Matthew 26:1-5

Chapter 86

Prayer

Almighty God, we know thee by our love: our hearts go out after thee in a great search, and come back with all thy grace glowing the soul and making the life new. We do not know thee by the mind, we cannot lay hold of thee by the senses, thou dost come secretly into the heart and speak to our meekness and love and modesty and waiting patience. Thou hast revealed thyself unto us in Jesus Christ, Son of man, Son of God, to us God the Son, bringing every secret of thy love to bear upon the necessity of our life, and redeeming us not with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of his own heart. We do not understand it, yet do we know it well: it is made plain to us by the agony of our heart: we see thy wonders through our tears, we hear thee best in the time of the silence of the night, thou dost shine upon us when all other lights are withdrawn. We feel after God, the heart goes out after thee in mute necessity, and yet in assurance that thou canst and will be found. This we know: we have tested it, and thou hast made us living witnesses of thy presence in our heart and life.

We were as sheep going astray, but now we have returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls; we had endeavoured to find for ourselves water in the wilderness, and behold we found none. We said we would smite the rocks and out of them would flow rivers of water; we smote the rocks and there was no answering stream. We have tried the world and found it a great emptiness, we have seized eagerly every offered cup and found in it nothing but death but we have come to Christ: he is bread and water, he is the soul's one satisfaction, we rest in him, we find in him the centre of our security and the assurance of our peace as we find in him the peace that is everlasting and the completion of our broken nature. He is our Saviour, and we call him such: thy Son and yet not ashamed to call us brethren, and we have fellowship with his heart, union with the inner spirit of his tenderest love, and because of this sympathetic intercourse we are lifted up into a new nature and intrusted with an infinite liberty and joy.

Thou dost come to us in occasional hours, thou dost take us up into a mountain and transfigure us, thou dost even lift us above the mountain and hide us in the luminous clouds, and there we hear sweet voices, grand with the music of old time, tremulous with answers to the present necessity. Send us down again from high raptures to willing service, to patient endurance, to waiting upon the helpless and the sick and comforting those that are ill at ease.

We commend one another with all confidence to thy tender care. Some need thee more than others, or so they say, and feel it, because of the urgency of the immediate pain: yet we all need thee equally, did we but know the case as it really is: not one can breathe without thee, we lift our hand because of thine almightiness, and we sit down and rest because of thy peace. Yet where there is consciousness of immediate need, a great crying pain in the heart, that importunes the Heavens and would seize the kingdom by violence, let thine answer be such as shall give special comfort to special distress.

Enable us to live our few days with all the simplicity of faith, with all the trust of immortal hope, and with all the delight of men who are assured that the very hairs of their head are all numbered and the time of their life is kept in Heaven. Is there not an appointed time to men upon the earth? Can our grave be dug before the hour which is written in Heaven? Is not every man immortal until his work is done? Give us this confidence, then shall we not be startled by accidents, and that which is a tragedy to the vain and the unprepared, will become the commonplace in the infinite movement of thy beneficent providence. Yet thou dost send upon us events with suddenness that break us down. If the blow be sudden, let the grace be an equal surprise: where the shock is startling and distressful, let the healing follow immediately and be the greater miracle.

Thou knowest who are in sorrow and great pain and who are made cold by bereavement and poor by the withdrawal of the choice life in whose smile the lesser lives all lay. O comfort those that mourn, and make our sorrows the roots of our joys. Amen.

Mat 26:1-5

Completeness of Divine Teaching

"When Jesus had finished all these sayings." Why not before? Why not have broken off the eloquent discourse midway, so that its latter music might never have been heard by the ages why not? Consider that question soberly and profoundly, and tell me, is there not an appointed time to man upon the earth, and can any great speech be interrupted until so much of it has been delivered as the ever watching and ever beneficent God deems to be enough? He punctuates our speeches: if it is better that they should be broken off at an intermediate stop, so be it: if it is better that they should go on to a full period and be sphered and rounded in logical and rhetorical completeness, so let it be. Do not live the fool's life and suppose that any man can kill you when he pleases. The very hairs of your head are all numbered: not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father. Fear not, little flock, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom, is a sweet and gracious promise, which has its detailed application to every honest man and every faithful worker.

Jesus Christ brings into his history this word finished more than once. In this instance he had finished the Sayings. When he offered his great priestly prayer, he said, "I have finished the work thou didst give me to do." When he bowed his sacred head upon the cross in the last intolerable agony, he said, "It is finished." Does he leave anything in an incomplete state? Has he left any star half-moulded, any planet without the last touch given to its infinite circumference? He works well. I am persuaded that he which hath begun a good work in you will continue it until the day of redemption and completion. If we had begun, we might never have finished, but he who began the work is pledged to complete it, and the top stone shall be brought on with shoutings of "Grace grace" unto it. Build with such stones as you are able to lift: do your little masonry as faithfully, as lovingly as you can, but he that buildeth all things is God.

