Righteousness
Matt. iii. 15. Mark ii. 17.
v. 6, 10, 20. vii. 8, 9.
vi. 1, 33. xii. 31.
x. 41.
xiii. 17, 43, 49.
xxi. 32.
xxiii. 23, 28, 29, 35.
xxv. 37.
xxviii. 20.
Luke v. 32.
vi. 20-49
xi. 42.
xiii. 6-9.
IN a preceding chapter it was shown that the blessedness of each beatitude is to be sought in the reason annexed to it; and in the last chapter we saw that, both in the first beatitude and the eighth, the promise in the reason annexed is “the kingdom of heaven.” I have already also adverted briefly to the promises thus made in several of the other beatitudes. But I passed over one such promise, not because of its being unimportant, but because it is so important as to demand consideration by itself. This is the beatitude which says, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled”; and it hardly requires to be pointed out that what they are to be filled with is righteousness. Thus is righteousness seen to be one of the elements of blessedness. But from the great Teacher it receives a much more marked distinction; for, after completing the Beatitudes, He returns to this one and makes righteousness the text of the ensuing discourse.
“Righteousness” was not, any more than “the
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kingdom of God,” a conception original to the Preacher. On the contrary, it is one of the most prominent ideas of the Old Testament; and the passion for righteousness, which He characterized by the phrase “hungering and thirsting after righteousness,” may be called a peculiarly Hebrew instinct.
In the Old Testament righteousness is originally a legal idea. It supposes two parties at the judgment-seat, the one of whom is in the right and the other in the wrong; and the office of justice is to see that each of the two gets his own deserts. In human justice, of course, this is liable to many kinds of failure; but, whether the judge does justice by him or not, there must be one of the parties in the right; and to be in this position, whether recognised as such or not, is to be righteous. Of course, there is a higher tribunal than that of human justice, and every human being may, at all times, be conceived as ideally at the bar of God, where he will receive a sentence about the accuracy of which there can be no dispute; and he who at this bar might, either in regard to some particular action or in regard to the general tenor of his life, be entitled to a verdict in his favour is the righteous man. Thus rightequs-
,” ’ — v
ness is the favourable verdict of God; and ft may imply also the practical justification ensuing from the decision of the heavenly Judge, when He makes the lot of the person whom He justifies correspond with the verdict. This consequence is made specially prominent in the second half of Isaiah, where “righteousness” is employed in a sense not much different from “prosperity,” or rather, perhaps, “salvation.” Most people use righteousness as a term for the behaviour of man to man; and it includes this; but, when Christ speaks of hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and of being filled with it, there can be little doubt that, in accordance with the usage of His race, the prize He has in view’ is the favourable verdict of God on a man’s character and conduct.*
No better way of ascertaining what the hunger and thirst after righteousness means will be found than to study the state of St. Paul’s feelings before he became a Christian. He had been trained in the Scriptures of his race, and in a godly home; and in his experience the total effect of the pre-Christian revelation may be said to have reached its culmination. To him righteousness appeared the
* Speaking of the New Testament usage of this term, Professor Stevens ( The Theology of the New Testament) remarks: 44 In profane Greek, righteousness is chiefly a social virtue, usage and custom prescribing the standard of righteousness and measuring its elevation. But in the New Testament, righteousness is, above all things, a religious word; it is rightness according to the divine standard; it is conformity to the will and nature of God Himself.” And Professor Skinner ( Commentary on Isaiah, xl.-lxvi., Appendix II.), speaking of the Old Testament usage, says that, “when any person or act is spoken of as righteous, a religious reference is probably always included, the ideal tribunal being that of God.”
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be-all and the end-all of existence; he felt he must die if he could not procure it; and by righteousness he understood the favourable verdict of God on his life. Luther was brought, by the training of his early days, to exactly the same state of mind; the thing he supremely desired was precisely the same — a favourable verdict of God on his character and conduct — and the flesh was eaten from his bones because he despaired of attaining it. While much can be said against Pharisaism, and much against Roman Catholicism, it was under Pharisaic auspices that Paul, and under Roman Catholic auspices that Luther, arrived at this conviction; and it may be open to question whether Protestantism is everywhere training up the populations under its charge to realise as much as this in as poignant a way. But, if this is not done, the very foundations on which serious religion can be built are not being laid. In our Lord’s beatitude the blessedness of being filled with righteousness is conditioned on hungering and thirst¬ ing after it.
The sympathy of Christ with the training imparted by the Old Testament, and with the passion for righteousness thereby generated, is expressed very distinctly in the Sermon on the Mount, before the Preacher proceeds to the exposition of His own ideal; the motive underlying this declaration being a fear lest His subsequent references to the Old Testament should be understood as disparaging to its authority.
