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.