Here the office of the Teacher ceases, and here the office of the Priest is about to begin. Correctly and deeply interpreted, the Teacher was the Priest, and the life was the death; and the doctrine was the atonement as well as the death. But for the sake of convenience, we divide the functions into Prophet, Priest, and King. The Prophet has closed; the great solemn peroration, broad as thunder, has ceased; he has just said, "These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal." That was his last word, according to the history which is before us, and when he had spoken of life eternal, his lips closed. There was nothing more to be said of a doctrinal kind the priestly function was to succeed the prophetical. What an air of repose there is about the statement. It reads like a great plan: there is nothing hurried, nothing tumultuous the uproar is on the outside; within, and specially in the central Man, there is ineffable peace. He speaks as one who came to his work from the sanctuary of eternity: there is no flush upon his face that betokens surprise, the surprise was in others, to him life was a calm, grand revelation.

How appropriate the last speech: from an artistic point of view the completeness is simply marvellous. There could be nothing to say alter the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. We often feel ourselves that after certain men have spoken for any other voice to attempt to make itself heard would be an anti-climax of an intolerable kind. We know when the wisest man of the assembly has spoken; he has reserved his judgment until other speeches have been made, and when he sits down, no other man could, with any regard to the fitness of things, presume to rise. What could have been said after the twenty-fifth chapter? The Son of man has come in his glory and all the holy angels with him, and he has sat upon the throne of his glory and conducted the arbitrament of the nations, and these have gone away to everlasting punishment and the righteous into life eternal. After that, the only possible eloquence is the CROSS!

Let us hear his final words before the great tragedy. Said he, in Matthew 26:2 , "Ye know that after two days is the feast of the passover, and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified." He never made a more characteristic speech. Here you have the very heart of the man talking. Look at that word " betrayed," and find the whole soul and purpose of Christ. To be betrayed was the agony to be crucified was nothing to the man who would take such a view of betrayal. It was the sin he looked at, not the butchery. That such truth could be met by such falsehood killed him. We look at the outward and vulgar aspect of things, we cry around the cross of wood as we see the sacred blood trickling down the beam. 'Tis childish. When we are older and wiser we will cry over the betrayal. It is one of the impossibilities of ordinary history: it would be a total, absolute, incredible impossiblity, if it did not take place in our own heart and in our own house day by day. That such purity, such truthfulness, such beneficence, should have made no deeper impression than this, killed the Son of God! The atonement was offered in Gethsemane, when he sweat, as it were, great drops of blood and said, "Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done." Then he redeemed the world. The rest was commonplace, the killing, the slaughter, the mean revenge, the triumph of hypocrisy and priestism.

All the great work in life is done in solitude, with the loved ones a few paces behind, with the dearest out of sight, with no one there but the soul and God. Win your battle there, and other fighting becomes quite easy, and if you seem to fail in the other fighting, it is only as a seed fails that dies in the earth to repeat itself in manifold productiveness and utility.

Jesus Christ always took the spiritual view of an action. He did not ask to be spared the nailing, he took meekly the spitting, for it went no deeper than the cheek but to be betrayed was more than he could bear. To be smitten on the face, what was it but to endure for a moment the ruffianism of the basest men of his day? but to be betrayed that was the mortal agony, and if we took a right view of life, we should see it precisely as Jesus Christ did not the robbery but the plot to rob, not the blow upon the face but the wound upon the heart, not the crime but the sin, would impress us most deeply and pain us most cruelly.

Jesus Christ will, in the judgment, take the spiritual view of every action. He is consistent with himself: he has not two standards or methods of judgment. What we would have done if we could will form our character at the last. We speak emptily and superficially about deeds and actions and conduct we do not see the real deed. Not what my hand accomplishes, but what my heart would effect, is my character. Thank God for that. It may tell against us in this or that instance, but it may also tell for us in the supreme totalising and adjudication of life. God knows what it is in our heart to be, and what we can honestly say in our heart is what we really are. Not our outbursts of temper, not our occasional displays of lowness of disposition, but the supreme desire and passion of the heart will form God's basis of judgment. If we can say at the last, as many a poor misunderstood man can say now but the church will not believe him God is better and greater than the church "Lord, thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love thee" that love will burn up all the sin, and they shall come from the east and from the west and from the north and from the south, and from all quarters, sections, churches, and provinces of human geography and human thinking and human feeling, and the great surprise will be that Heaven is so vast.

