The Hungry Filled; the Rich Sent Away Empty

“And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” —Matthew viii. 11, 12.

The passage: Many will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the children of the kingdom will be cast into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

This is St. John’s Day. The two Apocalypse chapters we have read commemorate it beautifully. The first shows how the Apostle wished his contemporaries to think of him — one who bore witness to the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ, their brother and companion in tribulation, and in the Kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. The second shows what that Kingdom was, in which he lived and for which he waited.

I have on other occasions spoken of this Apostle’s testimony to the Word of God, and recently from a passage in the Apocalypse about the Kingdom of Heaven and its saints. My text today, from St. Matthew, is also a testimony to the Word of God and the Kingdom of Heaven. It may show how wonderfully St. John’s doctrine explains the doctrine of those before him, how fitly the Apocalypse winds up the New Testament, and how its truths, by whomever delivered, expound Christmas Day and may prepare us for a New Year.

St. Matthew’s words follow the story of the Roman centurion who sent Jewish elders to ask Jesus to heal his servant. I referred to him not long ago as an illustration of the deep, practical divinity a man might learn in a camp. He had soldiers under him, and was himself under authority; he ruled them and was ruled not by physical force but by words — he said Go, and they went; Come, and they came. The soldier considered this: must there not be some power, not physical, not visible, from which it flowed? Must not someone be speaking to his very heart, whom he was bound to obey — was not this his Lord, the source and spring of his life?

Where did these thoughts lead him? He heard of one who went about healing sicknesses, and reasoned: if this Jesus can heal, it must be because the Word of God is with him, in him — perhaps because he is this Word of God himself. There is no need that he should come into my house; I am not worthy. Let him speak, and it will be done, as my commander speaks and I obey, as I speak and my soldiers obey me.

And our Lord said: I have not found such faith in Israel. Not even the best of you, who read the Law and Prophets, have discerned their true meaning as this heathen has; not even the best of you, who worship in the Temple, have shown such freedom from idolatry as this man, raised to reverence the Jove of the Capitol. All of you still crave the touch, the sight; you must have signs and wonders before you believe; you lack this inward trust, this bowing of the spirit before an unseen King. Yet until you come to the confession this Roman soldier made, you will not learn why I have come, what good it does, and you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven I preach and am to establish. That is the Kingdom in which your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived, by faith in a King they could not see, who was with them, watched over their households and flocks, told them where to go, and made them know when they did wrong. They were learning their place in a fellowship to which you belong, catching first glimpses of a ladder set on earth and reaching to heaven, on which you may stand and climb. But I say to you, many will come from east and west and sit down with them in this Kingdom, while the children of the Kingdom will be cast out.

I. Nothing in the first half of this announcement should have startled them. The name of Abraham should have recalled the covenant of blessing to all the families of the earth — but they had never understood what that blessing was, or that the families of the earth were to share it. What was this Kingdom of Heaven, and where? Was it at hand, the Son of David soon to enter Jerusalem as a Roman general enters his capital with spoils of east and west? Or was heaven a city in the sky, to which the pious would be carried after death for their prayers, fasts, and good deeds? Whichever notion, or whatever vaguer blend of them, was held, the same difficulty remained: how could Roman centurions, Greeks, or barbarians share in the felicity? Either they must be trampled down to grace the Conqueror’s procession, or they must somehow have earned rewards scarcely any but the most devout of the Covenant could hope for. What a sentence upon those who had toiled all day for their hire, if a multitude called at the eleventh hour received the same wage!

A sentence indeed — and such a sentence Jesus came to pronounce. The gospel of his Kingdom was judgment on those who had imagined another kingdom for themselves; news of salvation to the world was condemnation to those who counted the world’s salvation their own loss. We should hold this thought firmly: it shows why Christ’s coming as Deliverer necessarily meant his coming as Judge, and why the Jewish expectations were inverted — the nations they thought condemned were exalted, and the nation they thought would be exalted was laid low.

We must keep strictly to our Lord’s own words here, and everywhere he speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven, without importing our own fancies, if we are to grasp this great Christian paradox. The Kingdom in which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob sat, and in which many from every quarter would sit with them, could have nothing to do with either of the Jewish heavens. Judging by the centurion’s story, it must be bound up with acknowledging a mysterious sovereignty over human hearts — a sovereignty in which the general, the centurion, and the common soldier alike stood within reach of its commands and its grace. If Abraham was drawn out of an idolatrous race, and preserved amid one, to witness early to this righteous rule that would one day break all unrighteous rule to pieces, then the widening of this knowledge to ever more people was already implied in choosing one man to bear practical witness of it. His own sphere was small; soon a successor would take his place, and then be forgotten too. But as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob passed out of their brief and often troubled pilgrimage, they would come to understand better the Kingdom they had confessed, see how it overshadowed the world, and watch its grace and power gradually made known to the children of men. To see fresh spirits entering this Kingdom, God’s army increasing, his enemies ever freshly overthrown, to encourage the fainting, and themselves to grow in knowledge, awe, and love through every fresh service for their brethren — this was the reward God had prepared for those who loved him. Whatever rewards he had for those who sought only their own prizes and grudged others a share, such people did not aspire to.

So it was no wonder — only an infinite delight — that the divine Kingdom they themselves had grasped so faintly on earth should be made known, by one discipline or another, to Roman centurions, eastern Magians, Greek sages, sufferers at the world’s ends; no wonder, but delight, that these should learn of a Father’s house they might return to from the far country of their wandering, and that the Father himself was bringing them home. Every age had brought fuller apprehension of this, until the fulness of time revealed the perfect Image of the Father. That revelation opened the Kingdom of Heaven to the Gentiles; and what was a light to them was also the glory of Israel. What had been hidden for ages came to light; what prophets and kings had longed for was made known to fishermen, who were allowed to reap harvests sown by prophets and kings from fields they had ploughed. The Law went out indeed from Judah, and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem; the King of Israel claimed the homage of every land, and multitudes everywhere bowed heart and neck to his yoke.

