Numbers 15:37-41

The Fringes and Their Meaning

Num 15:37-41

The word garments is used with a special direction. The Lord was very careful about the raiment or garment of his people. The Lord's eyes are upon his people's apparel. We want to make him simply a Figure in theology to confine him within the radiant lines of what to us is an invisible heaven. But God will not so be treated. He lives with us in the house; he will make our bed in our affliction; he will turn the house round that it may catch the morning light, if the morning light is best for us. He will keep our books, and watch all our steps; he will conduct the blind man across the busy thoroughfare, and he will set a singing bird in the poor man's little house. "The very hairs of your head are all numbered." Why make a theological fancy of God? That is practical blasphemy. It is not worship; it is ill-treatment of the divine idea and the divine personality. God would have a seat in our house, a desk in our business, a pen in our library; he would rule our whole life, and make us his companions and friends. From the first he took an interest in the raiment of the people; he knew that poverty was no transient distress, but a part of the general life of the human family; so he made arrangements even about pawnbroking, saying, "If thou at all take thy neighbour's raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by that the sun goeth down" (Exodus 22:26 .) Pawnbroking was to be but for a few bright hours of the day; as soon as the chill evening came down the pledge was to be restored. Why? The garment referred to was a large foursquare cloth; in the middle of it a hole was cut through which the head could pass, so that the whole cloth fell round the body of the wearer. That garment was both a day garment and a blanket for the night. Allowing, therefore, such would seem to be the divine reasoning that a man can do without his outer cloth for a few hours whilst the sun is shining for the sunshine is a kind of cloak yet remember that the nights are cold and thy neighbour must not be allowed to lie down to sleep without being properly covered. This is what the Lord says in so many words in Exodus 22:27 : "For that is his covering only, it is his raiment for his skin: wherein shall he sleep? and it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto me, that I will hear; for I am gracious." Let us understand the meaning of this gospel tone. When the cold man cries because for want of his raiment he cannot sleep when he had to pawn his raiment for bread, "I will hear" his cry. What is the reason for hearing the cry? "for I am gracious" I care for men who cannot sleep because of the cold; I care for children who cannot sleep because they are hungry; the foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, how then can I forget my own image and likeness? my heart hears: my heart responds. At the four corners of this cloth were four tassels or fringes. The tassels or fringes were called Craspeda. Great sanctity was attached to these tassels by the Jews: hence the poor woman's declaration: "If I may but touch a Craspedon I shall be healed." We miss the whole meaning of the passage by thinking of the hem of the garment in the ordinary sense of the term. The garment was foursquare; the head was put through it; at each of the corners there was a fringe or a tassel; each tassel was called a Craspedon; each tassel was regarded with great seriousness by the Jewish mind; it represented great thoughts, and even the divine presence itself: hence the poor woman, knowing this, said within herself "If I may but touch one of the tassels if I may but touch one of the fringes, I shall be healed." So these Craspeda were not mere ornaments in dress: they were full of typical ideas, if not of moral virtues. Speaking of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus Christ says ( Mat 23:5 ) "They make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments" they are great in tassels and fringes: they enlarge them that they may in some way write upon them words from the law, and appear unto men, not only to be very learned in wisdom, but to be excellent patterns of virtue. The ordinary tassel was not enough for the Pharisee; the customary fringe is too small for the pedantic scribe, therefore the fringes must be enlarged, the writings must be multiplied, and a more ostentatious display of virtue must be made to the public eye.

