Bible Commentaries

Chapter63

Defilement Spiritual Not Ceremonial

Matthew 15:1-20

Not often did Jesus Christ lose his patience, but when that circumstance did occur, it was marked by the utterance of very memorable words. We are sometimes warned not to provoke quiet men. Nor was this loss of patience in the case of Jesus Christ in any sense one of mere irritation or peevishness—it was rather a sense of moral indignation. The answer which he made to the Scribes and Pharisees who came from the metropolis was an instance of high, noble, moral resentment: it was not anger of a merely personal and selfish kind, it was a grave and solemn judgment. That the leading men of the day, the scholars and the clerks of the time, should be putting such trivial questions, should be mocking the spirit of progress by such frivolous inquiries, should be making such mountains out of such molehills, roused the divinest anger of an earnest soul.

Consider how this answer of the Saviour carries with it some profound suggestion of the supreme purpose of his life. He had not come down to make nice things, to arrange a ritual, to propose encroachments upon a ceremonial descended from the seniors—he came to save the world. Hence his flashing anger, his burning, scorching retort upon men who wanted to bind down his attention to the meanest frivolities that could engage the attention of the meanest intellects. From his answers to his opponents always learn something of Jesus Christ's main object in life.

The difference between the Scribes and Christ was that they lived in ceremony, and he lived in truth. Their religion was a trick in ritual—all religious observances and duties had been reduced to a mechanical standard and arrangement. With the Son of God religion was life, spirit, it was a vital principle, a divine inspiration, a continual drawing down from heaven of the energy and the grace needful for the work and the suffering of life. Observe therefore that the difference between them was not literal and measurable in words; it was vital, final, and indestructible.

This is what Jesus Christ has to say to all opposing parties. He does not come as one of many, saying, "Let us see where the exact point of rest Matthew 15:21-31

Our Lord is now touching upon half-heathen countries, and about to give forecasts of his universal empire. Up to this time he has moved within given geographical limits, now he looks, and almost steps, over the dividing lines. It belonged to the religious genius of Matthew in particular to see beyond Hebrew boundaries, and to note every sign of the universality of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. It was Matthew who brought the Magi from the far east with their presents of gold and frankincense and myrrh. A man like Matthew could not have omitted that incident from his story, though the other evangelists take no notice of it. Not St. Luke but St. Matthew notes the case of the Canaanitish woman. Matthew is a silent man; there was next to nothing said about him: again and again he shows us in his noble Gospel how great and noble were the thoughts that moved and ruled his mind. There is nothing little in Matthew's conception of the kingdom of heaven. He does not beat off the men from the far east, saying, "You have nothing to do with this birth;" nor does he rebuke the Canaanitish woman—he rather rejoices in those openings which show him light through their welcome rents, and Matthew says in effect, "This Master of mine shall rule from the east to the west, from the north to the south, and his house shall be large as his universe." Who knows but that as Mary was the mother of Jesus in the sense of bringing him into the world, so this Canaanitish woman may be the mother of Christ as introducing him into Gentile lands?

It is thus that individual names are lifted up in importance, and that small events are charged with infinite meaning. We know not what shall be the limit of the Amen to this prayer of hers. This supplication may mark the agony of a birth time. Jesus Christ is now very near the dividing lines: will this Canaanitish woman succeed in taking him over the boundary, and bringing to Gentile necessity, and sin, and pain, all the sweet gospel of heaven? Let us see.

The woman was both right and wrong, in her simple prayer. That indeed may be said about all our prayers,—mostly wrong, however, in many instances. Her prayer was conceived in the wrong name, in this instance arising no doubt from her courteous recognition of historical facts, but she appealed to the Son of David. By no such narrow name can Jesus enter into Gentile lands. If Christ was not more than the Son of David, he had no message to heathen countries. Matthew 15:32-39

All orthodox critics regard this miracle as totally distinct from the strikingly similar one recorded in the fourteenth chapter. There can, indeed, be no doubt about it, if we believe what Jesus Christ himself is reported to have said in the sixteenth chapter, wherein he asks the people if they have forgotten the five loaves of the five thousand, and the seven loaves of the four thousand. This is one of the repetitions which are necessary in beneficent life. We must not find fault with the miracles because we have experienced something very like them before. Our life is a continual miracle; repetitions ought not to be monotonous to us, our love ought to be so intelligent and lively as to discern in every repeated miracle some new phase and tone of the divine mind and purpose.

