Matthew 5:21-26 - Homilies By P.c. Barker

The Christian type of a true fulfilling of the Law: Christ's first illustration.

Had the scribes and Pharisees not adulterated in many ways the Law, their righteousness would still have been the observing of the letter of commandments of the old covenant. The greatness of the moral step in advance now promulgated by Christ is measured by the fact that he sets as a necessity before his freshest recruits, that they should see better and do better than the masters and veterans of that old covenant. This is, as St. Chrysostom says, the fit illustration of the "superior power of grace." Observe, then, how—

I. CHRIST TRACES TO ITS REAL GERM AND ORIGIN THE FOUL , OVERT CRIME OF MURDER . That is to say, it is:

1 . Personal anger, i.e. anger with a person, that person necessarily a creature of God, and therefore one's own brother. Anger with sin, anger with a man's offence, and the mischief he and it may have done, and anger in the sense of self-defensive and instinctive momentary resentment , are not herein condemned.

2 . Anger permitted to express itself in the shape of utter contempt for the person. Illustrate by comparison of contempt, disdain, mockery, and all this family, with sorrow, grief, pity, compassion.

3 . Anger assuming energetic activity, neither suppressed and dying in its own ashes, nor (however mournful this) kept within the limits of a parched, arid atmosphere, where for less worthy reasons it nevertheless will extinguish itself; but finding fresh fuel and disastrous incentive in the shape of passion and passion's vocabulary.

II. CHRIST DIGNIFIES INFINITELY THE CONCORD OF BROTHERS ON EARTH BY LETTING US KNOW THAT HEAVEN TAKES SPECIAL NOTE RESPECTING IT , AND MAKES IT ITS OWN CAUSE . The gift to God cannot be laid on the altar, so that it shall be accepted, while upon that other altar, the altar of the offerer's heart, false fire burns. It cannot escape notice that the loved and beloved disciple's heart received this saying and treasured it to old age, and gave a most exemplary version of it, in its spirit, in his Epistle ( 1 John 2:9-11 ; 1 John 3:11 , 1 John 3:14 , 1 John 3:15 ; 1 John 4:20 , 1 John 4:21 ; 1 John 5:1 , 1 John 5:2 ). How far, far away even the Christian elements and tributaries of human society and brotherhood are still from apprehending and practising what is here taught!

III. CHRIST GIVES US THE SUREST GUIDE TO MORAL REFORM , ONCE SEEN AND ACKNOWLEDGED ; IT IS FOUND IN PROMPTNESS . The most merciless adversary a man ever had, whether only most exacting as regards debts due to him, or revengeful as well as exacting, is not to compare for mercilessness and exactingness with that adversary which each and any man has within himself, and which consists of his own worse self! That worse and lower self is our worst adversary. He equivocates, he extenuates, he procrastinates; he is grievously self-indulgent, slow to awake from sleep or sloth, self-partial to a proverb, and blind to all his own higher self's higher interest. Once let a just thought, a glimmering ray of light, a genuine conviction of duty, or an admonition from without, really heard, be his, and this is his hope, his safety, the earnest of his regeneration, that he "agree quickly."—B.