Matthew 5:33-48

Chapter 20

The Beatitudes In Practical Form On Taking Oaths the Personal Resistance of Evil on Borrowing and Lending

Prayer

Almighty God, we cannot mistake thy word, it is as fire and it is as music, it is as the sound of a mighty wind from heaven there is none like it; our hearts know thy voice, and when we follow thy word thy blessing upon us is like a great wave. Thou hast written for us thy book", thou hast given unto us thy Holy Spirit for its interpretation and for the enlightenment of our mind; enable us to receive thy book, not as the word of man, but as the express deliverance and message of heaven. Save us from all the reading of the letter, that does not see into the meaning of the infinite Spirit, bring us into sympathy with thine own purpose whilst we read thy wondrous words. We long to hear thy voice; it will soothe us, it will give us courage, it will answer every rising inquiry and repel every urgent temptation. Let thy voice fill the hearing of our soul to-day and make us glad with the music of heaven.

Give us release from the anxieties and torments of a worldly life; lift us above the cares and distresses incident to an earthly pilgrimage, and bring us into thine inner chamber, where our hearts shall see the radiance of thy face, and our life shall be lifted up into a new and immortal hope. Thou hast been with us in the valley of the week, and even in the darkness we have seen where the flowers were, and our hands have" been filled with their beauty. Thou hast caused us to pass over stony places, yet even in the rock hast thou found a river of water, so that we have not died in the wilderness by reason of thirst. Where the water has been bitter thou hast given us a plant to heal its bitterness, thou hast turned upon us an eye brighter than the morning, and upon our enemies thou hast turned a cloud darker than the night. Because of thy great goodness we are here this day, living, with hearts uplifted heavenward, with a great desire going out after thyself that our souls may be completed in perfection and soothed with peace.

Hear us whilst we confess our sin, and whilst we mourn our iniquity. Let thy forgiveness, through Jesus Christ our one Priest and only Saviour, be greater than all our guilt. When we sin most we most need him, for he is the Saviour of the world and the Redeemer of those that are in bondage. Bring us all round his cross, and high above all the writing of those who slew him may we see the superscription traced by thine own hand, "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."

We put ourselves into thine hands for guidance, direction, sustenance, and all things needful. We shall die tomorrow, but to die is to live, if so be we die unto the Lord. Our days are thinning down, so much so that we see through the remainder of them and behold the tomb at the other end. Yet, though our days be few, we would live them as industrious servants, being found diligent and faithful, stooping down to our work with a hearty good will, and doing it in all the strength and fear and hope of God.

We commend one another with mutual love to thy gentle care. Garry our sick ones in thy great arms, press our little ones to thine infinite heart, kiss the tears of our sorrow from our reddened cheek, and give us a time of sunshine, when the storm has spent itself upon our poor life. Help every man who wishes to do better to realize this solemn hope; to every man who would lift himself up by thy grace and strength so as to catch the full shining of thy light, give grace, strength, comfort, and renewal of confidence every day. If any heart be set upon evil and any hand be trying to find what mischief it can work, the Lord confound the counsel of those who are wrong and overturn the purpose of those who know not and fear not thy name.

Thy word awaits us, may we await its deliverance, may it come to us with great power and breadth, great simplicity and unction may every heart throw open its gates to give right loving welcome to the kingdom of Christ. The Lord direct us in everything, individually, congregation ally, socially, and nationally. Give righteousness and a spirit of mercy and judgment to all who are in high places. God save the Queen, and add many unto the days of her life; the Lord himself rule the nation and make us glad under his sovereignty. Send light and truth, purity and peace all over the world, and make the whole earth thy sanctuary, thou who didst redeem it with blood.

Hear us in these our uttered prayers, and as for the desires we may not and cannot speak, read them every one, as they lie unuttered in the heart. Wherein they point towards truth and better life and penitence and nobler purpose, thou wilt give them infinite answers "of satisfaction and peace. Amen.

Matthew 5:33-48 .

33. Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths:

34. But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne:

35. Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of. the great King.

36. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black.

37. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

38. Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:

39. But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

40. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

41. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

42. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

43. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

44. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

45. That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

46. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

47 And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

48. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is perfect.