Amidst all his thinking, which must have been of the most trying nature, Jesus Christ's acute and passionate sympathy was never suppressed. With such problems pressing for solution, with the purposes of eternity about to accomplish themselves in his agony and death, with the cross daily acquiring new definiteness of outline and weight, who could wonder if all that was merely sympathetic should be forgotten or suspended? Are not we absorbed in the solution of our intellectual problems, are we not sometimes so taken up with great questions, that we cannot attend to domestic affairs, or household anxieties, or to the so-called petty troubles of our passing life? Here is a man who was slain from before the foundation of the world, who is now to be seen in heaven by faith's vision, as a lamb slain, who was a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief always, who had the wall salvation pressing upon his attention and crushing the strength of his heart, and yet he has time to bestow attention upon the hunger and thirst of the multitude. Wherein then is our reasoning wrong, when we think that great intellectual and moral considerations might have excluded the action of sympathy? It is wrong in the fact that we do not understand the real nature and scope of sympathy, when properly interpreted and understood. But for his sympathy the cross would have been an impossibility; intellect cowered before it, love took it up and bore it onward until its very gloom was carried into glory.

So shall it be with all crosses that are rightly borne. If we carry our crosses in Christ's spirit and according to the measure of Christ's will, we shall force our troubles beyond the dark point at which they would bind us down, and make those troubles contribute to the very satisfaction which they were meant to destroy. Intellect soon drops its crosses, love bears them on to the happy consummation. We are too impatient with our crosses: we try to cut them down; we should let them alone until they take root and blossom and bear fruit for our soul's satisfaction. Herein is the lesson of Christ broad and gracious to us in all its application of wisdom and of comfort. You want to cut the cross into small pieces of wood and to burn them in the fire and so destroy the tree of crucifixion: Jesus Christ shows us how we are to treat the cross—we are to carry it forward from step to step until we cause the extreme of trouble to touch the beginning of joy. Let us consider then the High Priest of our profession, let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of God. The joy that is beyond should give strength to bear the cross which is the immediate portion of the passing day. If we omit from our recollection the coming, the necessary joy, what wonder if our souls be cast down as under the pressure of an intolerable burden? Our light affliction is but for a moment, whilst we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. We are to be constrained to nobler heroism of endurance and sweeter gentleness of patience, by the power of an endless life. Take in more field, cast your eyes abroad upon a bolder horizon, recognise the ulterior purpose and the sure consummation of divine love, and then the cross will begin to bud, and to have upon it green leaves, and then coloured blossoms, and then rich sweet fruit; and the soul will know that it was a glad time when that rough cross was planted in the soil of the life.

Hear this sweet music, which rises with the might of gentleness, in the desert. It comes upon us suddenly, and yet there ought not to be any suddenness in such a strain. Jesus says, "I have compassion." This is the key-word of the Saviour's life, the surname of Christ is Compassion. Why should such a speech startle one? He refers to his compassion as if it were a new feature in the day's proceedings: he indicates the rising of compassion as though it were a new emotion of his life. What was the Saviour doing all the time but having compassion? The feeling never ceased: it touched with its own gentleness everything that Christ did—he might have prefaced every day's work with "I have compassion," he might every night have fallen asleep to the music of his own words, "I have compassion." It gave a wondrous expression to his eyes, caused the subtlest tones to enter into his gentle yet all-pervasive and all-penetrating voice, it lifted him up above his burdens and made him face the devil with a new energy—it was the secret and the very inspiration of his life and ministry.

If you read the life of Jesus Christ under this suggestion that compassion is the key-word of it all, you will find everything Jesus Christ did taking on a new colour and bearing a new attitude and general relation to all history and to all providences. When he preached, he preached as one who had compassion, and preaching without compassion is not preaching the gospel in a gospel tone. He who would preach Christ must preach him yearningly, tearfully—there must throughout his sermons be great gushes of tenderest desire for the souls of men. This is the secret of apostolic power: Paul besought those who heard him night and day with tears; the apostle punctuated some of his letters with weeping. Jesus Christ was a preacher whose words were steeped in feeling; every sermon therefore came from his heart, belonged to his heart, expressed his heart's uppermost feeling and purpose. When Jesus Christ denounced, he denounced in the spirit of compassion, his curses were the emphasis of his pity and his love, not in relation to those on whom they fell like thunderbolts, but in relation to those on whose behalf he poured out the maledictions of his righteous and solemn anger. When he denounced the Pharisees because they would not touch the burdens they laid upon men with so much as the tips of their fingers, it was because he had compassion upon those who were oppressed by the tyranny of those who sought to override and over-drive them. When he called men hypocrites, liars, actors, it was because they were deluding and misleading people, and because he had compassion upon the dupes and victims of priestly cunning and wicked purpose.

