4. Our attitude to all men (12)
A Christian’s relationships: to his brothers and his Father
(Matthew 7:1–12)
Matthew 7 consists of a number of apparently self-contained paragraphs. Their link with each other is not obvious. Nor does the chapter as a whole follow on from the previous chapter with any clear sequence of thought. Many commentators conclude, therefore, that originally these blocks of material belonged to different contexts, that Matthew himself assembled them, and that he perhaps did his ‘scissors and paste’ work a trifle clumsily. But it is not necessary to reach this conclusion. The connecting thread which runs through the chapter, however loosely, is that of relationships. It would seem quite logical that, having described a Christian’s character, influence, righteousness, piety and ambition, Jesus should concentrate finally on his relationships. For the Christian counter-culture is not an individualistic but a community affair, and relations both within the community and between the community and others are of paramount importance. So some account is given in Matthew 7 of the network of relationships into which, as the followers of Jesus, we are drawn. These might be set out as follows:
1. Our attitude to our brother (1–5)
Jesus does not anticipate that the Christian community will be perfect. On the contrary, he assumes both that there will be misdemeanours and that these will give rise to tensions, to problems of relationships. In particular, how should a Christian behave towards a fellow member who has misbehaved? Has Jesus any instructions about discipline within his community? Yes, in such a situation he forbids two alternatives, and then commends a third, a better, a more ‘Christian’ way.
a. The Christian is not to be a judge (1, 2)
Jesus’ words Judge not, that you be not judged are well known but much misunderstood. To begin with, we must reject Tolstoy’s belief, based on this verse, that ‘Christ totally forbids the human institution of any law court’, and that he ‘could mean nothing else by those words’. But Jesus’ prohibition cannot possibly mean the one thing Tolstoy says it must mean, for the context does not refer to judges in courts of law but rather to the responsibility of individuals to one another.
Next, our Lord’s injunction to ‘judge not’ cannot be understood as a command to suspend our critical faculties in relation to other people, to turn a blind eye to their faults (pretending not to notice them), to eschew all criticism and to refuse to discern between truth and error, goodness and evil. How can we be sure that Jesus was not referring to these things? Partly because it would not be honest to behave like this, but hypocritical, and we know from this and other passages his love of integrity and hatred of hypocrisy. Partly because it would contradict the nature of man whose creation in God’s image includes the ability to make value-judgments. Partly also because much of Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is based on the assumption that we will (indeed should) use our critical powers. For example, we have repeatedly heard his call to be different from the world around us, in that we are to develop a righteousness which exceeds that of the Pharisees, to do ‘more than others’ in the standard of love we adopt, not to be like the hypocrites in our piety or like the heathen in our ambition. But how can we possibly obey all this teaching unless we first evaluate the performance of others and then ensure that ours is different from and higher than theirs? Similarly, in Matthew 7, this very command not to ‘judge’ others is followed almost immediately by two further commands: to avoid giving ‘what is holy’ to dogs or pearls to pigs (6), and to beware of false prophets (15). It would be impossible to obey either of these commands without using our critical judgment. For in order to determine our behaviour towards ‘dogs’, ‘pigs’ and ‘false prophets’ we must first be able to recognize them, and in order to do that we must exercise some critical discernment.
If, then, Jesus was neither abolishing law courts nor forbidding criticism, what did he mean by Judge not? In a word, ‘censoriousness’. The follower of Jesus is still a ‘critic’ in the sense of using his powers of discernment, but not a ‘judge’ in the sense of being censorious. Censoriousness is a compound sin consisting of several unpleasant ingredients. It does not mean to assess people critically, but to judge them harshly. The censorious critic is a fault-finder who is negative and destructive towards other people and enjoys actively seeking out their failings. He puts the worst possible construction on their motives, pours cold water on their schemes and is ungenerous towards their mistakes.