We had some difficulty in understanding the beatitudes, the music seemed to be too exquisite and refined for the rough instruments at our disposal. We hastened over them, rather than deliberately read them As your teacher, I had a purpose in this; I knew that the beatitudes would all come up again in practical form. Who can understand abstract and purely spiritual truth? But that which is impossible from one point of view may be rendered comparatively easy from another. Jesus Christ now proceeds to give examples upon what we might call the black board. When he said, looking it whilst he did say it, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," we did not understand the meaning of the unfathomable doctrine. When he said, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," we thought he was speaking of himself, or of strangers, for we had never come within the sacred lines described by that simple yet immeasurable word, meekness. Now he is proceeding from doctrine to exhortation, and you will find under his exhortations the whole set of the beatitudes: he is giving you now to drink out of the wells he dug when he laid down the doctrine.

I cannot tell what he means by purity of heart, so he approaches my dull understanding with this practical direction Do not be angry with your brother without a cause, do not call your brother by contemptuous names, do not describe any man wilfully and maliciously as a fool. I think these are easy exhortations, and when I begin to give them incarnation in my life I find they are supreme difficulties; I have not motive force in me enough to carry this tremendous engine along. Now I take him aside and say privately in the house, "I know now something of what you meant when you said, Blessed are the pure in heart." "Yes," he replies, "that was my purpose, and if your heart be not right you will never be able to do the apparently simple duties which I have now indicated. Unless there be pureness of heart there will be pollution of lips, unless there be rightness of heart there will be hidden and baleful fire in the spirit, and it will express itself in contempt and malice, and harshness and cruelty." So now that he comes into practical particulars, I find that they balance the spiritual doctrine which I could not understand. But I will try to do the duty I shall be led back into the doctrine, and be made to feel that I cannot work with the hand except it expresses the inspiration of a cleansed heart So when he says to me, "If a man smite thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other also;" when I ask, "How is this to be done?" he says, "Recall the beatitudes." I then endeavour to remember what he said in the spiritual part of his discourse, and this sweet word returns to my memory "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." When I heard that sentence the first time I dismissed it as a very beautiful conception, a high and beautiful theory, written in clouds and illustrated with sunset colours; but now that it comes down to me in a practical form, I find it was no cloudy revelation, no mere touch of intellectual beauty, no flash of the moral imagination, but something sound, honest, vital, divine. So it is no use telling a man to turn the other cheek to the man who has smitten him if he has not first turned his heart towards meekness. You cannot put on meekness except as you put on paint that can be washed off. If you have not the meek heart, you cannot do the meek deed. Do not play at meekness, do not simulate meekness; let us hide ourselves with Christ, who is meek and lowly in heart, then we shall be exactly what he meant when he told us that when we were smitten on one cheek we had to turn the other also. Throughout the whole of these practical exhortations you will find that he is reducing the beatitudes or spiritual doctrines to spiritual form and expression.

Let us now go a little into detail to establish this with some breadth of illustration. "Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths." That is, you have heard it laid down broadly that you are not to commit perjury: having taken a vow, you must be faithful to it; having uttered your oath, you must carefully and deliberately reduce it to practice. It must not be made a dead letter, it must net be evaded, it must not be inverted, there must be no perjury or false-swearing or foregoing of the most sacred oaths of life; but I say unto you, that that is a very poor advancement in the right direction. So far as it goes it is right enough, but go forward, follow me, so as to relieve yourself from the necessity of ever swearing at all. That is to say, let your heart be so sincere that your speech must be simple; cultivate that state of heart in the sight of God which naturally and necessarily, by virtue of the divine compulsion, expresses itself in simple, transparent, and beauteous sincerity and simplicity.

