate, and you must on no account resent it.”

 

It will not happen very often, if at all, that anyone will slap us on the face, but time and time again life brings to us insults either great or small; and Jesus is here saying that the true Christian has learned to resent no insult and to seek retaliation for no slight. Jesus himself was called a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber. He was called the friend of tax-gatherers and harlots, with the implication that he was like the company he kept. The early Christians were called cannibals and incendiaries, and were accused of immorality, gross and shameless, because their service included the Love Feast. When Shaftesbury undertook the cause of the poor and the oppressed he was warned that it would mean that “he would become unpopular with his friends and people of his own class,” and that “he would have to give up all hope of ever being a cabinet minister.” When Wilberforce began on his crusade to free the slaves slanderous rumors that he was a cruel husband, a wife-beater, that he was married to a negress were deliberately spread abroad.

 

Time and time again in a church someone is “insulted” because he is not invited to a platform party, because he is omitted from a vote of thanks, because in some way he does not get the place due to him. The true Christian has forgotten what it is to be insulted; he has learned from his Master to accept any insult and never to resent it, and never to seek to retaliate.

 

(ii) Jesus goes on to say that if anyone tries to take away our tunic in a law suit, we must not only let him have that, but must offer him our cloak also. Again there is much more than meets the eye.

 

The tunic, chiton, was the long, sack-line inner garment made of cotton or of linen. The poorest man would have a change of tunics. The cloak was the great, blanket-like outer garment which a man wore as a robe by day, and used as a blanket at night. Of such garments the Jew would have only one. Now it was actually the Jewish law that a man’s tunic might be taken as a pledge, but not his cloak. “If ever you take your neighbor’s garment in pledge (his cloak), you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down; for that is his only covering, it is his mantle for his body; in what else shall he sleep?” (Exodus 22:26,27). The point is that by right a man’s cloak could not be taken permanently from him.

 

So, then, what Jesus is saying is this: “The Christian never stands upon his rights; he never disputes about his legal rights; he does not consider himself to have any legal rights at all.” There are people who are for ever standing on their rights, who clutch their privileges to them and who will not be pried loose from them, who will militantly go to law rather than suffer what they regard as the slightest infringement of them. Churches are tragically full of people like that, officials whose territory has been invaded, office-bearers who have not bee accorded their proper place, courts which do business with a manual of practice and procedure on the table all the time, lest anyone’s rights should be invaded. People like that have not even begun to see what Christianity is. The Christian thinks not of his rights, but of his duties; not of his privileges, but of his responsibilities. The Christian is a man who has forgotten that he has any rights at all; and the man who will fight to the legal death for his rights, inside or outside the Church, is far from the Christian way.

 

(iii) Jesus then goes on to speak of being compelled to go one mile and says that in such a case the Christian must willingly go two miles.

 

There is here a picture of which we know little, for it is a picture from an occupied country. The word used for to compel is the verb aggareuein, and aggareuein is a word with a history. It comes from the noun aggareus, which is a Persian word meaning a courier. The Persians had an amazing postal system. Each road was divided into stages lasting one day. At each stage there was food for the courier and water and fodder for the horses, and fresh horses for the road. But, if by any chance there was anything lacking, any private person could be impressed, compelled into giving food, lodging, horses, assistance, and even into carrying the message himself for a stage. The word for such compulsion was aggareuein.

 

In the end the word came to signify any kind of forced impressment into the service of the occupying power. In an occupied country citizens could be compelled to supply food, to provide billets, to carry baggage. Sometimes the occupying power exercised this right of compulsion the most tyrannical and unsympathetic way. Always this threat of compulsion hung over the citizens. Palestine was an occupied country. At any moment a Jew might feel the touch of the flat of a Roman spear on his shoulder, and know that he was compelled to serve the Romans, it might be in the most menial way. That, in fact, is what happened to Simon of Cyrene, when he was compelled (aggareuein) to bear the Cross of Jesus.

 

So, then, what Jesus is saying is: “Suppose your masters come to you and compel you to be a guide or a porter for a mile, don[‘t do a mile with bitter and obvious resentment; go two miles with cheerfulness and with a good grace.” What Jesus is saying is: “Don’t be always thinking of your liberty to do as you like; be always thinking of your duty and your privilege to be of service to others. When a task is laid on you, even if the task is unreasonable and hateful, don’t do it as a grim duty to be resented; do it as a service to be gladly rendered.”

 

There are always two ways of doing things. A man can do the irreducible minimum and not a stroke more; he can do it in such a way as to make it clear that he hates the whole thing; he can do it with the barest minimum of efficiency and no more; or he can do it with a smile, with a gracious courtesy, with a determination, not only to do this thing, but to do it well and graciously. He can do it, not simply as well as he has to, but far better than anyone has any right to expect him to. The inefficient workman, the resentful servant, the ungracious helper have not even begun to have the right idea of the Christian life. The Christian is not concerned to do as he likes; he is concerned only to help, even when the demand for help is discourteous, unreasonable and tyrannical.

 

So, then, in this passage, under the guise of vivid eastern pictures, Jesus is laying down three great rules—the Christian will never resent or seek retaliation for any insult, however calculated and however deadly; the Christian will never stand upon his legal rights or on any other rights he may believe himself to possess; the Christian will never think of his right to do as he likes, but always of his duty to be o help. The question is: How do we measure up to that?

 

GRACIOUS GIVING

 

Matthew 5:38-42 (continued)

 

Finally, it is Jesus’ demand that we should give to all who ask and never turn away from him who wishes to borrow. As its highest the Jewish law of giving was a lovely thing. It was based on Deuteronomy  15:7-11:

 

“If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. Take heed lest there be a base thought in your heart, and you say, ‘The seventh year, the year of release is near,’ and your eye be hostile to you poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the Lord against you, and it be sin in you. You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him; because for this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. For the poor will never cease out of the land; therefore I command you. You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in the land.”

 

The point about the seventh year is that in every seventh year there was a cancellation of debts; and the grudging and the calculating man might refuse to lend anything when the seventh year was near, lest the debt be canceled and he lose what he had given.

 

It was on that passage that the Jewish law of giving was founded. The Rabbis laid down five principles which ought to govern giving.

 

(i) Giving must not be refused. “Be careful not to refuse charity, for everyone who refuses charity is put in the same category with idolators.” If a man refuses to give, the day may well come when he has to beg—perhaps from the very people to whom he refused to give.

 

(ii) Giving must befit the man to whom the gift is given. The law of Deuteronomy had said that a man must be given whatever he lacks. That is to say, a man must not be given that bare sufficiency which will keep body and soul together; he must be given enough to enable him to retain at least something of the standard and the comfort which once he knew. So, it is said, Hillel arranged that the poverty-stricken son of a noble family should be given, not simply enough to keep him from starvation, but a horse to ride and a slave to run before him; and once, when no slave was available, Hillel himself acted as his slave and ran before him. There is something gracious and lovely in the idea that giving must not only remove actual poverty; it must do something also to remove the humiliation which poverty brings.

 

(iii) Giving must be carried out privately and secretly. There must be no one else there. In fact, the Rabbis went the length of saying that in the highest kind of giving, the giver must not know to whom he was giving, and the receiver must not know from whom he was receiving. There was a certain place in the Temple to which people secretly came and gave their gifts; and these secret gifts were used in secrecy to help the impoverished members of once noble families, and to give the daughters of such impoverished ones the dowries without which they could not be married. The Jew would have regarded with abhorrence the gift which was given for the sake of prestige, publicity, or self-glorification.

 

(iv) The manner of giving must befit the character and the temperament of the recipient. The rule was that if a man had means, but was too miserly to use them, a gift must be given as a gift, but afterwards reclaimed from his estate as a loan. But if a man was too proud to ask for help, Rabbi Ishmael suggested that the giver should go to him and say, “My son, perhaps you need a loan.” His self-respect was thus saved, but the loan was never to be asked back, and it was in fact, not a loan, but a gift. It was even laid down that if a man was unable to respond to an appeal for help, his very refusal must be such as to show that, if he could give nothing else, he at least gave sympathy. Even a refusal was to be such that it helped and did not hurt. Giving was to be carried out in such a way that the manner of the giving was to help as much as the gift.

 

(v) Giving was at once a privilege and an obligation for in reality all giving is nothing less than giving to God. To give to some needy person was not something which a man might choose to do; it was something he must do; for, it he refused, the refusal was to God. “He who befriends the poor lends to the Lord, and he will repay him for his good deed.” “To every one who shows mercy to other men, mercy is shown from heaven; but to him who shows no mercy to other men, no mercy is shown from heaven.” The Rabbis loved to point out that loving-kindness was one of the very few things to which the Law appointed no limit at all.

 

Are we then to say that Jesus urged upon men what can only be called indiscriminate giving? The answer cannot be given without qualification. It is clear that the effect of the giving on the receiver must be taken into account. Giving must never be such as to encourage him in laziness and in shiftlessness, for such giving can only hurt. But at the same time it must be remembered that many people who say that they will give only through official channels, and who refuse to help personal cases, are frequently merely producing an excuse for not giving at all, and are removing the personal element from giving altogether. And it must also be remembered that it is better to help a score of fraudulent beggars than to risk turning away the one man in real need.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 5:43

CHRISTIAN LOVE

 

1. The Meaning of it

 

Matthew 5:43-48

 

You have heard that it has been said: You shall love your neighbor, and you shall hate your enemy; but I say to you: Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward can you expect? Do not even the tax- gatherers do that? If you greet only your brothers, where is there anything extra about that? Do not even the Gentiles do that? So, then, you must be perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect.

 

C. G. Montefiore, the Jewish scholar, calls this “the central and most famous section” of the Sermon on the Mount. It is certainly true that there is no other passage of the New Testament which contains such a concentrated expression of the Christian ethic of personal relations. To the ordinary person this passage describes essential Christianity in action, and even the person who never darkens the door of the church knows that Jesus said this, and very often condemns the professing Christian for falling so far short of its demands.

 

When we study this passage we must first try to find out what Jesus was really saying, and what he was demanding of his followers. If we are to try to live this out, we must obviously first of all be quite clear as to what it is asking. What does Jesus mean by loving our enemies?

 

Greek is a language which is rich in synonyms; its words often have shades of meaning which English does not possess. In Greek there are four different words for love.

