DIVISION V. § 4. CHAPTER XIII. 8-10.
The summary debt.
Christians are willingly to pay tribute and tax as a debt, a thing due in God's sight to His ministers. But this obligation is a specimen of innumerable obligations which we owe to our 'neighbours'—debts only limited by human need. And the Christian is to take a wide view of his obligations, and to let there be no legitimate claim upon him unfulfilled, no debt unpaid, except the one which a man ought always to be paying and still to be owing, for it is infinite—the debt of love. Here, in loving each other man with the same real regard to his personal interests as we devote to our own, is the satisfaction of the moral law. All the particular 'commandments'—those of the Second Table, and any other there may be—are comprehended in this one. For love can do no harm to any other, and can therefore break no commandment.
Owe no man anything, save to love one another: for he that loveth his neighbour hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shall not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet, and if there be any other commandment, it is summed up in this word, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: love therefore is the fulfilment of the law.
St. Paul gives here a very noticeable expansion to the idea of not being in debt. In its literal sense we have all of us a horror of it, at least in theory.
'No debtor's hands are clean
However white they be.'
We must both let that theoretic horror of debt dominate our practice in money matters, and also expand our idea of 'debts.' According to Christ's teaching, the priest and Levite did not pay their debt to their Samaritan neighbour, because they thought him a stranger with no claim on them. Dives ignored his rich man's debt to Lazarus. Of those who are to appear on the left hand of Christ's judgement-seat, each will be condemned because he never realized his debt to Christ in the persons of all those who had needs to which he might have ministered. St. Paul, as an apostle, acknowledged his debt to all the Gentile world[[1]], and we members of a church, catholic in idea, but as yet so far from catholic in fact—we Englishmen, members of an imperial and spreading race, responsible for the name of Christ all over the world—have a portentous and lamentably unfulfilled debt to the races of Africa and India, and to the whole world.
We can all think of manifold debts—to the lonely whom we might visit, the misunderstood whom we might sympathize with, the ignorant whom we might teach, the weak and oppressed whom we might support and combine, the sinful whom we might convert and establish in good living; so many debts to family and friends; so many debts to Englishmen and fellow Christians, to Africans and Asiatics. Is it not bewildering even to attempt to realize our debts? And yet, let a man make a beginning, and all will be well. Let him steadily set himself to behave towards those whom he employs or those who employ him, towards his domestic servants or his masters, towards railway porters and shop assistants and others who minister to his convenience, as being men and women with the same right to courteous treatment, and to a real opportunity to make the best of themselves, as he has himself; let him steadily refuse to 'exploit' those immediately concerned with him, or treat them as merely means to his ends or instruments of his convenience; let him thus realize his debts to his nearest 'neighbours,' and the whole idea of humanity, of brotherhood, will be deepened and made real to him. Serving the few, he will come to serve the many. His prayers will go before his actions, and enlarge their scope. He will get a habit of considerateness and thoughtfulness for others, as belonging to Christ, which will express itself habitually towards all, and especially the weak. His 'neighbour' will come to mean, as in our Lord's parable and in St. Paul's expression in this place, any 'other man[[2]].' And in our days when the old personal relations of masters to workers have been so largely merged in the relation of companies to unions or to men and women in masses, we shall never allow ourselves to forget that combinations are combinations of individuals, and that neither individual responsibility, nor responsibility for the individual, can be obliterated by union or by numbers.
St. Paul, we notice, is here plainly reproducing our Lord's saying about love and the law[[3]]; and he would seem to have the teaching of the parable about the Good Samaritan in his mind; as in the previous section the saying 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's,' and in the end of the preceding one (xii. 14, 19) the prohibition of vengeance and the injunction of love to enemies in the Sermon on the Mount. St. Paul's ethical teaching is in fact found to be throughout based on our Lord's, whether our Lord's words were with him in a written form or came to him simply in the oral tradition.
And we do well to remember, as we read this familiar passage, that here is the centre and kernel of Christianity. It is the revelation of a new and universal duty, based on a revealed relationship of all men to a common Father: the duty which lies upon all men of loving all men, because God loves all men with a father's love, or rather because God is love, and only by the life of love can we share His fellowship[[4]]. The Christian 'enthusiasm for humanity' has thus its roots in a disclosure of the character of God, and of His mind towards every man.
[[1]] Rom. i. 14.
[[2]] ver. 8, 'his neighbours': margin, 'the other.'
[[3]] Matt. xxii. 40; cf. Gal. v. 14, and James ii. 8.
[[4]] It has been commonly said that Christianity almost created a new word to express the new duty. But this now appears not to be strictly the case. Agape, love, is a word unknown indeed to classical writers, but it is found in the popular speech of Alexandria in the second century B.C. See Deissmann, Bibelstudien (Marburg, 1895), p. 80. (I was referred to this work by Dr. Bernard, Pastoral Epistles, p. 24.) Hence, i.e. from the popular speech of Greek Egypt, it passed into the Greek Bible and so into Christianity.