THE TREATMENT OF ENEMIES
“Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the Gentiles the same? Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
The exact expression, “Thou shalt hate thine enemy,” nowhere occurs in the Mosaic law; and there are, both in the law and elsewhere in the Old Testament, passages which come nearer to the Christian standard.[64] But on the whole we must accept Dr. Mozley’s conclusion:[65] “The whole precept as itstands undoubtedly represents, and is a summary of, the sense of the law”: nor can “the enemy” be regarded as meaning only the enemies of Israel. Thus many Christian consciences are distressed while psalms are being sung in our services which contain imprecations upon enemies, such as the 109th. Some modern critics assure us that these psalms express no individual feelings towards personal enemies, but the feeling of righteous Israel towards the enemies of the Lord. It may be doubted whether this is altogether the case. And even if it is so, the psalms still fall short of the Christian standard both of hope for the conversion of enemies and of love toward them in any case. No doubt, if we take the Righteous One who speaks in them to be Christ, we can find in them the divine principles of judgement; and so they are interpreted in the New Testament. Still in their mode of expression, and in the temper which they historically represent, they fall short of the Christian standard. And this ought not to surprise us. The whole Old Testament is on right lines of divine development: but it has not reached the goal, which isChrist. “It was said to them of old ... but I say unto you.”
Our Lord, in deepening and widening the Old Testament law of love, inculcates kindliness in disposition, in word, in act. In disposition, we are to “love our enemies.” Not of course that we can feel alike towards all people; but we can set our will, or what the Bible calls our heart, to do them good. And if we dispose ourselves aright towards others, we shall probably end by feeling aright, though that can never be a matter of commandment. And we are to show our disposition towards them by kindly salutations, or the ordinary words which express human goodwill, and by deeds, both earnest prayer for them and acts which imitate the impartial beneficence of our Father in heaven.
Nothing is said about the effect which such kindness to professed enemies may have. But there is no question that if we treat people as if they were permanently and necessarily what they are at the moment, we fix or do our best to fix them in their present condition. To make people better, we must believe that God intends them to be better andtreat them as if we believed them in fact to be better than they are. The clever barrister, Sidney Carton, in Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, who had been his own enemy, who had fallen from bad to worse, who had ceased to believe in himself as his friends also had ceased to believe in him, was recovered by a good and merciful woman who refused to take him at the general estimate and would not give him up—recovered, after many relapses, to the point of a final act of heroism by which he lost his own life to save his true friend’s husband. So if we refuse to treat people as our enemies, we have the best possible chance of winning them to be our friends. God has redeemed men by treating them, not as they are, but as they are capable of becoming.
Our Lord calls our attention to the fact that He is requiring such conduct of us as only a supernatural motive, the motive of fellowship with God, can account for. This is a consideration which we can apply to other parts of Christian duty—for instance, to the obligation of purity. But our Lord here applies it to kindliness. “You are kind to your friends. Are not the publicans thesame?” The publicans proper were capitalists who “farmed” the Roman taxes, undertaking to hand over a certain sum for a certain district and then getting as much as they could out of the inhabitants. But the name was also applied to their subordinates, the custom-house officers, as in the New Testament. These were held in special odium by their countrymen and generally justified a character for rapacity. But even such men are kind to their friends. It requires no other motive than human convenience, the most ordinary social virtue. But what our Lord asks of us is something which requires the supernatural or divine motive to account for it. Here then we have a serious question. Consider your actions, your ordinary dealings with others. Are they such as can be accounted for by convenience and social requirement, or does your conduct require the divine motive, the motive of fellowship with God, to explain it and to make it possible? It is only this latter sort of conduct that makes it—so to speak—worth while that Jesus Christ should have come down from heaven and sacrificed Himself for you. Are you walking worthily of thevocation wherewith ye are called? For your principle of conduct is to be nothing less than a real striving after the perfection of God, which is indeed the character of Christ.
“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Yet we must not despair. We have Christ’s Spirit working within us to make us like Christ: and if only we have the right ideal in front of us and are moving however slowly towards it, or even constantly recurring to the pursuit of it, we shall be perfected at last. We have eternity before us to grow in—not a year or two, or a life-time, but eternity. And in our best moments we do really recognize that what is most worth having in the world is the character of Christ. Only in proportion as we feel the magnitude of what is asked of us, let us throw ourselves upon the divine readiness to give strength and wisdom according to our needs. Let us pray with Augustine “Give what Thou commandest and then command what Thou willest.”
CHAPTER VI
THE MOTIVE OF THE CITIZENS OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
WHEN we were considering the way in which our Lord deepens the law of love, while abrogating the law of revenge, we were obliged to notice that what He gives us is not literal enactments, but rather principles or motives for action. He expresses Himself indeed proverbially, in the form of particular injunctions or prohibitions. But the proverbial nature of these directions is apparent, in part because they are sometimes mutually contradictory; and they must be taken, like proverbs generally, as embodying in extreme concrete instances general principles or motives for action.
