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THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
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FIRST EDITION _December, 1896_.
_Reprinted in the same month._
_Reprinted_ _January, 1897_.
_Reprinted_ _March, 1897_.
_Reprinted_ _June, 1897_.
_Reprinted_ _March, 1898_.
_Reprinted_ _December, 1898_.
_Reprinted_ _June, 1900_.
_Reprinted_ _October, 1901_.
_Reprinted_ _October, 1902_.
_Reprinted_ _January, 1905_.
_Edition (6d.) for distribution in paper covers, March, 1904._
_Reprinted_ _October, 1904_.
_Reprinted_ _March, 1906_.
SECOND EDITION (1/-) _June, 1910_.
_Reprinted_ _October, 1911_.
THIRD EDITION (2/6) _March, 1912_.
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
A PRACTICAL EXPOSITION
BY CHARLES GORE, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D.
BISHOP OF OXFORD
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1912
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PREFACE TO THE REISSUE OF 1910
IN reissuing this little book in a new form I wish, by way of preface,
to say a few words upon the passages (pp. 72‒78 and Appendix III.,
p. 227) in which I deal with the question of divorce in the Christian
Church. I am not prepared to alter the conclusions there drawn, so
far as they were drawn from the first Gospel, upon which alone I was
commenting. But I should wish to express a different opinion on the
relation of the statements about divorce in the first Gospel to those
given us by St. Mark and St. Luke.
The course of recent criticism seems to make it fairly certain that
we must regard the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke as giving us our
Lord’s teaching on this subject in its original form. They are as
follows:
_St. Mark_ x. 11, 12: “And he saith unto them, Whosoever shall put
away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her:
and if she herself shall put away her husband, and marry another, she
committeth adultery.”
_St. Luke_ xvi. 18: “Every one that putteth away his wife and marrieth
another, committeth adultery: and he that marrieth one that is put away
from a husband committeth adultery.”
Cp. _1 Cor._ vii. 10, 11: “But unto the married I give charge, yea not
I, but the Lord, That the wife depart not from her husband (but and
if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her
husband); and that the husband leave not his wife.”
Our Lord in these passages is represented as recognizing remarriage
after divorce in no case at all. He treats marriage as strictly
indissoluble. The astonishment of the disciples as expressed even in
the first Gospel (St. Matt. xix. 10: “If the case of the man is so with
his wife, it is not expedient to marry”) seems to require this teaching
to make it intelligible. It would not be intelligible if our Lord
were only reasserting the stricter of two views about divorce already
current among the Jews.[1] On the other hand, it is certain that the
passages in the first Gospel upon which I have commented in the text
of this book do admit an exception to the indissolubility of marriage
in favour at least of the innocent husband in the case of his wife’s
adultery. I must adhere to all that is said in this book in support of
this conclusion; but I now find myself constrained to believe that the
exception as recorded in St. Matthew, though it is an integral part
of our present Gospel, represents a serious modification of our Lord’s
teaching, due probably to Jewish tradition within the Church. The
Jewish Christians seem to have introduced a gloss into their record
of our Lord’s teaching, believing, no doubt, that they were rightly
interpreting His mind; and the gloss is represented in our first Gospel.
The fact that the Christian Church has accepted the first Gospel, and
stamped it with the fullest authority, accounts for the teaching of
the Church on the indissolubility of the marriage tie having been in
certain times and places uncertain. We cannot to-day equitably ignore
the appeal to the first Gospel, even though we do not believe it to
represent on this point the original teaching of our Lord. My practical
conclusions therefore are not different from those set out in this
book, except that I should now be still more decisive than formerly in
resisting any proposal to introduce any exception into the existing law
of the Church in England.
For the substance of this note――so far as it concerns the Gospels――I
would refer to Dr. Plummer’s _Exegetical Commentary on St. Matthew_
(Elliot Stock) and Allen’s _International Critical Commentary on
St. Matthew_ (T. & T. Clark), on Matt. v. 31 ff. and xix. 3 ff. Also
to Dr. Salmon’s _Human Element in the Gospels_ (Murray, 1907), p. 391,
and to a work of Professor Tyson’s entitled _The Teaching of our Lord
as to the Indissolubility of Marriage_ (University Press of Sewanee,
Tennessee, 1909).
C. B.
_Easter, 1910._
PREFACE
There is no plant in the spiritual garden of the Church of England
which at the present moment needs more diligent watering and tending
than the practical, devotional study of Holy Scripture. The extent to
which spiritual sloth, or reaction against Protestant individualism,
or the excuse of critical difficulties is allowed to minister to the
neglect of this most necessary practice, is greatly to be deplored. It
is surprising in how few parts of the Bible critical difficulties, be
they what they may, need be any bar to its practical use.