I do not understand the Saviour as forbidding what is known as judicial oath-taking or swearing. He always recognised certain necessities of the time, and he adapted his revelation from the beginning to the hardness of the hearts of those whom he had to instruct. But he was bound to point to the ultimate line he set up of ideal conversation. It is his purpose to make us so like himself that we cannot but speak exactly what is true. Consider the monstrousness of any man speaking only what is true because he has sworn to do it. That man is a liar. In his very nature and blood he is false, if he will only speak that which is true simply on the ground that he has taken an oath to do it. There can be no formal truthfulness: sincerity is a condition of heart; it is not the result of a mechanical contrivance coming out of the kissing a certain book under a certain adjuration. Jesus Christ therefore educates the race up to the point of not needing to swear or affirm or declare, with unusual emphasis. He would have our very breathing to be the expression of our hearts' condition, so that if a man said Yea, he meant that, and that only: if he said Nay, there was no mental reservation, no subtle and unexpressed equivocation of meaning, no intention, deep down in the heart, to take advantage of a certain set of terms under a certain set of circumstances that is the deep and glorious meaning of the Son of God. Be so right within as to be incapable of uttering one word that is not pure as light and as fire. It is to that high result he would bring us. We are dull scholars, and the teacher has yet an infinite work before him.

Jesus Christ then addressed himself to certain little trickeries that were in custom amongst the people. He told them not to swear by heaven, nor by earth, nor by Jerusalem, nor by the head. Why did he go into this detail? Because such was the corruption of his age, that there were great and learned men who laid it down as right to break any oath in which you could not find, in so many letters, the name Jehovah. There was one great man in history who openly avowed that he felt himself to be at liberty to break any oath in which he did not expressly use the word God. If the word God had passed his lips he felt himself bound in honour to fulfil his oath, but if he sware by heaven, by the altar, by the queen, by his hair, by his palace, he did but gather so much straw as he could cast into the fire of his passion and burn when he pleased. Jesus Christ, with that marvellous comprehensiveness of teaching which is characteristic of his school, proceeds to show that, though you may not have the name of God in your oath, whatever you touch is sacred and has God in it. "Swear not by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is his city; nor by thine head, for he fashioned it and clothed it, and thou canst not make one hair white or black." So he delivered the term God from its consisting of so many letters and syllables, and showed that the whole universe was alive with God, and that to swear by a stone was to invoke the Creator that formed it. To be under such a Teacher is an inspiration, to hear such a man is to expose yourself to the mountain breeze or a whiff of ocean air full of life and giving life.

Take the next particular. "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you that ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on the one cheek turn to him the other also, and if any man shall sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And if any man compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain." We all know to what absurdities and iniquities a merely literal acceptance of these words would lead. You nibble at the meaning of Christ when you begin to think that you see it all in these bare words, as they would be understood by the unenlightened and unspiritual mind. What is Jesus Christ teaching here? He is teaching the great principle of forbearance or long-suffering. He quells all human passion, and sets upon human revenge the seal of his displeasure. Revenge is not to enter into our thoughts. As to self-protection it is written in our nature; it is not a debased instinct, it was in the original Adam, the divinely-shaped and divinely-inspired man, and the very first word spoken to the man constituted an appeal to this instinct, "Take care; in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Protect thyself." It cannot be taken out of our manhood, this instinct of self-preservation; it can be sanctified, moderated, ennobled, and this is what Christ meant it to be. I may smite in judgment or I may smite in revenge, but the individual man who is injured cannot smite in judgment. I smite in temper that is the very thing forbidden. We caution a man against taking the law into his own hands that is exactly what Jesus Christ means in this direction. You ought not to have taken the law into your own hands Why? Because you were only an individual and the individual is incomplete. What, then, should I have done? You should have referred it to the complete man. What is his name? Society. Society will lay its terrific hand upon the man that smote you. When will you learn that you are only a part and not a whole, a fraction and not an integer? The judge, when he sits upon the bench and condemns a fellow-creature to penal servitude for life, is not an individual, he is the embodiment of Society, the representative of the latest civilization of his time and land. If you, being smitten on one cheek, turn round and smite the man who smote you, you may both be taken before the judge. Rather than that, turn to him the other also. Leave your defence and his punishment in the hands of the social man, the aggregate humanity, the judge.

