Matthew 5:20

Chapter 18

Faithful Unto Death False Sabbath-keeping Orthodox and Heterodox

Prayer

Almighty God, we bless thee for the gift of rest. Enable us to take it as thou dost give it with joyfulness, and may we, as the result of its acceptance, be stronger, and happier, and more useful in the world. Thou dost cause a great sleep to fall upon the life of man, and out of that sleep, as out of a grave, dost thou bring him again, quieted, and rested, and blest. Thou hast also given a rest for the soul, a time of quietness and peace for the mind; may we enjoy it to the full, knowing that tomorrow will bring its toil and its burden, and that soon we shall be in the world again, confused by its manifold tumult. May this be a Sabbath in the soul, a rest in the heart, a benediction pronounced upon the inner life, and under its soothing and healing influence may our best nature rise again to claim thyself, with all the impatience and delight of filial love.

May thy word dwell in our hearts richly; let all the sweetness of its music be heard by the ear of our soul, and may the light, which is above the brightness of the sun, shine upon our entire life and make it beautiful with the beauteousness of heaven. We come to thine house as men flee to a sanctuary, a refuge in the time of peril, a shelter in the great storm, and a place of prospect from which they can see the better time, the brighter morning, the greater land. Disappoint no soul that waits upon thee in trembling, reverent love. Speak large words in reply to our prayer, and while we are yet praying, do thou flood the soul with thy love, and lift us above all that is mean in earth and time.

Thy hand has been put out towards us in great richness of love, thou hast withheld no good thing from us, thou hast spread our table morning, noon, and night, thou hast been round about our dwelling-place as a defence, thou hast kept the storm from destroying us, and thou hast given thine angels charge concerning our life. Therefore do we return to thy holy sanctuary with a new song upon our lips, and a new gladness in our hearts. Meet us, we humbly pray thee, according to the urgency of our need, our pain, and our desire. Where the burden is heavy, thou canst lift it wholly off the trembling and crushed spirit; where it is more needful that it should remain than it should be removed, thou canst give sustaining and comforting grace. Not our will but thine be done, herein. Where the pain is intolerable, sharpening itself into a great fiery agony, the Lord come with heaven's own balm and save those who are in great distress, lest they be swallowed up of sorrow overmuch. Where our desire is towards the heavens and all heavenly things, becoming a solemn and urgent prayer for the indwelling of the kingdom of Christ in the heart, thou wilt not say No; thine answer shall be a great Yes of acquiescence, and in the heart desiring thy Son there shall be a great light and a peculiar joy.

We would put the remainder of our life into thine hands, we would think nothing, be nothing, do nothing but under the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit. Undertake for us, we humbly pray thee, and send us bread, little or much light, dull or splendid, and do thou make us contented because it is of thy giving and sending, and may our joy be in thyself and not in the passing circumstances of the dying day. Where any heart is set against thee stonily, with obduracy and obstinacy of feeling, in great rebellion and tumult, the Lord break not such a heart to its destruction, but break it to its healing. And bring in those that are afar off, that they may see thy light and be affrighted and saved by thy grace and thy redemption. And where any are in great fear and distress of mind because of their relation to thyself, send forth the spirit of thy Son into their hearts, the spirit of thy redeeming and sanctifying grace, recall all tender memories and all blessed associations, awaken the feelings that are lying dead, and give to such to know the power of the assurance of faith. Help us all to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus. Make us true, honour, able, sincere, before heaven and earth, enable us to enter into the spirit of thy gospel and to exemplify all its beauty and its tenderness. Save us from the poverty of the letter which killed, and lead us into the spirit which giveth life, and may all our conduct be attuned by thy Spirit and lifted up by thy grace, and may it become a great light shining afar to the guidance of any who are in doubt and fear.

The Lord pardon our sins, and delight in doing it, the Lord repeat his miracle of grace in our life every day. We say this in the name of Jesus, our Priest, our Intercessor, the Daysman between thyself and us: thou hearest him always, thy delight is to look upon his face, and to consider what he has done. Behold our shield and look upon the face of thine anointed, and from the inner and hidden sanctuary send us forgiveness and bless us with all spiritual help. Disappoint the bad man in all his evil counsels: cause him to forget himself, and strike him dumb when he would speak forbidden words.

