(1) The Synoptic teaching starts throughout from the ordinary post-exilic Jewish feeling and teaching, which indeed recognizes the ceremonial obligations and the more tangible amongst the ethical demands as standing under the categorical imperative of the Legal “Thou Shalt,” but places the large territory of the finer moral precepts outside of the Law. So with the “Zedakah,” the “Justice” of almsdeeds, and with the “Gemiluth Chasadim,” the “works of mercy,” such as visiting the sick, burying the dead, and rejoicing with the joyful and sorrowing with the sorrowful. Thus Rabbi Simon the Just tells us: “The world rests on three things: on the Law (Thorah), on Worship (Abodah), and on Works of Mercy (Gemiluth Chasadim)”; and Rabbi Eleazar declared the “Gemiluth Chasadim” to be above the “Zedakah.”[140] And it is especially in view of these works of supererogation that rewards, and indeed a strict scale of rewards, are conceived. Thus already in the Book of Tobit, (written somewhere between 175 and 25 B.C.), we have Tobit instructing his son Tobias that “Prayer is good with Fasting and Alms, more than to buy up treasures of gold. For Alms delivereth from death … they that practise Mercy and Justice shall live long.”[141] And one of the sayings of the Jewish Fathers declares: “So much trouble, so much reward.”[142]
Now this whole scheme and its spirit seems, at first to be taken over quite unchanged by Our Lord. The very Beatitudes end with: “Rejoice … because your reward is great in heaven.” And, in the following Sermon, his hearers are bidden to beware of doing their “Zedakah,”—the “Justice” of Prayer, Fasting, Almsdeeds in order to be seen by men; since, in that case, “ye shall not have reward from your Father Who is in heaven.” And this is driven home in detail: these three kinds of Justice are to be done “in secret,” and “thy Father will repay thee.” Even Prayer itself thus appears as a meritorious good work, one of the means to “treasure up treasures in heaven.” Similarly, the rich man is bid “Go sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor; and thou shalt have a treasure in heaven.” Even “he that shall give you a cup of cold water in My name, shall not lose his reward.” Indeed we have the general principle, “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”[143]
And yet we can follow the delicate indications of the presence, and the transitions to the expression, of the deeper apprehension and truth. For, on the part of God, the reward appears, in the first instance, as in intrinsic relation to the deed. The reward is the deed’s congenital equivalent: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”; “if ye forgive men their trespasses, your Father … will likewise forgive you your trespasses”; and “everyone who shall confess Me before men, him will I also confess before My Father Who is in heaven.”[144] Or the reward appears as a just inversion of the ordinary results of the action thus rewarded: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land”; take the highest seat at a banquet, and you will be forced down to the lowest, take the lowest, and you will be moved up to the highest; and, generally, “he who findeth his soul, shall lose it; and that loseth his soul, for My sake, shall find it.”[145] Or the reward appears as an effect organically connected with the deed, as its cause or condition: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”[146] And then the reward comes to vary, although the deed remains quantitatively identical, solely because of that deed’s qualitative difference,—i.e. according to the variation in its motive: “He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet, shall receive the reward of a prophet; and he who receiveth a just man in the name of a just man, shall receive the reward of a just man.”[147] And then the reward moves up and up and becomes a grace, through being so far in excess of the work done: “Every one who hath forsaken house … or father or children or fields for My name, shall receive manifold,” indeed “an hundredfold”—“a full … and overflowing measure shall they pour into your lap”; and “whosoever shall humble himself, shall be exalted,”—not simply back to his original level, but into the Kingdom of Heaven. So, too, “Thou wast faithful over a few things, I shall place thee over many things”; indeed this faithful servant’s master “shall place him over all his possessions;” or rather, “blessed are those servants whom the Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching. Amen, I say unto you, that he shall approach … and shall minister unto them.”[148]
This immense disproportion between the work and its reward, and the consequent grace-character of the latter, is driven home with a purposely paradoxical, provocative pointedness, in the two Parables of the Wedding Garment and of the Equal Payment of the Unequal Labourers, both of which are in St. Matthew alone. The former concerns the soul’s call to the kingdom, and that soul’s response. The King here, after having formally invited a certain select number of previously warned relatives and nobles, who all, as such, had a claim upon him, Matt, xxii, 3, sends out invitations with absolute indiscrimination,—to men with no claims or with less than none; to “bad” as well as “good.” And it is the King, again, who gratuitously supplies them each with the appropriate white wedding-feast garment. He has thus a double right to expect all his guests to be thus clothed, and to punish instantly, not the mere negligence, but the active rejection implied on the part of the man clothed in his ordinary clothing (vv. 11, 12). Both call and investiture have been here throughout pure graces, which rendered possible, and which invited but did not force, an acceptance.[149]
