Matthew 5:17 - Homilies By R. Tuck

The true relations of the old and the new.

"I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." "As a Teacher, our Lord came to fill up what was lacking, to develop hints and germs of truth, to turn rules into principles." Phillips Brooks says, "When Jesus came into the world to establish the perfect religion, he found here an imperfect faith. How should he treat this partial, this imperfect faith, which was already on the ground? He might do either of two things. He might sweep it away, and begin entirely anew, or he might take this imperfect faith and fill it out to completeness. He might destroy or he might fulfil. With the most deliberate wisdom he chose one method and rejected the other." A distinction may be pointed out between man's idea of the relations of the old and the new, and God's idea.

I. MAN 'S OLD MAY BE REPLACED . He does not build a new house as a development of the old one; he takes the old one down and puts the new in its place. And this is illustrative of man's methods in all his spheres of education and science and religion. Man reforms by destroying. The iconoclast begins our better days. The scientific teacher first destroys the theories of his predecessors. For man there is a constant succession of something like absolute new beginnings, because there is no guaranteed truth in man ' s old.

II. GOD 'S OLD MUST BE FULFILLED . It can never be destroyed, because it is a step in a series, a piece of a plan, a process in a growth. It is not only true for the time, it is true for all time, but getting expression in adaptation to a particular time. Illustrate by the fruit fulfilling the seed. The seed remains in the fruit, finding there its developed form, or its fitlfilment. Show that it is not precise to say that our Lord's new teaching replaced Mosaism, or even absorbed Mosaism. It developed it, realized it, fulfilled it, fruited it. Christianity is the spirituality of the Mosaism liberated from the chrysalis of formal commands, and set free to show itself as the beautiful winged thing that it is. God's new is always his glorified old. —R.T.