And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also — St. Luke xi. 39, 40.
The last chapter closes with a simple domestic picture which has fixed itself on the heart of all Christian nations. Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary, served diligently by the one, listened to by the other — this story has been felt to be true for that time, true for all times. Such diversities of character, such impatience of the busy spirit against the thoughtful one, there must have been in the villages of Palestine, because they are to be found in the villages of England. And it has been felt that the love which binds together tempers so naturally at variance, which enables them to work together in their own ways, for the same end, must dwell in One above themselves. There must be a hidden guest in every family group, who appoints the special tastes of its members, who gives them a common centre; without such a guest the father, the mother, the brother, would only confuse them by their opposing counsels and hasty judgments.
The chapter which follows—that of which I am especially to speak this morning—ends with a very different feast from that with these women. Jesus is in the house of a Pharisee. He pours forth there one of those terrible denunciations of the Pharisaic mind and temper which have been thought so unlike His language to His disciples. Was all this burning wrath, it has been asked, working in Him who said, ‘Love your enemies, pray for them that hate you and despitefully use you’—in Him who had compassion upon the crowd that was hungry, and the woman that was a sinner?
I purposely bring together the story of Martha and Mary with these sentences of indignation, that you may feel the force of the contrast. Till we feel it, I do not think we can enter into the Revelation of the Son of Man and the Son of God. If in the voice of the Saviour we do not hear the voice of the Judge, we shall not confess Him to be indeed the Saviour. If in the voice of the Judge we do not hear the voice of the Saviour, we shall not confess Him to be indeed the Judge. We may divide these characters in our minds, clinging to the one, turning away from the other; but our delight in the first will prove to be a weak, maudlin, ineffectual one; our dread of the second will lead us to cherish all the habits of mind which are most alien from the mind of Christ, from His true gentleness.
If we follow the incidents of the eleventh chapter, I think you will see how this lesson rises out of them all.
(1.) The disciples, we are told, on a certain occasion asked Jesus to teach them to pray, as John also taught his disciples. He does teach them. They may have wondered as they found that most of the petitions were not new. They had heard them from other lips. The hallowing of the Name, the coming of the Kingdom, the doing of the Will, these prayers gathered up the strongest expressions of the old Psalms, of the prayers with which they were most familiar. To ask for bread enough for their daily wants, this was surely nothing new. Could there be any prayer in which the thought of forgiveness did not mingle—any which was not a refuge from temptation—any which was not a cry for deliverance from evil? Had they learnt anything which they did not know before? Had Jesus given them the help which John gave his disciples?
For twelve centuries this prayer has been used in this land, in every church of it, in every corner of it. We have repeated it several times this morning. Can we then answer this question? Why is it the Lord’s Prayer? What is it that Jesus taught which only He could teach?
I should answer, my friends, our Lord taught His disciples, and teaches us, precisely what makes this form of words a prayer; precisely that which had made any words that had ever been spoken in any age, in any country, by any man, a prayer. When He bade them say, ‘Our Father,’ He explained the nature of prayer, the possibility of prayer, the necessity of prayer. If there had not been in men the sense of a Father, the impulse to pray would never have been awakened in them. The sky, the sun, the earth, would not have created that impulse. Because they had the yearnings of children, they could turn to every object in creation in hopes of finding what they wanted there. They could dream that He might be in the grandest objects which they admired, or in the meanest things which did them good. Every one who left the world might be invoked, for he might know the secret; it might be in the invisible region, if the visible did not contain it. Against the worship of all these created things the Jew had borne witness. For the worship of One who created them all he had borne witness. His negative protest was still vigorous and fierce. His positive testimony was perishing. He worshipped a God who was not in the sky, the sea, or the earth; who was not like animals, or like human forms. What was He then? Just or unjust? Light or dark? The Friend of man or the Destroyer of men? The Jew hesitated; he could not tell. And therefore, practically, he arrived at a very decisive judgment. The God whom he worshipped was the Destroyer. He was the dark Fate that was plotting against the peace and life of the Universe, He was the invisible Power which Heathens had concealed from themselves behind forms of nature and conceptions of art; which had only now and then forced itself upon them in its full terror; which they thought might possibly be propitiated by costly sacrifices, or diverted from its deadly purpose by the influence of the more benevolent divinities. Was it the Name of such a Being as this that the Jews wished to hallow? Was it His kingdom that they wished to come? Was it His Will that they desired to be done? Did He care to give any bread? Could He forgive? Was not every temptation of His devising? Was not Evil that which He desired and designed for His creatures? See, then, how those words, ’Our Father,” endorsed and interpreted every hope that man had ever cherished, in the Gentile world as well as the Jewish! See how they scattered the horrible fictions of both! See how they translated petitions which, in the mouths of Pharisees, were imprecations upon mankind, and even upon themselves, into entreaties for the greatest blessings that could come upon both! For would not the real hallowing of a Father’s name, the coming of a Father’s kingdom, the doing of a Father’s will, be a blessing to the Pharisee as well as the Heathen, such as neither had ever dreamed of?
