The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Exposition. Gore Charles

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CHAPTER III

       THE BEATITUDES IN DETAIL

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      I

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      “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

      THE Old Testament is full of descriptions of the spirit of the world, the spirit of selfish wealth with its attendant cruelty: and by contrast to this are descriptions of the oppressed poor who are the friends of God. Our Lord took up all this language upon His own lips when, as St. Luke records, He turned to His disciples and said “Blessed are ye poor … woe unto you that are rich.” But all the actually poor are not the disciples of Christ. It is possible to combine the selfishness and grasping avarice of “the rich” with the condition of poverty. So our Lord has, as recorded by St. Matthew, gone beneath the surface and based His kingdom, the character of His citizens, not upon actual poverty, but upon detachment. The world says “Get all you can, and keep it.” Christ says, Blessed are those who at least in heart and will have nothing.

      There is one verse in the Old Testament which describes this poverty of spirit. It is the utterance of Job:14 “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” There is pure, perfect detachment. Job took and used aright what God gave him, adoring the sovereignty of God. The sovereign took away what He had given; Job gave it up freely. Being detached—that is poverty of spirit; at the least, “having food and covering, let us be therewith content.”15

      Our Lord says then, Blessed are those who are thus detached; and of course we look to Him for illustration, for these beatitudes express His own character. He was detached. The Incarnation was a self-emptying. He clung not to all the glories of heaven, but “emptied Himself” and “beggared Himself,” as St. Paul says.16 Then when He had been born a man, He set the example of clinging to nothing external. He abandoned ease, popularity, the favour of the great, even the sympathy of His friends, even, last and greatest of all, on the cross, the consolation of the divine presence. Each privilege in turn was abandoned without a murmur, not, speaking generally, on the ascetic principle, but because moral obedience to God in fulfilment of His mission required it. He became utterly naked, poorer than the poorest; therefore in a supreme sense “His was the kingdom of heaven.” He stood empty, persecuted, before Pilate, and said “Thou sayest that I am a king”; and the moral conscience of the world has witnessed that He spoke truth. So we, like Him, are to be ready to surrender, ready to give up; and in proportion to this detachment, in proportion as we do really in will adore the sovereignty of God, and are ready to receive and to give up according to His will, in that proportion are all the hindrances removed by which the royalty of His kingdom is prevented from entering into our hearts and lives. St. Paul’s comment on this first beatitude lies in his description of the apostles “As having nothing, and yet possessing all things”; or in his encouragement to Christians generally “All things are yours.”17 The wilfulness with which we cling to supposed “necessaries of life,” “things we cannot do without”; false claims on life for enjoyments which we should be the stronger for dispensing with; false ideals of vanity and display—these, and not our circumstances, are the hindrances to that largeness of heart and peace and liberty and joy, which have their root only in the bare and naked relation of the soul to God.

      The splendid promise attached to this beatitude brings it into contrast with an old Jewish saying which has many parallels, “Ever be more and more lowly in spirit, for the prospect of man is to become the food of worms.” The motive to humility which our Lord suggests is very different.

      Before we pass on, let us observe how important it is that there should be at all times those in the Church who are capable, not merely of poverty in spirit, but voluntarily of poverty in fact. Upon all men our Lord enjoins detachment. But upon one young man in particular He enjoined that he should give his possessions away, that he should sell all that he had and give to the poor. So in the Church there have been those who in the religious orders have dedicated themselves in voluntary poverty to the service of God and of man; and the Church has lost incalculably in ages when there have been none such. Like all other institutions, the religious orders have been liable to great abuses: they have been homes very often, not so much of scandalous vices, as of sloth and corporate greed; but we must not give up the ideal because there are abuses. There is the command of the Lord to all to be, like Job, detached; there is the counsel of the Lord to some to be, in fact, voluntarily poor.

      II

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      “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”

      These beatitudes follow one another, as St. Chrysostom says, in a golden chain. Once again our Lord is putting Himself in startling opposition to one of the favourite maxims of the world. The world says “Get as much pleasure as you can out of life; suck it in wherever you can; and hug yourself as close as you can from all that disquiets you or makes you uncomfortable; in a word, get as much pleasure and avoid as much pain as by intelligence and forethought you can possibly do.” In startling opposition to this maxim of the world our Lord puts His maxim “Blessed are they that mourn.”

      What does that mean? Briefly: there are two chief kinds of mourning into which it is the duty of every true servant of our Lord to enter—the mourning for sin and the mourning for pain. We must mourn for sin, for we are sinners. It is possible to hide the fact from our eyes, to prevent the inconvenient light from coming in upon our consciences, to suppose that things that are widely tolerated must be tolerable, that things that are frequently or habitually done must have something to say for themselves. But the Christian gets into the light; he lets the light of the divine word go down into his heart; he strives to see himself first, in the silence of his own soul, as the Lord sees him. Thus he is brought to repentance, and repentance which is in regard to the future a “change of purpose,” is with respect to the past a true mourning: if not emotional sorrow, still profound and heartfelt regret on account of those things in which we have gone against the will of God: and “blessed are they that mourn.”

      Next to this mourning for sin is the mourning of sympathy with others’ pain. There are moments when a Christian may legitimately, like his Lord in the garden of Gethsemane, be engrossed in the bearing of “his own burden.”18 But in the main a Christian ought, like his Lord, or like St. Paul, to have his own burden so well in hand, that he is able to leave the large spaces of his heart for other people to lay their sorrows upon. “Bear ye one another’s burdens.”19 Of our Lord it was said “Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases”20—not on the cross simply, but as He moved about in Galilee and Judæa, and the sad, the sorrowful and the sick came to Him. It is always possible to use the advantages of a comparatively prosperous position to exempt ourselves, to screen ourselves off, from the common lot of pain. This is to shut ourselves off from true fruitfulness and final joy. “Except a grain СКАЧАТЬ