Worse than that, to be censorious is to set oneself up as a censor, and so to claim the competence and authority to sit in judgment upon one’s fellow men. But if I do this, I am casting both myself and my fellows in the wrong role. Since when have they been my servants, responsible to me? And since when have I been their lord and judge? As Paul wrote to the Romans, applying the truth of Matthew 7:1 to their situation: ‘Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls’ (14:4). Paul also applied the same truth to himself when he found himself surrounded by hostile detractors: ‘It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.’ The simple but vital point which Paul is making in these verses is that man is not God. No human being is qualified to be the judge of his fellow humans, for we cannot read each other’s hearts or assess each other’s motives. To be censorious is to presume arrogantly to anticipate the day of judgment, to usurp the prerogative of the divine Judge, in fact to try to play God.
Not only are we not the judge, but we are among the judged, and shall be judged with the greater strictness ourselves if we dare to judge others. Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. The rationale should be clear. If we pose as judges, we cannot plead ignorance of the law we claim to be able to administer. If we enjoy occupying the bench, we must not be surprised to find ourselves in the dock. As Paul put it, ‘Therefore, you have no excuse, O man, whoever you are, when you judge another; for in passing judgment upon him you condemn yourself, because you the judge are doing the very same things.’
To sum up, the command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous. Jesus does not tell us to cease to be men (by suspending our critical powers which help to distinguish us from animals) but to renounce the presumptuous ambition to be God (by setting ourselves up as judges).
b. The Christian is not to be a hypocrite (3, 4)
Jesus now tells his famous little parable about ‘foreign bodies’ in people’s eyes, specks of dust on the one hand and logs or beams on the other. James Moffatt referred to them as the ‘splinter’ and the ‘plank’. Earlier Jesus exposed our hypocrisy in relation to God, namely practising our piety before men to be seen by them; now he exposes our hypocrisy in relation to others, namely meddling with their peccadilloes, while failing to deal with our own more serious faults. Here is another reason why we are unfit to be judges: not only because we are fallible humans (and not God), but also because we are fallen humans. The fall has made all of us sinners. So we are in no position to stand in judgment on our fellow sinners; we are disqualified from the bench.
The picture of somebody struggling with the delicate operation of removing a speck of dirt from a friend’s eye, while a vast plank in his own eye entirely obscures his vision, is ludicrous in the extreme. Yet when the caricature is transferred to ourselves and our ridiculous fault-finding, we do not always appreciate the joke. We have a fatal tendency to exaggerate the faults of others and minimize the gravity of our own. We seem to find it impossible, when comparing ourselves with others, to be strictly objective and impartial. On the contrary, we have a rosy view of ourselves and a jaundiced view of others. Indeed, what we are often doing is seeing our own faults in others and judging them vicariously. That way, we experience the pleasure of self-righteousness without the pain of penitence. So you hypocrite (5) is a key expression here. Moreover, this kind of hypocrisy is the more unpleasant because an apparent act of kindness (taking a speck of dirt from somebody’s eye) is made the means of inflating our own ego. Censoriousness, writes A. B. Bruce, is a ‘Pharisaic vice, that of exalting ourselves by disparaging others, a very cheap way of attaining moral superiority’. The parable of the Pharisee and the publican was our Lord’s own commentary on this perversity. He told it ‘to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others’. The Pharisee made an odious and inaccurate comparison, magnifying both his own virtue and the publican’s vice.
What, instead, we should do is to apply to ourselves at least as strict and critical a standard as we apply to others. ‘If we judged ourselves truly’, wrote Paul, ‘we should not be judged.’ We would not only escape the judgment of God; we would also be in a position humbly and gently to help an erring brother. Having first removed the log from our own eye, we would see clearly to take the speck from his.
c. The Christian is rather to be a brother (5)
Some people suppose that in the parable of the foreign bodies Jesus was forbidding us to act as moral or spiritual oculists and meddle with other people’s eyes, and telling us instead to mind our own business. This is not so. The fact that censoriousness and hypocrisy are forbidden us does not relieve us of brotherly responsibility towards one another. On the contrary, Jesus was later to teach that if our brother sins against us, our first duty (though usually neglected) is ‘go and tell him his fault between you and him alone’. The same obligation is laid upon us here. To be sure, in certain circumstances we are forbidden to interfere, namely when there is an even bigger foreign body in our own eye which we have not removed. But in other circumstances Jesus actually commands us to reprove and correct our brother. Once we have dealt with our own eye trouble, then we shall see clearly to deal with his. A bit of dirt in his eye is, after all, rightly called a ‘foreign’ body. It doesn’t belong there. It is always alien, usually painful and sometimes dangerous. To leave it there, and make no attempt to remove it, would hardly be consistent with brotherly love.