The Lord help every honest and good man to do good whilst his little day lasts, and may we all be found in the end good and faithful servants, inspired by thy spirit, upheld by thy grace, made strong by thy truth, rejoicing in the assurance that the life spent in thy service will be crowned with heaven in thy presence. Amen.

Matthew 5:20 .

"For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of Heaven."

For righteousness read rightness. Then the text will read, "For I say unto you, that except your rightness, your notion and idea of what is right, shall exceed the notion and idea entertained by the Scribes and Pharisees as to what is right, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." Given, a ministry which begins in this tone, to know how it will end. It is impossible that it can end otherwise than in crucifixion. The Cross is here. If the Scribes and Pharisees get to know that a man has been speaking so of them, they will never rest until they kill him. The shadow of the Cross is in everything spoken and done by Jesus Christ. He here assails the religion and the respectability, the learning and the influence of his day. This is more than a speech, it is a challenge, it is an impeachment, it is an indictment of high treason how then can the speaker finish his eloquence but in a peroration of blood? He must die for this, or play the hypocrite further on. A man who talks so, in any age, even including the nineteenth century, must die. The reason we do not die now is that we do not speak the truth. The preacher now follows those whom he appears to lead: if he put himself into a right attitude to his age, its corruption, its infidelities, and its hypocrisies, he would be killed. No preacher is now killed, because no preacher is now faithful.

Consider who these Scribes and Pharisees were. They were the bishops and clergy and ministers of the day. Suppose a reformer should now arise and say concerning the whole machine ecclesiastical and spiritual, "Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness that is turned out of that machine ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven." I do not know that we should nail him to wood with vulgar iron nails, but we would take care to pinch him so in bread and water as to take the life out of him. Christianity is nothing if not an eternal challenge in the direction of honesty, reality, breadth, charity. Has not the whole Church, in all its fragments and communions, become a mere theological grinding machine for turning out certain quantities and colours, of regulation extent and tone?

Religion was polluted at the well-head. It had become a ceremony, a profession, a dead adherence to dead formalities, synagogue-going, word-splitting, hand-washing, and an elaborate system of trifling and refining. Understand who these men were. They knew the law: the Scribes spent their time in copying it, in expounding, or rather in confounding and confusing those who listened to their peculiar expositions of its solemn requirements. They were not illiterate, so far as the law was concerned: they knew every letter, they had a thousand traditions concerning it, they formed themselves into synods and consistories for the purpose of extending, defining, and otherwise treating the requirements of the law. They were so familiar with it as to miss its music, as we have become so familiar with the sunlight as not to heed its beauty. A rattle, a sputter in the air, will excite more attention than the great, broad, calm shining of the. king of day. The Scribes were the men who professed to have the keys of the kingdom of heaven upon their girdles, and yet Jesus Christ, the reputed son of the carpenter, arises and says to them, "Ye are not in the kingdom of heaven at all; actors, mimics, pretenders, painted ones, ye are not in the spirit and the genius of the heavenly kingdom?" No man dares this day say a word against a bishop or a minister I speak of all churches, and not of one in particular without being publicly and severely reprimanded for his impious audacity. Jesus gathered himself up into one strain of power, and hurled his energy in one blighting condemnation against the whole of the Scribe and Pharisee system of his day. Beware! He was killed! He did not talk against disreputable persons, as the world accounts repute; the Scribes and the Pharisees were the most respectable people of their generation, they were looked up to as leaders and guides by those amongst whom they lived. They were the saints, the pillars of the Church, the lights of the synagogue, the very cream of respectable society: yet this Galilean peasant beards them all, lays his soft but sinewy fingers upon their throats, and says, "Stand back, ye defile and pervert the kingdom ye profess to serve." Do not, therefore, let us be too bold and too faithful. The cost of integrity everywhere in a corrupt age is death.

I infer from Christ's treatment of the Scribes and Pharisees that it is possible for men to deceive themselves on religious methods to suppose that they are in the kingdom of God when they are thousands of miles away from it. Is it possible that any of us can have fallen under the power of that delusion? I fear it may be so. What is your Christianity? A letter, a written creed, a small placard that can be published, containing a few so-called fundamental points and lines? Is it an affair of words and phrases and sentences following one another in regulated and approved succession? If so, and only so, there is not one drop of Christ's blood in it: it is not Christianity, it is a little intellectual conceit, a small moral prejudice. Christianity is life, love, charity, nobleness it is sympathy with God.

