God the Uprooter of Sects

“But He answered and said, Every plant, which My Heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up.”—Matthew xv. 13.

The passage: Jesus answered that every plant which his heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.

Our Lord had been stating the principle that what goes into the mouth does not defile a man, but what comes out of it does. This clearly applied very widely, and it undermined a whole scheme of religion. The Jewish teachers felt how much it involved. The disciples asked their Master whether he knew the Pharisees were offended by it. He answered that every plant his Heavenly Father had not planted would be rooted up, that they should let the Pharisees alone, that they were blind leaders of the blind, and that if the blind lead the blind both fall into the ditch.

Again he stated a universal maxim, but he did not leave the disciples to work out its application. He made it plain that the sect of the Pharisees was the plant he meant, and that it was to be rooted up. The disciples must have wondered at this. They knew many Pharisees were righteous only on the surface, and they may have been with him long enough to see that keeping an outward rule is very different from doing God’s will. Still, this sect was emphatically the religious sect. It stood as a witness against another sect, which made light of divine ordinances and would have replaced everything peculiar to their fathers’ faith with a morality hardly different from the heathen schools. The earlier Pharisees were no doubt earnest men who wanted to save their countrymen from indifference, and who witnessed not just to what they believed but to what was true. There must always have been sincere, elevated devotion among them. Their teaching kept alive in the people the sense that man’s existence is not bounded by what is present and visible. The disciples knew this. Must they not have asked: if a plant that has grown so long is to be rooted out, what can we expect but the disturbance of all that is most sacred in our nation and in ourselves?

(1) Such thoughts may have shaken these humble fishermen, but they were not unwholesome. Our Lord wanted them to believe that the axe was laid to the root of the tree, that a great judgment-day for their nation was approaching, and that not earth only but heaven would be shaken. All his teaching had prepared them for terrible events that would mark his coming and the end of an age. These words were one note of the trumpet announcing that day. He was saying: “It is not the Sadducees—the sect you may imagine has defied God and deserves his wrath—that will be rooted out. It is the sect that carries the names of Religion and God on its banner, that believes itself the only plank between the nation and Atheism. It must wither and die, because God is not its root and it does not draw its life from him.”

(2) The disciples needed this lesson so that they would not be startled when much that looked fair and vigorous faded away. They needed it still more to understand what in the Jewish soil could not be rooted out, what would spread its fibres wider and send up higher branches where the birds of the air might nest. The Pharisee sect, our Lord says, his Father had not planted. Men set it up with the idea that it might further God’s glory, keep his name from being forgotten, and put down his enemies. It took faith, or Religion, under its patronage and watched over the interests of the Divine Kingdom. The first father of the nation did not feel like that when he went out into Canaan not knowing where he was going. He had obeyed a call from the Voice of God, believed in a Righteous Lord who ruled him, trusted that Lord, and risen up a righteous man. He kept his flocks, lived with his wife, raised his children and fought his battles as a servant of the Unseen Protector, bearing witness to him by doing the work given him. He expected God to be with his children as he had been with him, and the seed to multiply like the stars of heaven and bless all the families of the earth. The Heavenly Father did plant this seed. He did establish a Family, bidden to trust and obey him. The Father of the Faithful began a Family, not a Sect that would proclaim itself the worshipper of Jehovah and so exalt itself rather than him.

Moses was not the author of any such sect either. His heart yearned over his kinsfolk, slaves to a tyrant. Slowly and reluctantly he came to be convinced that the God of these slaves had called him to deliver them. He showed the tyrant that a God who cared for outcasts was stronger than he and his gods, and showed the slaves that the Lord, the I AM, is a Deliverer. He bound them together in that Deliverer’s name as subjects of a Law no one could break without bringing punishment on himself. He taught them that the Unseen God wanted to make them a brave and understanding people, free from their own lusts and restored when they transgressed. He taught them that God himself was among them, binding them as a Nation, and that none of them should doubt his presence and help. In a word, Moses was God’s instrument in planting a Nation of Israelites, to bear witness to him as the One Living God of the whole earth. The Laws and Ordinances he gave meant that God was King of the land, the people were his subjects, and worshipping any visible thing was revolt against him. Moses was not founding a Jewish sect to testify against heathen sects or for Jewish rites and customs.

We are told likewise that God called David from keeping sheep to shepherd his people Israel. Through defeats and victories, as popular champion and as outlaw, through the strength given him to rule righteously and the punishments laid on him when he ruled unrighteously, he was taught that he was always under a higher King and lived to bear witness to him. He could do so only by judging between man and man, putting down the Nation’s enemies, uniting its members, and preparing the Gentiles to feel that the same King reigned over them and would one day be revealed to them as their Light and Deliverer. David was the man after God’s heart just so far as he did not set himself up as head of a self-made sect, but was the called chief of a divine Nation, destined to grow until it embraced all Mankind.

