Luminescence, Volume 1. C. K. Barrett
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of people called “the people of the land.” They did not keep the Law, so that by those who did keep it, they were excluded. The Law did not bring them in, it shut them out. These were the people whom Jesus was most concerned to include. We considered this a fortnight ago in the saying ‘I came not to call the righteous but the sinners.’ Again, the Law cut out the Gentile. It bound the Jews together but it separated them from the rest of the world. Jesus brought Jew and Gentile together and that was a miracle at which the early Church never ceased to wonder.
I have no time to discuss the way that Christ unites us, not by laying down our rights over against one another in a legal manner, but by sowing love between us. ‘Forgive one another even as God, for Christ’s sake, has forgiven you.’ That is the key to the business of bringing together. When we meet around the manger in Bethlehem, we must be humble enough to get on with one another. I know of course that the story does not tell us that the shepherds and the wise men came to Bethlehem at the same time, but I like to think of them all there. Rich and poor, learned and ignorant, Gentile and Jew.
And let me in a word or two apply that quite personally. There is very much that might be said here. What can bring all the nations together in peace? What will make the English and Indians, Russians and Germans friends, even brothers and sisters? Fellowship in Christ will do it. No law will do it; no treaty will do it. But Christ and Christ alone can do it. Therefore, since there is but little indication that any or all of these nations as a whole will accept Christ, I am very skeptical about the possibility of a stable world peace; and certainly it is my duty as a minister of the Word of God, to warn against undue optimism about the Atlantic Charter or the Moscow Conference. There is the same ground for pessimism in social and industrial questions in our own country.
I wish however to speak more positively than that. What can weld individual people together into one Church? What can heal and prevent quarrels in the Church? What can make two circuits live peaceably together? What can even make us forget ex.W, ex. P, and ex. U?8 You know the answer. Will you apply it to yourselves Secondly, the Law was—
THAT WHICH RELATED PEOPLE TO GOD
Again you will find it hard to grasp the divine nature that was ascribed to the Law. Let a naïve and even comical story help to bring it home. It describes how God spends the twelve hours of the day. The first three God sits and busies himself with the Torah. The second three he sits and governs the whole world. The third three he sits and nourishes the whole world. The fourth three he sits and plays with Leviathan! (Abodah Zara 3G, 18). The first three hours God himself studies the Law; that is not only the higher occupation humans can have. It is God’s own primary occupation. Sometimes the Law was spoken of as if it was a real person who acted as a mediator between God and humankind. It brought knowledge of God’s will to human beings. And it was a guide by which people could come to God.
It could affect God’s presence on earth. There is an interesting parallel to Jesus’ promise that wherever two or three met in his name, he would be with them. ‘Where five men sit together to study the Law, God’s presence will be with them.’
But most of all, the Law governed people’s thoughts about their relationship with God. There was a set of rules, and if you could keep them you were alright. If you didn’t, you weren’t. By painstaking application and attention, a person built up, so he believed, a whole set of rights over against God. He made a ladder of his acts of obedience by which he thought painfully to clamber up into the divine presence. This was the way into life. Here too the weakness of the Law is plain to see, though all too few see it. Of course none of us is in danger of supposing that to abstain from pork and rabbits will commend us to God. But we have our own laws. How many English people, if they would confess it, think that they are saved by their decency—good, solid British decency? How many people think, in effect, that they will be saved by total abstinence? That is, that they really do stand a bit higher in God’s sight than the man who has a glass or two of beer? If it is not one ladder we climb, it is another. Some sort of law we use as a means of getting to God. But it won’t do. The whole thing founders, if nowhere else, upon the principle that he who is guilty in one thing is guilty in all. Besides, it is all vitiated from the start based on the monstrous assumption that even if we lived a morally perfect life, we should have some sort of claim on God. But we are still unprofitable servants.
But Jesus came to fulfill the Law. He came to do what it could not do. He came to bring people to God. He fulfills the Law in all its aspects. He sets forth more clearly than any code of statutes could do, the unattainable majesty of the demand made upon us by God’s holiness. His life is the life we owe to God. There is no limit to God’s claim upon us. We go one mile with someone, and we wipe our brow and think to sit down in a glow of self-satisfaction. But no—go another mile. Someone injures us; it hurts, it’s a hot iron clamped on our side. And we forgive him. He does it again, and with a huge effort, we forgive him again. We do it seven times, and with our temper torn to shreds and our nerves worn out we turn to Christ and say, “There, that’s pretty good isn’t it? You can’t want more than that.” “Seven times?” he replies. “Why you’re only just beginning. Get up to 490 times and then perhaps you will be on the way.” “Not the labors of my hands, can fulfill thy laws’ demands.”
BUT—there is a way for us to live, only it is not by the ladder of the Law. Jesus came to do what the Law could not do. As Paul says, “if a Law had been given that could give life, then righteousness, salvation could have been got by the Law.” But it was not so. It was Jesus who came that people might have life. By his incarnation, his death, and his resurrection he does what the Law could not do. He brings us to God. That is why he came and that is the purpose of his birth.
During the last war, an officer was on leave in London at Christmas. In the evening he dropped into a city church seeking peace. The preacher, no doubt a clever and eloquent person, discussed learnedly the question of whether God really was born in Bethlehem or at some other place. The soldier came out, saying to himself, “What does it matter to me whether he was born in Bethlehem or not? What I want to know is whether he can help a poor devil in Piccadilly tonight?”
May God forgive me if I ever preach you a sermon in which I do not tell you that Christ can save us poor devils in Darlington now. He came to Palestine, that is true enough and important too, that he might bring us to God, that the righteousness of the Law might through Him be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.
7. Kingsley was the full-time pastor of Bondgate from 1943–45, hence many of these sermons list this church as one place where a sermon was preached, even long after he had gone to Durham as a professor in 1945.
8. Editor’s note: I do not know what this means, but it must have something to do with the war.
“YOU SHALL BE PERFECT”—Matthew 5.48
[Preached eighteen times between 10/9/60 at Hamsterley to 2/4/95 at Newton Aycliffe]
There is no room for mediocrity in Christianity. That needs to be said; it needs to be emphasized. It also needs to be understood. We must not take it the wrong way. It does not mean that there is no room in Christianity for the average person, whose gifts and powers are only mediocre. There is room for such a person. It has been said that Christianity is good for either plaster saints or blasted idiots. That is not true. It is good for everyone, for the good, the bad, and the merely indifferent. It is a faith for the average ordinary person. But it is not a faith for a person who is going to be content with average effort and ordinary performance. Christianity does not mean living up to an ordinary decent average; the word of the text is absolutely clear—it means being perfect, doing the job properly.
The crime of our age is that we do not care enough—about anything, I mean. It is well enough to live in the age of the average person if that means an age when not only the mighty and the noble, not only the wealthy