Why then should we be surprised when Jesus Christ says, "I have compassion"? Sometimes he had to express his compassion in the very lowest and commonest forms. He accommodated himself to human weakness in the ways in which he made his revelations. We ought to have known that his very cunning was the expression of a passionate feeling, we ought to have heard tones of compassion in every beatitude he pronounced and in every thunder of denunciation which he launched; but seeing that we were not spiritually sympathetic enough so to do, he had actually to come down and express his compassion to us in the feeding of our physical hunger. He has, so to say, to force himself by vulgarest miracle upon the rude stupidity of those who cannot follow the subtler music and diviner passages of his ministry. Not until he clothes some of us do we understand that he cares about us. He has, so to say, to build up, brick by brick, our very houses, and not until he has roofed them in and furnished them and made them glow with comfort do we begin to see that possibly there may be a Father and a Saviour in the universe. When our spiritual education is more advanced, when our sympathies are more eager and sensitive and are illuminated with divine intelligence, we shall see God in other directions and in other relations, and shall not need the miracle of bread to convince us that the very hairs of our head are all numbered and the very beatings of our heart are heard in heaven. Meanwhile we are rude, coarse, impervious, and he has to treat us according to the impenetrableness of our moral condition.

"I have compassion." How did he say that word? With what richness of tone, how broadly yet penetratingly he pronounced the word. He expounded it in its very enunciation, it warmed the wilderness when he uttered it, a new glow of hope pervading the breasts of all who heard that ineffable music. The compassionate man is the one whom we need oftenest and longest. The clever man amuses us for a moment, the entertaining man comes happily into the life now and again on sundry numerable occasions, the argumentative man troubles and vexes the intellect with many a hard proposition which he labours to solve and settle according to his own conceptions, but we tire of them all—we cannot live upon cleverness, entertainment sates its dupes, argumentativeness wears the brain which it challenges to high controversy, but pity, gentle compassion, noble all-including sympathy—it is the everlasting necessity, it is the divinest expression of interest.

This is Christ's power over the world—not the splendour of his intellect, not the witchery and fascination of his simple crystal eloquence, but his love, care, pity, patience, hopefulness, the heavenly way he has of stooping down to us and reconstructing our life when it has been shattered by rude blows, by whispering into our ear the word of hope which we dare not whisper to ourselves lest we should provoke the sword of conscience or bring to bear upon our souls the sting of outraged memory. By his love he wins, by his compassion he stands foremost among the world's redeemers, not one of many but one alone, and they are broken parts of him.

In such miracles as this we see how Jesus Christ includes the whole life in his purview and intent, and how nothing is too lowly for him to do that will bring into our hearts quietness and rest and satisfaction. The clever man will abandon you when you enter the chamber of affliction: his voice would be harsh there. The entertaining man cannot go with you into the sanctuary of sorrow: his laughter would offend the genius of the place, his jokes would be blasphemies in that solemn place. The argumentative man even would vex the soul by his problems and propositions, his hypotheses and clever conjectures, when the soul is ill at ease and is the subject of such afflictions as can be known only by those who have been transfixed by the accusations of God's law.

Who then can enter the chamber or be at home in the great darkness or take up the speech of the new land and utter it so that the soul can understand its whole meaning? He only who trod the winepress, who sweat, as it were, great drops of blood, who spake seven times on the accursed tree, who said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and who added, "It is finished." He goes with us everywhere, he is with us at the wedding feast, he will find wine enough for the guests. Wherever he goes he takes the wine of gladness with him, and when we come to die, he will be the principal guest in the chamber, and will then give us the same wine, the wedding wine. He only goes everywhere and is equally strong at every point.