The present exposition is, I trust, based upon a careful study of the
original text, but it is, as presented, intended simply to assist
ordinary people to meditate on the Sermon on the Mount in the Revised
Version, and to apply its teaching to their own lives. If it proves
useful, I hope, as occasion offers, to follow it up with other similar
expositions of St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Ephesians, and the
epistles of St. John.
My original intention was to publish some lectures given in
Westminster Abbey on the Sermon on the Mount in Lent and Easter, 1895.
But the attempt to correct for the press a report of those lectures was
practically abandoned, and the exposition as now printed is a new one.
It is intended to suggest thoughts rather than to develop them, and
to minister to practical reflection rather than to intellectual study;
and I have ventured, in view of this latter aim, to omit almost all
references and discussions such as involve footnotes.
I owe as much gratitude as usual to the Rev. Richard Rackham, my
brother in the Community of the Resurrection, for help in the
correction of proofs.
C. G.
RADLEY,
_All Saints’ Day, 1896_.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE SERMON
II. THE BEATITUDES IN GENERAL
III. THE BEATITUDES IN DETAIL
IV. THE REVISION OF THE OLD LAW
V. THE REVISION OF THE OLD LAW (_cont._)
VI. THE MOTIVE OF THE CITIZENS OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
VII. THE LORD’S PRAYER
VIII. UNWORLDLINESS
IX. CHRISTIAN CHARACTERISTICS
X. FINAL WARNINGS
APPENDIX
I. THE TEXT OF THE SERMON WITH PARALLEL PASSAGES IN
ST. LUKE’S GOSPEL
II. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR CHRISTIANS
III. THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH WITH REGARD TO DIVORCE
ANALYSIS
OF
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
ST. MATTHEW V‒VII.
_The character of the citizens of the kingdom of God_ v. 3‒12
_The place of this character in the world_ 13‒16
_The relation of this character to the righteousness of 17‒48
the old Covenant_
A relation of continuity 17‒19
A relation of supersession 20‒48
both of the existing standard of its professors 20
and of the original standard of the law 21‒48
the law of murder (Comm. vi) 21‒26
the law of adultery (Comm. vii) 27‒30
the law of divorce 31‒32
the law of perjury (Comm. iii) 33‒37
the law of retaliation 38‒42
the hatred of enemies 43‒48
_The motive of the citizens of the kingdom_ vi. 1‒34
The approval of God, not of man 1
this applied to almsgiving 2‒4
this applied to prayer 5‒6
[further directions about prayer 7‒8
the gift of the pattern prayer 9‒15]
the gift of fasting 16‒18
their consequent unworldliness 19‒24
and freedom from anxiety 25‒34
_Further characteristics of the citizens of the vii. 1‒12
kingdom_
The uncritical temper 1‒5
Reserve in communicating religious privileges 6
Impartial considerateness, based on experience of
the character of God 7‒12
_Final warnings_ vii. 13‒27
The two ways 13‒14
Character the one thing needful 15‒23
Endurance the test 24‒27
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
CHAPTER I
THE SERMON
I
WHAT is the Sermon on the Mount? It is the moral law of the kingdom
of Christ, or in other words it occupies in the New Testament the
place which in the Old Testament is occupied by the Ten Commandments.
It is thus an excellent example of the relation of the two divine
“testaments,” or rather covenants, to one another. There is a sentence
of St. Augustine’s on this subject which it would be useful for every
one to have constantly in mind. “We do wrong,” he says, “to the Old
Testament if we deny that it comes from the same just and good God
as the New. On the other hand, we do wrong to the New Testament if we
put the Old on a level with it.”[2] This is a general statement of the
relation between the two covenants, and it applies especially to the
moral law. The moral law of the Old Testament, as it is expressed in
the Ten Commandments, was the utterance of the same God who now speaks
to us in the person of Jesus Christ. It reappears here in the Sermon on
the Mount, but deepened and developed. We may say with truth that the
Sermon on the Mount supersedes the Ten Commandments; but it supersedes
them by including them in a greater, deeper, and more positive whole.
This Sermon on the Mount, then, is the moral law of the new kingdom,
the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of the Messiah. We have been used
to think of the Messiah, the Christ, as an isolated figure; but the
Messiah whose advent is expected in the Old Testament is only the
centre of the Messianic kingdom. Round about the king is the kingdom.
The king implies the kingdom as the kingdom implies the king. Thus the
way in which Christ announced His Messiahship was by the phrase “The
kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And now――now that He has gathered round
Him his first disciples――He takes them apart, and there on the mountain
He announces to them the moral law of the new kingdom to which they are
to belong. Thus it is a law not only for individual consciences, but
for a society――a law which, recognized and accepted by the individual
conscience, is to be applied in order to establish a new social order.