(2.) In this light, then, we must read the words of our Lord which follow respecting importunity in prayer. ‘The man,’ he says, ‘does not rise from his bed when his friend asks him for the three loaves for a neighbour who has come to see him; but if he persists in his entreaty, he will rise and give him as many as he needeth.’ ‘There,’ it has been said, ‘you see how our Lord Himself encourages us to overcome the will of God by the urgency of our petitions!’ Does He so? Had He not just been teaching His disciples to say, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?’ Do you suppose, when He told them to be importunate with His Father and their Father, that He meant them to imitate those worshippers who cried from morning to noon, ‘Oh, Baal, hear us!’ and shewed their earnestness by cutting themselves with stones? To that importunity the Bible says:—‘there was no answer, neither was there any that regarded.’ Our Lord supports His counsel of importunity by these questions:—‘If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children; how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?’
As if He had said, ‘What, then, will you merely repeat the prayer that God’s name be hallowed? Are you not in earnest that it should be hallowed— that all the false, detestable names which have been substituted for the true name of a Father, or become mingled with it, should be separated from it? Are you not really desirous that His Kingdom should overthrow all the tyrannies and oppressions of the earth—that His perfectly good Will should triumph over your will and all other wills that are striving against it?’ If you are, will you not go on asking your Father for these blessings, in the assurance that it is His purpose, because He is your Father, to bestow them, in the assurance that He is educating you to desire what He desires, to work with Him for the overthrow of that which He hates? Will He not give you that without which you cannot hallow His Name, seek His Kingdom, do His Will—without which bread is nothing, forgiveness a mere name, temptation irresistible—without which evil must reign for ever? Will He not give you His own Holy Spirit? Is it not this which such a Father would count the good thing for His children? Can you dream of anything better? And surely the more you receive it, the more you will ask for it; the more you find it, the more you will seek for it. This importunity, then, is not the Baal importunity. It is that which we demand in different spheres of labour, from every scientific man, from every artist, from every sincere student in every profession. We say to all, ‘Be not slothful, be not discouraged by a thousand obstacles, by a thousand defeats. Onward, still onward. The truth is there. It will reward your diligence in wrestling for it when it seems most to deny itself to you; in pursuing it, though the roads are most rugged.’ ‘Seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened.’ I say these exhortations are sound and wholesome, because God is a God of Truth, and because He is our Father, and because He has promised His Spirit of Truth to those who know that without it they shall sink ever deeper into falsehood.
(3.) There can be no better introduction than this prayer, and the comment upon it, to the next passage of the chapter—that in which Christ answers those who said, ‘He casteth out devils through Beelzebub, the chief of the devils.’ ‘Shall not your Father,’ said Christ, ‘give His Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?’ ‘By an unholy Spirit,’ said the Pharisees, ‘He casteth out these unclean and unholy spirits that have got the dominion over you.’ Here is the point of that memorable answer of Christ:—‘Every kingdom divided against itself, is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth.’ Is it so, indeed? is there a battle going on between the powers of evil? An ominous strife it is for them! They do not understand one another, then; they must destroy each other! ‘But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you.’ ‘If these works are not the tricks of some mighty power of evil, but the works of the Holy God—the God of Righteousness and Truth—do not doubt that you are standing before that God, that He is calling you to account.’ Thus He explains all His exercises of power; to this test He brings them. Do they manifest the good Spirit in conflict with the evil spirit? Do they testify that the good must overcome the evil? He intimates that by this test the acts of all men must be tried. There were men of repute among the Jews who tried to cure diseases—perhaps who practised exorcism. Were they working, as He was said to be, in the service of an evil spirit? Was such a spirit enduing them with the powers which they claimed?