In order to avoid this danger, He prefaced His exposition with the statement: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil; for, verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.” In our day this has been declared to be as extreme a misrepresentation of the mind of Christ as the annals of falsification contain; one critic remarking that it is just as credible that Jesus said this as it would be if a Romish book asserted that, after nailing his theses to the church-door, Luther had bought an indulgence. But the truth is, there are few sayings of our Lord more strongly authenticated by every internal sign; and it is only by putting on it a meaning which it does not bear, and which is contrary to the Preacher’s obvious intention, that it is brought into antagonism with the general strain of His teaching. If it referred to the details of the ceremonial law, such as those about which St. Paul and the Judaizers contended, of course it would be outrageously in opposition not only to St. Paul but to Jesus Himself, as His mind is expounded in other portions of the Gospels. But to suppose this is quite unnecessary. Those who have been most in sympathy with Him have not misunderstood Him here, and they have not seen the necessity for any violent vindication of His consistency. By “the law” they have understood the education of the Old Testament
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as a whole; and, when Christ says that He came not to destroy this, but to fulfil it, they have understood that^He intended to honour the teachers of the dispensation preceding His own and to intimate that their work was not to be annulled by His, but, on the contrary, carried on to its completion. To the men of revelation in the Old Testament it was vouchsafed to make known the mind of God as to the type of character and conduct which He approved. All their doctrine on this subject Jesus accepts, sympathizing with it from the bottom of His heart. The tone of His references all through His ministry amply confirms this; for they are not only frequent, but full of affection and reverence, like the references of a son to the utterances of an honoured father. Christ accepted the education of the Old Testament in its entirety. I think we may go further and say, that He accepted all the ethical wisdom of the ancient world in so far as it may have been known to Him. The sages of Greece speculated not without success on the character and conduct pleasing to God; ana they sketched, as has been already observed, in the four cardinal virtues the outlines of a noble manhood. Some have supposed that the reason why Jesus dwelt comparatively little on such masculine virtues, expatiating more frequently on the feminine graces of character, such as compassion and humility, may have been because the work in relation to the former had already been done by His predecessors. Perhaps this implies an acquaintance with pagan thinkers such as we cannot attribute to the Man of Nazareth.
But at any rate He adopted the wisdom of Moses and the prophets; not a ray of light cast by them oh human life was to be lost; or, if lost, it was to be lost only in the same way in which the morning twilight is lost as it is absoi bed 1 in the perfect day.*
Whilst, however, thus incorporating with His own teaching all noble conceptions of human conduct and character already in the world, He went far beyond them. We cannot now read the finest efforts of pagan philosophy in this region without being astonished at the blots and the blanks by which they
* Compare Justin Martyr: “Not because the teachings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but because they are not in all respects similar, as neither are those of the others, Stoics and poets and historians. For each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic Word, seeing what was related to it. But they who contradict themselves on the more important points appear not to have possessed the heavenly wisdom, and the knowledge which cannot be spoken against. Whatever things are rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians. For, next to God, we honour and love the Word, who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that, becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing. For all the writers were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted Word, that was in them. For the seed and imitation imparted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the thing itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.’’ — Second Apology, ch. xiii.
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are disfigured. Even the circle about Socrates had no conception of the inviolable personal purity which is a commonplace to those who have been instructed by Jesus. In Cicero’s delightful treatise on Old Age there are traits of selfishness, expressed with the utmost naivete which shock the moral sense of the least sensitive Christian. The truth is, as someone has observed, the pagan world not only never produced one holy man, but never even drew the picture of one. The Hebrew Scriptures soar infinitely higher; yet even they come far short of* the level on which Jesus moves. It used to be considered a point of orthodoxy to maintain that, in ethical doctrine, Christ did not go beyond Moses. But it required a great deal of forcing to make this even plausible. In the Sermon on the Mount He Himself, when quoting what had been said “to them of old time,” might have reasoned that Moses had been misunderstood, and that in His discourse He was to give the true meaning of the ancient lawgiver; but, instead of doing so, He gives the new precept as something of His own. In what He said about divorce — that Moses gave them his law on the subject on account of the hardness of their hearts — we obtain a hint of the true point of view. The morality of the Old Testament was divine; yet it was human, because modified by circumstances and in adaptation to the stage of development at which those stood to whom it was given. So there was room for a new revelation of the divine mind and will; and this Jesus had come to make known to the world.
