Again, our Lord is at pains so to put what He says that it may not be taken for a fresh body of injunctions added to the Law; for the people were already, as He said, overburdened with such injunctions. He puts therefore what He has to say [pg 211] into such strong forms, and, by way of example, takes such extreme cases, that it is plain that He is illustrating a principle and not laying down a literal rule.
We have
“Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil: but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain.”[148]
He Himself, before the High Priest, does not submit to wrong, without asking in remonstrance “Why smitest thou me?” and the most literal minded of our Lord's hearers would not have felt bound to offer his cloke to one who had stolen his coat. The language shews by its very strength that it is figurative.
Indeed, a code of Law can hardly be delivered in an address to a multitude. If it is to meet all cases it must be complex, and to the hearer wearisome. If our Lord had delivered a treatise telling men what they were to do in the ordinary occasions of life, the precepts must have been so encumbered by qualifications that all impressiveness would have been lost. If to the saying “Give to him that asketh of thee” our Lord had appended all the obvious exceptions—such as the cases in which what is asked for would be hurtful—the [pg 212] whole force of the passage would have been frittered away. As long as a preacher delivers broad truths, put forcibly, his audience are ready to hear; but as soon as he begins to qualify his statements and to make exceptions, his hold over his hearers is gone, and they think he is unsaying what he said.
Our Lord wished to leave seed thoughts lying in men's minds. He knew that His words would have to be carried in men's memories for a long while before being written down. They must therefore be clad in the form in which they would last longest and be easiest to carry. He therefore embodied what He wished to have remembered in terse sayings, illustrated by cases which are familiar but extreme. The hearer could carry these sentences away, and would ponder on them all the more, because in their literal sense they are startling and impracticable as rules of conduct. I can conceive no style better fitted for the purpose which I believe to have been dominant with our Lord, than that employed in the Sermon on the Mount.
It seems to me to be part of the strange adaptation of circumstances to the needs of the Faith, that what was most vital and most universal was uttered in the Hebrew tongue. This was the language of the comparative infancy of the world; and there is in the genius of it much—especially its ready lending itself to the form of balanced sentences—which takes hold of the hearts of untutored [pg 213] men. Such men store their wisdom in saws and proverbs; and in like manner the wisdom of the Hebrew is dropped in separate pearls, which can easily be treasured up. When the time came for touching cultured minds, and connected argument was required, Greek forms of thought and speech were needed. Saul was then converted; and Greek became the language of the Word.
Nothing in our Lord's ministry impresses me more than the extraordinary sobriety of the whole movement. We hear nothing of religious transport or ecstatic devotion. People listen in awe to our Lord's preaching as to a communication made from above. They never dare to applaud. He is too much above them for that. Many have since come crying “Lord, Lord,” in different accents, at different times; we have heard of “revivals” among great multitudes, carried headlong by wild excitement, and of religious delirium reaching to the borders of mania. All this is in the strongest contrast with the ways of teaching of our Lord.
True human freedom was with Him a sacred thing; what man was made for was that he might be a free spiritual being; and a man is not free when he is fascinated by fervid oratory and becomes the blind tool of another, or when he is intoxicated by religious fanaticism and is no longer master of his own mind. Any agencies, therefore, which would impair the health and freedom of a man's will Christ refused to employ. They belonged [pg 214] to that Spirit of the World whose alliance He had refused. One cause of this sobriety of the great movement may be found in the elevation and tone of authority which has just been spoken of as characterizing our Lord. He seemed to move in a plane parallel indeed to that of men, but a little above it. For a speaker to kindle men's passions he must be possessed by the notions and feelings of the time: he and his hearers must have common objects of desire, or a common jealousy of those who possess what they themselves want, they must therefore wear the stamp of a passing and particular phase of mankind. Now it was the distinctive peculiarity of our Lord's Personality that it belongs not more to one time or class than to another. The Son of Man represents Humanity in the abstract, and no party has ever been able to claim Him as their own.
In the course of the winter of a.d. 28-29, Levi, in the vernacular of Galilee called also Matthew, a toll-taker on the borders of the lake, is summoned to follow our Lord. He justified our Lord's choice in a signal manner, for “he forsook all, and rose up and followed Him.”