He does not conceal it. He had not come to make the world quiet. He had come to disturb a strong man who was keeping his palace, and whose goods were in peace. He had come to bind that strong man, and to take from him all the armour wherein he trusted, and to spoil his goods. He invited all to work with Him in that conflict. Not to engage with him in it was to take part with the false spirit; not to join Him in gathering was to join with the spirit who was seeking to divide and scatter. The Lord told His disciples that those who were not against Him were with Him. If they cared for the name of the true God, though they might not assume His name, they were on His side. Now He says, that those who were not with Him in asserting the difference between the true God and all false gods—the uniting Spirit and the dividing spirit—were against Him. And then He goes on to describe, in awful language, the state of a nation, or an age, or a man, which has rid itself of one unclean spirit—the spirit, as most have said, and, I doubt not, truly, of idolatry; the spirit that tempts us to seek God in visible forms, but which has not sought any nobler, purer, diviner Spirit to replace what it has parted with; which therefore feels denuded of all the pictures and decorations that had filled its chambers of imagery; which goes wearily, restlessly about, seeking for something to people the vacant niches; to adorn the house that is empty, swept, and garnished. And then, in its dreariness and loneliness, the age or the nation, or the individual soul, invites spirits far more evil than the one of which it has been dispossessed. ‘And they came in and dwelt there, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.’
(4.) ’And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it. Could this poor woman understand the parable by which so many wise men have been puzzled? If she did understand it, must it not have had a sound of terror for her rather than of blessing? She may, or may not, have comprehended the words. The face of the Speaker, the witness which it bore of gentleness and of power, was more to her than any language. It might be the most soothing or the most tremendous ever spoken; she had a certainty about the heart from which it issued that no explanations could have given or have taken away. Her words were the utterance of a simple nature. It was a woman’s thought about the woman’s blessedness in having such a Son. He turned her to the blessedness of a diviner parentage, of that higher life which comes from the Divine Word, when it has mastered and governed the heart within.
(5.) But the heart of the age was not governed by that Word, rather was struggling with it. ‘And when the people were gathered thick together, he began to say, This is an evil generation: they seek a sign; and there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet. For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of man be to this generation. The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with the men of this generation, and condemn them: for she came from the utmost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineve shall rise up in the judgment with this generation and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.’ Everything here points to the condition of a land which had heard all Divine calls, which was hearing the divinest of these calls then, and was shutting itself up in its pride and self-righteousness. All is pointing to the Divine purpose and power which had been manifested in past time, which would be manifested more wonderfully out of stones to raise up children to Abraham. Did God care only for the Jews? Did not their earliest prophet testify that He cared for the Ninevites? Did not the Ninevites hear when the prophet’s own heart was hardened? Did God bestow wisdom on Solomon only for the sake of Solomon’s countrymen? Did not the Queen of Sheba come to hear it? Had the Ninevites, had the Queen of Sheba the same blessing as the men of that generation? No! a greater than Jonas, a greater than Solomon was among them. Yet they did not repent. The highest wisdom seemed to them folly.
(6.) ‘No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light. The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light: but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.’
Words like these we have heard before, evidently with a somewhat different application. Here they belong, it would seem, strictly to the Jewish people. A light had been kindled on the earth; it was intended to shine forth on the world, not to be hid under a bushel. All were to come in and see the light; but alas! they had fancied that the light was in themselves. They had boasted of having what others wanted. Oh, what fear there was that the light so shut up, never rekindled from its source, would become the most absolute darkness. But if any of you will come to the light, and let it stream into you, your whole bodies shall be full of it. There shall be no place dark.
(7.) This sentence is the proper introduction to the discourse from which I have taken my text.
‘And as he spake, a certain Pharisee besought him to dine with him: and he went in, and sat down to meat. And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner. And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also? But rather give alms of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you. But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye love the uppermost seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them.’