Having thus cleared the ground, the Great Teacher proceeds, in the Sermon on the Mount, to expound His conception of righteousness; and, in so doing, He adopts a method frequently resorted to by every expositor who knows his business: He contrasts the conception of the subject in His own mind with one already familiar to His hearers — “Except,” says He, “your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.” He proceeds to describe the righteousness of the scribes, as it was taught by them in their sermons in the synagogue, going over five points — their teaching as to the sixth, the seventh and the third commandments, as to the law of retaliation, and as -to the love due to others — and in each case to set His new teaching over against theirs. This goes on to the end of the fifth chapter. At the beginning of the sixth He passes on to a still more piquant contrast, comparing his own conception of righteousness, not with the teaching of the scribes, but with the practice of the Pharisees. This new division opens thus — “Take heed that ye do not your righteousness before men, to be seen of them” — not “your alms before men,” as our Bible most unfortunately says, obscuring the fact that He is still continuing the discussion of righteousness. Only in
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the next verse is mention made of alms, as a specimen of righteousness; and, after it, there follow other two specimens, namely, prayer and fasting.
The positive result that comes out of this thorough and well-planned discussion is that Christian righteousness is to be marked by three characteristics — Inwardness, Secrecy and Naturalness.
I. Inwardness.
The righteousness of the scribes was external; that of Jesus is internal. Theirs was a righteousness of words and actions; His flows out from the innermost thoughts and feelings. Theirs was conventional — that is to say, it was intended for the eye of society — His was a righteousness of the conscience, having regard only to God.
Society has certain rules which its members must not transgress on pain of punishment. These punishments are of different degrees of severity. For some transgressions it goes to the extreme length of imprisonment or even death. Assaults on the person, forgeries, thefts, and other serious crimes are thus punished; and, accordingly, such acts are avoided by all who have any respect for themselves or the social system of which they are members. To the ordinary respectable citizen the mere thought of being locked up in prison is one of horror; and to a respectable family it appears an intolerable disgrace if anyone belonging to it thus brings himself within. the clutches of the law. But there are other offences which society, although not going the length of shutting those guilty of them away behind prison-bars, yet highly disapproves; and it finds means of making its disapproval felt. This it does by excluding those who commit them from its select circles. A woman, for example, who has broken the seventh commandment is not put in jail, but she is visited with an ostracism of extreme painfulness; and in circles that are not exacting on other points of morality a breach of honour is punished in a way that is keenly felt.
By methods such as these society knows how to protect itself against the evil dispositions of its members; and those who have been brought up within the circle of well-ordered social life stand in wholesome awe of the barriers on the other side of which grow the forbidden fruits of crime and vice. The force of public opinion is a strong providential check upon sin; for none can affect to despise fine and imprisonment; and to multitudes the loss of character is a terror hardly less formidable; because it means loss of position, of friendship, of everything that makes life worth living. Accordingly, by these motives the average man is kept straight. Nothing would induce him so to compromise himself as to come under the ban of the law or the censure of public opinion.
This is conventional goodness. It is of immense
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benefit to society. And it is the utmost which the majority aim at. Their boast is that nobody has anything to say against them. Yet it is a very poor kind of righteousness. A man does not require to be very good to escape the clutches of the police; nor is it difficult to obtain from society a certificate of respectability, for its scrutiny does not go deep. Aware that it is able only to look on the outward appearance, society does not concern itself with motives. One man may be honest because honesty is the best policy, another because he scorns a lie; one may be sober because drunkenness interferes with business, another because even a single act of drunkenness is an infinite degradation; but society makes no distinction between these; all it inquires is whether a man is honest or sober — it takes no account of motives, feelings and thoughts.
Yet there is a vast difference between a man who is honest from policy and another who is so from principle; and it is on this inner world of feeling that the ethic of Jesus concentrates attention. With Christ the motive is everything; and sin is sin, though it may never escape outside the hidden world of the mind. “Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his neighbour without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.” “Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou ,shalt not commit adultery; but I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.” A man may never commit the act of adultery, and yet his imagination may be a pandemonium of lust and passion; a man may not inflict on his neighbour any act of which the law will take cognisance, and yet he may cherish in his heart a great deal more hatred and rancour than has, many a time, gone to the commission of murder. A man may have learned the lesson of conventional propriety so well as never to make a single slip to which the finger of others can be pointed, and yet behind the curtain that hides his personality from the view of his fellow-creatures may be daily and hourly enacting itself a drama of ambition, envy and jealousy, of unholy desire, or of dark doubt and profanity, which he would not for the world allow any eye to see. God’s eye, nevertheless, sees all; and these movements of the hidden man of the heart are sins no less than outward acts. This was the ethical revelation of Jesus.
