a circle around yourself and some people who are inside it, and the rest are outside. That is the pattern of conventional religion in every age and ever place. It has many names and it has often passed for Christianity. But what Jesus says is “unless you can do better than that, you have no right to call yourself my disciples.” That is not how God behaves, that is not how God loves. His love is “so wide it never passed by one/ or it had passed by me.” And anyone who means to be a disciple of Jesus must be like God. That is what he means when he says, “unless your righteousness goes beyond that of the scribes and Pharisees you will never enter the Kingdom of God.”
The crime of the Church today is that so many of us are conventionally religious and nothing more. We have the religion of scribes and Pharisees, and not always the cheerful company of publicans and sinners. We keep the dull and decent rules of respectability, and are bored by them; we don’t even have the fun of cocking a snook in the eye of convention and running home from time to time.9 And because we think this conventional and respectable religion is Christianity, we begin to suppose that Christ himself is as dull and dreary as we are, and there is no help in the Church and no hope in Christ. How wrong we are! If only this word of Christ could penetrate, get under our skins, wake us out of sleep. What do I ask of you? I want you to be perfect like God.
HOW CAN WE BECOME PERFECT
Fortunately, we know where to look for an answer. If you turn on to Matthew 19 you will find a well-known story. A man whom we generally call the rich young ruler comes to Jesus asking what he must do in order to inherit eternal life. Jesus answers, “You know the ten commandments, what about starting with them.” “I have done them all,” says the inquirer. “What else?” “Alright,” says Jesus, “if you want to be perfect, . . .” but I will tell you the rest in a moment. I have two practical points to leave with you.
Keep the commandments. You must not misunderstand what I said a few minutes ago. It is terribly easy to keep the rules and get hung up in them like a little pig. When that happens you must be blown out of your stuffiness like when Luther said to Melanchthon his famous colleague—“for God’s sake man, go sin a few sins worth sinning.” Rules are a deadly danger; but they have their uses. They mean discipline and discipline means strength. I have begged you, and I mean it, to go in for something, anything with enthusiasm and abandonment. But whatever it is, discipline will increase your effort and your success.
Cricket for example (to take one of the few things I know anything about). Go out for it with all the abandon in the world. But practice and practice until you can drop the ball on a sheet of newspaper, until there isn’t an inch of daylight between bat and pad. Or take another kind of illustration (if only for appearance’s sake). What makes great literature or great music? First an exaltation and passion of spirit which pours forth with the untamed ardor of a mountain spring. But—with this the unwearying discipline of form and style, the classical mold for the romantic spirit. I am speaking of life, not literature. And while there is no life without the inner springs of verve and energy and enthusiasm, there is also no life worth living without discipline. The inner discipline that recognizes and obeys the laws of God. Well, said the young man, I’ve kept the ten commandments, what more do you want? If you want to be perfect, cut the patter, and follow me. If you are tired of the dreary round of conventional religion and conventional morality, follow me. Be a disciple of Jesus Christ.
I haven’t time to say all that this means. But as he himself was God incarnate, living like him means living like God. The Sermon on the Mount, from which we started, is not another set of rules like the old ones only harder. A set of A-level religion compared with others’ O-level religion. It is just the crystalization of the sort of person Jesus was and a pointer towards the way he leads. If you are to be his disciple you do not calculate what people deserve from you; what sort of claim X, Y, or Z may reasonably make. You simply give yourself in the service for Jesus’ sake.
If you follow him you know where the way will lead. It will lead to death. That is the essence, the inescapable goal of it all. For the death is the death of you, of self; the end of self-love, self-satisfaction, self-righteousness. And that death is the only way into life worth living.
9. Editor’s note: “Cocking a snook” is the British gesture of contempt, like thumbing your nose at someone.
“OUR FATHER”—Matthew 6.9
[Preached twenty nine times from 2/9/64 at St. Mary-le-Bow to 7/25/99 at Wooley Terrace]
These are, I suppose, the best-known and most frequently used words in the New Testament; we repeat them constantly. They are also, surely, the most shocking. Could crude theological anthropomorphism go further? God is described as a father, but I am a father, one among millions and there is no more human relationship than that of parent and child. Is this essential human relationship to be predicated of God? And our Father—in heaven! “In” is a preposition with a local meaning, where God is said to be—up there? But there is no such place “up there.” We have Mr. Khrushchev’s own word for it, that his cosmonauts have found no angels or other supernatural beings on their journeys, and I think we may well accept his conclusions. Outer space is not inhabited by winged or white-robed creatures.
Can we take this New Testament language seriously? Yes, of course. What I have just been saying (though you took it seriously because so many profoundly serious people say it) is really sheer nonsense. The New Testament writers, though less well instructed about celestial topography than we are, knew quite well that words like “Father in heaven” were parables, only they were wise enough to take these parables as seriously as we take our literalism. It may be, I think, that there are elements in the New Testament language that we cannot easily use today, but our first task is to see what this classical Christian language means. Let us begin with heaven.
HEAVEN
God has his home in heaven, human beings do not. Humans live on earth. This means that God is other than humankind, and that humankind has no way of knowing God unless God himself takes action to make himself known. To put the picture into a modern form, you must think of a house converted into two flats—an upstairs flat and a downstairs flat. The staircase has been taken out or torn up, and the upstairs tenant has his own exit. Now if I live downstairs, I shall probably have a pretty good idea that there is someone upstairs. I shall hear him walking about, moving the furniture, playing the piano and so on. But I shall not, so long as we stay on our own premises, see him and get to know him. Only if he comes down shall I be able to get to know him.
Now this is what the Bible teaches about God, and the use of the term heaven conveys the opposite of what some might think. God is not described as a glorified human being, but as a being existing on a totally different plane, completely remote from humankind, unless he of his own initiative chooses to come into the human orbit. God is in heaven, human beings are on earth. The Bible is forever reminding us of this truth, and in doing so teaches a far more spiritual and far more exalted doctrine of God than do some—I do not say all—of those who are impatient with the Bible’s pictorial imagery. I do not propose this evening to take up the epistemology and metaphysics of all this; I want to preach a plain, simple, and practical sermon. Let me therefore point out how errors arise when we fail to take seriously this absolute distinction between God and human beings.
We fail to understand the time ratio of God’s action. I mean the sort of ratio that the Bible expresses when it says that with God 1,000 years are but as yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night. God can afford to work slowly. We jump to the conclusion that because God fails to do justice quickly enough for us to see it, that he does not do justice, or care about justice at all. But this is not so; he does not work on our timetable.