Now we come to a point which for ever separates Jesus Christ from all other men, even the most tender-hearted and compassionate. It can be said of Christ alone that his resources were equal to his compassion. Our compassion outruns our resources: we are so often utterly helpless we might as well have no senses at all. What we would do, if we could: we would lift up the sick and the weary and make them well in a moment if it lay within our power so to do. We would take up the languishing and the death-stricken and make them glad in the summer light, and cause them to laugh with new energy, and because of new earthly hopes. We would cover up the grave, filling it with flowers, and smooth down the green face of the earth, so that it would be a shame to rip it up again for the purpose of hiding away the life of man. But though this would be the expression of our ignorant compassion, we are left without resource.

Jesus Christ always startled his disciples by the completeness of his proposals. "Feed the multitude," said he, and the disciples instantly answered "How?" "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature"—the same completeness and the same compassion, the same determination to meet the necessity of the whole case; and truly from a human point of view there is as little apparently in the one case as in the other—that is to say, in the case of preaching the gospel to every creature, and feeding the multitude with a few loaves and small fishes. What is there in this gospel to preach to every creature? what is there of sufficiency to meet the wants of the human family in all lands in all times? Yet it grows as it is spoken: this message never ends: it halts for a moment to accommodate the weakness of the speaker, but it tarries for him, it makes the air throb and burn till he returns to his work, itself is. never expressed in final speech. Let those testify to the sufficiency of the gospel to meet every want, who have known the gospel longest.

Notice the reason which Jesus Christ gives for his action—"lest they faint in the way." Here is the preventive ministry of the Saviour: he does not wait until the people do faint, he will run before them to prevent them fainting. Who can estimate this aspect of the Saviour's ministry amongst us? We know the accidents which actually occur, and we magnify them into tragedies, but who knows the accidents which we narrowly escape, the accidents, so to say, which might have happened, the perils which surround us on the right hand and on the left and yet which do not express themselves in their ultimate form? The physiologists tell us that every day we have ten thousand narrow escapes from death: you do not know how near you were dying five minutes ago—death, so to say, brushed you, and there was not room for a breath between the monster and the possible victim. We only know the rude accident, the actual fainting fit; but the accidents from which we are spared, the fainting fits that are kept off, the perils that are commanded to stand aside, who can estimate all these? Yet in this instance Jesus Christ invites our attention to his broadly preventive ministry; the action in which he goes before us to make ready against every contingency that could give us trouble.

"I go that I may prepare a place for you." He is always running before: if he go away, he says, when we cling to him as if we would detain him on the earth, "It is expedient for you that I go away." He never did anything for himself; he saved others, himself he could not save. To-day he is pleading for us, making our poor prayers into great prevalent intercessions, lifting up our little ministry of supplication into his own broad and grand priesthood, and giving gifts unto men as the answers to his own great prayers. We do not know all that Jesus is doing for us, we do not even know all that the summer does. Add up and tell me in plain speech what the summer does. You will speak of gardens and meadows, blossoms, foliages of a thousand tints, ripening fruits, singing-birds, great breadths of blue sky, height on height, an infinite immensity—is that all? You do not tell me how the summer climbed up into the poor man's one paned window and looked at him and told him he should be well again. You do not tell me how the summer subtly affected the souls of men who were depressed, and caused them to believe that even yet they would have a few cheerful hours before they passed away and were no more. You cannot follow all the ministry of light; it is always speaking, always working miracles, always recalling hope, always showing ways out of difficulties—light, a word of one syllable, but of all syllables in one.

Christ did not say that he wished to perform a miracle; Jesus Christ had no wish to show signs and wonders, and to display mere power. Had the bread been equal to the compassion, no miracle would have been performed. Compassion is the secret of every miracle; there are no instances of Jesus Christ exerting mere power for the sake of its display: he never sought to do anything by the exhibition of mere omnipotence. Read the miracles in the light of this suggestion, and you will find that every miracle is, so to say, the expression of his tears, the utterance of his love, the form of his compassion. Think of all his healing, and see in all the wondrous cures which he wrought, how he had compassion on the multitude. See him raising the dead, and as the dead rise in obedience to his word, hear him say, "I have compassion on the living because they are so lonely and cold in the absence of the loved one." See him walking on the sea, and hear him saying to the cold night wind, roused into storms that affrighted the poor voyagers, "I have compassion on the storm-tossed disciples because they are alone and know not what to do." And hear him say on the cross, "I have compassion on the multitude."