Is all this passed and done with? It can never be obsolete so long as human nature is human nature. If the Lord permit us to wear a fringe or a tassel, or any outward and typical sign of adoption and sonship, we are by so much exposed to insidious and mighty temptation. Yet we must have something to look at and something to touch, for we ourselves are in the body, and all the creation that we can see is a creation tangible, substantial, full of allegorical writing, it may be, which only skilled eyes can read. Still this visible creation must have some correspondence in the invisible creation into which we are called through Christ, the Keeper of the kingdom. We cannot be trained according to divine purpose except we have the outward, the material, and the visible. These gifts are of divine appointment. God recognises our need of them, and he supplies them, and names them, and specifies their uses. But who can be trusted with line or image, with tassel or fringe, with book or censer, with anything that appeals to the eye and the touch, without misunderstanding God and exaggerating the purpose of the thing visible and tangible, and thus passing through into all manner of superstition and idolatry? God has given us tassels and fringes to the great garment of the spiritual gift in Christ Jesus his Son, and we have misunderstood them, and what were divine gifts to begin with have been turned into temptations by which our worship has fallen into a species of feeble or contemptible idolatry. God has given us the Sabbath day. A most beautiful gift if we could have regarded it within the divine intention, and have accepted God's sweet purpose implied in the great donation; but we must needs meddle with it and enlarge the tassel, and make broad the phylacteries and the borders, and write upon God's spring day all manner of narrow-minded and evil writing of our own invention; or we must needs make hard what God made soft with pity, and gracious with love; we must make the day into the sourest of the week, instead of the smile of the passing time; we must be pedantic, stern, iron-bound, exacting in a most narrow-minded and despotic degree; and this we do to show our noble piety! This is Pharisaism. We condemn ancient Pharisaism the more vehemently that we do not understand what we are condemning, for ignorance has no bounds. But let us be careful whilst we recognise the divine tassel, fringe, or ribband of blue, that we accept it in God's sense, and with God's limitation and purpose; then it shall be unto us Heaven's own sign a visible thing by which we enter into invisible meanings and invisible liberties. But Pharisaic virtue will be meddling; it will add one hour to the Sabbath day: it will begin a little earlier than was at first intended; it will make its face sour and its fingers hard, and it will lay upon people exactions intolerable, whilst it, by some way unknown to the people, will sneak off to the enjoyment of its own wicked luxuries. In this way the fringe of the Sabbath has been enlarged by Pharisaic impiety and ostentation, and the sweet idea of sleep, rest, renewal, reinvigoration, worship, psalm, sacrifice of a spiritual kind, all these have been subordinated or lost. He does not keep the Sabbath who merely talks about it. Sabbath-keeping is an affair of the heart. You cannot keep the Sabbath by Act of Parliament; you may close every business in the kingdom by imperial statute, but when you have done so, unless there be a consenting heart, every place devoted to business in the kingdom is more open on the Sabbath than it was on the common week day. We must cultivate love of the Sabbath spirit before we can have obedience to the Sabbath law; we must recall the idea of Christ's resurrection and believe in its historical reality, or we cannot have a day to celebrate what never took place. We do not keep the birthdays of people who were never born. The birthday represents a historical reality in the family an advent, a sweet epiphany, an incoming of a stranger who shall never be stranger more. Lose the idea of the birth, and the birthday must go; lose the idea of the resurrection of Christ, and the Sabbath will come only to be misunderstood, and will pass away in contempt or in violation of its claims.

The Lord has given us two tassels called the Sacraments. Look at the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. It was meant as a memorial; it was a sublime appeal to the memory of the heart. Said the dying Son of God, "This do in remembrance of me." A simple feast: a Supper which the poorest man can have at his own little deal table, if so be he will drink one little drop of water and taste one crumb of bread, nay, he can even do without these things if he eat and drink with the Spirit Into what enlargement of priestly pomp and meaning has that Sacrament been brought! What magic has been used over the bread and the cup! What with transubstantiation and consubstantiation, and all the polysyllables of the theologues, we have lost the Supper. Memory has now next to no function to perform in connection with that Sacrament. The priest must operate upon the elements, some mysterious process must take place in the bread and in the cup; and not until such priestly pranks have been played may the common people touch these things, nay, in some churches, they may not touch them at all, especially one of the elements: it is enough if the priest drink in some kind of representative capacity. They have enlarged the borders of their garments. The blue ribband was right, the fringe was of divine appointment, God meant the robe to have its tassels; but we have enlarged and vitiated and perverted and played all manner of tricks, and exercised every possible species of invention. "God made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions" and God does not know the tassels he appointed because of the enlargements and the discolourings invented and accomplished by depraved human genius.