(3) Now the crisis had come, and the disciples were to understand that it had. It would decide whether this Family, of which Abraham the friend of God was the first earthly father, and this Nation that Moses led out of bondage and that under David became a Kingdom, would end in a sect or several sects, or would unfold into that Universal Society of which they and all the Prophets believed it was the germ. The religious party among the Jews could imagine no higher blessing than its own complete triumph over its enemies and the putting down of every notion adverse to its own. What else could be desired? Would not religion then be raised to its highest place, as the religion learnt from the Divine books? Would not everything irreligious—all heathenism, all imperfect, insincere, heretical Judaism—be banished into outer darkness?

(4) The disciples learned gradually from his lips that they were chosen to tell their countrymen that the Son of David and Son of Abraham had come to bind Publicans and Sinners, Jews, Galileans and Samaritans into one. This Son of David and Abraham was the Son of Man, who would finally gather all Nations into one. The Son of Man was the Son of God, in whose image men were created, the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of his person. Like Moses he was a Deliverer from bondage, but because he was a Son and not a Servant he could break the bonds Moses could not, and fulfil the Righteousness of which Moses only testified. With this Gospel they were to go to Jews and Gentiles. As they carried it, they soon found that its natural and necessary enemies were the sects. Sadducees and Pharisees hated it equally, because they saw in it the destruction of the sect-principle, and they felt they could keep even a temporary ascendancy only by fighting this rival to the death.

When the disciples saw how mighty the sect-principle was, how many were pledged to it, and how it tied itself to the better thoughts and faith of some, so that those people supposed everything would perish if it gave way, they must have remembered the words once spoken to them: every plant my Heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up. As they saw how wicked the Jewish sects became in the last days of the commonwealth, they grew surer that the sentence would one day be carried out, though the cry “How long, O Lord!” must often have been in their hearts and on their lips.

(5) They had deeper reasons for that cry. They saw all too clearly that other soils than Judæa’s could nourish this old plant, and that its root of bitterness could be traced in every Church baptized into the all-embracing, all-uniting Name. How terrible this discovery was to St. Paul, the first Epistle to the Corinthians shows directly, and every other Epistle shows if we look into its heart. The deeper he went into the Gospel entrusted to him, the more he dwelt on the Son of God as the destroyer of all walls of partition, the Atoner of God and Man, the Head of a body fitly joined together and indwelt by a quickening, uniting Spirit, who means to gather all things in heaven and earth to himself. And so the more startling it seemed that party names and watchwords should be heard in his Society. Everything Paul said and wrote was aimed at this contradiction. When he had to speak of himself or his fellow-workers, it was as Apostles called by God and sent with a message of peace. When he spoke of the Church’s members, it was to tell them they were called to be saints.

This language strikes at the root of the sect-maxim just as much as his speaking of prayer to the Father of the whole family in heaven and earth, or his claiming all Church members as members of Christ and bidding them live worthily of their calling. The sect says: “We have bound ourselves together to promote certain great objects; we have adopted distinct badges of our faith; we are pledged to oppose whatever interferes with it.” Christ chooses the Church to witness to his love for mankind. The sect chooses Christ because it is convinced his doctrine is better than that of other religions’ founders, and then goes on to choose Cephas, Paul or Apollos for the most refined or satisfactory form of that doctrine. So the person of Christ is lost in the opinions the sects have taken up about him.

(6) What supported the Apostles as they saw this Sectarianism unfold in the Churches God had enabled them to build, and felt sure it would not cease in coming ages but spread? First, they were certain that what God had planted would not be uprooted but would bear fruit from generation to generation. Christ would remain, however men formed notions about him and split into parties over them. And they did not dare, and found it impossible, to think of human society as anything but constituted in Christ. It was men’s confusion and unbelief to think they could have fellowship and existence without him, and gather simply because solitude was inconvenient. Christ’s ministers were to proclaim that there could have been no families, nations, social impulses or laws, nothing to resist the selfish tendencies each of us feels in himself and complains of in his neighbours, if there were not one living centre of the whole body of Humanity, one Head of every man. So his ministers were to be assured that the Church of Christ, which stands not on men’s faith but on God’s Will, would go on living and bearing witness to the order he has established in his Universe and his purpose to bring all into one, whatever powers threatened to crush it from outside or undermine it from within.