‘What tremendous withering words!’ exclaims the modern critic. ‘Can they have been really spoken at the house of one who asked Jesus to dine with him? How His temper must have been changed! What irritation must have been awakened in Him by the hostility which He encountered!’ I admit at once that, if the Pharisee were not abusing a trust which had been committed to him for the good of the nation, and if it was not the King of the nation—his King—who was calling him to answer for his trust, this language is wholly strange—I can make no defence of it. If that were so, then I say the more Jesus cared for the poorest, the most suffering, the most sinful of the land—the more He had stooped to them—the more might we expect Him to speak in thunders to the consciences of those who were lifting up themselves, of those who were making themselves gods and hiding from the people the living and true God. If it were the great disease of the Pharisee, that he made all clean without and left all foul within, was our Lord merciful or unmerciful for telling him to his face that it was so? Was it merciful or unmerciful to remind him that the unseen God, the God of his fathers, demanded truth in the inward parts, and was willing to give what He demanded? Was it better for him to know, or not to know, that his money was not his to buy God’s favour with, but his to be used as the almoner of God’s bounty to His creatures? Was it well that he should wake up to discover in some dying hour, or when the land was perishing, that he had substituted mint, anise, and cummin for judgment and the love of God, or that the disguise should be torn from his eyes whilst he was yet full of ease and satisfaction? Was it good that he should go on receiving the greetings in the markets, and thinking himself the best of men, or that he should for a moment be discovered to himself in his rags and corruption? Was it well that more men should drop into the hollow graves which looked so fair without, or that the owners of the graves should be admonished to purify them from the bones and pollutions within?
(8.) Did these words merely strike at the evils of a single school or sect? Were they not meant to reach all the teachers of Israel—all who were busy with commenting on the laws and letters of the Holy Book?
‘Then answered one of the lawyers, and said unto him, Master, thus saying thou reproachest us also. And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres. Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute: that the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; from the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation. Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not of yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.’
No sentence here is wasted. Each is aimed at some special tendency of the time. Each is more intense than the one that went before it. First, the infliction of hard rules and practices, burdensome to the conscience of the victim, not causing the least trouble to the imposer. Then the complacent admiration for holy men who are safe out of reach, who can no more utter the reproofs which enraged their contemporaries and brought death upon themselves. ‘You joyfully build their sepulchres; what would you do if they stood up and confronted you!’ Then the fearful assurance that the age, instead of being free from the guilt of previous ages, as it fancied, was gathering the guilt of them into itself, was cultivating all the murderous tempers and habits which had been their curse, was sowing wind to reap a whirlwind, such as they had not reaped. And this because the teachers of the divine law had that great master sin, the sin of priests and possessors of knowledge in all times. They think that knowledge is given for their own use. They think the people are to be kept away from it, and fed on mere husks. So the key which might unlock divine treasures becomes rusty in their hands, and cannot move the lock. They cannot find their own way into the kingdom of God, and those that are longing for it they keep out.
Woes indeed these were—woes for the most grievous of all sins, but woes contained in the sins themselves. These religious teachers were their own tormentors, as well as the tormentors of the land. And this was their sorest misery. They longed to silence the voice which told them of their misery. They did not know that, in ridding themselves of the Judge they would be ridding themselves of the Saviour. They did not know that He could take from them their pride, their hypocrisy, their hatred of Him and of His Father. Therefore, ‘And as he said these things unto them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to urge him vehemently, and to provoke him to speak of many things: laying wait for him, and seeking to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him,’
Oh my friends, may we take warning by that example! If we believe that He who sat in the Pharisee’s house was indeed the Eternal Son of God, may we open our ear to hear what He is now saying to the Churches! In the cottage, where sisters are working and learning, may they know Him as the Inspirer of their work, as the Giver of their knowledge! May He teach us to pray, that we may pray aright! May He conquer the spirit which is dividing us by His uniting Spirit! May that Spirit come and dwell with us, that the evil spirit of pride and malice may not enter into us and possess us! May He enable us to listen to all the warnings which heathens who have repented at His call and profited by His Word sent to us! And if our religion ever becomes one of show and not of substance, of self-exaltation and not of humility, of death and not of life, may the words that have been fulfilled to other countries and ages ring in our ears and make us tremble, that we may turn with all our hearts to Him who can renew us by His grace, who can cause the light which He has kindled in us to shine forth on the world!