Our Christian duty, then, is not to see the speck in our brother’s eye while at the same time we do not notice the log in our own (3); still less to say to our brother ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’ while we have not yet taken the log from our own (4); but rather this, first to take the log out of our own eye, so that then with the resulting clarity of vision we shall be able to take the speck out of our brother’s eye (5). Again, it is evident that Jesus is not condemning criticism as such, but rather the criticism of others when we exercise no comparable self-criticism; nor correction as such, but rather the correction of others when we have not first corrected ourselves.
The standard of Jesus for relationships in the Christian counter-culture is high and healthy. In all our attitudes and behaviour towards others we are to play neither the judge (becoming harsh, censorious and condemning), nor the hypocrite (blaming others while excusing ourselves), but the brother, caring for others so much that we first blame and correct ourselves and then seek to be constructive in the help we give them. ‘Correct him,’ said Chrysostom, alluding to someone who has sinned, ‘but not as a foe, nor as an adversary exacting a penalty, but as a physician providing medicines,’ yes, and—even more—as a loving brother anxious to rescue and to restore. We need to be as critical of ourselves as we often are of others, and as generous to others as we always are to ourselves. Then we shall anticipate the Golden Rule to which Jesus brings us in verse 12 and act towards others as we would like them to act towards us.
2. Our attitude to ‘dogs’ and ‘pigs’ (6)
At first sight and hearing this is startling language from the lips of Jesus, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, and indeed immediately after his appeal for constructive brotherly behaviour. But Jesus always called a spade a spade. His outspokenness led him to call Herod Antipas ‘that fox’ and hypocritical scribes and Pharisees ‘whitewashed tombs’ and a ‘brood of vipers’. Here he affirms that there are certain human beings who act like animals and may therefore be accurately designated ‘dogs’ and ‘pigs’.
The context provides a healthy balance. If we are not to ‘judge’ others, finding fault with them in a censorious, condemning or hypocritical way, we are not to ignore their faults either and pretend that everybody is the same. Both extremes are to be avoided. The saints are not judges, but ‘saints are not simpletons’ either. If we first remove the log from our eye and thus see clearly to take a speck from our brother’s eye, he (if he is a true brother in the Lord) will appreciate our solicitude. But not everyone is grateful for criticism and correction. According to the book of Proverbs, this is one of the obvious distinctions between a wise man and a fool: ‘Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you; reprove a wise man, and he will love you.’
Who then are these ‘dogs’ and ‘pigs’? By giving them these names Jesus is indicating not only that they are more animals than humans, but that they are animals with dirty habits as well. The dogs he had in mind were not the well-behaved lapdogs of an elegant home but the wild pariah dogs, vagabonds and mongrels, which scavenged in the city’s rubbish dumps. And pigs were unclean animals to the Jew, not to mention their love for mud. The apostle Peter was later to refer to them by bringing together two proverbs: ‘The dog turns back to his own vomit,’ and ‘The sow is washed only to wallow in the mire.’ The reference is at least to the fact that unbelievers, whose nature has never been renewed, possess physical or animal life, but not spiritual or eternal life. We remember also that Jews called Gentile outsiders ‘dogs’. But Christians certainly do not regard non-Christians in this contemptuous way. So we have to penetrate more deeply into Jesus’ meaning.