 

(i) There is the noun storge with its accompanying verb stergein. These words are the characteristic words of family love. They  are the words which describe the love of a parent for a child and a child for a parent. “A child,” said Plato “loves (stergein) and is loved by those who brought him into the world.” “Sweet is a father to his children,” said Philemon, “if he has love (storge.)” These words describe family affection.

 

(ii) There is the noun eros and the accompanying verb eran. These words describe the love of a man for a maid; there is always passion in them; and there is always sexual love. Sophocles described eros as “the terrible longing.” In these words there is nothing essentially bad; they simply describe the passion of human love; but as time went on they began to be tinged with the idea of lust rather than love, and they never occur in the New Testament at all.

 

(iii) There is philia with its accompanying verb philein. These are the warmest and the best Greek words for love. They describe real love, real affection. Hot philountes, the present participle, is the word which describes a man’s closest and nearest and truest friends. It is the word which is used in the famous saying of Meaner: “Whom the gods love, dies young.” Philein  can mean to fondle or to kiss. It is the word of warm, tender affection, the highest kind of love.

 

(iv) There is agape with its accompanying verb agapan. These words indicate unconquerable benevolence, invincible goodwill. (Agape is the word which is used here.) If we regard a person with agape, it means that no matter what that person does to us, no matter how he treats us, no matter if he insults us or injures us or grieves us, we will never allow any bitterness against him to invade our hearts, but will regard him with that unconquerable benevolence and goodwill which will seek nothing but his highest good. From this certain things emerge.

 

(i) Jesus never asked us to love our enemies in the same way as we love our nearest and dearest. The very word is different; to love our enemies in the same way as we love our nearest and our dearest would neither be possible nor right. This is a different kind of love.

 

(ii) Wherein does the main difference lie? In the case of our nearest and our dearest we cannot help loving them; we speak of falling in love; it is something which comes to us quite unsought; it is something which is born of the emotions of the heart. But in the case of our enemies, love is not only something of the heart; it is also something of the will. It is not something which we cannot help; it is something which we have to will ourselves into doing. It is in fact a victory over that which comes instinctively to the natural man.

 

Agape does not mean a feeling of the heart, which we cannot help, and which comes unbidden and unsought; it means a determination of the mind, whereby we achieve this unconquerable goodwill even to those who hurt and injure us. Agape, someone has said, is the power to love those whom we do not like and who may not like us. In point of fact we can only have agape when Jesus Christ enables us to conquer our natural tendency to anger and to bitterness, and to achieve this invincible goodwill to all men.

 

(iii) It is then quite obvious that the last thing agape, Christian love, means is that we allow people to do absolutely as they like, and that we leave them quite unchecked. No one would say that a parent really loves his child if he lets the child do as he likes. If we regard a person with invincible goodwill, it will often mean that we must punish him, that we must restrain him, that we must discipline him, that we must protect him against himself. But it will also mean that we do not punish him to satisfy our desire for revenge, but in order to make him a better man. It will always mean that all Christian discipline and all Christian punishment must be aimed, not at vengeance, but at cure. Punishment will never be merely retributive; it will always be remedial.

 

(iv) It must be noted that Jesus laid this love down as a basis for personal relationships. People use this passage as a basis for pacifism and as a text on which to speak about international relationships. Of course, it includes that, but first and foremost it deals with our personal relationships with our family and our neighbors and the people we meet with every day in life. It is very much easier to go about declaring that there should be no such thing as war between nation and nation, than to live a life in which we personally never allow any such thing as bitterness to invade our relationships with those we meet with every day. First and foremost, this commandment of Jesus deals with personal relationship. It is a commandment of which we should say first and foremost; “This means me.”

 

(v) We must note that this commandment is possible only for a Christian. Only the grace of Jesus Christ can enable a man to have this unconquerable benevolence and this invincible goodwill in his personal relationships with other people. It is only when Christ lives in our hearts that bitterness will die and this love spring to life. It is often said that this world would be perfect if only people would live according to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount; but the plain fact is that no one can even begin to live according to these principles without the help of Jesus Christ. We need Christ to enable us to obey Christ’s command.

 

(vi) Lastly—and it may be most important of all—we must note that this commandment does not only involve allowing people to do as they like to us; it also involves that we should do something for them. We are bidden to pray for them. No man can pray for another man whom he is tempted to hate to God, something happens. We cannot go on hating another man in the presence of God. The surest way of killing bitterness is to pray for the man we are tempted to hate.

 

CHRISTIAN LOVE

 

2. The Reason for it

 

Matthew 5:43-48 (continued)

 

We have seen what Jesus meant when he commanded us to have this Christian love; and now we must go on to see why he demanded that we should have it. Why, then, does Jesus demand that a man should have this love, this unconquerable benevolence, this invincible goodwill? The reason is very simple and tremendous—It is that such a love makes a man like God.

 

Jesus pointed to the action of God in the world, and that is the action of unconquerable benevolence. God makes his sun to rise on the good and the evil; he sends his rain on the just and the unjust. Rabbi Joshua ben Nehemiah used to say, “Have you ever noticed that the rain fell on the field of A, who was righteous, and not on the field of B,  who was wicked? Or that the sun rose and shone on Israel, who was righteous, and not upon the Gentiles, who were wicked? God causes the sun to shine both on Israel and on the nations, for the Lord is good to all.” Even the Jewish Rabbi was moved and impressed with the sheer benevolence of God to saint and sinner alike.

 

There is a rabbinic tale which tells of the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. When the Egyptians were drowned, so the tale runs, the angels began a paean of praise, but God said sorrowfully: “The work of my hands are sunk in the sea, and you would sing before me!” The love of God is such that he can never take pleasure in the destruction of any of the creatures whom his hands have made. The Psalmist had it: “The eyes of all look to thee; and thou givest them their food in due season. Thou openest thy hand, thou satisfiest the desire of every living thing” (Psalm 145:15). In God there is this universal benevolence even towards men who have broken his law and broken his heart.

 

Jesus says that we must have this love that we may become “the sons of our Father who is in heaven.” Hebrew is not rich in adjectives; and for that reason Hebrew often uses son of'85with an abstract noun, where we would use an adjective. For instance  a son of peace is a peaceful man;  a son of consolation is a consoling man. So, then, a son of God, is a godlike man. The reason why we must have this unconquerable benevolence and goodwill is that God has it; and, if we have it, we become nothing less than sons of God, godlike men.

 

Here we have the key to one of the most difficult sentences in the New Testament, the sentence with which this passage finishes. Jesus said: “You, therefore, must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” On the face of it that sounds like a commandment which cannot possibly have anything to do with us. There is none of us who would even faintly connect ourselves with perfection.

 

The Greek word for perfect is teleios. This word is often used in Greek in a very special way. It has nothing to do with what we might call abstract, philosophical, metaphysical perfection. A victim which is fit for a sacrifice to God, that is a victim which is without blemish, is teleios. A man who has reached his full-grown stature  is teleios in contradistinction to a half-grown lad. A student who has reached a mature knowledge of his subject is teleios as opposed to a learner who is just beginning, and who as yet has no grasp of things.

 

To put it in another way, the Greek idea of perfection is functional. A thing is perfect if it fully realizes the purpose for which it was planned, and designed, and made. In point of fact, that meaning is involved in the derivation of the word. Teleios is the adjective formed from the noun telos. Telos means an end, a purpose, an aim, a goal.  A thing is teleios, if it realizes the purpose for which it was planned; a man is perfect if he realizes the purpose for which he was created and sent into the world.

 

Let us take a very simple analogy. Suppose in my house there is a screw loose, and I want to tighten and adjust this screw. I go out to the iron-monger and I buy a screw-driver. I find that the screw-driver exactly fits the grip of my hand; it is neither too large nor too small, too rough nor too smooth. I lay the screw-driver on the slot of the screw, and I find that it exactly fits. I then turn the screw and the screw is fixed. In the Greek sense, and especially in the New Testament sense, that screw-driver is teleios, because it exactly fulfilled the purpose for which I desired and bought it.

 

So, then, a man will be teleios if he fulfills the purpose for which he was created. For what purpose was man created? The Bible leaves us in no doubt as to that. In the old creation story we find God saying. “Let us make man in our image after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Man was created to be like God. The characteristic of God is this universal benevolence, this unconquerable goodwill, this constant seeking of the highest good of every man. The great characteristic of God is love to saint and to sinner alike. No matter what men do to him, God seeks nothing but their highest good.

 

The hymn has it of Jesus:

 

“Thy foes might hate, despise, revile,

They friends unfaithful prove;

Unwearied in forgiveness still,

They heart could only love.”

 

It is when man reproduces in his life the unwearied, forgiving, sacrificial benevolence of God that he becomes like God, and is therefore perfect in the New Testament sense of the word. To put it at its simplest, the man who cares most for men is the most perfect man.

 

It is the whole teaching of the Bible that we realize our manhood only by becoming godlike. The one thing which makes us like God is the love which never ceases to care for men, no matter what men do to it. We realize our manhood, we enter upon Christian perfection, when we learn to forgive as God forgives, and to love as God loves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew 6:1

THE REWARD MOTIVE IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

 

Matthew 6:1-18

 

When we study the opening verses of Matthew 6, we are immediately confronted with one most important question—What is the place of the reward motive in the Christian life? Three times in this section Jesus speaks of God rewarding those who have given to him the kind of service which he desires (Matthew 6:4,6,18). This question is so important that we will do well to pause to examine it before we go on to study the chapter in detail.

 

It is very often stated that the reward motive has no place whatsoever in the Christian life. It is held that we must be good for the sake of being good, that virtue is its own reward, and that the whole conception of reward must be banished from the Christian life. There was an old saint who used to say that he would wish to quench all the fires of hell with water, and to burn up all the joys of heaven with fire, in order that men seek for goodness nor nothing but goodness’ sake, and in order that the idea of reward and punishment might be totally eliminated from life.

 

On the face of it that point of view is very fine and noble; but it is not the point of view which Jesus held. We have already seen that three times in this passage Jesus speaks about reward. The right kind of almsgiving, the right kind of prayer, and the right kind of fasting will all have their reward.

 

Nor is this an isolated instance of the idea of reward in the teaching of Jesus. He says of those who loyally bear persecution, who suffer insult without bitterness, that their reward will be great in heaven (Matthew 5:12). He says that whoever gives to one of these little ones a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple will not lose his reward (Matthew 10:42). At least part of the teaching of the parable of the talents is that faithful service will receive its reward (Matthew 25:14-30). In the parable of the last judgment the plain teaching is that there is reward and punishment in accordance with our reaction to the needs of our fellow-men (Matthew 25:31-46). It is abundantly clear that Jesus did not hesitate to speak in terms of rewards and punishments. And it may well be that we ought to be careful that we do not try to be more spiritual than Jesus was in our thinking about this matter of reward. There are certain obvious facts which we must note.