"They consulted that they might take Jesus by subtlety." Subtlety that was their condemnation. Honest men know nothing about subtlety, honest men are fearless, honest men rely upon the instincts of the people, honest men never fear the instincts of a great nation. See how sin debases everything: it turns a grand magisterial function into a machine for the performance of little party tricks. Sin blights whatever it touches: if it looks at a flower, the flower dies: if it goes through a garden it leaves a wilderness behind it. It is a most damnable thing. See the Sanhedrim, the great council of the nation, that ought to be its pride and ornament and crown, and that ought to speak with a voice that would commend itself in every tone to the conscience and reason and inner heart of the people, conniving, arranging, temporising, trick-making and that is the work of the fear which comes of conscious wrong. Fearlessness goes out by the front door, honesty speaks aloud in a plain mother tongue that every man can understand. Honesty may seem to be inconsistent here and there and again, but the inconsistency is apparent only and not real. Honesty can bear to be searched into, for all the parts belong to one another, and they come together and form a symmetrical and indissoluble completeness. Your trick is your condemnation, your subtlety is mere cleverness, it is not philosophy.

But they said, "Not on the feast day." That is an excellent resolution, not to take Jesus and kill him, and if the punctuation had been complete there, we would have said, "They have come to their better mind;" forgive them, they are going to abstain from their purposed slaughter, but instead of having a full stop after "day," we read, "lest there be an uproar among the people." A bad excuse, but any excuse will do for persons who are bent on villainy. We are quick at excuse-making, we have the genius of wriggling out of righteous positions and evading sacred duty. Our reasons often come afterwards, and our excuse is but a post hoc it never would have occurred to us, if we had not found ourselves in danger of being ensnared and trapped and killed with weapons we had made for the slaughter of others. Our excuses may ruin us: our little pleas may become the sharp weapons that will penetrate our misspent life. One man thought he had an excuse which would make even the great man dumb; he said, "I knew thee, that thou wert an hard man, reaping where thou hadst not sown, and gathering where thou hadst not strawed, so I took thy talent, wrapped it in a napkin, hid it in the earth there it is." And the great man said, "Thou knewest that I was a hard man? Thou knewest? Thou oughtest, therefore..." An unexpected logic, a turn in the argument which became intolerable as fire. No excuse can stand the examination of God.

What will Jesus Christ now do with the case so vividly and completely before him? He will turn away from the great feast of the Jews? No he will keep the feast, though he must die. That is the Teacher the world wanted, that was the kind of heroism of a moral type which alone could act upon the world like salt, to save it from putridity. He will go to church, though he will be killed under its sacred roof; he will keep the great historic feast of Israel, though the price he must pay for admission is the price of his life. But in doing that, he will give the feast its highest meaning. Up to this time the feast of passover has been but an historical memorial in Israel, getting farther and farther away from the first incident, and losing, by mere lapse of time, much of its first freshness. But Jesus makes all things new. He goes to that last service, and lifts it up to its spiritual significance. May he come to every service of ours and make our homes and prayers and Scripture readings and expositions new. That is all we want larger definition, more fearless application of what we do know; enlargement, not destruction, spiritual interpretation, not mechanical re-arrangement.

Not a word will Christ say against the feast: he will keep it, he will be a Jew, but in keeping the feast, he will give it its last deep and continual signification. Such a preacher do we always want in the church: not a man who will lay down the old hymn-book and say, "We have had enough of that," but will so sing the hymn as to make us feel we never heard it before. Not a man who will shut up the Bible and make a new one on his own account, but will so read the old Hebrew and Greek and the present English as to make our blood tingle as he reads. Not a man who will take down the grand evangelical system of teaching and doctrine, but will redeem its noblest terms from sectarian uses and lift up into a firmament what has been fastened upon a ceiling. We need no new doctrine, but we do need some new definitions and larger applications and nobler sympathies and more comprehensive charities.

In going to the feast and acting so, Jesus Christ showed the possibility of the irreligiousness of some religion. That is the great hindrance to Christian progress unchristian Christianity, a Christian doctrine without a Christian practice. Who is a Christian? Christianity is a question of the spirit, the heart, the inner life not a question of mere propositions and theologies and metaphysics and mechanical arrangements of an ecclesiastical kind. If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his, and if any man have the spirit of Christ, I care not in what language he may express himself most uncouth and not at all orthodox from my standpoint he is a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. Christianity is pureness, meekness, gentleness, sympathy with right, trust in God, charity, forgiveness against such there is no valid accusation.

The chief priests, the scribes, and the elders, were religious after an irreligious kind. The light that was in them was darkness, therefore the darkness was great. They mumbled the right words, but they did not live the right life or develop the right spirit. If you are selfish, haughty, resentful, proud, so sensitive that no man can speak to you about the affairs which belong to your life without your taking immediate offence, are you a Christian? There is not one element of Christianity in you, though you could repeat every catechism and defend with infinite cleverness every proposition made by the corruptest church in Christendom. But if you are gentle, pure, kind, unselfish, noble, forgiving for Christ's sake and because he is in you, you are God's witnesses to the power of the cross. When the Psalmist prayed for the destruction of his enemies he was irreligiously religious. It was religion gone sour, the wine of piety turned into the vinegar of resentment it showed what men would be even in their religiousness, when left to themselves. The highest justice is mercy, the completest righteousness is gentleness, meekness, trust in God.