His command is that we should not give dogs what is holy and not throw our pearls before swine. The picture is plain. A Jew would never hand ‘holy’ food (perhaps food previously offered in sacrifice) to unclean dogs. Nor would he ever dream of throwing pearls to pigs. Not only were they also unclean, but they would probably mistake the pearls for nuts or peas, try to eat them and then—finding them inedible—trample on them and even assault the giver. But if the picture or parable is clear, what is its meaning? What is the ‘holy’ thing, and what are the ‘pearls’? Some of the early fathers thought the reference was to the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist, and argued from it that unbelieving, unbaptized people should not be admitted to Communion. While they were no doubt right in this teaching, it is extremely doubtful whether Jesus had this question in mind at all. It is better to find a link with the ‘pearl of great value’ in his parable, which refers to the kingdom of God or salvation, and by extension to the gospel. We cannot possibly deduce from this, however, that Jesus was forbidding us to preach the gospel to unbelievers. To suppose this would stand the whole New Testament on its head and contradict the Great Commission (with which Matthew’s Gospel ends) to ‘go and make disciples of all nations’. Extreme Calvinists cannot use it as an argument against evangelism, for Calvin himself urged that it is our duty ‘to present the doctrine of salvation indiscriminately to all’.
So then the ‘dogs’ and ‘pigs’ with whom we are forbidden to share the gospel pearl are not just unbelievers. They must rather be those who have had ample opportunity to hear and receive the good news, but have decisively—even defiantly—rejected it. ‘It ought to be understood’, Calvin wisely continued, ‘that dogs and swine are names given not to every kind of debauched men, or to those who are destitute of the fear of God and of true godliness, but to those who, by clear evidences, have manifested a hardened contempt of God, so that their disease appears to be incurable.’ Chrysostom uses a similar expression, for he identifies the ‘dogs’ as people ‘living in incurable ungodliness’, and in our day Professor Jeremias has defined them as ‘those who have wholly abandoned themselves to vicious courses’.
The fact is that to persist beyond a certain point in offering the gospel to such people is to invite its rejection with contempt and even blasphemy. Jesus applied the same principle to the ministry of the twelve when he gave them his charge before sending them out on their first mission. He warned them that in every town and house they entered, although some people would be receptive or ‘worthy’, others would be unreceptive or ‘unworthy’. ‘If anyone will not receive you or listen to your words,’ he went on, ‘shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.’
The apostle Paul also followed this principle in his mission work. On his first expedition he and Barnabas said to the Jews who ‘contradicted’ their preaching in Pisidian Antioch: ‘It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.’ And when the Jews incited the city leaders to drive them out, ‘they shook off the dust from their feet against them’ and went on to Iconium. Much the same happened in Corinth on the second missionary journey. When the Jews opposed and reviled him, Paul ‘shook out his garments’ and said to them: ‘Your blood be upon your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.’ For the third time Paul reacted in the same way when in Rome the Jewish leaders rejected the gospel. ‘Let it be known to you then’, he said, ‘that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen.’
Our Christian witness and evangelistic preaching are not to be entirely indiscriminate, therefore. If people have had plenty of opportunity to hear the truth but do not respond to it, if they stubbornly turn their backs on Christ, if (in other words) they cast themselves in the role of ‘dogs’ and ‘pigs’, we are not to go on and on with them, for then we cheapen God’s gospel by letting them trample it under foot. Can anything be more depraved than to mistake God’s precious pearl for a thing of no worth and actually to tread it into the mud? At the same time to give people up is a very serious step to take. I can think of only one or two occasions in my experience when I have felt it was right. This teaching of Jesus is for exceptional situations only; our normal Christian duty is to be patient and persevere with others, as God has patiently persevered with us.
3. Our attitude to our heavenly Father (7–11)
It seems natural that Jesus should move on from our relationship with our fellow men to our relationship with our heavenly Father, the more so because our Christian duty of discrimination (not judging others, not casting pearls before pigs, and being helpful without being hypocritical) is much too difficult for us without divine grace.
a. The promises Jesus makes
This passage is not the first instruction on prayer in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has already warned us against pharisaic hypocrisy and pagan formalism, and has given us his own model prayer. Now, however, he actively encourages us to pray by giving us some very gracious promises. For ‘nothing is better adapted to excite us to prayer than a full conviction that we shall be heard’. Or again, ‘He knows that we are timid and shy, that we feel unworthy and unfit to present our needs to God … We think that God is so great and we are so tiny that we do not dare to pray … That is why Christ wants to lure us away from such timid thoughts, to remove our doubts, and to have us go ahead confidently and boldly.’
