Mateo 11:20-24

Chapter 47

Prayer

Almighty God, do thou be pleased, through Jesus Christ our Saviour, to come to every one of us with some new revelation of thyself. Thou hast poured out thine heart upon us, and behold we have not been contrite: thou hast urged us, by every appeal known to thy tender love, and behold some of us are still far away from thee, as if we had forgotten our father's house. May we ask thee now for some light to fall upon our heart which has not yet fallen, for some tender strain to seek the heart which has sought it in vain through years gone by! All things are possible unto thee. We know not what more thou canst do: thou hast thyself inquired, What can I do to my vineyard more than I have done? If thou canst not answer the question, behold there is no reply in us. Thou hast gathered the clouds into the heavens, and poured them down upon us in a plentiful rain, thou hast made all thy heaven quick with light, thou hast filled the air with angels, thou hast sent thy son to die for us, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us unto God, thou hast granted to strive with men the Holy Spirit what thou canst do more we know not, but if thou canst do anything, now save us, every one.

We are weary of the world; we have sounded the hollowness of time and space and sense there is nothing in them to satisfy our inward hunger, there is in them no water for our soul's thirst. Thou hast opened in the house of David a fountain for sin and for uncleanness: the blood of Jesus Christ thy Son cleanseth from all sin: at thy table is satisfaction, in thy truth is rest for the soul may we take upon ourselves Christ's yoke and Christ's burden, and be the glad slaves of the Son of God!

We thank thee for every man whose heart is attuned to thy praise, and whose life is a daily sacrifice offered upon the altar of the sanctuary; we bless thee for every man who can move us to prayer, to holy tears, to noble endeavours, to sacred heroisms encourage all such men, yea, do thou give them a plentiful reward, and every day renew their inspiration, that they weary not nor fail in their great mission.

Here are worn lives, tired, bruised, and weary men, travellers that long for the time of lying down and to be at final rest, men who have seen great things which have not moved them in the right direction, lives that have made shipwreck of faith and of a good conscience, men in whom there is hardly any good thing left. Make to-night the gospel of Christ heard by them to the rekindling of their hope and the re-animation of their best desires and purposes. Here are silent sufferers, carrying their burden wearily, whose grief is too sacred for speech, whose wounds are all in the heart. A wounded spirit who can bear? O Healer of mankind, Gentle One, Physician of souls, Redeemer of the whole human race, come thou in all thy tender power, in all thy healing gentleness, and speak a word in season to him that is ill at ease. Amen.

Mat 11:20-24

20. Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works (unrecorded miracles) were done, because they repented not:

21. Woe unto thee, Chorazin (or town of Galilee, two miles from Capernaum), woe unto thee, Bethsaida (the birthplace of Peter, Andrew, and Philip): for if the mighty works which were done in you (chastised by Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander) had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

22. But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you.

23. And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven (as the frequent residence of Christ), shalt be brought down to hell: for if the works which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

24. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee.

Seeking Fruit and Finding None

This is a new tone in the voice of Jesus Christ. All that has yet come out of him has been an utterance of love and hope and hospitality, great offers of healing and peace and joy. Now comes the tone of reproach. It must come sooner or later in all human training. Every man who is deeply interested in the race has had occasion to utter a keen voice of reproach at some period of his generous toil. It is important to observe that in this instance the reproach is founded upon absolute reasonableness. It is not petulance; it is the result of labour not misapplied, but unworthily received. And we are accustomed amongst ourselves to utter reproach under precisely the same circumstances. Sometimes there is a whining and unreasonable reproach among men, but, as a general rule, in the deeper experience of life our upbraidings and reproaches are founded upon reason.

How do you address the boy upon whom you have lavished all your care; upon whom you have spent a fortune, little or great; whose well-being has been the one object of your desire; for whom you would gladly have suffered the loss of all things that he might be wise and good and useful; and who, when everything has been done for him human love could devise and human sacrifice provide, has turned out ungrateful, unfilial, a disappointment, a wreck? Is it possible for you to look on with complacency? Do you feel no pang of the heart as you look upon the result of all your prayer and toil and care? What if there break from the tongue of the most patient some bitter cry of regret, some tone of parental disappointment would it be unreasonable? Its pathos would be in its reasonableness.

You speak of the land you toil upon, and on which you bestow money and labour and care, and which does not reward your industry, in almost anger and contempt. You look for results; you have a right to do so; you have laboured, and you say where is the produce? Yet the land will drink up all you pour upon it, eat it, and be as lean as ever; and if you visit that land with a judgment of condemnation you are acting reasonably in so doing.