The second Parable describes the “Householder” who hired labourers for his vineyard at the first, third, sixth, ninth, and even eleventh hour,—each and all of them for a penny a day; who actually pays out to them, at the end of the day, this one identical pay; and who, to the labourer of the first shift who complains, “These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us who have borne the burden and heat of the day,” declares, “Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take thine own and go thy way: I will give to this last even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil (art thou envious) because I am good” (because I choose to be bountiful)? Matt. xx, 1-15. Here again the overflowing generosity of God’s grace is brought home to us, as operating according to other standards than those of ordinary daily life: nor is this operation unjust, for the Householder paid their due to the first set of workers, whilst rewarding, far above their worth, those poor labourers of the last hour. But, as Jülicher well points out, “we should not pedantically insist upon finding here a doctrine of the strict equality of souls in the Beyond—a doctrine contradicted by other declarations of Jesus. Only the claim of single groups of souls to preferential treatment is combated here …: a certain fundamental religious disposition is to be awakened.” And, as Bugge rightly notes, “the great supreme conception which lies at the bottom of the parable has, parablewise, remained here unnamed: Paul has found the expressive term for it,—‘Grace.’”[150]
And we get corresponding, increasingly spiritual interpretations with regard to man’s action and man’s merit. First, all ostentation in the doing of the deed cancels all reward in the Beyond; so, in the case of each of the three branches of “Justice.”[151] And then the worker is to be satisfied, day by day, with that day’s pay and sustenance: “Give us this day our daily bread,” every soul is to pray; the divine Householder will say, “Didst thou not agree with me for a penny a day? Take thine own and go thy way.” And even “when ye have done all that has been commanded you, say ‘we are unprofitable servants, we have but done what we were bound to do.’” They are invited to look away from self, to “seek first the Kingdom and His Justice,” and then “all these things,” their very necessaries for earthly life, “shall be added unto you.” Indeed it is the boundlessly generous self-communicativeness of God Himself which is to be His disciples’ deliberate ideal, “be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; and the production of this likeness within themselves is to be the ultimate end and crown of their most heroic, most costly acts: “love your enemies, and pray for those that persecute you: that you may become the sons of your Father who is in Heaven, who maketh His sun to rise upon the evil and the good, and who raineth upon the just and the unjust.” And the more there is of such self-oblivious love, the more will even the gravest sins be entirely blotted out, and the more rapid will be the full sanctification of the soul, as Our Lord solemnly declares concerning the sinful woman in St. Luke, “her many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much.”[152]
In all this matter it is St. Luke’s Gospel which is specially interesting as showing, so to speak, side by side, an increased Rabbinical-like preciseness of balance between work and reward, and yet the adoption, doubtlessly under Pauline influence, of St. Paul’s central term in lieu of the old Jewish terminology. For, in one of its curious so-called “Ebjonite” passages, this Gospel works up the Parable of the Talents, with its only approximate relation between the deeds and their rewards (Matt. xxv, 14-30), into the Parable of the Pounds (Luke xix, 12-27), with its mathematically symmetrical interdependence between the quantities of the merit and those of this merit’s reward: the man who makes ten pounds is placed over ten cities, and he who makes five, over five. And, on the other hand, in a Lukan equivalent for part of the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew’s “reward” is replaced by “grace”: “If ye love them that love you, what grace (χάρις) have you? and if ye do good to those that do you good, what grace have you?”[153]
(2) St. Paul indeed it is who, in the specially characteristic portions of his teaching, unfolds, by means of a partly original terminology, the deepest motives and implications of Our Lord’s own divinely deep sayings and doings, and never wearies of insisting upon the Grace-character of the soul’s call and salvation,—the Free Mercy, the Pure Love which God shows to us, and the sheer dependence and complete self-donation, the pure love which we owe to Him, and which, at the soul’s best, it can and does give Him.
It is true that in the contrasting, the traditional layer of his teaching, we find the old Jewish terminology still intact: “God will render unto every man according to his works”; “it behoves us to appear before the Judgment-seat of Christ, that everyone … may receive according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad.”[154] Indeed it is precisely in St. Paul’s pages that we find the two most difficult and, at first sight, least spiritual sayings concerning this matter to be discovered in the whole New Testament: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most miserable.” And: “If the dead do not rise … let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”[155] But these two passages must doubtless be taken partly as arguments adapted to the dispositions of his hearers,—the “Let us eat and drink” conclusion is given in the words of a current Heathen Greek proverb,—and, still more, as expressions not so much of a formal doctrine as of a mood, of one out of the many intense, mutually supplementary and corrective moods of that rich nature.
According to his own deepest, most deliberate, and most systematic teaching, it is the life of Christ, the living Christ, energizing even now within the faithful soul, that constitutes both the primary source and the ultimate motive of Christian sanctity. “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” And through this divine-human life within us “we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” Indeed the Lord Himself said to him: “My grace is sufficient for thee; for power is made perfect in infirmity”; and hence he, Paul, could declare: “Gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” And thus, with Christ living within him, he can exclaim: “If God be for us, who shall be against us?… Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or peril, or the sword?… In all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor things present nor things to come … shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” “Whether we live, or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”[156] We thus get here a reinsistence upon, and a further deepening of, perhaps the profoundest utterance of the whole Old Testament: “What have I in Heaven besides Thee? and besides Thee I seek nothing upon earth. Even though my flesh and my heart faint, Thou art my rock and my portion for ever.”[157]