 

(i) It is an obvious rule of life than any action which achieves nothing is futile and meaningless. A goodness which achieves no end would be a meaningless goodness. As has been very truly said: “Unless a thing is good for something, it is good for nothing.” Unless the Christian life has an aim and a goal which it is a joy to obtain, it becomes largely without meaning. He who believes in the Christian way and the Christian promise cannot believe that goodness can have no result beyond itself.

 

(ii) To banish all rewards and punishments from the idea of religion is in effect to say that injustice has the last word. It cannot reasonable be held that the end of the good man and the end of the bad man are one and the same. That would simply mean that God does not care whether men are good or not. It would mean, to put it crudely and bluntly, that there is no point in being good, and no special reason why a man should live one kind of life instead of another. To eliminate all rewards and punishments is really to say that in God there is neither justice nor love.

 

Rewards and punishments are necessary in order to make sense of life. A. E. Housman wrote:

 

“Yonder, on the morning blink,

The sun is up, and so must I,

To wash and dress and eat and drink

And look at things and talk and think

And work, and God knows why.

 

And often have I washed and dressed,

And what’s to show for all my pain?

Let me lie abed and rest;

Ten thousand times I’ve done my best,

And all’s to do again.”

 

If there are no rewards and no punishments, then that poem’s view of life is true. Action is meaningless and all effort goes unavailingly whistling down the wind.

 

(i) The Christian Idea of Reward

 

But having gone this length with the idea of reward in the Christian life, there are certain things about which we must be clear.

 

(i) When Jesus spoke of reward, he was very definitely not thinking in terms of material reward. It is quite true that in the Old Testament the idea of goodness and prosperity are closely connected. If a man prospered, if his fields were fertile and his harvest great, if his children were many and his fortune large, it was taken as a proof that he was a good man.

 

That is precisely the problem at the back of the Book of Job. Job is in misfortune; his friends come to him to argue that that misfortune must be the result of his own sin; and Job most vehemently denies that charge. “Think now,” said Eliphaz, “who that was innocent ever perished?” (Job 14:7). “If you are pure and upright,” said Bildad, “surely then he would rouse himself for you and reward you with a rightful habitation” (Job 8:6). “For you say, My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in God’s eyes,” said Zophar, “but oh that God would speak and open his lips to you” (Job 11:4). The very idea that the Book of Job was written to contradict is that goodness and material prosperity go hand in hand.

 

“I have been young, and now am old,” said the Psalmist, “yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, or his children begging bread” (Psalm 37:25). “A thousand may fall at your side,” said the Psalmist, “and ten thousand at your right hand; but it will not come near you. You will lonely look with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked. Because you have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your habitation, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent” (Psalm 91:7-10). These are things that Jesus could never have said. It was certainly not material prosperity which Jesus promised his disciples. He in fact promised them trial and tribulation, suffering, persecution and death. Quite certainly Jesus did not think in terms of material rewards.

 

(ii) The second thing which it is necessary to remember is that the highest reward never comes to him who is seeking it. If a man is always seeking reward, always reckoning up that which he believes himself to be earning, then he will in fact miss the reward for which he is seeking. And he will miss it because he is looking at God and looking at life in the wrong way. A man who is always calculating his reward is thinking of God in terms of a judge or an accountant, and above all he is thinking of doing so much and earning so much. He is thinking of life in terms of a credit and debit balance sheet. He is thinking of presenting an account to God and of saying, “I have done so much. Now I claim my reward.”

 

The basic mistake of this point of view is that it thinks of life in terms of law, instead of love. If we love a person deeply and passionately, humbly and selflessly, we will be quite sure that if we give that person all we have to give, we will still be in default, that if we give that person the sun, the moon and the stars, we will still be in debt. He who is in love is always in debt; the last thing that enters his mind is that he has earned a reward. If a man has a legal view of life, he may think constantly in terms of reward that he has won; if a man has a loving view of life, the idea of reward will never enter his mind.

 

The great paradox of Christian reward is this—the person who looks for reward, and who calculates that it is due to him, does not receive it; the person whose only motive is love, and who never thinks that he has deserved any reward, does, in fact, receive it. The strange fact is that reward is at one and the same time the by-product and the ultimate end of the Christian life.

 

(ii) The Christian Reward

 

We must now go on to ask: What are the rewards of the Christian life?

 

(i) We begin by noting one basic and general truth. We have already seen that Jesus Christ does not think in terms of material reward at all. The rewards of the Christian life are rewards only to a spiritually minded person. To the materially minded person they would not be rewards at all. The Christian rewards are rewards only to a Christian.

 

(ii) The first of the Christian rewards is satisfaction. The doing of the right thing, obedience to Jesus Christ, the taking of his way, whatever else it may or may not bring, always brings satisfaction. It may well be that, if a man does the right thing, and obeys Jesus Christ, he may lose his fortune and his position, he may end in jail or on the scaffold, he may finish up in unpopularity, loneliness and disrepute, but he will still possess that inner satisfaction, which is greater than all the rest put together. No price-ticket can be put upon this; this is not to be evaluated in terms of earthly currency, but there is nothing like it in all the world. It brings that contentment which is the crown of life.

 

The poet George Herbert was a member of a little group of friends who used to meet to play their musical instruments together like a little orchestra. Once he was on his way to a  meeting of this group, when he passed a carter whose cart was stuck in the mud of the ditch. George Herbert laid aside his instrument and went to the help of the man. It was a long job to get the cart out, and he finished covered with mud. When he arrived at the house of his friends, it was too late for music. He told them what had detained him on the way. One said: “You have missed all the music.” George Herbert smiled. “Yes,” he said, “but I will have songs at midnight.” He had the satisfaction of having done the Christlike thing.

 

Godfrey Winn tells of a man who was the greatest plastic surgeon in Britain. During the war, he gave up a private practice, which brought him in 10,000 pounds a year, to devote all his time to remoulding the faces and the bodies of airmen who had been burned and mutilated in battle. Godfrey Winn said to him, “What’s your ambition, Mac?” Back came the answer, “I want to be a good craftsman.” The 10,000 pounds a year was nothing compared with the satisfaction of a selfless job well done.

 

Once a woman stopped Dale of Birmingham on the street. “God bless you, Dr. Dale,” she said. She absolutely refused to give her name. She only thanked him and blessed him and passed on. Dale at the moment had been much depressed. “But,” he said, “the mist broke, the sunlight came; I breathed the free air of the mountains of God.” In material things he was no one penny richer, but in the deep satisfaction, which comes to the preacher who discovers he has helped someone he had gained wealth untold.

 

The first Christian reward is the satisfaction which no money on earth can buy.

 

(iii) The second reward of the Christian life is still more work to do. It is the paradox of the Christian idea of reward that a task well done does not bring rest and comfort and ease; it brings still greater demands and still more strenuous endeavors. In the parable of the talents the reward of the faithful servants was still greater responsibility (Matthew 25:14-30). When a teacher gets a really brilliant and able scholar, he does not exempt him from work; he give him harder work than is given to anyone else. The brilliant young musician is given, not easier, but harder music to master. The lad who has played well in the second eleven is not put into the third eleven, where he could walk through the game without breaking sweat; he is put into the first eleven where he has to play his heart out. The Jews had a curious saying. They said that a wise teacher will treat the pupil “like a young heifer whose burden is increased daily.” The Christian reward is the reverse of the world’s reward. The world’s reward would be an easier time; the reward of the Christian is that God lays still more and more upon a man to do for him and for his fellow-men. The harder the work we are given to do, the greater the reward.

 

(iv) The third, and the final, Christian reward is what men all through the ages have called the vision of God. For the worldly man, who has never given a thought to God, to be confronted with God will be a terror and not a joy. If a man takes his own way, he drifts father and farther from God; the gulf between him and God becomes ever wider, until in the end God becomes a grim stranger, whom he only wishes to avoid. But, if a man all his life has sought to walk with God, if he has sought to obey his Lord, if goodness has been his quest through all his days, then all his life he has been growing closer and closer to God, until in the end he passes into God’s nearer presence, without fear and with radiant joy—and that is the greatest reward of all.

 

RIGHT THINGS FROM THE WRONG MOTIVE

 

Matthew 6:1

 

Take care not to try to demonstrate how good you are in the presence of men, in order to be seen by them. If you do, you have no reward with your Father in heaven.

 

To the Jew there were three great cardinal works of the religious life, three great pillars on which the good life was based—almsgiving, prayer and fasting. Jesus would not for a moment have disputed that; what trouble d him was that so often in human life the finest things were done from the wrong motives.

 

It is the strange fact that these three great cardinal good works readily lend themselves to wrong motives. It was Jesus’ warning that, when these things were done with the whole intention of bringing glory to the doer, they lost by far the most important part of their value. A man may give alms, not really to help the person to whom he gives, but simply to demonstrate his own generosity, and to bask in the warmth of some one’s gratitude and all men’s praise. A man may pray in such a way that his prayer is not really addressed to God, but to his fellow-men. His praying may simply be an attempt to demonstrate his exceptional piety in such a way that no one can fail to see it. A man may fast, not really for the good of his own soul., not really to humble himself in the sight of God, but simply to show the world what a splendidly self-disciplined character he is. A man may practice good works simply to win praise from men, to increase his own prestige, and to show the world how good he is.

 

As Jesus saw it, there is no doubt at all that that kind of thing does receive a certain kind of reward. Three times Jesus uses the phrase, as the Revised Standard Version has it: “Truly I say to you, they have their reward” (Matthew 6:2,5,16). It would be better to translate it: “They have received payment in full.” The word that is used in the Greek is the verb apechein, which was the technical business and commercial word for receiving payment in full. It was the word which was used on receipted accounts. For instance, one man signs a receipt given to another man: “I have received  (apecho) from you the rent of the olive press which you have on hire.” A tax collector gives a receipt, saying, “I have received (apecho) from you the tax which is due.” A man sells a slave and gives a receipt, saying, “I have received (apecho) the whole price due to me.”