2. Secrecy.
The righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees was ostentatious; that recommended by Jesus courts the shade. When, in doing good, people are thinking of the eyes of the public and not of the eyes of God, it is but a step from the avoidance of that which would incur the world’s censure to the pursuit of
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that which will win the world’s applause. And the praise of men can be won by goodness or the appearance of it Indeed, there is nothing to which the world renders more handsome homage than to the appearance of extraordinary righteousness or sanctity. Of this tendency in human nature the Pharisees took advantage, affecting in their daily habits an exaggerated piety. In the sayings of our Lord are preserved imperishable pictures of their practices, by which they are pilloried in the eyes of the ages. We see them distributing their alms in the synagogues and the streets with a trumpet sounding before them; standing with uplifted faces and hands in public places engaged in prayer; going about on their fast-days with sad and disfigured countenances, that everyone may be aware of the sacred work in which they are engaged.
These pictures are to us now incredible, and, as we look at them, we seem to be reading about beings of a different species from ourselves. Not only, however, are they amply confirmed by the literature of the Jews themselves, but it is only the difficulty of seeing ourselves as others see us that prevents us from detecting parallel practices in our own religious life. In all probability these practices of the Pharisees had an excellent origin, being at first the overflowing of genuine zeal. In a time of persecution someone may have thought it his duty to pray in a public place in defiance of the law; in a time of famine someone, melting with pity, may, to shame the selfishness of the rich, have given his alms away in the market-place. By the noble example others were stirred up to go and do likewise. By degrees that which had been the exception became the rule; and all who wished to come up to a certain standard had to follow suit. But the practice continued after the enthusiasm by which it had been generated had passed away; and it remained as a lying sign for feelings no longer in existence. Thus may the virtues of one generation be the vices of the next. To the contemporaries of Jesus these practices were only a theatrical mask, in which they were playing for the reward of popular admiration. And this is the very meaning of the name He applied to the Pharisees, when, as He often did, He called them “hypocrites”; the original significance of this word being nothing else than “play-actors.”
This led Him to impose on His followers a strict law of secrecy. “Take heed,” He said, “that ye do not your righteousness before men.” “When thou doest thine alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet and shut thy door.” “When thou fastest, anoint thine head and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast.”
These precepts seem to be inconsistent with others which came from the same lips. In the Sermon on the Mount itself He says, “Let your light so
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shine before men that they may see your good works”; and elsewhere He demands with extra¬ ordinary solemnity that all who believe in Him should confess Him before men. But this paradox is not difficult of solution. The public side of virtue must be balanced and kept in its right place by the private side. If a man’s prayers in public are more numerous than his private devotions, he is in a bad way; but, if his testimony in public is accompanied with a hidden life of intercourse with God, it is likely to be salutary for all concerned. If a man never gives to the poor or to the cause of Christ except when his name is to appear in the newspapers or in a subscription-list, he is no better than the hypocrites of the time of our Lord; but, if a man’s public charity be only the expression of a spirit of com¬ passion and helpfulness, which he carries with him wherever he goes, then his example may fairly be allowed to be an encouragement to others, and he may even without danger enjoy the gratitude called forth by his generosity.
r«i*
3. Naturalness.
The righteousness of the Pharisees was a manufactured article; Jesus desired a goodness which was a product of nature — a living flower, the beauty of which is organically connected with the root from which it springs. When goodness was supposed to consist in fasting twice a week, in paying tithes of mint and anise and cummin, and in washing the hands before meals, it is easy to see that such practices were a mere garment, which could be put on or off at pleasure; but Jesus desiderated a morality in the blood and in the bone. “Either,” says He, “make the tree good and his fruit good, or else make the tree corrupt and his fruit corrupt.” “A good tree,” He says in the Sermon on the Mount itself, “cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.” No more characteristic saying ever issued from His lips. It comes to this, that he who would do good must be a good man; real goodness is not possible on easier terms. On the other hand, let anyone be evil at the core, and then, evenagainst his will, his actions will be bad also.
The latter statement may seem to contradict what has been already said. The words and the deeds of the Pharisees, it may be argued, were good, and yet their hearts were corrupt. Jesus would not, however, have allowed that even their outward conduct was good. It imposed, it is true, on the multitude; but to the discerning and spiritual eye it was vulgar and counterfeit. He was not deceived by it; His disciples, learning from Him, detected it to be a sham; and even the multitude at last, under His teaching, found it out. Christ has communicated to His people an instinct for detecting spurious goodness:
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as St. Paul sa)rs, “he that is spiritual judgeth all things.” When a hypocrite, after a long course of duplicity, falls at length, and is exposed in the eyes of all, it will generally be found that the truly spiritual have not been deceived, though they have held their peace. As an uneducated man, when he attempts to make use of the language of the learned, is sure, by a misplaced accent or some similar nicety, to bet.ay himself to those who know, so is the Pharisee detected by the saint. “A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit.”