Second, they were to remember the words, “Every plant which my Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up.” Whatever unions men form to support their theories or opinions, whatever plans they devise in their wisdom to keep the ark of God from falling—or, in their coarse jargon, “to promote the interests of religion”—carry in them the pledge and prophecy of dissolution. They may look plausible to men, and may work themselves so far into the plant our Heavenly Father has planted that they seem inseparable from it, but they have a different root. He can part them, though his servants cannot. He can bind the one in bundles to be burned, and gather the fruit of the other into his garner for ever.

(7) My brethren, I believe no men ever needed the lesson of this verse more than we do, and we should ask God earnestly to teach us to apply it. We are all ready enough to apply it to our opponents. Each party turns to the one it wants to overthrow and says solemnly, “Yours is a plant God has not planted, so it will be rooted up,” and sets about the uprooting by honest means or dishonest. The Protestant tells the Romanist, “Your Popedom was not planted by our Heavenly Father; it will be rooted up.” The Romanist tells the Protestant, “All your schools and parties were not planted by our Heavenly Father; they shall be rooted up.” Which is right? Which uses Christ’s words truly, and which abuses them? I take it that all use them in their true sense and none abuses them. Each proclaims God’s judgment, which must stand though heaven and earth pass away, and each is a prophet of what will surely come to pass. Each is largely justified in what it alleges against the immorality and ungodliness the denounced system has produced and is likely to produce. But we must remember that we are not to look for the causes of this immorality and ungodliness in other men, but in ourselves, where we can know their malignity and be God’s instruments for casting them out. There is a plant in your heart and mine that our Heavenly Father has not planted and that must be rooted out. It is that same plant of self-seeking, opinionativeness and party spirit that has shed its poison over the Church and the world. In us it springs from the same root of unbelief in One who is the Head of us all and whose Life is the common Life of all—the root out of which all sects and parties have come. It is the root of pride that has led to the amazing delusion that God has not called us to be his servants and children, but that we are taking him to be our Lord and Father. Once by his grace we are delivered from that presumption, we shall not doubt that he has taken care of his own name and kingdom on this earth, however ignorantly his creatures have set themselves to defend and exalt them. We shall not talk of a set of men who preserved his faith and Church when he had let them fall into ruin. We shall believe that his Church has stood firm in his Son. In every land he has testified to its existence by his ordinances, which no corruption of men could set aside; by the light he has kindled in the hearts of unknown myriads, which no darkness of theirs could quench; and by his witness to a Unity among men that no artificial arrangements could create and no divisions destroy.

(8) If this is so, we shall remember that when Christ spoke to his disciples of the rooting up of the Pharisee sect, he added, “Let them alone.” The work will be done, but it is not yours to do. You cannot separate the tares from the wheat, or distinguish the man I love from the Pharisee I hate. If you tried to destroy the sect my Heavenly Father has not planted, you would destroy something of the Church he has planted and is watching over until it reaches the full stature of Christ. We are to listen to the denunciations parties hurl at each other and admit, trembling, that they are all too well founded. We should not eagerly join in them, for God has given us another and nobler work: showing the members of parties that when their mud houses fall, there is a house of God not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, where they may find refuge. Above all, we must never be tempted to the greatest of sins, forming a new party to displace or overcome existing ones. That temptation will come in ten thousand forms. The Evil Spirit will come as an Angel of Light and tell us we are not to build a new party—that would be very wicked—but a protest against all parties, a larger Church, a freer and more expansive Christianity. Accursed sophist! We construct a Church! We lay a broader foundation for Humanity than God has laid in his Son! We invent a more comprehensive Gospel than the Gospel of the Ascension, that he has gone on high, leading captivity captive and glorifying our Nature at his Father’s right hand! Such an experiment would gather all the arrogance and unbelief of former sects into one grand, devilish scheme of self-exaltation, and the Society we helped form would be the Society of Antichrist. No, brethren: in the sense of competing with parties, imitating them or superseding them, we must let them wholly alone. In another sense we must never let them alone; we must keep tormenting them. The Apostles did not uproot the Pharisee sect, but they preached the corner-stone of Humanity, and against that stone the sect stumbled and fell. It could not confess a One Lord who came to bind Jew and Greek, bond and free, heaven and earth in one. It would maintain itself and its traditions against man and God, and man and God were too strong for it.

So it will be with every party and system formed by human wit, however religious its purpose, that our Heavenly Father has not planted. The compromises of statesmen and churchmen will not weaken them, and indifference and infidelity will lend them a force not their own. But they will shrink and shrivel before the blast of the breath of the mouth of him who is the Son of Man and the Son of God, the Saviour and Judge of the whole earth.