II. “But the children of the Kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Again, let us hold to our Lord’s own words rather than substitute our own — we cannot make them clearer than he has. He speaks of darkness; St. John explains why: “This is the condemnation, that Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than Light, because their deeds were evil.” The Light of the World shines on mankind; those who should welcome and spread it are instead frightened by it and flee it. Either they establish their reign of darkness, or the Light proves stronger. It does prove stronger — so they are left to the darkness they chose. It is outer darkness, lying outside God’s kingdom, outside humanity, banished by God’s order.

Such words, coming from the holiest lips, must not be handled like the phrases of ordinary rhetoric — they are to be pondered, not played with. When our Lord speaks of darkness, he means us to think of what darkness is in common experience: the inability to make out the shape of things or the faces of men, to tell the safe from the perilous. In our spiritual condition nothing can be more terrible than the corresponding state — the incapacity to know evil from good, to distinguish what should be hated utterly from what should be loved utterly. As light comes to the eye from the sun, so light comes to the spirit from the presence of the Father of Spirits; to be shut up in ourselves without him is the deepest possible ruin of a creature made in his image.

Is the phrase gnashing of teeth any less plain? Have you ever been in a madhouse? Compare what you saw and heard there with yesterday’s Lesson: how the crowd to whom Stephen said, “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost, as your fathers did, so do ye,” gnashed on him with their teeth. Conscience within them said, He speaks truth; the Devil within them said, Kill the truth. The Devil seemed to triumph — they killed the utterer to kill the truth. But if the truth could not die, if it and its witnesses remained, must not the teeth go on gnashing? It was the gnashing over blessings very near yet unrealized, the inward conviction that they were gone.

Brethren, human conscience in every age has responded so powerfully and fearfully to these words of our Lord, finding in them so personal an application, that it has been hard to insist on their plain, direct sense — that when he spoke of Israel he meant Israel, that the children of the Kingdom who cast themselves out did so in that very generation. I believe it is both our duty and our wisdom to hold to the letter of Scripture; if we soften it merely to extract useful lessons, all its power over us vanishes. Yet I attach great weight to this response of our hearts — that these words cannot have meant more for Judæa than they mean for Christendom, that their whole blessing and terror belong to us and our children too. We shall best grasp that blessing and that terror by considering what the Advent of Christ gave the world, and what was lost to those who had been stewards of God’s blessings for it. The Word made flesh opened to men a Kingdom of Righteousness, Peace, and Joy; told them they were its heirs; showed them how to enter it in spirit; promised them the Spirit that had dwelt without measure in him, so that they might enter it. The Word came to his own, and his own received him not — they would not confess him as Lord of their spirits, seeing in him only the Carpenter’s Son. So the invisible world grew ever more obscure to them; they could perceive only what their senses showed them. And so those great possessions the senses cannot register — Justice, Love, Truth, the eternal treasures without which holy hearts felt they must perish — were withdrawn from the chosen people’s grasp, as though they no longer existed. Shadows replaced them; the forms that had once spoken of and revealed those treasures grew monstrously large, like spectres of the night — sometimes hinting in awful voices at what they could not restore, sometimes deluding those who embraced the cloud into thinking they had found the divinity itself. Then came the uproar of parties, a Babel of noise, nothing clear but the passion and fury trying to express itself, which, words having failed, turned to other weapons.

Is the picture too familiar? Dare we not look at it because it resembles too closely what might happen, what may be happening, in our own nineteenth century? Yes — we know and feel that the signs of God’s Kingdom are among us; every Christmas Day testifies that it has drawn near, that we live and move and have our being within it. It is not far off, so that we must ask who will go up to heaven or down to the deep to fetch it — it is close, at the heart of each of us. The Word of God preaches it to us there, turning every record of the past into a message for the present. Stephen looks at us as he did at the Sanhedrin, with an angel’s face; he witnesses and dies for us. John is our brother and companion in tribulation and in the Kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. The Innocents mingle with the children born and dying before our eyes. All testify to an undefiled, eternal Kingdom which we may enter, whose treasures are for us all.

And around us all are powers of darkness that would persuade us there is no Kingdom of Light, and would draw us outside its bounds. They tell us the world of eye, ear, and taste is the only real world. If we believe them, the beauty of that world vanishes — what was full of life, motion, and freedom becomes dull and hopeless. We believe them, and become citizens instead of a kingdom just as spiritual as Christ’s, but a kingdom of Unrighteousness, War, and Joylessness. We do not give up religion by becoming sensualists — but our religion turns into one of terror and hatred, a set of devices for escaping God, for making the Holy One cease from us.

Brethren, may Christendom, may England, never so trifle with these powers of darkness as at last to be cast into that outer darkness which fell upon the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! May we never gnash our teeth because God’s Word speaks to our consciences of good things that were ours and that we refused! May the warnings and deliverances of this past year be received as God’s own loving entreaties not to cast ourselves into that torment! But whether we receive them so or not, multitudes will come from east and west, north and south — even, we believe, the Jewish exiles themselves at last — and sit down in the Kingdom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As surely as day follows night, as year follows year, he who stood before John on Patmos will be revealed to every eye. As surely as any earthly friend’s voice speaks warning or comfort to us, he is saying: “Behold, I come quickly, and my reward is with me, to give to every man as his work shall be.”