And yet, you observe, the Saviour gives us no encouragement to depend upon those helps that tradition might bring us. On the contrary, His language shows how dangerous He felt the influence of tradition to be. How are we to account for this? His strongest denunciations are reserved for the Pharisaic party; and yet a historian would describe them as in many respects the best elements of Jewish life. They were earnest, patriotic, religious, many of them wise and holy men; but their judgment was held in bondage by the influence of tradition, and in this lies the cardinal defect of their life. They had set up between their souls and the spirit of God a sort of graven image of ritualistic observances, and traditional usages and interpretations. They depended on externals, or what came to them from
the past or from the outer world, and their eyes were blinded, and their hearts hardened against every new revelation.
Thus they stand before Christ, blocking His path, the very embodiment of that power which closes the soul against those inspiring and purifying influences that come from direct communion with God. They block the Saviour’s path, because this personal communion is just what He represents to us—the direct revelation of the Spirit of God in man. He comes to reveal the Father to each of us, and to make us feel the presence of the Divine creative Spirit in every separate human life; and till we feel this personal illumination we have not realised the manifestation of the Son of God. But the Pharisee with his continual reference to tradition, his multiplication of external observances, and elaborate ritual, his reliance upon usage and external authority, knows little or nothing of the personal illumination by the direct influence of the Spirit of God upon our spirit. Hence this absolute and
fundamental contrast between Jesus and the Pharisees. They represent two opposing principles in life. And it is this that gives such intensity to the words He addressed to them: “Ye have made the word of God of none effect through your traditions”; and it is a universal warning—never out of date.
If the spirit of traditional usage and influence holds the citadel of a man’s life, the spirit of Christian progress cannot gain an entrance.
That is the lesson which the Saviour presses upon our attention by His denunciation of the Pharisaic usage, habit, and attitude, and it is hardly possible to overestimate the importance of the lesson, because this same spirit of Pharisaic tradition is constantly laying its hand upon every human institution, and it has contributed to every abuse or perversion that has taken possession of the Christian Church.
Our life is, in fact, a continuous struggle between the two principles here represented. Which is to prevail in it, and fix its character—
traditional custom, or personal inspiration? Are we to follow the world with its conventions and laws, or to live in personal communion with God? The tendency of our life will be determined in one direction or the other according as we surrender our will to the rule of traditional notions and usages, the power of the external world, or as we seek for direct illumination of mind, conscience, and spirit at the Divine sources of truth and light.
Here, then, we have a principle to guide us in our relation to the traditions amidst which we live.
We do not expect to get away from them; we never dream of escaping from the influences of the external world, whether of the past or the present; but to move safely among them, we must have learnt and adopted this primal lesson, that no tradition, and no external practice or custom, has any authoritative claim upon us, simply from being established as a tradition or a custom.