God has given us another tassel in the Bible. He knew we could not do without a book: he made the Bible as small as possible; never book had so much matter crushed into it every line a living stem of a living vine; the very punctuation seems to be part of the common vitality. But it is possible to make a fetish or idol of the Bible; it is possible to make it a mere gathering of isolated texts to be fingered by men as they may be pleased to manipulate the thousand beads of heaven. So we have the Bible misunderstood little detached texts thrust into wrong perspective and relation. We have lost the Biblical spirit in pedantic reverence for the Biblical letter. We have never yet seen in all its fulness that the letter is trying to tell something which it can never tell in all the amplitude of its meaning, and we have been afraid lest we should lose the spirit by not properly regarding the letter. Believe me, God's Book is a revelation. Everything is contained in it. The Book cannot be enlarged by human hands: it enlarges itself. You can enlarge the loaf of bread by your hands whilst that loaf is in process of formation, but you must keep your fingers off the growing blade and ear of wheat; let the baker deal with the dough he may not touch that living, golden thing which, through great agony and travail down in the darkness, has pierced the sod and come breathingly and lovingly up into the mellowing and ripening light. It is even so with God's Book. It needs no vindication. Your manufactured bread may need to be announced and weighed and justified to the public examiner and the public taste; but God's wheat is not to be so regarded. How it grew he has never told us; in all the information he has conveyed to the human family, he has never told us where the wind is, how the wheat grows; he has kept these things so palpable and obvious in their appearances to himself, as to the secret of their origin and movement. The vindication which the Bible asks for is to be seen, to be read. The Bible does not begin at the Book of Kings, or in the middle of the volume; the Bible simple as the statement may appear begins at the beginning, where so few people have ever begun; they have used the Bible as if it began nowhere, and could be opened promiscuously and understood in the most casual manner. The Bible has its own beginning, its own line of evolution, and it must be begun and perused according to its own genesis and law if its music is to be heard, and if human life is to fall into rhythm with its majestic purpose. Nothing is easier than to pervert the Bible. More mischief can be done by incompetent persons talking about the Bible and in its favour than ever can be done by the most skilful and obstinate assailants of its inspiration. The Bible has more to fear from its friends than from its enemies. I will vary the phrase and say, the Bible has nothing to fear from opposition; sometimes even it may tremble under the shadow of patronage.

All these the Sabbath, the Sacraments, the Bible, the Sanctuary are divine institutions, tassels ordained and declared in heaven; but we must be careful to ascertain where the divine ends and the human begins. The Pharisees have meddled with the fringes; the scribes have performed magical tricks upon the tassels. It is so with the ministry of the Gospel. The ministry of the Gospel is a divine institution; but how we have meddled with it and made it less in trying to make it larger! The ministry of the Gospel is a ministry of brotherhood, sympathy great human love. It has been made into a priestly trick and has been invested with sacerdotal sanctions, and men constables of their own appointment have stood at the pulpit stairs to keep away persons who were supposed not to be authorised. The great authorisation of the preacher is first of God, and next of the common people. The common people will soon tell you whom God has called to the ministry. The congregation is judge. You cannot deceive the great common heart; it knows the elect man: the very first sentence he utters is recognised as genuine or as counterfeit. The people, the common people, all the people, they stand next to God in this matter: " Vox populi, vox Dei ." The question has sometimes been asked Do the common people hear us "gladly"? That question ought not to be asked until another has been answered: Do we preach to the common people in great human words, in tears of compassion, in genuine, manly, Christian sympathy? Blessed be God, the common people will never listen to theology, to polysyllables, to wordy refinements. The common people can understand the sunshine and respond to its sublimity; but they cannot understand many of the lights which men have invented and patented and heavily charged for. So with truth. The great fringe truth has been enlarged by opinions. Opinion has been enthroned. Not until we distinguish between truth and opinion can we distinguish between God's fringe and the Pharisee's phylactery. When any man has spoken whatever his name, intellectual capacity, moral pith, or rhetorical eloquence he has only announced a series of opinions. He can so announce them as to make himself ridiculous, offensive, as to usurp a divine position. But the truth underlies opinion, is different from opinion, admits of great variety of opinion. As the sun will grow all kinds of flowers, and the good old mother earth will let all flowers grow within the bounds of her hospitality, so truth will admit of all shades of opinion, all varieties of expression. Why can we not recognise this, and clasp hands in spiritual brotherhood, every man having a right to his own opinion and being bound to society in nothing but in the reality and sincerity of his soul?

