1. The Sermon on the Mount (Mat_5:1 to Mat_7:29) was addressed to Orientals. Jesus was an Oriental teacher. Oriental teachers make large use of short parables, proverbs, and what are called apothegms or wise sayings—familiar to the people whom they are trying to instruct—and throw their teaching into that form. Oriental peoples can scarcely understand our direct and definite Western teaching. They are not accustomed to it. It is not familiar to them. The words fall on their ears—words quite plain and intelligible to us—and yet fail to make any impression on their understanding. So much is this the case that many a missionary has failed to make his hearers understand what we should call the plain truths of the Gospel till he has learned a collection of Arabic or Hindu or Chinese or Swahili proverbs and wise sayings; and when he has illustrated what he has to say by these familiar sayings, he has then been able to make the people understand him. So common was this mode of teaching in Bible lands that there is one book of the Bible which is nothing but a collection of these sentences of condensed and popular wisdom.
It is very difficult to describe a proverb or wise popular saying; but there is this to be said about it, that it is seldom or never universally true, and does not hold good in every case. It is often an extreme instance of the universal truth which it teaches. So much is this the case that you may have wise sayings which are almost contradictory. You have an example in the Book of Proverbs (Pro_26:4): “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him”; and Pro_26:5 : “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.”
Now the precepts about non-resistance belong to this class of wise sayings. They are all true. In most cases it is neither wise nor Christian to resist an ill done to us, or to go to law, or to refuse to help a neighbour. But what we have are extreme cases—instances in the extremest form to be imagined of the general principle of Christian love to our neighbour.
When Jesus promised His followers a hundred-fold return in this present life for all the sacrifices they had made for the Kingdom of Heaven, Peter and John were not misled into expecting to become possessors of vast landed estates; nor did even Tolstoi attempt to interpret this saying literally. So when Jesus declared that no man could be His disciple without hating his own mother, no one has ever for a moment imagined that Jesus meant this literally. We recognize it plainly for what it is, an extreme and startling statement of a profound spiritual truth. The statement in the form in which it was made could not by any possibility be true. We frankly discount it by the application of common sense. [Note: J. W. Powell, What is a Christian? 36.]
We have enough evidence to indicate that our Lord Himself did not intend His precepts to be taken with the deadly literalness which Western minds, bent either on a too literal imitation of the outward accidents of the Master’s life on the one hand, or anxious to represent them as obsolete and impracticable on the other, have been disposed to take them. The most unsympathetic modern critic of Christ’s utterances will not seriously contend that our Lord meant that men were to mutilate themselves in order to observe His precept about the offending member, or that He who bade us love all men really meant that His followers should hate—in the ordinary sense of the word “hate”—father and mother and child, or that forgiveness was to cease after 490 offences. So to interpret Christ is to reduce His teaching to a mass of inconsistent, self-contradictory nonsense. He declared that to call a brother fool might be as bad as murder: yet He is recorded once at least to have used the word Himself, and on other occasions used language of equal vehemence and severity. [Note: H. Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, 148.]
2. The next thing to notice is that the hearers are addressed as individuals. They are not yet organized in a society. The Sermon on the Mount contains the principles which shall make a Society possible and inevitable and these principles are given to prepare the individual to take his place, and do his duty, as a member of it. The whole emphasis is laid upon the possession of certain fundamental dispositions of the heart and will by the individual. The whole atmosphere is one which is intensely personal; interest centres in the supremacy of the three love-values (God, Self, and Neighbour) over each individual soul. If the motives and dispositions of the heart or will are such that love reigns over it on these three sides, then it is assumed that the resulting conduct will be true.
Jesus began His ministry at the time when the ancient, narrow, closed-group organization of society had been broken up by the combination and commingling of the multifarious groups in one great empire. That was the necessary preparation for the emergence into full consciousness of the value of the individual. At that period a number of ethical teachers appeared who apprehended with more or less clearness the central value of the individual, and embodied the principle with more or less consistency in their systems. But in the evangel of Jesus it found its most perfect expression; and the emphasis it received in His teaching has never been exceeded since. So strongly did He stress it, and so constantly did He assume it in all His religious and ethical doctrine, that many of His followers have not unnaturally attributed to Him an extreme individualism, and failed to grasp the broader social implications of His message. He came “in the fullness of time,” when the systems of religious and ethical thought, organized in and adapted to the old regime, had disintegrated, and the inner life of mankind had not been reorganized about a new centre. That new centre was the individual rather than the clan or tribe or nation. More properly speaking, the social consciousness was so broadened as to include all humanity, and in this consciousness the individual necessarily appears as the centre of value. It was Jesus who effected this transference of emphasis.