 

What Jesus is saying is this: “If you give alms to demonstrate your own generosity, you will get the admiration of men—but that is all you will ever get. That is your payment in full. If you pray in such a way as to flaunt your piety in the face of men, you will gain the reputation of being an extremely devout man—but that is all you will ever get. That is your payment in full. If you fast in such a way that all men know that you are fasting, you will become known as an extremely abstemious and ascetic man—but that is all you will ever get. That is your payment in full.” Jesus is saying, “If your one aim is to get yourself the world’s rewards, no doubt you will get them—but you must not look for the rewards which God alone can give.” And he would be a sadly short-sighted creature who grasped the rewards of time, and let the rewards of eternity go.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 6:2

HOW NOT TO GIVE

 

Matthew 6:2-4

 

So, when you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as they hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men. This is the truth I tell you—they are paid in full. But when you give alms, your left hand must not know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms-giving may be in secret, and your Father who sees what happens in secret will give you your reward in full.

 

To the Jew almsgiving was the most sacred of all religious duties. How sacred it was may be seen from the fact that the Jews used the same word—tzedakah—both for righteousness and almsgiving. To give alms and to be righteous were one and the same thing. To give alms was to gain merit in the sight of God, and was even to win atonement and forgiveness for past sins. “It is better to give alms than to lay up gold; almsgiving doth deliver from death, and it purges away all sin” (Tobit 12:8).

 

“Almsgiving to a father shall not be blotted out,

And as a substitute for sins it shall stand firmly planted.

In the day of affliction it shall be remembered to they credit.

It shall obliterate thine iniquities as the heat, the hoar-frost.”

(Ecclesiasticus 3:14,15).

 

There was a rabbinic saying: “Greater is he who gives alms than he who offers all sacrifices.” Almsgiving stood first in the catalogue of good works.

 

It was then natural and inevitable that the man who desired to be good should concentrate on almsgiving. The highest teaching of the Rabbis was exactly the same as the teaching of Jesus. They too forbade ostentatious almsgiving. “He who gives alms in secret,” they said, “is greater than Moses.” The almsgiving which saves from death is that “when the recipient does not know from whom he gets it, and when the giver does not know to whom he gives it.” There was a Rabbi who, when he wished to give alms, dropped money behind him, so that he would not see who picked it up. “It were better,” they said, “to give a man nothing, than to give him something, and to put him to shame.” There was one particularly lovely custom connected with the Temple. In the Temple there was a room called The Chamber of the Silent. People who wished to make atonement for some sin placed money there; and poor people from good families who had come down in the world were secretly helped by these contributions.

 

But as in so many other things practice fell far short of precept. Too often the giver gave in such a way that all men might see the gift, and gave far more to bring glory to himself than to bring help to someone else. During the synagogue services, offerings were taken for the poor, and there were those who took good care that others should see how much they gave. J.J. Wetstein quotes an eastern custom from the ancient days: “In the east water is so scarce that sometimes it had to be bought. When a man wanted to do a good act, and to bring blessing on his family, he went to a water-carrier with a good voice, and instructed him: “Give the thirsty a drink.’ The water-carrier filled his skin and went to the market-place. ‘O thirsty ones,’ he cried, ‘come to drink the offering.’ And the giver stood by him and said, ‘Bless me, who gave you this drink.;” That is precisely the kind of thing that Jesus condemns. He talks about the hypocrites  who do things like that. The word hupokrites is the Greek word for an actor. People like that put on an act of giving which is designed only to glorify themselves.

 

THE MOTIVES OF GIVING

 

Matthew 6:2-4 (continued)

 

Let us now look at some of the motives which lie behind the act of giving.

 

(i) A man may give from a sense of duty.  He may give not because he wishes to give, but because he feels that giving is a duty which he cannot well escape. It may even be that a man can come—perhaps unconsciously—to regard the poor as being in the world to allow him to carry out this duty, and thus to acquire merit in the sight of God.

 

Catherine Carswell in her autobiography, Lying Awake, tells of her early days in Glasgow: “the poor, one might say, were our pets. Decidedly they were always with us. In our particular ark we were taught to love, honor and entertain the poor.” The key-note, as she looked back upon it, was superiority and condescension. Giving was regarded as a duty, but often with the giving there was a moral lecture which provided a smug pleasure for the man who gave it. In those days Glasgow was a drunken city on a Saturday night. She writes: “Every Sunday afternoon, for some years, my father went a round of the cells of the police station, bailing out the week-end drunks with half-crowns, so that they might not lose their jobs on Monday morning. He asked each one to sign the pledge, and to return his half-crown out of next week’s wages.” No doubt he was perfectly right, but he gave from a smug eminence of respectability, and included a moral lecture in the giving. He clearly felt himself to be in a quite different moral category from those to whom he gave. It was said of a great, but superior man: “With all his giving he never gives himself.” When a man gives, as it were, from a pedestal, when he gives always with a certain calculation, when he gives from a sense of duty, even a sense of Christian duty, he may give generously of things, but the one thing he never gives is himself, and therefore the giving is incomplete.

 

(ii) A man may give from motives of prestige. He may give to get to himself the glory of giving. The chances are that, if no one is to know about it, or, if there is no publicity attached to it, he would not give at all. Unless he is duly thanked and praised and honored, he is sadly disgruntled and discontented. He gives, not to the glory of God, but to the glory of himself. He gives, not primarily to help the poor person, but to gratify his own vanity and his own sense of power.

 

(iii) A man may give simply because he has to. He may give simply because the overflowing love and kindliness in his heart will allow him to do no other. He may give because, try as he may he cannot rid himself of a sense of responsibility for the man in need.

 

There was a kind of vast kindliness about Dr. Johnson. There was a poverty-stricken creature called Robert Levett. Levett in his day had been a waiter in Paris and a doctor in the poorer parts of London. He had an appearance and manners, as Johnson said himself, such as to disgust the rich and to terrify the poor. Somehow or other he became a member of Johnson’s household. Boswell was amazed at the whole business, but Goldsmith knew Johnson better. He said of Levett: “He is poor and honest which is recommendation enough for Johnson. He is now become miserable, and that insures the protection of Johnson.” Misfortune was a passport to Johnson’s heart.

 

Boswell tells this story of Johnson. “Coming home late one night he found a poor woman lying on the street, so much exhausted that she could not walk: he took her upon his back and carried her to his house, where he discovered that she was one of these wretched females, who had fallen into the lowest state of vice, poverty and disease. Instead of harshly upbraiding her, he had her taken care of with all tenderness for a long time, at considerable expense, till she was restored to health, and endeavored to put her in a virtuous way of living.” All that Johnson got out of that was unworthy suspicions about his own character, but the heart of the man demanded that he should give.

 

Surely one of the loveliest pictures in literary history is the picture of Johnson, in his own days of poverty, coming home in the small hours of the morning, and, as he walked along the Strand, slipping pennies into the hands of the waifs and strays who were sleeping in the doorways because they had nowhere else to go. Hawkins tells that one asked him how he could bear to have his house filled with “necessitous and undeserving people.” Johnson answered: “If I did not assist them no one else would, and they must not be lost for want.” There you have real giving, the giving which is the upsurge of love in the heart of a man, the giving which is a kind of overflow of the love of God.

 

We have the pattern of this perfect giving in Jesus Christ himself. Paul wrote to his friends at Corinth: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). Our giving must never be the grim and self-righteous outcome of a sense of duty, still less must it be done to enhance our own glory and prestige among men; it must be the instinctive outflow of the loving heart; we must give to others as Jesus Christ gave himself to us.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 6:5

HOW NOT TO PRAY

 

Matthew 6:5-8

 

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they are fond of praying standing in the synagogues and at the corners of the streets, so that they may be seen by people. This is the truth I tell you—they are paid in full. But when you pray, go into your private room, and shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret: and your Father who sees what happens in secret will give you your reward in full.

 

When you pray, do not pile up meaningless phrases, as the Gentiles do, for their idea is that they will be heard because of the length of their words. So, then, do not be like them, for your Father knows the things you need before you ask him.

 

No nation ever had a higher ideal of prayer than the Jews had; and no religion ever ranked prayer higher in the scale of priorities than the Jews did. “Great is prayer,” said the Rabbis, “greater than all good works.” One of the loveliest things that was ever said about family worship is the Rabbinic saying, “He who prays within his house surrounds it with a wall that is stronger than iron.” The only regret of the Rabbis was that it was not possible to pray all day long.

 

But certain faults had crept into the Jewish habits of prayer. It is to be noted that these faults are by no means peculiar to Jewish ideas of prayer; they can and do occur anywhere. And it is to be noted that they could only occur in a community where prayer was taken with the greatest seriousness. They are not the faults of neglect; they are the faults of misguided devotion.

 

(i) Prayer tended to become formalized. There were two things the daily use of which was prescribed for every Jew.

 

The first was the Shema, which consists of three short passages of scripture—Deuteronomy 6:4-9; 11:13-21; Numbers 15:37-41. Shema  is the imperative of the Hebrew word to hear, and the Shema  takes its name from the verse which was the essence and center of the whole matter: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”

 

The full Shema had to be recited by every Jew every morning and every evening. It had to be said as early as possible. It had to be said as soon as the light was strong enough to enable a man to distinguish between blue and white, or, ad Rabbi Eliezer said, between blue and green. In any event it had to be said before the third hour, that is, 9 a.m., and in the evening it had to be said before 9 p.m. If the last possible moment for the saying of the Shema had come, no matter where a man found himself, at hoe, in the street, at work, in the synagogue, He must stop and say it.

 

There were many who loved the Shema, and who repeated it with reverence and adoration and love; but inevitably there were still more who gabbled their way through it, and went their way. The Shema had every chance of becoming a vain repetition, which men mumbled through like some spell or incantation. We Christians are but ill-qualified to criticize, for everything that has been said about formally gabbling through the Shema can be said about grace before meat in many a family.

 

The second thing which every Jew must daily repeat was called the Shemoneh ‘esreh, which means The Eighteen. It consisted of eighteen prayers, and was, and still is, an essential part of the synagogue service. In time the prayers became nineteen, but the old name remains. Most of these prayers are quite short, and nearly all of them are very lovely.

 

The twelfth runs:

 

“Let Thy mercy, O Lord, be showed upon the upright, the humble, the elders of they people Israel, and the rest of its teachers; be favorable to the pious strangers amongst us, and to us all. Give thou a good reward to those who sincerely trust in thy name, that our lot may be case among them in the world to come, that our hope be not deceived. Praised by thou, O Lord, who art the hope and confidence of the faithful.”