It is the law of a kingdom, and a kingdom is a graduated society of
human beings in common subordination to their king.
But observe, what we have here is law――law, not grace. In St. Paul’s
phrase, it is letter, not spirit. When St. Paul says that “the
letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,”[3] he means this――that
an external written commandment (that is, the letter) is capable
of informing our consciences, of telling us what God’s will is, of
bowing us down to the dust with a sense of our inability to fulfil it;
but it is not capable of going further. Thus it “killeth”; it makes
us conscious of our sin, of our powerlessness, but it leaves it for
something else to put life into us to do the thing we ought. That
life-giving power is the Spirit. Thus the law, by informing, kills
us: the Spirit, by empowering, gives us life. Observe, it is a good,
a necessary thing to be thus killed. The perilous state is “to be alive
without the law,”[4] that is, to have an unenlightened conscience and
be living in a false peace. “If the light that is in thee be darkness,
how great is that darkness.” The first thing is to know what we ought
to do; and the very fact that we feel our powerlessness to do it, makes
us ready to offer the cry, the appeal for divine help.
Again I would ask you to notice a sentence of Augustine’s, which is
full of meaning: “The law was given that men might seek grace; grace
was given that the law might be fulfilled.”[5]
Thus what we have here, in the Sermon on the Mount, is the climax
of law, the completeness of the letter, the letter which killeth;
and because it is so much more searching and thorough than the Ten
Commandments, therefore does it kill all the more effectually. It
makes us all the more conscious of sin; all the more full of the
clamorous demand that God, who asks such things of us, shall give
us also the power to fulfil them. But just as in many departments of
human life “man’s necessity is God’s opportunity,” just as in some
well-constructed drama the very culminating moment of difficulty
suggests the immediate arrival of release, so it is here. The divine
requirement is pressed home with unequalled force upon the conscience,
but it is pressed home not in the form of mere laws of conduct, but (as
we shall see) as a type of character,――not out of the thick darkness by
an inaccessible God, but by the Divine Love manifested in manhood and
pledging His own faithfulness that he who hungers shall be satisfied
and he who asks shall be heard. The hard demand of the letter is here
in the closest possible connexion with the promise of the Spirit.
II
You will often see it noticed that a resemblance to some of the
precepts in the Sermon on the Mount is to be discovered, not only in
the Old Testament, on which the whole is confessedly based, but in the
sayings of Jewish fathers, or in heathen philosophers and writers, like
Confucius among the Chinese, and Socrates or Plato among the Greeks;
and this has at times distressed Christians jealous of the unique glory
of their religion. Thus they have sometimes sought to account for the
coincidences between “inspired” and “uninspired” authors, or between
the divine and the human speakers, by supposing that even heathen
writers borrowed from the Old Testament. They were forgetting surely
a great truth, a truth of which in the early centuries the minds of
men were full: that Christ is the Word; and it is through fellowship
in the Word, who is also the Reason of God, that all men are rational.
Christ, therefore, is the light which in conscience and reason lightens
every man from end to end of history. Christ has been at work, moving
by His Spirit in the consciousness of man, so that the whole moral
development of mankind, the whole moral education of the human race, is
of one piece from end to end. There moves in it the same Spirit, there
expresses itself the same Word. So that, as we should expect, there
are fragments of the moral truth which in the Sermon on the Mount is
completely delivered, fragments――greater or smaller, we need not now
discuss――to be found among the Chinese, the Japanese, the Greeks, the
Indians, because God left Himself nowhere without witness, the witness
of His Word and Spirit in the hearts of men.[6]
But what we also find to be true is, that the moral law here given
supersedes the moral law as it is found among heathen nations or even
among the Jews, by including it in a greater whole. We may compare the
morality of this Sermon with that expressed by other religious teachers
in several ways.
1. The Sermon on the Mount compared with the summaries of moral
duty belonging to other religions is comprehensive while they are
fragmentary. No moral code can be produced which approaches this in
completeness or depth. There is no other moral code belonging to an
accepted and ancient religion for which any educated European could
even claim finality and completeness. We know what John Stuart Mill,
though not a believer, said about our Lord’s moral teaching. He said
“Not even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a
better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the
concrete, than to endeavour so to live that Jesus Christ would approve
our life.” And Dr. Pusey commented on that by saying “If men would set
this before themselves, there would be fewer unbelievers.”[7] There is
then, I say, no other moral summary belonging to an ancient religion on
behalf of which a man of modern enlightenment could, with a reasonable
chance of being listened to, make the claim that its principles can
never be outgrown or found insufficient for any race of men. This is
to others as the comprehensive to the fragmentary.