We must not go the other extreme, and do away with profession tear off the ribband of blue, and the fringe on the borders of the garment, and say, We will have nothing more to do with these things. They are all divine appointments. The sanctuary is God's; the coming together of men to worship is itself a holy act. You cannot worship individually, in the fullest sense of the term. What is an individual? There is no such thing; society has rendered that impossible. God is the Author of society; God is the Author of humanity. Only in some narrow or limited sense can a man offer any worship in solitude. He is part of a band a great organisation built for music. In some sense it may be true that a man considerably under six feet high may take hold of a gun and sword and say he will go out and fight as an individual wherever the war may be; but such an action needs hardly to be named to bring upon itself the contempt which it deserves. The individual is part of a larger individuality; the person is part of the larger person called the army. To your ranks! To your regiments! When the trumpet-blast sounds, it sounds an appeal and an instruction to the whole body of men. Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together, as the manner of some is. A man who is not a churchgoer is a bad man, in some sense, or an incomplete man in others; he has fallen below a right comprehension of human relations and social connections and reciprocations. Behold the solitary wanderer who has gone away by himself on the holy Sabbath morning! he is going to "hear the birds sing" and "the brooks ripple and gurgle," and "see the hyacinths and the violets" behold him there! Was ever irony more complete? He has missed the divine idea. He should have said, No; to the centre! to the meeting-place! to the rendezvous! together, all together, common prayer, common song, common study; and then radiate as you please, carrying the public personality with the narrow individualism, and enlarging the little unit by the infinite completeness of human nature. We need some outward help. We love to hear somebody pray when we are very lonely and dyingly sick. To hear another human voice is a hint of fellowship, a hint of consolidation, a hint of heaven. We could pray by ourselves, mayhap. Not altogether. It will do us good if some man has force enough to pray aloud; the very audibleness of the speech will bring a kind of society into the chamber; we shall feel the larger by hearing some sympathetic voice arguing, pleading, with God; the walls of the chamber will be broken down and the boundary line will be a horizon, the roof will be removed and the blue ceiling will be heaven. We need the Sabbath day, the memorial Sacraments, the Holy Book, the preaching man, the fellow-suppliant, the congregation; but let us take care not to make more of these tassels than God intended. Let us take care lest by enlarging the fringe we destroy its meaning.

Note

The Law of Fringes. According to Herodotus, the dress of the Egyptians consisted of a linen garment, over which was worn a white woollen cloak or shawl. The former, which seems to have been often, if not generally, worn without the other, was fringed at the bottom. Concerning the form of this fringe perhaps nothing positive can be determined. Some endeavour to ascertain its character by examining the two Hebrew words by which it is expressed, ציצח tzizith , in the present text, and גדלים gedilim , in Deuteronomy 22:12 . The former of these words elsewhere (as in Eze 8:3 ) means a lock of hair; and the latter a rope, such as that with which Delilah bound Samson ( Jdg 14:11-12 ); and it is hence imagined that these fringes consisted of many threads which hung like hair, and were twisted like a rope. The "ribband" probably was either a blue thread twisted with a white one through the whole fringe, or a lace by which the fringe was fastened to the edge of the garment. Many commentators of authority think, from the explanation in Deut. xxii., that the "fringes" were no other than strings with tassels at the end, fastened to the four corners of the upper garment, the proper use of these strings being to fasten the corners together. Of this opinion are the modern Jews. What they understand by the direction of the text appears from Levi's description of the tzizith or robe in question. It is made of two square pieces with two long pieces like straps joined to them, in order that one of the said pieces may hang down before upon the breast, and the other behind; at the extremity of the four corners are fastened the strings, each of which has five knots besides the tassel, signifying the five books of the law. The rabbins, under whose instruction this profound analogy has been established, further observe that each string consisted of eight threads, which, with the number of knots and the numeral value of the letters in the word tzizith , make 613, which is, according to them, the exact number of the precepts in the law. From this they argue the importance of this command, since he who observes it, they say, in effect observes the whole law! The law seems to require that the fringes should be constantly worn; but as it would not consist with the costume of the countries through which the Jews are now dispersed to wear the fringed garment as an external article of dress, every Jew makes use of two a large one which is used only at prayers, and on some other occasions, and is then worn externally, and a small one which is constantly worn as an under-garment. The principal denomination of this article is Tzizith , on account of the fringes, in which all its. sanctity is supposed to consist; but the proper name of the vestment itself is Talith, and by this it is commonly distinguished.