 

The fifth runs:

 

“Bring us back to thy law, O our Father; bring us back, O king, to thy service; bring us back to thee by true repentance. Praised by thou, O Lord, who dost accept our repentance.

 

No church possesses a more beautiful liturgy than the Shemoneth ‘esreh. The law was that he Jew must recite it three times a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. The same thing happened again. The devout Jew prayed it with loving devotion; but there were many to whom this series of lovely prayers became a gabbled formula. There was even a summary supplied which a man might pray, if he had not the time or the memory to repeat the whole eighteen. The repetition of the Shemoneth ‘esreh became nothing more than the superstitious incantation of a spell. Again, we Christians are ill-qualified to criticize, for there are many occasions when we do precisely the same with the prayer which taught us to pray.

 

HOW NOT TO PRAY

 

Matthew 6:5-8 (continued)

 

(ii) Further, the Jewish liturgy supplied stated prayers for all occasions. There was hardly an event or a sight in life which had not its stated formula of prayer. There was prayer before and after each meal; there were prayers in connection with the light, the fire, the lightning, on seeing the new moon, comets, rain, tempest, at the sight of the sea, lakes, rivers, on receiving good news, on using new furniture, on entering or leaving a city. Everything had its prayer. Clearly there is something infinitely lovely here. It was the intention that every happening if life should be brought into the presence of God.

 

But just because the prayers were so meticulously prescribed and stated, the whole system lent itself to formalism, and the danger was for the prayers to slip off the tongue with very little meaning. The tendency was glibly to repeat the right prayer at the right time. The great Rabbis knew that and tried to guard against it. “If a man,” they said, “says his prayers, as if to get through a set task, that is no prayer.” “Do not look on prayer as a formal duty, but as an act of humility by which to obtain the mercy of God.” Rabbi Eliezer was so impressed with the danger of formalism that it was his custom to compose one new prayer every day, that his prayer might be always fresh. It is quite clear that this kind of danger is not confined to Jewish religion. Even quiet times which began in devotion can end in the formalism of a rigid and ritualistic timetable.

 

(iii) Still further, the devout Jew had set times for prayer. The hours were the third, the sixth and the ninth hours, that is, 9 a.m., 12 midday and 3 p.m. In whatever place a man found himself he was bound to pray. Clearly he might be genuinely remembering God, or he might be carrying out an habitual formality. The Mohammedans have the same custom. There is a story of a Mohammedan who was pursuing an enemy with drawn knife to kill him. The muezzin rang out; he stopped, unrolled his prayer mat, knelt and raced through his prayer; and then rose to continue his murderous pursuit. It is a lovely thing that three times a day a man should remember God; but there is very real danger that it may come to no more than this that three times a day a man gabbles his prayers without a thought of God.

 

(iv) There was a tendency to connect prayer with certain places, and especially with the synagogue. It is undeniably true that there are certain places where God seems very near, but there were certain Rabbis who went the length of saying that prayer was efficacious only if it was offered in the Temple or in the synagogue. So there grew up the custom of going to the Temple at the hours of prayer. In the first days of the Christian Church, even the disciples of Jesus thought in terms like these, for we read of Peter and John going up to the Temple at the hour of prayer (Acts 3:1)

 

There was a danger here, the danger that a man might come to think of God as being confined to certain holy places and that he might forget that the whole earth is the temple of God. The wisest of the Rabbis saw this danger. They said, “God says to Israel, pray in the synagogue of your city; if you cannot, pray in the field; if you cannot, pray in hour house; if you cannot, pray on your bed; if you cannot, commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.”

 

The trouble about any system lies, not in the system, but in the men who use it. A man may make any system of prayer an instrument of devotion or a formality, glibly and unthinkingly to be gone through.

 

(v) There was amongst the Jews an undoubted tendency towards long prayers. That was a tendency by no means confined to the Jews. In the 18^th century worship in Scotland length meant devotion. In such a Scottish service there was a verse by verse lecture on scripture which lasted for an hour, and a sermon which lasted for another hour. Prayers were lengthy and extempore. Dr. W. D. Maxwell writes, “The efficacy of prayer was measured by its ardor and its fluency, and not least by its fervid lengthiness.” Rabbi Levi said, “Whoever is long in prayer is heard.” Another saying has it: “Whenever the righteous make their prayer long, their prayer is heard.”

 

There was—and still is—a kind of subconscious idea that if men batter long enough at God’s door, he will answer; that God can be talked, and even pestered, into condescension. The wisest Rabbis were well aware of this danger. One of them said, “It is forbidden to lengthen out the praise of the Holy One. It says in the Psalms: ‘Who can utter the mighty doings of the Lord, or show forth all his praise?’ (Psalm 106:2). There only he who can may lengthen out and tell his praise—but no one can.” “Let a man’s words before God always be few, as it is said, ‘Be not rash with your mouth, and let not your heart be hasty to utter a word before God; for God is in heaven, and you upon earth, therefore let your words be few’” (Ecclesiastes 5:2). “The best adoration consists in keeping silence.” It is easy to confound verbosity with piety, and fluency with devotion, and into that mistake many of the Jews fell.

 

HOW NOT TO PRAY

 

Matthew 6:5-8 (continued)

 

(vi) There were certain other forms of repetition, which the Jews, like all eastern peoples, were apt to use and to overuse. The eastern peoples had a habit of hypnotizing themselves by the endless repetition of one phrase or even of one word. In 1 Kings 18:26 we read how the prophets of Baal cried out, “O Baal answer us,” for the space of half a day. In Acts 19:34 we read how the Ephesian mob, for two hours, kept shouting, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.” The Mohammedans will go on repeating the sacred syllable HE for hours on end, running round in circles, until they drive themselves to ecstasy, and finally fall down unconscious in total exhaustion. The Jews did that with the Shema. It is a kind of substitution of self-hypnotism for prayer.

 

There was another way in which Jewish prayer used repetition. There was an attempt to pile up every possible title and adjective in the address of the prayer to God. One famous prayer begins:

 

“Blessed, praised, and glorified, exalted, extolled and honored, magnified and lauded by the name of the Holy One.”

 

There is one Jewish prayer which actually begins with sixteen different adjectives attached to the name of God. There was a kind of intoxication with words. When a man begins to think more of how he is praying than of what he is praying, his prayer dies upon his lips.

 

(vii) The final fault which Jesus found with certain Jews was that they prayed to be seen of men. The Jewish system of prayer made ostentation very easy. The Jew prayed standing, with hands stretched out, palms upwards, and with head bowed. Prayer had to be said at 9 a.m., 12 midday, and 3 p.m. It had to be said wherever a man might be, and it was easy for a man to make sure that at these hours he was at a busy street corner, or in a crowded city square, so that all the world might see with what devotion he prayed. It was easy for a man to halt on the top step of the entrance to the synagogue, and there pray lengthily and demonstratively, so that all men might admire his exceptional piety. It was easy to put on an act of prayer which all the world might see.

 

The wisest of the Jewish Rabbis fully understood and unsparingly condemned this attitude. “A man in whom is  hypocrisy brings wrath upon the world, and his prayer is not heard.” “Four classes of men do not receive the face of the glory of God—the mockers, the hypocrites, the liars, and the slanderers.” The Rabbis said that no man could pray at all, unless his heart was attuned to pray. They laid it down that for perfect prayer there were necessary an hour of private preparation beforehand, and an hour of meditation afterwards. But the Jewish system of prayer did lend itself to ostentation, if in a man’s heart there was pride.

 

In effect, Jesus lays down two great rules for prayer.

 

(i) He insists that all true prayer must be offered to God. The real fault of the people whom Jesus was criticizing was that they were praying to men and not to God. A certain preacher once described an ornate and elaborate prayer offered in a Boston Church as “the most eloquent prayer ever offered to a Boston audience.” The preacher was much more concerned with impressing the congregation than with making contact with God. Whether in public or in private prayer, a man should have no thought in his mind and no desire in his heart but God.

 

(ii) He insists that we must always remember that the God to whom we pray is a God of love who is more ready to answer than we are to pray. His gifts and his grace have not to be unwillingly extracted from him. We do not come to a God who has to be coaxed, or pestered, or battered into answering our prayers. We come to one whose one wish is to give. When we remember that, it is surely sufficient to go to God with the sigh of desire in our hearts, and on our lips the words, “Thy will be done.”

 

 

 

 

Matthew 6:9

THE DISCIPLE’S PRAYER

 

Matthew 6:9-15

 

So, then, pray in this way:

Our Father in heaven, let your name be held holy:

Let your Kingdom come:

Let your will be done, as in heaven, so upon earth:

Give us to-day bread for the coming day:

Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors:

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the Evil One.

For, if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father

will forgive you too; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

 

Before we begin to think about the Lord’s Prayer in detail there are certain general facts which we will do well to remember about it.

 

We must note, first of all, that this is a prayer which taught his disciples to pray. Both Matthew and Luke are clear about that. Matthew sets the whole Sermon on the Mount in the context of the disciples (Matthew 5:1); and Luke tells us that Jesus taught this prayer in response to the request of one of his disciples (Luke 11:1). The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer which only a disciple can pray; it is a prayer which only one who is committed to Jesus Christ can take upon his lips with any meaning.

 

The Lord’s Prayer is not a child’s prayer, as it is so often regarded; it is, in fact, not meaningful for a child. The Lord’s Prayer is not the Family Prayer as it is sometimes called, unless by the word family we mean the family of the church. The Lord’s Prayer is specifically and definitely stated to be the disciple’s prayer; and only on the lips of a disciple has the prayer its full meaning. To put it in another way, the Lord’s Prayer can only really be prayed when the man who prays it knows what he is saying, and he cannot know that until he has entered into discipleship.

 

We must note the order of the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. The first three petitions have to do with God and with the glory of God; the second three petitions have to do with our needs and our necessities. That is to say, God is first given his supreme place, and then, and only then, we turn to ourselves and our needs and desires. It is only when God is given his proper place that all other things fall into their proper places. Prayer must never be an attempt to bend the will of God to our desires; prayer ought always to be an attempt to submit our wills to the will of God.

 

The second part of the prayer, the part which deals with our needs and our necessities, is a marvelously wrought unity. It deals with the three essential needs of man, and the three spheres of time within which man moves. First, it asks for bread, for that which is necessary for the maintenance of life, and thereby brings the needs of the present  to the throne of God. Second, it asks for forgiveness and thereby brings the past  into the presence of God. Third, it asks for help in temptation and thereby commits all the future into the hands of God. In these three brief petitions, we are taught to lay the present, the past, and the future before the footstool of the grace of God.