2. It is as the pure to the partially corrupt or mixed. Origen, in
commenting on the words of the twelfth Psalm, “the words of the Lord
are pure words, even as the silver which from the earth is tried and
purified seven times in the fire,” contrasts in this respect the sacred
writings of the heathen with those of the Christians. “For though there
are _noble_ words among those who are not Christians, yet they are not
_pure_, because they are mixed up with so much that is false.” Take
for an example the Symposium of Plato. You find in it much that is
most noble about divine love; but you find this noble element mixed
with dross, that is with acquiescence in some of the foulest practices
of Greek life. The same is true of the sacred books of Buddhism. The
Sermon on the Mount, then, is to other moral codes as the pure to the
mixed or partially corrupt.
3. It is as teaching for grown men, who are also free, compared
to teaching for children and slaves. It teaches, not by negative
enactments or by literal enactments at all, but by principles, positive
and weighty principles, embodied in proverbs which must be apprehended
in their inner spirit and reapplied continually anew as circumstances
change.
4. Lastly, it differs from other codes by the authoritative sanction
which is given to the words by the person of the speaker. “He spoke as
one having authority, and not as the scribes.” All the weight of His
mysterious person, all the majesty of His tone, His demeanour, His
authority, go to give sanction to this law which He uttered: and not
only to give it sanction, in the sense of making men feel that they
were dealing with one whose mysterious power it would be better not to
offend: His person gives sanction to His words also by inspiring the
profoundest confidence that He who makes the claim will also provide
strength to correspond with it.
III
I must say one word about a problem which could not by any means be
satisfactorily dealt with in the space now at our disposal.
We know that the critics of the Gospel narratives are in our time
occupied with nothing so much as with the difficult problem of the
relation which the Gospels bear to one another. This problem presents
itself in connexion with our present subject.
The Sermon on the Mount as given in St. Matthew corresponds, though
with many differences, to what you find scattered over a great number
of different chapters in St. Luke――vi. 20‒49, xi. 1‒4, 9‒13, 33‒36,
xii. 22‒31, 58‒59, xiii. 24‒27, xiv. 34‒35, xvi. 13, 17‒18.[8] Now
what are we to say about the relation of these two accounts of the
same teaching? There is a good deal that is most characteristic in
St. Matthew’s sermon which has nothing corresponding to it in the other
evangelist, e.g. the spiritual treatment of the Commandments and of the
typical religious duties of prayer, almsgiving and fasting; but where
they are on the same ground they are often so closely similar that it
is plain they are drawing from the same source. Whether this source was
oral or written is a question we need not now discuss; but what are we
to say of the different treatment of the same material?
It is throughout the method of St. Matthew to collect or group
similar incidents or sayings. Thus he gives us a group of miracles
(ch. viii‒ix), a group of seven parables (ch. xiii), a long
denunciation of the Pharisees which is represented in two different
passages of St. Luke’s Gospel (ch. xxiii), and a great group of
discourses about “the end” of which the same thing may be said
(ch. xxiv). Judging from his general method, then, we should conclude
that in the Sermon on the Mount we have grouped together sayings which
probably were uttered in fact, as St. Luke represents, on different
occasions. For it is St. Luke’s intention throughout to present events
“in order,” and the sayings of Christ each in its proper context.
But it must not be forgotten that a teacher who, like our Lord, teaches
by way of “sentences” or proverbs, is sure to repeat the same truth
in different forms and from different points of view. Those who have
examined Francis Bacon’s note-books and published works tell us how
those weighty sentences of his were written down again and again and
reappear continually in slightly different shapes. So we may suppose
it probable that our Lord frequently repeated similar utterances.
Thus if St. Luke truly represents that our Lord on a certain occasion
consoled His disciples by short and emphatic benedictions pronounced
on the actual poverty in which they lived and the actual persecutions
which they endured――“Blessed are ye poor, blessed are ye that hunger
now, blessed are ye that weep now, blessed are ye when men hate
you”――it does not by any means follow that He did not on another
occasion pronounce, as recorded by St. Matthew, similar benedictions,
more numerous, more general, and more spiritual, beginning with one
not now on certain actually poor men, but on the “poor in spirit”
in general. Thus on another occasion[9] He repeated the saying, “How
hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God,” in
the more spiritual form, “How hard it is for them that trust in riches
to enter into the kingdom of God.” Again, it does not follow that
because He gave the pattern prayer in a shorter form, as recorded
by St. Luke, He should not also have given it in the longer form, as
recorded by St. Matthew.
The collection of our Lord’s discourses which characterizes the
first Gospel is――there is every reason to believe――the work of the
apostle St. Matthew. If so, we need to remember that it was the
work not only of a first-rate witness, but also of one whose memory,
naturally retentive, was quickened by a special gift of the divine
Spirit bestowed on the apostles “to bring to their remembrance all that
Christ had said unto them.”[10]