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 and the learned, can have their chance and their happiness. But it is a poor thing to live in a world where every modern convenience is so efficiently laid on that the adventure and the struggle, the longing and the drama have gone out of life. It is a poor thing to live in a world that couldn’t care less.
I would gladly talk about this on almost any level. If you have never known it, you ought to have the joy that comes from flinging yourself into something with all your heart and soul. It doesn’t much matter what, and it doesn’t matter much how good you are at it. If you are going to do a thing at all, you are going to do it for all you are worth. Don’t stand back and ask—“How much can I get past with?” That’s a poor wretched way of living, and there is neither joy nor profit in it. Or think of your responsibilities as a citizen of the world and don’t ask how little, but how much you can do, in a world that suffers and starves and dies.
But I must stick to my list. I shouldn’t like you to think I had been put up by the school authorities to produce a pep talk just at the moment when the first fine rapture of the beginning of term begins to fade. A preacher can very properly talk about politics and scholarship, games and hobbies, but he starts from the back. And the word of Jesus is, “You shall be perfect.”
YOU SHALL BE PERFECT
That is a staggering order, if you take it seriously. What did Jesus mean? I think I can tell you, if you will give me five minutes. First, this is a misquotation; I mean Jesus is misquoting the Old Testament. There is a text that comes more than once in the Old Testament, which was at the very root of the religion of the people Jesus was talking to. God had said to his people “you shall be holy, for I am holy.” That is, you belong to me, and because we belong together, we are different from everything and everyone else in the world. The Jews fastened on this idea, and they put it into practice. They said—“Yes, we will be different from everyone else in the world. We will be separate from everyone else in the world.” And with infinite pains they achieved their goal. Don’t think I am sneering at them. They were the best people in the world. At a time when you could scarcely trust the average Greek or Roman as far as you could throw them, the Jews were upright, honest, and pure. They did it by keeping the rules, the rules of the Old Testament which are very good rules.
But this was not how Jesus understood the will of God. His misquotation says in effect—I’m not interested in your being holy, religious in a conventional sense. God isn’t religious, he is perfect. And that is what you must be. What he meant by that, he illustrates here in this chapter. Look at some of the illustrations.
You know the old Law which says “you shall not murder” well most of us can keep it. But it is only a hint of what God really means. You can keep your hands off a persons skin, but murder him in your heart. If you do that, you may be conventionally religious, but you are not perfect, and you are not like God. God is not angry with me; if he were, I should be blasted out of existence this moment, and well I should deserve it. On the contrary, he is kind, and gracious and loving; if I am going to be like God, that is what I must be. You shall not be conventionally religious, living by the book, but perfect; with no anger, nothing but love in my heart towards my brother.
But who is my brother whom I must love? That will give us another example. There is another old rule says Jesus: “thy shalt love thy neighbor” and I know what you make of that. You supply