This is exactly what Christ did himself. Christ did not personally resist evil. He exemplified the very doctrine now being explained. Personally, when he was reviled, he reviled not again, when he suffered he threatened not; he gave his back to the smiters and his cheeks to them that pluck off the hair. But as Judge, not the Jesus of Nazareth, but the Son of Man, he shall come in his glory and all the holy angels with him he shall divide the nations and open hell under the feet of those that despised him. We believe that thou wilt come to be our Judge. Every eye shall see him, they that pierced him shall mourn because of him, those whose hands are wettest and reddest with human blood shall seek mercy of the rocks and pity of the mountains, for the wrath of his face shall scourge them like the fire that awaits their coming. Resist not evil, do not take the law into your own hands; personally be meek, forbearing, long-suffering, show that the spirit of revenge has no place in you, show that you would rather suffer wrong than do wrong, take the larger view, be gentle, hopeful, noble, and as to your sufferings, there is an organised anger that shall burn the adversary, there is a judicial scourge that shall cut to his bone. "Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord," and he repays through organised society, through enlightened and established civilization, and by a thousand ministries which we can neither name nor measure.

"And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain." This refers to the system of forced courierships. In ancient times and oriental lands, messages were delivered by couriers, persons were required to show the way to strangers. If you were lost upon a mountain or in a valley, it was part of your right to insist upon any person who was in the neighbourhood to go with you part of the road; to help you out of your difficulty. Persons could be compelled to bear messages and letters. One Simon, a Cyrenian, was compelled to bear the cross. Who would not carry that every mile he has yet to walk? The Saviour said, "If a man compel you to go a mile with him to show him the road, go two rather than not go at all. Show a cheerful disposition under the pressure, let your philanthropy absorb your convenience."

"Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away." We all know that society would be wrecked in a very short time if this rule were to be literally applied. In fact it bears upon its face the proof that it does not admit of application in the way which the mere literalist would expect. It is too broad to mean anything as a mere letter; it is, as the lawyers say, void by generality. It means so much as to mean nothing. And yet it must have some profound signification? Certainly. Where shall we find that signification? In God's own government, just as we find the explanation of non-resistance in Christ's own conduct. God does not do this himself, as the literalist would interpret it. He does it in the nobler and larger way which is of no use to the mere devotee of the letter. Let me explain. I ask God to give me what I mention to him, yet he turns away. Then he tells me to give to the man that asketh of me. I must find the meaning of these words in the course of his own action. I would borrow of God, and yet he turns away from my cry. He judges what is best for me, what is good for me: He Says "No" to many a prayer: many a desire of mine that I have sent out towards the heavens has fallen back upon the door-sill like a wounded bird. I know now what Christ means: he teaches me clemency, sympathy, he developes in me an interest in human affairs, he saves me from absurdity and folly and recklessness and from putting myself into the very position in which I should have gone to repeat the doctrine he lays down, and thus keep up a system and action of absurd borrowing, now one man having it and now another, and so passing it between themselves through every hour of the day.

If you want to find the meaning of these sweet words, you can easily find them. Do not try to discover it in the letter. Whenever you are clement, sympathetic, large-hearted, kind-handed, you are going in the direction of the meaning of this passage. Jesus is not laying down little laws and small maxims, he is developing infinite principles which can be applied in every climate, and which can embody themselves under all the various circumstances which make up all the changefulness of human life.

That I am right in seeking the explanation of the whole doctrine in myself and in God is proved by what Jesus Christ immediately adds, "That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven," that you may do in your degree as he does upon an infinite scale. He does not answer every petition, he turns away from some requests, he knows that difficulty has a place in the discipline and sanctification of life, and he uses the rod as sometimes the only admissible lesson. I would be taught by him, I would be like him, I would err, as we sometimes say, on the liberal side rather than on the ungenerous. I would rather be taken in than take in any human creature, I would rather try to find the means of healing a man than sourly turn away from his distressed face and his faltering voice. If that be my disposition of heart, I am in the school of Christ.

But take these exhortations as you like, you cannot give their application, without you have help from heaven. It is not in man that liveth to work out this sublime morality, it is not in the human heart as at present existing to find room for these divinities. He who made the heart must disinfect it, cleanse it, enlarge it to give hospitality to such guests.