 

But not only is this a prayer which begins the whole of life to the presence of God; it is also a prayer which brings the whole of God to our lives. When we ask for bread to sustain our earthly lives, that request immediately directs our thoughts to God the Father, the Creator and the Sustainer of all life. When we ask for forgiveness, that request immediately directs our thoughts to God the Son, Jesus Christ our Savior and Redeemer. When we ask for help for future temptation, that request immediately directs our thoughts to God the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Strengthener, the Illuminator, the Guide and the Guardian of our way.

 

In the most amazing way this brief second part of the Lord’s Prayer takes the present, the past, and the future, the whole of man’s life, and presents them to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, to God in all his fullness. In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus teaches us to bring the whole life to the whole of God, and to bring the whole of God to the whole of life.

 

THE FATHER IN HEAVEN

 

Matthew 6:9

 

Our Father in Heaven.

 

It might well be said that he word Father used of God is a compact summary of the Christian faith. The great value of this word Father is that it settled all the relationships of this life.

 

(i) It settles our relationship to the unseen world. Missionaries tell us that one of the greatest reliefs which Christianity brings to the heathen mind and heart is the certainty that there is only one God. It is the heathen belief that there are hordes of gods, that ever stream and river, and tree and valley, and hill and wood, and every natural force has its own god. The heathen lives in a world crowded with gods. Still further, all these gods are jealous, and grudging, and hostile. They must all be placated, and a man can never be sure that he has not omitted the honor due to some of these gods. The consequence is that the heathen lives in terror of the gods; he is “haunted and not helped by his religion.”

 

The most significant Greek legend of the gods is the legend of Prometheus. Prometheus was a god. It was in the days before men possessed fire; and life without fire was a cheerless and a comfortless thing. In pity Prometheus took fire from heaven and gave it as a gift to men. Zeus, the king of the gods, was mightily angry that men should receive this gift. So he took Prometheus and he chained him to a rock in the middle of the Adriatic Sea, where he was tortured with the heat and the thirst of the day, and the cold of the night. Even more, Zeus prepared a vulture to tear out Prometheus’ liver, which always grew again, only to be torn out again.

 

That is what happened to the god who tried to help men. The whole conception is that the gods are jealous, and vengeful, and grudging; and the last thing the gods wish to do is to help men. That is the heathen idea of the attitude of the unseen world to men. The heathen is haunted by the fear of a horde of jealous and grudging gods. So, then, we discover that the God to whom we pray has the name and the heart of a father it makes literally all the difference in the world. We need no longer shiver before a horde of jealous gods; we can rest in a father’s love.

 

(ii) It settles our relationship to the seen world, to this world of space and time in which we live. It is easy to think of this world as a hostile world. There are the chances and the changes of life; there are the iron laws of the universe which we break at our peril; there is suffering and death; but if we can be sure that behind this world there is, not a capricious, jealous, mocking god, but a God whose name is Father, then although much may still remain dark, all is now bearable because behind all is love. It will always help us if we regard this world as organized not for our comfort but for our training.

 

Take, for instance, pain. Pain might seem a bad thing, but pain has its place in the order of God. It sometimes happens that a person is so abnormally constituted that he is incapable of feeling pain. Such a person is a danger to himself and a problem to everyone else. If there were no such thing as pain, we would never know that we were ill, and often we would die before steps could be taken to deal with any disease or illness. That is not to say that pain cannot become a bad thing, but it is to say that times without number pain is God’s red light to tell us that there is danger ahead.

 

Lessing used to say that if he had one question to ask the Sphinx, it would be: “Is this a friendly universe?” If we can be certain that the name of the God who created this world is Father, then we can also be certain that fundamentally this is a friendly universe. To call God Father  is to settle our relationship to the world in which we live.

 

THE FATHER IN HEAVEN

 

Matthew 6:9 (continued)

 

(iii) If we believe that God is Father, it settles our relationship to our fellow-men. If God is Father, he is Father of all men. The Lord’s Prayer does not teach us to pray My Father;  it teaches us to pray Our Father. It is very significant that in the Lord’s Prayer the words I, me, and mine never occur; it is true to say that Jesus came to take these words out of life and to put in their place we, us, and ours. God is not any man’s exclusive possession. The very phrase Our Father  involves the elimination of self. The fatherhood of God is the only possible basis of the brotherhood of man.

 

(iv) If we believe that God is Father, it settles our relationship to ourselves. There are times when every man despises and hates himself. He knows himself to be lower than the lowest thing that crawls upon the earth. The heart knows its own bitterness, and no one knows a man’s unworthiness better than that man himself.

 

Mark Rutherford wished to add a new beatitude: “Blessed are those who heal us of our self-despisings.” Blessed are those who give us back our self-respect. That is precisely what God does. In these grim, bleak, terrible moments we can still remind ourselves that, even if we matter to no one else, we matter to God; that in the infinite mercy of God we are of royal lineage, children of the King of kings.

 

(v) If we believe that God is Father, it settles our relationship to God. It is not that it removes the might, majesty and power of God. It is not that it makes God any the less God; but it makes that might, and majesty, and power, approachable for us.

 

There is an old Roman story which tells how a Roman Emperor was enjoying a triumph. He had the privilege, which Rome gave to her great victors, of marching his troops through the streets of Rome, with all his captured trophies and his prisoners in his train. So the Emperor was on the march with his troops. The streets were lined with cheering people. The tall legionaries lined the streets’ edges to keep the people in their places. At one point on the triumphal route there was a little platform where the Empress and her family were sitting to watch the Emperor go by in all the pride of his triumph. On the platform with his mother there was the Emperor’s youngest son, a little boy. As the Emperor came near the little boy jumped off the platform, burrowed through the crowd, tried to dodge between the legs of a legionary, and to run out on to the road to meet his father’s chariot. The legionary stooped down and stopped him. He swung him up in his arms: “You can’t do that, boy,” he said. “Don’t you know who that is in the chariot? That’s the Emperor. You can’t run out to his chariot.” And the little lad laughed down. “He may be your Emperor,” he said, “but he’s my father.” That is exactly the way the Christian feels towards God. The might, and the majesty, and the power are the might, and the majesty, and the power of one whom Jesus taught us to call Our Father.

 

THE FATHER IN HEVEN

 

Matthew 6:9 (continued)

 

So far we have been thinking of the first two words of this address to God—Our Father; but God is not only Our Father, He is Our Father who is in heaven. The last words are of primary importance. The conserve two great truths.

 

(i) They remind us of the holiness of God. It is very easy to cheapen and to sentimentalize the whole idea of the fatherhood of God, and to make it an excuse for an easy-going, comfortable religion. “He’s a good fellow and all will be well.” As Heine said of God: “God will forgive. It is his trade.” If we were to say Our Father, and stop there, there might be some excuse for that; but it is Our Father in heaven to whom we pray. The love is there, but the holiness is there, too.

 

It is extraordinary how seldom Jesus used the word Father in regard to God. Mark’s gospel is the earliest gospel, and is therefore the nearest thing we will ever have to an actual report of all that Jesus said and did; and in Mark’s gospel Jesus calls God Father only six times, and never outside the circle of the disciples. To Jesus the word Father was so sacred that he could hardly bear to use it; and he could never use it except amongst those who had grasped something of what it meant.

 

We must never use the word Father in regard to God cheaply, easily, and sentimentally. God is not an easy-going parent who tolerantly shuts his eyes to all sins and faults and mistakes. This god, whom we can call Father, is the God whom we must still approach with reverence and adoration, and awe and wonder. God is our Father in heaven, and in God there is love and holiness combined.

 

(ii) They remind us of the power of God. In human love there is so often the tragedy of frustration. We may love a person and yet be unable to help him achieve something, or to stop him doing something. Human love can be intense—and quite helpless. Any parent with an erring child, or any lover with a wandering loved one knows that. But when we say Our Father –in heaven we place two things side by side. We place side by side the love of God and the power of God. We tell ourselves that the power of God is always motivated by the love of God, and can never be exercised for anything but our good; we tell ourselves that the love of God is backed by the power of God, and that therefore its purposes can never be ultimately frustrated or defeated. It is love of which we think, but it is the love of God. When we pray Our Father in heaven we must ever remember the holiness of God, and we must ever remember the power which moves in love, and the love which has behind it the undefeatable power of God.

 

THE HALLOWING OF THE NAME

 

Matthew 6:9 (continued)

 

Let your name be held holy.

 

“Hallowed by They name”—it is probably true that of all the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer this is the one whose meaning we would find it most difficult to express. First, then, let us concentrate on the actual meaning of the words.

 

The word which is translated hallowed  is a part of the Greek verb hagiazesthai. The Greek verb hagiazesthai is connected with the adjective hagios, and means to treat a person or a thing as hagios. Hagios is the word which is usually translated holy; but the basic meaning of hagios is different or separate. A thing which is hagios is different from other things. A person who is hagios is separate from other people. So a temple is hagios because it is different from other buildings. An altar is hagios because it exists for a purpose different from the purpose of ordinary things. God’s day is hagios because it is different  from other days. A priest is hagios because he is separate from other men. So, then, this petition means. “Let God’s name be treated differently from all other names; let God’s name be given a position which is absolutely unique.”

 

But there is something to add to this. In Hebrew the name  does not mean simply the name by which a person is called—John or James, or whatever the name may be. In Hebrew the name means the nature, the character, the personality  of the person in so far as it is known or revealed to us. That becomes clear when we see how the Bible writers use the expression.

 

The Psalmist says, “Those who know thy name put their trust in thee” (Psalm 9:10). Quite clearly that does not mean that those who know that God is called Jehovah will trust in him. It means that those who know what God is like, those who know the nature and the character of God will put their trust in him. The Psalmist says, “Some boast of chariots and some of horses, but we boast of the name of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7.) Quite clearly that does not mean in a time of difficulty the Psalmist will remember that God is called Jehovah. It means that at such a time some will put their trust in human and material aids and defenses, but the Psalmist will remember the nature and the character of God; he will remember what God is like, and that memory will give him confidence.

 

So, then, let us take these two things and put them together. Hagiazesthai, which is translated to hallow, means to regard as different, to give a unique and special place to. The name is the nature, the character, the personality of the person in so far as it is known and revealed to us. Therefore, when we pray “Hallowed be Thy name,” it means, “Enable us to give to thee the unique place which thy nature and character deserve and demand.”