There have been various conjectures as to the object of this law. The most probable is that, the "fringe" was intended as a sort of badge or livery, by which, as well as by circumcision and by the fashion of their beards, and by their peculiar diet, the Hebrews were to be distinguished from other people. Be this as it may, much superstition came in the end to be connected with the use of these fringes. The Pharisees are severely censured by our Saviour for the ostentatious hypocrisy with which they made broad the "border" of their garments.

Pictorial Commentary.

Prayer

Almighty God, to thy throne we come as if by right of love. Surely we have no right of conduct. Our behaviour would turn us away from places of light, but because of a love thou hast created in the heart we cannot be content with darkness; we yearn towards the morning; we would stand up in places full of glory and take part in every hymn of praise which celebrates thy pity and thy grace. This is the Lord's working in our hearts, this is the seal divine, this is the signature of Heaven; there is none like it, there is no mistaking it. We feel what we cannot explain that we have been born into a new life, have laid hold of a new relation, and are now standing in the strength and comfort of a covenant that cannot be broken. If for a moment we doubted this, we should be as men who think the clouds have put out the sun; we should reason wrongly, and make perverted use of thy promises and ministries in the soul. Yet it is difficult sometimes not to think that the sun is dead, that the clouds have conquered at last, and that the air is mightier than light. Thou wilt pity us herein, for our ignorance is our commendation as well as our infirmity. If we own it, thou wilt displace it by wisdom; if we obstinately cling to it, we may suffer the penalty of our folly. We are of yesterday and know nothing. We will not reason before thee; we will that thou wilt reason with us; so there shall be no argument on our side, except the argument of listening well, fixing upon thee the attention of our love and looking at thee with eyes of hunger. With this thou wilt be satisfied. Thou delightest in our upward look; to thee it is a great speech without words, a longing of the heart, a quick beating of the pulses. Behold, thou art worshipped by all the world in this form or in that; but it is after thee the nations yearn. They do not all know it, nor could many of them explain it, and some might even deny it; but, Lord, the earth groaneth for thee, and the peoples of the world are looking wistfully for thy coming. This day we all worship thee: some through the moles and the bats, some through hideous images; those of broader and livelier imagination through the sun and moon and stars, the dawning east and the purpling west; and some in this way and in that: some truly, wisely, by way of revelation, grasping the Cross, seeing the propitiatory Blood, owning the mighty Name, and sealing every prayer with the name of Christ; but the whole earth is thine. In our littleness we reject and classify and distinguish, but in thy greatness thou dost see the inner meaning of things the spiritual purpose, the ultimate design, and thou wilt judge righteous judgment and save many whom we would lose. We come before thee with different forms and conceptions of worship, but thou wilt interpret the motive and answer the heart's desire. Hear the little child, who can but say, Father, and then wait in troubled silence because other and equal words will not come; tell him it is the greatest prayer the unfinished cry, and the cry that never can be finished. Hear the sinner broken, shattered, and confounded, who can but sob, God be merciful to me a sinner. Stop him there as thou dost stop men who have built a whole tower; there is no need for further word, or speech, or plea; thou wilt stop it with an infinite reply, and come with much of blessing, yea, with festival and banqueting of soul to those who are alive at every point, who commune with thee in high imagining, in gracious fellowship, in tender yearning, through every form possible to the human mind, through all the mediums open to the access of the creature; and thus give a portion of meat to each in due season, and make us all forget the difference of way, and speech, and degree, in the enthusiasm of a common thankfulness, the burning of a unanimous love. We put ourselves into thy keeping. They are well kept whom thou keepest. Stand by the gate; watch the way to the heart; set a burning word near the tree of life to keep it from all trespass. Help us to do our duty bravely, wisely, tenderly, as strong and trustful hearts should do it. May we walk through the night as if it were a new form of day, may we plunge into the sea assured that the plunge will divide the waters, and may we face the wilderness as if it were a garden planted from on high; and when the way is beauteous and summer-lighted, full of song and sweetness and manifold delight, keep us from its fascinations and help us to make it but a dim, poor symbol of the paradise and the heavens which we have yet to realise. Amen.