Jesus Christ accepts and endorses the centurion's estimate of Him, as He
always accepts the highest place offered Him. No one ever proffered to
Jesus Christ honours that He put by. No one ever brought to Him a trust
which He said was either excessive or misdirected. 'Speak the word and
my servant shall be healed,' said the centurion. Contrast Christ's
acceptance of this confidence in his power with Elijah's 'Am I a God, to
kill and to make alive, that they send this man to me to recover him of
his leprosy?' Or contrast it with Peter's 'Why look ye so earnestly on
us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to
walk?' Christ takes as His due all the honour, love, and trust, which
any man can give Him--either an exorbitant appetite for adulation, or
the manifestation of conscious divinity.
'And He marvelled.' Twice we read in Scripture that Christ
wondered--once at this heathen's faith, so strongly grown, with so few
advantages of culture; once at Jewish unbelief, so feeble and fruitless,
after so much expenditure of patience and care. But passing from that,
notice how much lies in these sad and yet astonished words of His:
'Verily I say unto you, I have not _found_ so great faith, no, not in
Israel.' Then, He came _seeking_ faith from this people whom God had
cared for during centuries. The one fruit that He desired was trust in
Him. That is what He is seeking for in us--not lives of profession, not
orthodoxy of conception, not even fruits in work, but before all this,
and productive of all that is good in any of them, He desires to find in
our hearts the child's trust that casts itself wholly on His Omnipotent
word, and is sure of an answer. This man's faith was great, great in the
rapidity of its growth, great in the difficulties which it had overcome,
great in the clearness of its conception, great in the firmness of its
affiance, great in the humility with which it was accompanied. Such a
faith He seeks as the thirsty traveller seeks grapes in the wilderness,
and when He finds it growing in our hearts, then He is satisfied and
glad.
Still further, there is brought out the dignity of faith as being not
only the great desire of Christ's heart for each of us, but also as
being the one means of admission into the kingdom. 'I say unto you, many
shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham
and Isaac and Jacob, in the Kingdom of Heaven; but the children of the
Kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness.' Strange that Matthew's,
the Jewish gospel, should record that saying. Strange that Luke's, the
universal human gospel, should omit it. But it was relevant to Matthew's
great purpose to make very plain this truth--which the nation were
forgetting, and which was gall and wormwood to them,--that hereditary
descent and outward privileges had no power to open the door of Christ's
Kingdom to any man, and that the one thing which had, was the one thing
which the centurion possessed and the Jews did not, a simple trust in
that divine Lord.
My brethren, there are many of us who attach precisely the same value as
these Jews did, in slightly different forms, to external connection with
religion and religious institutions. What blunts the sharpest words that
come from pulpits, and prevents them from getting to hearts and
consciences, is just that pestilent old Jewish error, that because men
have always had a kind of outward hold on the Kingdom, therefore they do
not need the teaching that the publicans and the harlots want.
My dear friend, nothing binds a man to Christ but trust. Nothing opens
the doors of His Kingdom, either here on earth or yonder, but reliance
upon Him. And although you were steeped to the eye-brows in religious
privileges, and high in place in His church, it would avail nothing. The
Kingdom of Christ is a Kingdom into which faith, and faith only, admits
a man. Therefore from the furthest corners of the world Christ's sad
prescience saw the Gentiles flocking, and the Jews who trusted in
externals, cast out.
I need not dwell on the two halves of the picture here, the radiant glow
of the one, the tragic darkness of the other. The feast expresses
abundance, joy, rest, companionship. 'They shall come' says Christ; then
He is there, and sitting at the head of the table; and the Master's
welcome makes the feast. On the other hand, that which is without the
banqueting hall is dark. That darkness is but the making visible of the
nature of the men. Hell comes out of a man before it surrounds him. They
'were sometime darkness,' and now they are in the darkness. I say no
more about that, I dare not; but I pray you to remember that the lips
which said this 'spake that He did know'; and to take heed lest,
speculating and arguing, and sometimes quarrelling, about the nature and
the duration of future retribution, we should lose our sense of the
awfulness and certainty of the fact.