 

THE PRAYER FOR REVERENCE

 

Matthew 6:9 (continued)

 

Is there, then, one word in English for giving to God the unique place which his nature and character demand? There is such a word, and the word is reverence. This petition is a prayer that we should be enabled to reverence God as God deserves to be reverenced. In all true reverence of God there are four essentials.

 

(i) In order to reverence God we must believe that God exists. We cannot reverence someone who does not exist; we must begin by being sure of the existence of God.

 

To the modern mind it is strange that the Bible nowhere attempts to prove the existence of God. For the Bible God is an axiom. An axiom is a self-evident fact which is not itself proved, but which is the basis of all other proofs. For instance, ‘A straight line is the shortest distance between two points,’ and, ‘Parallel lines, however far produced, will never meet,’ are axioms.

 

The Bible writes would have said that it was superfluous to prove the existence of God, because they experienced the presence of God every moment of their lives. They would have said that a man no more needed to prove that God exists than he needs to prove that his wife exists. He meets his wife every day, and he meets God every day.

 

But suppose we did need to try to prove that God exists, using our own minds to do so, how would be begin? We might begin from the world in which we live. Paley’s old argument is not yet completely outdated. Suppose there is a man walking along the road. He strikes his foot against a watch lying in the dust. He has never in his life seen a watch before; he does not know what it is. He picks it up; he sees that it consists of a metal case, and inside the case a complicated arrangement of wheels, levers, springs and jewels. He sees that the whole thing is moving and working in the most orderly way. He sees further that the hands are moving round the dial in an obviously predetermined routine. What then does he say? Does he say: “All these metals and jewels came together from the ends of the earth by chance, by chance made themselves into wheels and levers and springs, by chance assembled themselves into this mechanism, by chance wound themselves up and set themselves going, by chance acquired their obvious orderly working”? No. He says, “I have found a watch; somewhere there must be a watch-maker.”

 

Order presupposes mind. We look at the world; we see a vast machine which is working in order. Suns rise and set in an unvarying succession. Tides ebb and flow to a timetable. Seasons follow each other in an order. We look at the world, and we are bound to say, “Somewhere there must be a world-maker.” The fact of the world drives us to God. As Sir James Jeans has said, “No astronomer can be an atheist.” The order of the world demands the mind of God behind it.

 

We might begin from ourselves. The one thing man has never created is life. Man can alter and rearrange things; but he cannot create a living thing. Where then did we get out life? From our parents. Yes, but where did they get theirs? From their parents. Yes, but where did they get theirs? From their parents. But where did all this begin? At some time life must have come into the world; and it must have come from outside the world for man cannot create life; and once again we are driven back to God.

 

When we look in upon ourselves and out upon the world we are driven to God. As Kant said long ago, “the moral law within us, and the starry heavens above us,” drive us to God.

 

(ii) Before we can reverence God, we must not only believe that God is, we must also know the kind of God he is. No one could reverence the Greek gods with their loves and wars, their hates and their adulteries, their trickeries and their knaveries. No one can reverence capricious, immoral, impure gods. But in God as we know him there are three great qualities. There is holiness; there is justice; and there is love. We must reverence God, not only because he exists, but because he is the God whom we know him to be.

 

(iii) But a man might believe that God is; he might be intellectually convinced that God is holy, just and loving; and still he might not have reverence. For reverence there is necessary a constant awareness of God. To reverence God means to live in a God-filled world, to live a life in which we never forget God. This awareness is not confined to the Church or to so-called holy places; it must be an awareness which exists everywhere and at all times.

 

Wordsworth spoke of it in Lines composed near Tintern Abbey:

 

“And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.”

 

One of the finest of modern devotional poets is Henry Ernest Hardy who wrote under the name of Father Andrew. In The Mystic Beauty he writes:

 

“O London town has man y moods,

And mingled ‘mongst its many broods

A leavening of saints,

 

And ever up and down its streets,

If one has eyes to see one meets

Stuff that an artist paints.

 

I’ve see a back street bathed in blue,

Such as the soul of Whistler knew:

A smudge of amber light,

 

Where some friend fish-shop plied its trade,

A perfect note of color made—

Oh, it was exquisite!

 

I once came through St. James’s Park

Betwixt the sunset and the dark,

And oh the mystery

 

Of grey and green and violet!

I would I never might forget

That evening harmony.

 

I hold it true that God is there

If beauty breaks through anywhere;

And his most blessed feet,

 

Who once life’s roughest roadway trod,

Who came as man to show us God,

Still pass along the street.”

 

God in the back street, God in St. James’s Park, God in the fried fish-shop—that is reverence. The trouble with most people is that their awareness of God is spasmodic, acute at certain times and places totally absent at others. Reverence means the constant awareness of God.

 

(iv) There remains one further ingredient in reverence. We must believe that God exists; we must know what kind of a God he is; we must be constantly aware of God. But a man might have all these things and still not have reverence. To all these things must be added obedience and submission to God. Reverence is knowledge plus submission. In his catechism Luther asks, “How is God’s name hallowed amongst us?” and his answer is, “When both our life and doctrine are truly Christian,” that is to say, when our intellectual convictions, and our practical actions, are in full submission to the will of God.

 

To know that God is, to know what kind of a God he is, to be constantly aware of God, and to be constantly obedient to him—that is reverence and that is what we pray for when we pray: “Hallowed be thy name.” Let God be given the reverence which his nature and character deserve.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 6:10

GOD’S KINGDOM AND GOD’S WILL

 

Matthew 6:10

 

Let your Kingdom come:

Let your will be done, as in heaven, so also in earth.

 

The phrase The Kingdom of God is characteristic of the whole New Testament. No phrase is used oftener in prayer and in preaching and in Christian literature. It is, therefore, of primary importance that we should be clear as to what it means.

 

It is evident that the Kingdom of God was central to the message of Jesus. The first  emergence of Jesus on the scene of history was when we should be clear as to what it means.

 

It is evident that the Kingdom of God was central to the message of Jesus. The first emergence of Jesus on the scene of history was when he came into Galilee preaching the good news of the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:14). Jesus himself described the preaching of the kingdom as an obligation laid upon hi: “I must preach the good news of the Kingdom of God to the other cities also, for I was sent for this purpose” (Luke 4:43; Mark 1:38). Luke’s description of Jesus’ activity is that he went through every city and village preaching and showing the good news of the Kingdom of God (Luke 8:1). Clearly the meaning of the Kingdom of God is something which we are bound to try to understand.

 

When we do try to understand the meaning of this phrase we meet with certain puzzling facts. We find that Jesus spoke of the Kingdom in three different ways. He spoke of the Kingdom as existing in the past. He said that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and all the prophets were in the Kingdom (Luke 13:28; Matthew 8:11). Clearly therefore the Kingdom goes far back into history. He spoke of the Kingdom as present. “The Kingdom of God,” he said, “is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21). The Kingdom of God is therefore a present reality here and now. He spoke of the Kingdom of God as future, for he taught men to pray for the coming of the Kingdom in this his own prayer. How then can the Kingdom be past, present and future all at the one time? How can the Kingdom be at one and the same time something which existed, which exists, and for whose coming it is our duty to pray?

 

We find the key in this double petition of the Lord’s Prayer. One of the commonest characteristics of Hebrew style is what is technically know as parallelism. The Hebrew tended to say everything twice. He said it in one way, and then he said it in another way which repeated or amplified or explained the first way. Almost any verse of the Psalms will show this parallelism in action. Almost every verse of the Psalms divides in two in the middle; and the second half repeats or amplifies or explains the first half.

 

Let us take some examples and the thing will become clear:

 

“God is our refuge and strength—a very present help in trouble”

(Psalm 46:1).

 

“The Lord of Hosts is with us—the God of Jacob is our refuge”

(Psalm 46:7).

 

“The Lord is my shepherd—I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures—He leads me beside still waters”

(Psalm 23:1,2).

 

Let us apply this principle to these two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. Let us set them down side by side:

 

“Thy Kingdom come—Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.”

 

Let us assume that the second petition explains, and amplifies and defines the first. We then have the perfect definition of the Kingdom of God—The Kingdom of God is a society upon earth where God’s will is as perfectly done as it is in heaven. Here we have the explanation of how the Kingdom can be past, present and future all at the one time. Any man who at any time in history perfectly did God’s will was within the Kingdom; any man who perfectly does God’s will is within the Kingdom; but since the world is very far from being a place where God’s will is perfectly and universally done, the consummation of the Kingdom is still in the future and is still something for which we must pray.

 

To be in the Kingdom is to obey the will of God. Immediately we see that the Kingdom is not something which primarily has to do with nations and peoples and countries. It is something which has to do with each one of us. The Kingdom is in fact the most personal thing in the world. The Kingdom demands the submission of my will, my heart, my life. It is only when each one of us makes his personal decision and submission that the Kingdom comes.

 

The Chinese Christian prayed the well-known prayer, “Lord, revive thy Church, beginning with me,” and we might well paraphrase that and say, “Lord, bring in thy Kingdom, beginning with me.” To pray for the Kingdom of Heaven is to pray that we may submit our wills entirely to the will of God.

 

GOD’S KINGDOM AND GOD’S WILL

 

Matthew 6:10 (continued)

 

From what we have already seen it becomes clear that the most important thing in the world is to obey the will of God; the most important words in the world are “They will be done.” But it is equally clear that the frame of mind and the tone of voice in which these words are spoken will make a world of difference.

 

(i) A man may say, “Thy will be done,” in a tone of defeated resignation. He may say it, not because he wishes to say it, but because he has accepted the fact that he cannot possibly say anything else; he may say it because he has accepted the fact that God is too strong for him, and that it is useless to batter his head against the walls of the universe. He may say it thinking only of the ineluctable power of God which has him in its grip. As Omar Khayyam had it:

 

“But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays

Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;

Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,

And one by one back in the closet lays.

 

The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,

But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;

And He that Toss’d you down into the Field,

He knows about it all—He knows—HE knows!’

 

A man may accept the will of God for no other reason that that he has realized that he cannot do anything else.

 

(ii) A man may say, “Thy will be done,” in a tone of bitter resentment. Swinburne spoke of men feeling the trampling of the iron feet of God. He speaks of the supreme evil, God. Beethoven died all alone; and it is said that when they found his body his lips were drawn back in a snarl and his fists were clenched as if he were shaking his fists in the very face of God and of high heaven. A man may feel that God is his enemy, and yet an enemy so strong that he cannot resist. He may therefore accept God’s will, but he may accept it with bitter resentment and smoldering anger.