These illustrations may help us to understand in some degree the pathos of this reproach, the bitterness of this cry, and the more so because the object of Jesus Christ in all his labour is distinctly laid down here. The reason given is, Because they repented not. It was not petulance on the part of Christ; there was no tone of merely personal disappointment; it seemed as if he had made the cities worse rather than better; it seemed as if they would have been better if they had never seen him, for having seen him, they rejected him with despite and contempt. Surely it would have been better for some of us if we had never heard of Christ. No man can hear of Christ and be just the same after hearing concerning him and his gospel as before hearing the revelation of his person and ministry. The gospel makes a man better or it makes him worse; it is a savour of life unto life or of death unto death. No man is the same after church as he was before church; the prayer is an event in his history; any offer of divine mercy, any display of divine love, is a crisis in the man's personal history, and if he accept not the offer that was made, it were better for him that the offer had never been presented to his attention.

We may no longer then doubt the one purpose of Christ in working his miracles. The object which Christ had in view in working miracles was to bring men to repentance. He upbraided the cities that had seen his mighty works because they repented not, the argument being that the miracles were wrought for the purpose of bringing the people to repentance, and that object having failed, the whole purpose of Christ came to nothing. They were not wrought to startle, to please, to amuse, or to gratify curiosity, but to bring the heart to contrition; they were assaults upon unbelief, they were appeals to obduracy, they were so many forms and methods of gospel preaching.

The miracles will be a continual stumbling-block to us if we do not seize this view of them. Regarded by themselves, they stun the mind and excite many eager questions, but placed in their right atmosphere and read in the high light of their generous purpose, the miracles are but the emphasis with which divine messages were delivered. No miracle is to be torn out of its setting, Wrenched away from its proper atmosphere, and judged as a thing complete in itself. Every miracle belongs to something else, and if you do not bring that something else within your purview, and add that in the consummation of your argument, you will miss the whole purpose and meaning of Christ's miracles. Yet this is how the miracles have been treated. They have been taken out one by one, brought away from their natural atmosphere and proper surroundings, and each has been judged as a thing that had no relation to anything else. Now Jesus Christ adds, in one utterance of reproach, the miracles to a grand moral purpose. He upbraided the cities, and cried in terms of bitter reproach because the miracles had not produced repentance. They might have excited the cities to applause, roused the cities to admiration and delight, as mere feats of power; Christ would not have found, in such external enthusiasm, the result of his purpose.

Understand therefore, in reading the miracles, that every one of them has a moral issue in view in the scheme and providence of God, and we must not detach the miracle from the moral and beneficent purpose which God had in view in working that wonder in the sight of Man. Take the Incarnation of our Lord himself. As a mere incident in human history, it is incredible. But the Incarnation of our Lord is never set before us as a mere incident in human history. It is not an anecdote complete in itself, it brings up the ages with it, it sums infinite processes into one grand manifestation. As a divine method of coming into the race, it was from the point of reason the only method of approaching the solemn work which was to be done. Given, God's purpose to manifest himself unto the world in visible form, and the gospel method of incarnation was not only the best possible, but the only possible method. I wish we had the opportunity of working out that theorem to its fullest issues. It needs to be stated over and over again until men become perfectly familiar with its terms. Not only was the Incarnation of our Lord the best possible method of coming into the human race, but the only method of doing so. And this I undertake to show on the ground of natural reason itself.

God could not come into any common man as he came into Christ without first destroying that man's identity, altering the centre and the weight of that man's responsibility, and placing that man in a totally false relation to every other member of the human race. The Incarnation of God in Christ exactly as it is stated in the gospel alone fills my imagination and satisfies my reason in its sternest mood. It would have amounted, had God come into any common man as he came into Christ, to an invidiousness which would have insulted every intelligent creature, and would have set up a perpetual irritation in every process of moral reasoning. He chose one of ourselves, and out of the lips of that elect man he rebuked every one of us. Why did he not choose every one of us, why did he not come a million strong, why not incarnate himself in every creature that bore his image? He incarnated himself in one common man, picked up one of ourselves, dwelt in all the fulness of his deity in him bodily. Why did he not repeat the miracle according to the number of millions of human creatures upon the earth, and then the whole work would have been done? But to tell me that he incarnated himself in a creature precisely of my own kind and standing precisely on a level with myself, and then left me out and spoke to me through the man whom he had thus made his own tabernacle, insults my reason, annoys my sense of justice, fills me with contempt. But take the gospel method, coming as Christ came into the world, begotten by the Holy Ghost, conceived of the Virgin Mary, made like unto us yet without sin, and it becomes a mystery indeed, but a mystery before which our reason uncovers its head and bows down in lowly wonder and worship. As it is, I can say, Great is the mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh, but upon any other theory I should say, Great is the injustice of godliness; a common man is chosen and purified as a vessel of God, whilst other men are left to be touched and moved by his inferior ministry.