But neither, on the other hand, can a good tree bring forth evil fruit. If a man is genuine at the core, he does not need to try excessively to do right, and he does not require to assume a cloak to cover his defects. His character may be im¬ perfect; it may be disfigured with exaggerations and deficiencies; its possessor may make many slips and false steps; but still his influence is wholesome, and those brought into contact with him feel that they are in touch with reality. This is the final solution of the contradiction between the law of secrecy, as expounded by Jesus, and the obligation, also enforced by Him, to shine before men. The goodness which is growing spontaneously from a natural root is safe from corruption even if exposed to publicity; because it is not showing off its beauty for effect, but displaying it because it cannot help it, as the flower grows or the bird sings because it is its nature so to do.
In ethical systems the question has often been raised whether that is the superior virtue which is achieved by effort or that which is achieved with ease. The usual answer is, I think, that virtue is praiseworthy exactly in proportion to the effort required to bring it to pass.* But surely there must be a fundamental error in a line of argument which leads to a conclusion so unnatural. The strenuous virtue, which bears on its face the marks of the effort by which it has been attained, has its own merit, to which homage ought to be
rendered; but the incomparable grace which we call the beauty of holiness belongs to the virtue which proceeds without effort from a nature good to the core. This conclusion, it is true, raises
many questions: How is this perfect naturalness to be attained? is it, like physical beauty, the
prerogative of a few favourites of fortune, or is it accessible to all? We shall come to this question by and by in the course of our study of the
teaching of Jesus; but, in the meantime, I content myself with saying that the highest grace of the goodness He demands is its naturalness.
The exposition of the nature of righteousness by contrasting it with the teaching of the scribes and
* As is well known, this was the view of Kant.
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the practice of the Pharisees, comes to an end about the middle of the Sermon on the Mount; and it is a question whether the argument is sustained after this point or whether the Speaker, having concluded the description of’ righteousness, diverges to other topics, passing from one to another without any very close connection. I am inclined to believe that at vi. 19 He still goes on describing the nature of righteousness, by contrasting it with what may be called the ordinary life of worldly men, who, living to eat and to drink, forget their origin and their destiny in the cares and pleasures of the world. This is confirmed by the great statement with which this section winds up: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” It is even possible that the dominant idea of righteousness can be traced right through the Sermon on the Mount to its close. This is, how¬ ever, dubious; and I shall, therefore, break off here the account of righteousness, only remarking how utterly those are mistaken who labour under the belief that the Sermon on the Mount is a very simple and plain affair, containing a few kindly and homely rules, which commend themselves to the common sense of all and present no great difficulties to anyone who is disposed to live an honest life. It is not infrequent to hear people say that the Sermon on the Mount is enough for them, and that, in their opinion, the world would be no loser if all other theology were forgotten; such doctrines as the corruption of human nature, the inability of man to keep God’s law, and the need of a Saviour, being inventions of theology and figments of the pulpit.
Jesus is conceived as a teacher genial and original, who, seeing mankind crushed under the burdens heaped upon them by priests and scribes, called His audience away from the legality of Pharisaism to an easier religion, telling them that God was not a tyrant or taskmaster, demanding a strict and scrupulous obedience, but a Father, who would take his erring child, just as he was, to His breast, and then accept from him such services as he might, without effort or anxiety, be able to render. Such shallow platitudes have not only misled a prejudiced mind here and there, but have even deceived whole generations of men. They rest, however, on an almost inconceivable misunderstanding of the words of Jesus. The reason why He revised the old law and the practice of His time was not because they were too strict, but because they were too lax. He sharpens the edge of every precept and enlarges the scope of every principle. There is an intensity in the Sermon on the Mount that is appalling; it searches the conscience as with an electric ray. The Preacher demands a height of character and attainment never even dreamed of by Moses and the prophets. When
So
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He says, “Ye are the salt of the earth,” what does this imply about the moral condition of the mass of men? When He says, “Ye are the light of the world,” what does this imply about the world? And how do Christians come to be in such a condition that they are to other human beings what salt is to corruption or light to darkness? It is mere stupidity to ignore such problems. These are the hidden foundations on which the whole structure of the teaching of Jesus is erected; and it is only by getting down to them, and forming some fair estimate of their magnitude, that we obtain any just conception of the mind of the Divine Teacher.