(1) This at once makes a distinction. Christ demands the renunciation of revenge, which is personal, but does not interfere with the application of retribution, which is social. And this is no fanciful or unintelligible distinction. If the offender strikes me on the right cheek, I am to turn to him the other. But suppose he strikes my mother on the right cheek am I to look on while he strikes her on the left? Does the precept contemplate any such case? Does it prohibit the generous interposition which flings back insults directed against the innocent, and stands between the defenceless and their oppressor? Not in the least; and if it did, no argument could be heard to prove that such a religion was divine. No; these are simply maxims of self-renunciation; not renunciation of our brother’s rights, of all struggle for the just and good, of all practical vindication of God’s will. They suppose the case when only two persons are present on the scene —the aggressor and the aggrieved; and teach simply how to deal with the mere hurt inflicted on the sufferer’s self-love; to suppress the resentment which promotes retaliation; to make no claim on his own account against the offender; but in the presence of higher ends to surrender himself to even further harm, and leave the award to a fitter tribunal than his own anger.
If, like the first disciples, I am a lonely missionary, sent forth as a lamb among wolves, and seeking to win conquests with only the shield of faith and the sword of the spirit, it may be wise to ask no support from the sense of justice, but to disappoint insult by meekness, and break down the stubborn heart by unexpected love. But there is a third presence upon the stage in every scene of the great drama; usually in the shape of human beings, whose wrongs we witness, so that we have to play the part, not of sufferers, but of spectators, of injury; and if not, in the viewless form of God Himself, whose Law demands our testimony and makes its repellent expostulation in our hearts. To confound this divine indignation at wrong with personal resentment, to see any resemblance, to miss the intense contrast, between the wrath of conscience and the petty spite of wrong, to look at the open countenance and free gesture of the one and not know it for a godly inspiration, to watch the pinched features and rigid shrinking of the other and not perceive it to be a devilish possession, is the mistake of a blindness without excuse. To quell our personal passion is Christian quietude; to stifle our moral indignation is sin against the Holy Ghost.
Much confusion has arisen from a failure to distinguish the position and duties of an individual from the powers and responsibilities of an earthly Ruler, in the application of Divine commands. In consequence of this, there is considerable misapprehension as to the real attitude of the Lord Jesus Christ towards the use of physical force by earthly Rulers. Happily, however, He has not left us in doubt as to His will, for when before the Roman Governor Pilate, in answer to the latter’s question “What hast thou done?” Jesus replied, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight that I should not be delivered to the Jews”(Joh_18:35-36). [Note: G. H. Braithwaite, The Society of Friends and War, 7.]
(2) Another point is that Jesus is clearly not thinking of political problems. They lay entirely beyond His province. The people whom He was addressing had nothing to do with government or the administration of justice: they had no votes and did not sit on juries. This must not be distorted into the doctrine that Christianity has nothing to do with politics or social questions. The principles of Ethics, whatever principles they are that we adopt, must necessarily be applicable to all spheres of life. Those who have accepted Christ’s principles of conduct must necessarily, when they find themselves in power, regard them as their rule of action in their official or civil capacity as well as in their business life and their private affairs. The principles must be applied to politics: but Christ did not so apply them Himself.
3. But more important is the fact that the Sermon on the Mount is addressed to those who are, or are understood to become, Christ’s own followers. Its principles express the climax of the character of a Christian. They imply a high stage of moral development, and can only be in place when they are of a piece with the rest of the life. This is true even of the individual. Refusal to resist a wrong can make its appeal only when it is perfectly clear that it does not arise from laziness or cowardice, pride or hypocrisy, or the desire to curry favour. It has been well said, with regard to the Bishop in Les Mise’rables who defends the convict he has sheltered by pretending that he has given him the stolen candlesticks, that “you must be that bishop to be able to do such a thing.” Very few Christians have, in fact, risen to this level in their private lives; the Churches emphatically have not in their dealings with one another. Least of all have States.
The world very naturally finds an occasion of stumbling in our Lord’s command not to be anxious about the morrow, but to imitate the insouciance of the birds and flowers. This teaching has been described as some of the most foolish and pernicious teaching ever given by a moralist. And so it would be, were it addressed to all the world. But it is not addressed to all the world; it is addressed solely to His own followers, and it is bound up with the special relation in which they stand to God. Like Himself, they are to seek first God’s Kingdom and righteousness; they are to be entirely devoted to God and to His service. They are not to be anxious about the things of this life, because, while they live wholly for God, He Himself will provide for their lower needs.
That His teaching has no bearing either upon the individual or upon the corporate life of those who do not share His devotion to God, He Himself implies: “Be not therefore anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek” (Mat_6:31). It is entirely natural that the Gentiles should seek them. Living as they do for their own ends rather than for God’s, they have every reason for anxiety. The future is uncertain, and death by starvation is not impossible. If they do not anxiously endeavour to provide for themselves, they have no assurance that God will provide for them.
A similar limitation holds with our Lord’s teaching as to nonresistance. His teaching may be held to apply to the corporate action of the Church as fully as it applies to the action of the individual Christian. But it does not apply to “the children of this world,” or to the corporate action of “the kingdoms of this world,” nor would they be right, remaining as they are in other respects, to follow our Lord’s teaching in this one particular. On the contrary, their resistance to evil, individually and corporately, has a real place in the Divine scheme, and a real value in relation to it.