Do not detach the miracles from their atmosphere, above all things do not create any space between the miracle and its moral purpose; the moral purpose of every miracle was to bring men to consideration, to spiritual softening, to individual repentance, and it is through that moral purpose that the whole scheme of the miracles must be viewed and estimated.

Jesus Christ tells us that judgment is to be in proportion to opportunities. Tyre and Sidon will not have to answer for more than their own advantages. But this law, so simple and so just, adds to the gravity of living now. If we grow in responsibility as we grow in age, what arithmetician in all this house shall add up the sum of our obligation? He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses; of how much sorer punishment suppose ye shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden under foot the Son of God and hath counted the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the spirit of grace? It is an awful thing to live now. We live longer than Methusaleh lived; we are astounded by patriarchal statistics as to human age, but there is not a child living who has not lived longer than Methusaleh lived. We live longer in a week than Methusaleh lived in a century; his age was but a span to ours; everything is made ready to our hands, the whole world is now a grand machine for the instantaneous doing of things; there is nothing more possible in our case. If I were called upon to say what more could be done I should be at an utter loss to reply.

What more could be done in your case? Let me for a moment ask, individualising any one of you. Tell me wherein you have been neglected. Have you heard every variety of human voice, have you heard the son of thunder and the son of consolation, have you the open Scripture in your house, written in your mother tongue, is not the air full of sacred ministry, in every street is there not a sanctuary throwing open its hospitable doors and inviting you to its hospitable refreshment? Have you not been reared in a Christian home, taught the prayers that Jesus breathed, have you not been prayed over, cared for, watched, written to in many a tender motherly epistle, spoken to, and had the advantage of much fatherly counsel? Have not your friends gathered round you and bidden you welcome to some higher life and nobler purpose what more can be done? What if the next voice shall rend the air and a bitter wail of reproach shall fall upon your ear, God's own upbraiding, because you have returned to him the prophets and minstrels, the holy books, the cross, his son, the Holy Ghost, as unequal to the breaking up of the obduracy of your selfishness and the fortification of your selfish will. If you were to ask me what more could be done I should be, I repeat, at a loss to reply; you have heard the thunder, seen the light, listened to the music, had an opportunity of entering the open door of hope a thousand new chances have come to you and offered you new light, to every one of these appeals and opportunities you have returned a sullen No, a selfish denial, and God has nothing else. He said, "I will send my Son, they will reverence my Son, they will see me in my Son," and we have taken his Son and stoned him and slain him and have bound our oaths with his sacred name. O the tragedy, O the awfulness beyond all human speech! It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for us, if we have refused the gracious offers of God.

To me there is a glowing and final proof of the eternal truthfulness of Christ in the fact that he never concealed his own failures. No impostor can afford to make the worst of his case. Impostors magnify their successes; through one success impostors try to force their way to others. Impostors live in grand reports, they publish their statistics to an admiring world they never tell you of their failures. Truth alone loves truth. Jesus Christ never gave us a coloured picture of the successes of his ministry. He did not hide his disappointment, he did not tell the disciples round about him that Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum were much better than they looked, and there were instances of encouragement and germs of promise, and he did not tell three of the disciples that they themselves came out of the very Bethsaida on which they were looking. No, he was true, he spoke the truth, he confessed the terrific tragedy of his soul's disappointment. "And when he came near the city he wept over it, and said, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thee as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not. Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life." "We will not have this man to reign over us," say you. He upbraided the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not.

You will always find Christ consistent with his own truthfulness. He has nothing to colour, pervert, distort, tinge with glowing tints, in order that he may win further support. He says, "I have laboured and I have reaped nothing. I have toiled and my labour has been my only reward. I came unto my own, and my own received me not." There is a ring of solemn truthfulness in all these declarations. Impostors would have seen the glitter and called it gold. Christ saw the failure, and upbraided those who had caused his ministry to return to himself as a bitter disappointment.