We may truly say that the Sermon on the Mount gives us a social law for Christians. That is true in this sense: the Sermon on the Mount gives us principles of action which every Christian mustapply and re-apply in his social conduct. But just because it embodies motives and principles and does not give legal enactments, it must appeal in the first instance to the individual, to his heart and conscience; and it is only as the character thus formed must set itself to remodel social life on a fresh basis, that the Sermon on the Mount can become a social law for Christians. You cannot take any one of its prescriptions, and apply it as a social law at once. You cannot take the maxim “If a man smite thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other also,” or “If a man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also,” and make it obligatory on Christians as a rule of external conduct, without upsetting the whole basis of society and without ignoring a contrary maxim which our Lord gives us in another connexion.
But each of the maxims can be taken to the heart and conscience of the individual, to become a principle of each man’s own character and conduct, and then to reappear, retranslated into social action, according to the wisdom of the time or the wisdom of the man or the wisdom of the Church.
This truth—that our Lord is giving us principles, not laws—will appear only more conspicuously now, when we pass to the next great section of the Sermon; because it will be obvious that our Lord can only be dealing with motives of action—motives such as belong to the secret heart of the individual. He proceeds to inculcate the abandonment of a worldly temper by prohibiting, literally, such religious actions as other men can see. But His own example, His own institution of a corporate religion, His special promises to common worship, His countermaxim “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works,” force us to recognize the proverbial character of these prohibitions, and to look for the principle rather than the law.
And indeed this sixth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel has one subject throughout. It teaches us one great principle—that the new righteousness, the righteousness of the citizens of the kingdom, looks throughout towards God. God is its motive, God is its aim, God is its object; God, and nothing lower than God. No man is truly a citizen who is not in all his conduct and life looking directly God-ward.
We will attend first to verses 1–18, omitting the positive directions about prayer. Their theme does not vary: The Christian righteousness, in all its departments, looks for divine praise; never for human praise. Our Lord lays this down first of righteousness generally, then of its different branches. Thus, in the first place, of righteousness generally:
“Take heed that ye do not your righteousness before men, to be seen of them: else ye have no reward with your Father which is in heaven.”
We may observe here, once for all, that our Lord in no way disparages the seeking a reward, only the seeking it in a wrong place. There are “altruists” who regard the seeking of even an eternal reward from God as ignoble; they would find the true religious motive only in such an utterance as that of St. Francis Xavier, “My God, I love Thee, not because I hope for heaven thereby,” and would recall the mediæval story of the man who would quench with water the flames of hell and burn up with fire the joys of heaven, that men might seek God for His own sake. But indeed these philosophers ignore indestructible and necessary instincts in human nature. We cannot separate lovefor God from a desire to find our own happiness in God. This is inseparable from personality. We must crave for ultimate satisfaction, recognition, approval. The point is that we should seek it in the right place, that is from God. For coming from Him it can never involve any spoiling of our own capacity for usefulness to others, or narrowing of our own selves. Thus there is a true self-love: and a true self-love seeks satisfaction in the fellowship of God in the eternal world. If “other-worldliness” or the seeking of the divine reward has done harm in religion, that is because the character of the God whom we seek, as revealed in the character and teaching of Jesus Christ, has not been attended to. Granted that we seek God as He is, there can be no possible peril of our undervaluing this world or the bodies of men, nor of our tolerating selfishness in religion. He that said “What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own life (soul)?” said also, “He that saveth his life (soul) shall lose it.”
Then our Lord applies the general principle of seeking only God’s approval to the three great branches of humanconduct. Christian, and indeed human conduct generally, looks in three directions. There is a duty to God, there is a duty to one’s neighbour, and there is a duty to one’s self. And each of these great departments of human conduct has one typical form of action, one form of action in which it specially expresses itself. Our duty to God expresses itself particularly in prayer. Our duty to man expresses itself in works of mercy, or alms. Our duty towards ourselves expresses itself in self-subdual, self-mastery—that is, fasting. And so our Lord applies the general principle to each of these typical duties. In your prayers, in your alms, in your fastings—in each case you are to look to nothing lower than the praise of God.
And, before we study these passages, let me ask you to notice how simply our Lord does always regard human life as bound to move in these three directions. There is our duty to God. That He puts first, not to be merged in our duty to our neighbour. There is our personal duty to God as a person, and it is the first and chief commandment to love the Lord our God. Then there is ourduty towards our neighbour; and then, also, there is our duty towards ourselves. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour—as thyself!” Our duty towards ourselves is, in a word, to make the best of ourselves. Each one is an instrument, divinely created by God, with that sum total of faculties which the Bible calls his life or soul. Well, he is to make the best of himself. Considered as a spiritual being, capable of right spiritual activity, each man is to love himself and his neighbour and God; himself, by bringing his whole being into good order and efficiency, which cannot be without fasting or the subdual of the flesh to the spirit: his neighbour, by considering his true interests like his own, which cannot be without almsgiving or actual gifts out of his substance to supply the other’s needs: and God, which cannot be unless he deal with Him as a person by way of actual personal requests in prayer. And in each direction he is to seek only the praise of God.