 

(iii) A man may say, “Thy will be done,” in perfect love and trust. He may say it gladly and willingly, no matter what that will may be . It should be easy for the Christian to say, “Thy will be done,” like that; for the Christian can be very sure of two things about God.

 

(a) He can be sure of the wisdom of God Sometimes when we want something built or constructed, or altered or repaired, we take it to the craftsman and consult him about it. He makes some suggestion, and we often end up by saying, “Well, do what you think best. You are the expert.” God is the expert in life, and his guidance can never lead anyone astray.

 

When Richard Cameron, the Scottish Covenanter, was killed his head and his hands were cut off by one Murray and taken to Edinburgh. “His father being in prison for the same cause, the enemy carried them to him, to add grief unto his former sorrow, and inquired at him if he knew them. Taking his son’s head and hands, which were very fair (being a man of fair complexion like himself), he kissed them and said, ‘I know them—I know them. They are my son’s—my own dear son’s. It is the lord. Good is the will of the lord, who cannot wrong me or mine, but hath made goodness and mercy to follow us all our days.’” When a man can speak like that, when he is quite sure that his times are in the hands of the infinite wisdom of God, it is easy to say, “Thy will be done.”

 

(b) He can be sure of the love of God. We do not believe in a mocking and a capricious God, or in a blind and iron determinism. Thomas Hardy finishes his novel Tess with the grim words: The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess.” We believe in a God whose name is love. As Whittier had it:

 

“I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air.

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care.”

 

As Browning triumphantly declared his faith:

 

“God, Thou art love! I build my faith on that'85

I know thee who has kept my path and made

Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow

So that it reached me like a solemn joy.

It were too strange that I should doubt thy love.”

 

And as Paul had it: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Romans 8:32). No man can look at the Cross and doubt the love of God, and when we are sure of the love of God, it is easy to say, “Thy will be done.”

 

 

 

 

Matthew 6:11

OUR DAILY BREAD

 

Matthew 6:11

 

Give us to-day bread for the coming day.

 

One would have thought that this is the one petition of the Lord’s Prayer about the meaning of which there could have been no possible doubt. It seems on the face of it to be the simplest and the most direct of them all. But it is the fact that many interpreters have offered many interpretations of it. Before we think of its simple and obvious meaning, let us look at some of the other explanations which have been offered.

 

(i) The bread has been identified with the bread of the Lord’s Supper. From the very beginning the Lord’s Prayer has been closely connected with the Lord’s Table. In the very first orders of service which we possess it is always laid down that the Lord’s Prayer should be prayed at the Lord’s Table, and some have taken this petition as a prayer to be granted the daily privilege of sitting at the Table of our Lord, and of eating the spiritual food which a man receives there.

 

(ii) The bread has been identified with the spiritual food of the word of God. We sometimes sing the hymn:

 

“Break thou the bread of life,

Dear Lord, to me,

As thou didst break the loaves

Beside the sea.

Beyond the sacred page

I seek thee, Lord,

My Spirit pants for thee,

O living word,”

 

So this petition has been taken to be a prayer for the true teaching, the true doctrine, the essential truth, which are in the scriptures and the word of God, and which are indeed food for a man’s heart and soul.

 

(iii) The bread has been taken to stand for Jesus himself. Jesus called himself the bread of life (John 6:33-35), and this has been taken to be a prayer that daily we may be fed on him who is the living bread. It was in that way that Matthew Arnold used the phrase, when he wrote his poem about the saint of God he met in the east end of London one suffocating day:

 

“’Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead

Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,

And the pale weaver, through his windows seen,

In Spitalfields, look’d thrice dispirited.

 

I met a preacher there I knew and said:

‘Ill and o’er worked, how fare you in this scene?’

‘Bravely!’ said he, ‘for I of late have been

Much cheer’d with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.’”

 

So then this petition has been taken as a prayer that we too might be cheered and strengthened with Christ the living bread.

 

(iv) This petition has been taken in a purely Jewish sense. The bread has been taken to be the bread of the heavenly kingdom. Luke tells how one of the bystanders said to Jesus. “Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God” (Luke 14:15). The Jews had a strange yet vivid idea. They held that when the Messiah came, and when the golden age dawned, there would be what they called the Messianic banquet, at which the chosen ones of God would sit down. The slain bodies of the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan would provide the meat and the fish courses of the banquet. It would be a kind of reception feast given by God to his own people. So, then, this has been taken to be a petition for a place at the final Messianic banquet of the people of God.

 

Although we need not agree that any one of these explanations is the main meaning of this petition, we need not reject any of them as false. They all have their own truth and their own relevance.

 

The difficulty of interpreting this petition was increased by the fact that there was very considerable doubt as to the meaning of the word epiousios, which is the word which the Revised Standard Version translates daily. The extraordinary fact was that, until a short time ago, there was no other known occurrence of this word in the whole of Greek literature. Origen knew this, and indeed held that Matthew had invented the word. It was therefore not possible to be sure what it precisely meant. But not very long ago a papyrus fragment turned up with this word on it; and the papyrus fragment was actually a woman’s shopping list! And against an item on it was the word epiousios. It was a note to remind her to buy supplies of a certain food for the coming day. So very simply what this petition means is: “Give me the things we need to eat for this coming day. Help me to get the things I’ve got on my shopping list when I go out this morning. Give me the things we need to eat when the children come in from school, and the men folk come in from work. Grant that the table be not bare when we sit down together to-day.” This is a simple prayer that God will supply us with the things we need for the coming day.

 

OUR DAILY BREAD

 

Matthew 6:11 (continued)

 

When we see that this is a simple petition for the needs of the everyday, certain tremendous truths emerge from it.

 

(i) It tells us that God cares for our bodies. Jesus showed us that; he spent so much time healing men’s diseases and satisfying their physical hunger. He was anxious when he thought that the crowds who had followed him out into the lonely places had a long road home, and no food to eat before they set out upon it. We do well to remember that God is interested in our bodies. Any teaching which belittles, and despises, and slanders the body is wrong. We can see what God thinks of our human bodies, even we remember that he himself in Jesus Christ took a human body upon him. It is not simply soul salvation, it is whole salvation, the salvation of body, mind and spirit, at which Christianity aims.

 

(ii) This petition teaches us to pray for our daily bread, for bread for the coming day. It teaches us to live one day at a time, and not to worry and be anxious about the distant and the unknown future. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray this petition, there is little doubt that his mind was going back to the story of the manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16:1-21). The children of Israel were starving in the wilderness, and God sent them the manna, the food from heaven; but there was the condition—they must gather only enough for their immediate needs. If they tried to gather too much, and to store it up, it went bad. They had to be satisfied with enough for the day. As one Rabbi put it: “The portion of a day in its day, because he who created the day created sustenance for the day.” And as another Rabbi had it: “He who possesses what he can eat to-day, and says, ‘What shall I eat to-morrow?’ is a man of little faith.” This petition tells us to live one day at a time. It forbids the anxious worry which is so characteristic of the life which has not learned to trust God.

 

(iii) By implication this petition gives God his proper place. It admits that it is from God we receive the food which is necessary to support life. No man has ever created a seed which will grow. The scientist can analyze a seed into its constituent elements, but no synthetic seed would ever grow. All living things come from God. Our food, therefore, is the direct gift of God.

 

(iv) This petition very wisely reminds us how prayer works. If a man prayed this prayer, and then sat back and waited for the bread to fall into his hands, he would certainly starve. It reminds us that prayer and work go hand in hand and that when we pray we must go on to work to make our prayers come true. It is true that the living seed comes from God, but it is equally true that it is man’s task to grow and to cultivate that seed. Dick Sheppard used to love a certain story.  There was a man who had an allotment; he had with great toil reclaimed a piece of ground, clearing away the stones, eradicating the rank growth of weeds, enriching and feeding the ground, until it produced the loveliest flowers and vegetables. One evening he was showing a pious friend around his allotment. The pious friend said, “It’s wonderful what God can do with a bit of ground like this, isn’t it?” “Yes,” said the man who had put in such toil, “but you should have seen this bit of ground when God had it to himself!” God’s bounty and man’s toil must combine. Prayer, like faith, without works is dead. When we pray this petition we are recognizing two basic truths—that without God we can do nothing, and that without our effort and co-operation God can do nothing for us.

 

(v) We must note that Jesus did not teach us to pray: “Give me my daily bread.” He taught us to pray: “Give us our daily bread.” The problem of the world is not that there is not enough to go round; there is enough and to spare. The problem is not the supply of life’s essentials; it is the distribution of them. This prayer teaches us never to be selfish in our prayers. It is a prayer which we can help God to answer by giving to others who are less fortunate than we are. This prayer is not only a prayer that we may receive our daily bread; it is also a prayer that we may share bread with others.

 

 

 

 

Matthew 6:15

FORGIVENESS HUMAN AND DIVINE

 

Matthew 6:12,14,15

 

Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors'85For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you too; but, if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

 

Before a man can honestly pray this petition of the Lord’s Prayer he must realize that he needs to pray it. That is to say, before a man can pray this petition he must have a sense of sin. Sin in not nowadays a popular word. Men and women rather resent being called, or treated as, hell-deserving sinners.

 

The trouble is that most people have a wrong conception of sin. They would readily agree that the burglar, the drunkard, the murderer, the adulterer, the foul-mouthed person is a sinner.

 

But they are guilty of none of these sins; they live decent, ordinary, respectable lives, and have never even been in danger of appearing in court, or going to prison, or getting some notoriety in the newspapers. They therefore feel that sin has nothing to do with them.

 

The New Testament used five different words for sin.

 

(i) The commonest word is hamartia. This was originally a shooting word and means a missing of the target. To fail to hit the target was hamartia. Therefore  sin is the failure to be what we  might have been and could have been.

 

Charles Lamb has a picture of a man named Samuel le Grice. Le Grice was a brilliant youth who never fulfilled his promise. Lamb says that there were three stages in his career. There was a time when people said, “He will do something.” There was a time when people said, “He could do something if he would.” There was a time when people said, “He might do something if he would.” There was a time when people said, “He might have done something, if he had liked.” Edwin Muir writes in his Autobiography: “After a certain age all of us, good and bad, are grief stricken because of powers within us which have never been realized: because, in other words, we are not what we should be.