But this question arises: Is it possible for Jesus Christ to have come into any city and to have preached the gospel, and to have shown his mighty works, and yet for that city not to repent? Let me tell you that we have too many analogies in our own common life to allow us to doubt of that possibility for one moment. Some of us have sinned away the very highest advantages of secular life. Here is a man of the highest education; he has passed through a university career and brought out after him all the prizes the university could offer. He is adorned at every point, the very ripest specimen of the most modern culture, so far as his intelligence is concerned. It would be impossible for that man to do the dishonourable deed, to speak the dishonourable word, to play falsely, to be guilty of malfeasance; he will be true, upright, noble, pure, beautiful as a beam of light. Not necessarily so. We have known such men use their intelligence as an increased facility for doing mischief.

Here is a man surrounded by all that art can do for the adornment and the enlivenment of his home, every panel a picture, every window a, hint of beauty, the whole surrounding a triumph of the highest art. As the man sits there, his thoughts will correspond with his surroundings. He will say, "It will be impossible in this sanctuary of beauty to be other than beautiful myself; my soul sings in this palace of colour, and my heart is at ease amid all this harmony of architectural and artistic relationships. There can be no unrest here; all the lines fall into one another; all the colours hold sweet fellowship; the whole house is all but alive; it will be a sacred place." Not necessarily. In that palace of beauty plots of iniquity may be hatched; under that fair ceiling sin may perpetrate its most cunning victory; amid all that beauty there may be a moral hideousness which may make the angels weep. The life of that man may be a daily insult to every soft colour, to all the blended lights and shadows, and to the very genius of the sanctuary of art and loveliness. In many a humble cot, in many a lowly home, with hardly a little engraving in it, you will find a moral loveliness which would turn that debased palace into a scene of ghastliest hideousness.

Yes, it is possible to sin away music, beauty, love, life, light; possible to sin away all the ministry of wife, child, friend, picture, and all that makes life deep, solemn, lovely. If it be so, then it is but a step to the other possibility of sinning Christ out of the life, urging him away, rebuking him and bidding him depart out of the region of our thought and love. My friend, I know of no ghastlier sight than grand external exaltation associated with moral perversity and putridity. Men would be shocked if they found under royal purple and regalia a skeleton propped up at the feast, with a foaming glass fastened in its bony and icy fingers. That would drive them mad; that would be intolerable irony; yet that is a commonplace in the moral world. If you could go into the banqueting-house, and sit down next the royal purple, and feel your face flushing with pride because of the association, and could then turn round and see that under the purple there was a dead carcass, you would never forget the sight, and you would refer to it as the most tragic of your experiences. You would shudder in horror every time you recalled the instance. My friends, 'tis nothing a gibe, a joke, a thing to laugh at, compared with the moral skeletons that are around the table of the world every day. Fine coats do not make fine characters; fine houses do not always mean splendid tenants; the basest metal may have a covering of gold. I wonder not that Jesus Christ, looking upon some men, said, "Whited sepulchres, full of dead men's bones, and men walk over them, and are not aware of them." It required his eye, the eye in which is the light that shall make the glory of the resurrection morning, to see those whited sepulchres, and count those dead men's bones.

He sees us as we are; he conceals nothing of the ghastly reality; he prophesies no smooth things to sinners that are living lies. Thank God for the truthfulness of Christ. If you want to know what you are, go to him; he makes no false reading of character; he makes no miscalculation of human force and value; he is the one character that tests every other living man. O that upbraiding face, may we never see it! O that upbraiding voice, may we never hear it! Every eye shall see him, and they also that pierced him shall look upon him and mourn, and shall call to the rocks and to the mountains, saying, "Fall on us, and hide us from the face and the wrath of the Lamb."

I have seen faces so laden with sorrow that to look upon them was to feel an intolerable burden of self-accusation resting upon and distressing the soul, without a word spoken, just as your mother looked when, after a thousand prayers, you came home a wreck. She said, "Speech is useless; I have spoken, and my throat is sore." But O the look, the reddened eyes, the wet eyelids, the swollen face, the trembling lips, the whole look! It said, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is, to have a thankless child." And the old man, as he looked up off his book, and saw you, said nothing; but his eyes were judgment, his glance was hell.

O that upbraiding face, O that upbraiding voice may they never come within our experience!