My belief is that if Jesus Christ were to come into England to-day, the first thing he would do would be to condemn all places of so-called worship. What he would do with other buildings I cannot tell, but it is plain that he would shut up all churches and chapels. They are too narrow; they worship the letter; they are the idolaters of details; they are given up to the exaggeration of mint, rue, anise, cummin, herbs and weeds of the garden and the field; but charity, nobleness, honour, all-hopefulness, infinite patience with evil where are they? If judgment begins at the house of God, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? In disputing about the letter, the danger is that we neglect and despise the spirit; we quarrel about trifles; we are founders of sects and parties, and the champions of our own inventions; we pay tithe of mint and anise, and neglect the weightier matters of the law. The Christianity of this day, so far as I have been enabled to examine it, has no common meeting ground. If Jesus Christ came amongst us now he would have to call upon the leaders of the various denominations, and if he did not happen to begin at the right quarter he would have but scant hospitality. If he called upon the Independents first, the Plymouth Brethren would decline to see him; and if he called upon the Primitive Methodists in the first instance the Independents would urge the claims of an earlier ancestry. He would find us in pugilistic attitude, separated by cobwebs, or bickering and chaffering with one another over high walls, and pinning sheets of paper over little crevices in those walls lest any of the saintly air should get through to the other side. Is this the Church Christ died to redeem? Is this the blood-bought host? Where is our common meeting ground?

Let me now show you what religion had been brought to by the Scribes and Pharisees in their time. I called attention to some of these points in a discourse not long ago. I cannot do better than ask your attention again to those very points. Take the instance of Sabbath-keeping. To what pass do you suppose the Scribes and Pharisees had brought this matter of the fourth commandment? Recent writers upon the life of Christ have been at great pains in reading the Talmud (or doctrine), the Mishna (or repetition), and the Gemara (or supplement); and it would be amusing, if it were not distressing, to find how these theological carpenters have whittled away the broad, grand, solemn commandments of our Father in heaven. With regard to the Sabbatic observance, recent authorities tell us that the Scribes and their allies laid it down that a knot which could be untied with one hand might be untied on the Sabbath day, but not one that required both hands. A man might carry a burden upon his shoulder, but if that burden were slung between two, or even slung between the shoulders, the carrying of it would be a breach of the sanctity of the Sabbath day. It was unlawful to carry a loaf in the public streets on the Sabbath, but if two people carried the same loaf the act was good. It was so written in the Mishna and the Gemara. Understand this. If a man carried a loaf in the public streets, it was breaking the Sabbath Day; but if he got some other man to take hold of another end, they two could be carrying it without a breach of the commandment! This was the state of things when that carpenter's Son came into the world. The law forbade any visiting upon the Sabbath day when I say the law, I mean the traditional law yet the Scribes must visit; how then was this difficulty to be overcome? They fixed a chain at one end of the street, and another chain at the other end of the street, and they called the enclosure one house, and thus the painted hypocrites went backward and forward, dining and drinking, and feasting and revelling, and yet keeping the Sabbath day! Two thousand cubits was a Sabbath day's journey, but two thousand cubits was too short a walk for some of these traditionalists. What did they do? On the Friday they went two thousand cubits and deposited a loaf, and where a man deposited a loaf he was entitled to call the place his home for the time being. So the literalist walked his two thousand cubits to his loaf, and then began his Sabbath day's journey of two thousand cubits further on. Do you wonder that when a man whose soul was aflame with righteousness came into such corruption, he damned the society of his day, and said it was not in the kingdom of heaven? This is the way to try Christ, this will show you what he was no trimmer, no oscillating theological pendulum, now here, now there but a fire, a judgment, a stern word, a living critic of the corrupt heart. It is in such instances as these that I see the shining of his real personality, and it is in such denunciations as are in the text that I see the beginning of his crucifixion.

