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‘Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.’
Mat_15:14
I. The blind leader.—Our Lord is thinking, not of some poor, pitiful man shut up in his blindness, and humbly, tentatively feeling his way along with creeping bewildered steps; but of the man who has no notion that he is blind. On the contrary, he believes himself to be the one person who sees. This is the type—some man fitted apparently to show others the way, to direct their course, to point the goal. He is a man born to lead; only he is blind. He cannot take the true measure of things.
II. The Pharisee had so much in him to give him that amazing dominance over the popular imagination and conscience, which is so strikingly portrayed in our Gospels. He was relentlessly sincere in his adherence to the faith and the discipline of the fathers. He had no other object in life but to extend the sphere of the Holy Kingdom, and would compass sea and land to make one proselyte. So strong, so capable, so masterful was his Pharisaism. It carried all along with it.
III. Man must bend himself to this truth if he would live. The text hits an Englishman very hard. It passes criticism on that which he too often takes as his last word. ‘I did what I thought right.’ That is the Englishman’s ultimate position. ‘I obeyed my conscience.’ ‘I acted up to my own standard of duty.’ ‘What more could I do?’ So he triumphantly asserts and retorts. But our Lord has a further question to ask. ‘Why had you a conscience, which gave so false or poor a verdict?’ You followed your conscience. Yes, but your conscience was darkened; it had no hold on the light; it pronounced in ignorance of the realities; it never detected the true issue; it had no eyes for the vision. Why was that?
IV. The one vital question pressed home by our Lord upon each one of us is not: ‘How do you stand to yourself? Do you satisfy your own standard?’ But, ‘How do you stand to the realities of eternal life? Do you satisfy God?’ He drives the urgent question home again and again. That is why He loathes, with such a peculiar hatred, the self-complacency of the righteous. Be quite sure that you are blind! Our Lord never condemns us for being blind, but only for refusing to recognise it. Detect your own blindness, condemn it, confess it, and you are saved! The blindness which is your bane becomes your boon. It is your bane, for it withholds from you the sight of the glory which even now enwraps you. But it becomes your boon, because in discovering and recognising that you are blind, you are, by that very act, proved to be in true relation to the Eternal.
Canon H. Scott Holland.
Illustrations(1) ‘Religious persecutors, Roman or Puritan, did it always for the best. They obeyed rigidly the law of their highest conscience. Neither the Inquisition, nor Cromwell, doubted for a moment the voice that bade them slay. Rather, they were honest beyond their fellows. They went so far in crime, and cruelty, because they were more resolute in following up their own convictions than others. Yet the verdict against them is given out. Why did they arrive at convictions that were in such flagrant defiance of God’s will? Why had they got so far out of the right way?’
(2) ‘A philosopher at Florence could not be persuaded to look through one of Galileo’s telescopes, lest he should see something in the heavens that would disturb him in his belief of Aristotle’s philosophy. Thus it is with many who are afraid of examining God’s Word, lest they should find themselves condemned.’