James Nisbet Commentary - Matthew 9:13 - 9:13

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James Nisbet Commentary - Matthew 9:13 - 9:13


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

MERCY NOT SACRIFICE

‘Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.’

Mat_9:13

Let us look into the wonderful passage more closely.

I. A strange passage.—The passage is admittedly a difficult one, nor does the Christian at first gain comfort as he realises who it is that preserves the saying for us. We are apt to take Matthew to be the legalist, the strict Jew. But he was not the legalist we take him for, or at least, if his instincts led in that direction, the teaching of the Master gave them another point, for, by his traditions, he belonged to one of the two classes vitally concerned in the eternal authority of this saying of Jesus—and not less vital now than then—the class that pleads for mercy and the class that preaches sacrifice.

II. The preachers of ‘sacrifice.’—They were both of them at meat in the house; they were looking on rather than taking part in the company, but congratulating themselves that they were not of it. There was the Pharisee, the man of uncompromising religious habits. It is difficult to believe that Jesus only scouted all this religious niceness. Behind the strict observance of what was written and had been ratified by the Jewish Church, there might, of course, be oppression of the doer; but the obvious characteristic of the Pharisees as a class was their conscientious churchmanship, their sincere belief that God desired sacrifice and therefore ought to have it, that God delighted in burnt offerings and should not be denied the pleasure of receiving them. They stood out absolutely for sacrifice as a principle.

III. Those who need mercy.—And then there is the other sort of folk in the house. They are not like the Pharisees, and yet the Pharisees do not have the effect of making them feel as if they were out of place, because there is One present Whose Personality is more potent than that of the Pharisees, and He it is Who makes them feel at home. But, like the Pharisees, they have a sort of class name. Respectable people class them together as ‘publicans and sinners.’ Whatever their birthright, they had come to be outside the covenant. The others ranged comfortably within the four walls of the City of God, but these suffered without the gate. Their only chance was some hope in the word ‘mercy,’ and it filled them with a new and unimagined hope that there should stand One among them, in all the unmistakable respectability of a Rabbi, saying to these doctors of the Law: ‘Go ye and learn what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.’ Is there no warning here for us of the English Church? We are better, humbler men than the Pharisees in the text, but some sense of what we call the fitness of things, some consistent desire to stand upon the old paths, bids us postpone mercy to sacrifice, and so to some extent—let us be honest and say to a deplorable extent—we feel that the good news entrusted to us does not seem to be good news to the multitude, to whom it ought to mean as much as it means to us.

IV. ‘Mercy, not sacrifice.’—There are two classes of publicans and sinners to whom mercy needs to be extended before they can be brought to temper mercy with sacrifice, before they can appreciate the system as we have learned to appreciate it and to thank God for it. There is he who is called (a) the man in the street, using his Sunday for laziness or jollity, lapsing year by year more and more into an attitude of mind in which religion has lost any grip that ever it had. Jesus sat at meat with such, regardless of propriety; but if some preacher of the good news among us takes unconventional means of calling the wayfarer to hear the message, we begin to complain. And there is (b) the man in the study—more to be pitied than the man in the street, because he is more sensitive, more conscious of his position. He reads his Bible, he attends our services, he follows our theological progress, but he cannot go all the way with us in the knowledge of God, though he seeks earnestly and with tears. In his difficulties he pleads for ‘mercy, not sacrifice.’ Is it anything to us, all we that pass by? The coming in the flesh of the Son of God was proclaimed first to the men in the fields, to the shepherds who were an abomination to the scrupulous Pharisee. The Babe Himself was shown to the staid, wise men from country far. Neither class was within the system. The Son of Man from His cradle was as one who told men to go and learn what this meaneth, ‘I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.’

The Rev. E. H. Pearce.