When the Pharisee invited him to dine, he went in and sat down to meat without washing his hands, and the Pharisee marvelled that he should eat with hands unwashed. His marvelling was audible in all probability, and Jesus Christ answered it with the severest denunciation. We cannot understand the importance which was attached by the Pharisees and others to the washing of hands before eating. Not to wash the hands before a meal was, we are told by competent annotators, equal to homicide. Dwell upon that fact for one moment. Not to wash the hands before eating was, in the estimation of the Pharisees, an act equal to the killing of a man. Jesus Christ, knowing this, went into the house of the Pharisee, and sat down to eat without hand-washing. Did it take no courage so to act upon personal conviction? Was this a weak-minded man, was this an effeminate Redeemer? Does it cost nothing to rise up in daily, manly protest against the most settled and cherished usages of the time? Give him the honour due to his energy, consider the circumstances by which he was surrounded, and then tell me if he was the carpenter's son or the Son of God.

So far was this matter carried by the Pharisees that no man, but themselves probably, could touch the parchment or skin upon which the law was written without being pronounced unclean. So we learn from those who take an interest in such studies that the question was asked of them, "How is it that a man can touch the pages of Homer and be clean, and yet he cannot touch the parchment or skin on which the law is written without being defiled?" The answer was, "Because of the peculiar sacredness of the law." Thus extremes meet. It was because the law was so holy, that no man might touch the parchment on which it was written without being pronounced ceremonially defiled. And one commentator tells us that there was something like an ironical and sarcastic joke among the people of the time, who said to those high authorities in the law, "How is it that we can touch the bones of a dead ass without contracting pollution, and yet cannot touch the bones of John Hyrcanus, the most saintly of the High Priests, without being unclean?" And the casuistic answer was, "Because Hyrcanus was a holy man, and his very holiness caused those who touched his bones to be unclean."

It was to this pass that religion had been brought by the Scribes and Pharisees, the traditionalists and the literalists of the time before Christ. There were hundreds of refinements, colourings, degrees of violation of the law and breaches of requirements of the letter, and it required a man a lifetime to read all that had been written as to the violation of the law, so that by the time he had become acquainted with all the traditional exactions and requirements of the literalists he was an old man. Can you wonder that when an earnest soul came to take charge of the kingdom of heaven upon earth, he sent a fire on such paper palaces and devoured the walls of such sectarian and monstrous restrictions? Jesus Christ came to give liberty. "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." With the besom of destruction he swept these things into the sea. He said, "Away with them, the kingdom of heaven is purity, peace, love, charity."

What say you to following this new Leader? I like his tone, it sounds like the tone of an honest heart. But for him we should have fallen in the wake of these men, in all probability; and our religion would have consisted of innumerable lines of exact requirements, punctual observance, ceremonial cleanness, until our souls would have been vexed within us, and life would have been reduced to one daily chafe and fret. Jesus Christ came and said, "The kingdom of heaven is within you. What doth the Lord thy God require of thee, O man, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God?" "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."

This question arises, and I would put it with the sharpest emphasis of which the human voice is capable, were it in my power to do so What is our religion? I dare not ask what mine is. It is church-going, it is ceremony, it is going to a particular church, it is singing out of a particular hymn-book, it is being set within a certain regular surrounding of circumstances. I am so afraid of my religion I speak of mine that I may not reproach others becoming a question of routine and regulation. I now ask a man to put down on paper what he believes, then I take it up and I examine it, and I say, "You are orthodox." To another man I say, "Put down on paper what you believe." The man writes it. I examine it, and say, "Heterodox." The orthodox man has gone out of the church. I ask him to bring in his week's report of work done, and he says, "I bound your certificate upon my forehead, I went amongst men as orthodox, and I have sent at least two hundred people to hell for not believing what I believe. I got them to put down on paper what they believed, and I found they did not know what they did believe, and so I sent them all to perdition, and I have waked up the church; and I will do the same next week." Heterodox man, bring in your report. How does it read? "Visited ten poor families, gave each of them five shillings and a word of encouragement, and told them to send for me if I could be of any help to them at any time. Saw a poor woman sitting on a doorstep, without a friend or a home in the world

Made an appointment with her, gave her something to be going on with, and I intend to see this woman as often as possible, until I get her established in life." Who is the Christian?

What, then, is Christianity? A broken heart on account of sin going to Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, the Son of God, the wounded One, the Priest, and saying