Jesus seeks to imprint his promises on our mind and memory by the hammer-blows of repetition. First, his promises are attached to direct commands: Ask … seek … knock … (7). These may deliberately be in an ascending scale of urgency. Richard Glover suggests that a child, if his mother is near and visible, asks; if she is neither, he seeks; while if she is inaccessible in her room, he knocks. Be that as it may, all three verbs are present imperatives and indicate the persistence with which we should make our requests known to God. Secondly, the promises are expressed in universal statements: for every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened (8).
Thirdly, Jesus illustrates his promises by a homely parable (9–11). He envisages a situation with which all his hearers will have been daily familiar, namely a child coming to his father with a request. If he asks for bread, will he be given something which looks a bit like it but is in fact disastrously different, e.g. a stone instead of a loaf, or a snake instead of a fish? That is, if the child asks for something wholesome to eat (bread or fish), will he receive instead something unwholesome, either inedible (a stone) or positively harmful (a poisonous snake)? Of course not! Parents, even though they are evil, i.e. selfish by nature, still love their children and give them only good gifts. Notice that Jesus here assumes, even asserts, the inherent sinfulness of human nature. At the same time, he does not deny that bad men are capable of doing good. On the contrary, evil parents give good gifts to their children, for ‘God drops into their hearts a portion of his goodness’. What Jesus is saying is that even when they are doing good, following the noble instincts of parenthood and caring for their children, even then they do not escape the designation ‘evil’, for that is what human beings are.
So the force of the parable lies rather in a contrast than in a comparison between God and men. It is another a fortiori or ‘how much more’ argument: if human parents (although evil) know how to give good gifts to their children, how much more will our heavenly Father (who is not evil but wholly good) give good things to those who ask him? (11). ‘For what would he not now give to sons when they ask, when he has already granted this very thing, namely, that they might be sons?’ There is no doubt that our prayers are transformed when we remember that the God we are coming to is ‘Abba, Father’, and infinitely good and kind.
Professor Jeremias has demonstrated the novelty of this teaching of Jesus. He writes that, with the help of his assistants, he has carefully examined ‘the prayer literature of ancient Judah—a large, rich literature, all too little explored’, but that ‘in no place in this immense literature is this invocation of God as Abba to be found … Abba was an everyday word, a homely family word. No Jew would have dared to address God in this manner. Jesus did it always … and authorizes his disciples to repeat the word Abba after him.’ What could be simpler than this concept of prayer? If we belong to Christ, God is our Father, we are his children, and prayer is coming to him with our requests. The trouble is that for many of us it seems too simple, even simplistic. In our sophistication we say we cannot believe it, and in any case it does not altogether tally with our experience. So we turn from Christ’s prayer-promises to our prayer-problems.
b. The problems men raise
Confronted by the straightforward promises of Jesus, Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find, people raise several objections which we need now to consider.
1. Prayer is unseemly. ‘This encouragement to pray presents a false picture of God. It implies that he needs either to be told what we lack or to be bullied into giving it, whereas Jesus himself said earlier that our heavenly Father knows it and cares for us anyway. Besides, he surely cannot be bothered with our petty affairs. Why should we suppose that his gifts are dependent on our asking? Do human parents wait before supplying their children’s needs until they ask for them?’
To this we reply that the reason why God’s giving depends on our asking is neither because he is ignorant until we inform him nor because he is reluctant until we persuade him. The reason has to do with us, not with him; the question is not whether he is ready to give, but whether we are ready to receive. So in prayer we do not ‘prevail on’ God, but rather prevail on ourselves to submit to God. True, the language of ‘prevailing on God’ is often used in regard to prayer, but it is an accommodation to human weakness. Even when Jacob ‘prevailed on God’, what really happened is that God prevailed over him, bringing him to the point of surrender when he was able to receive the blessing which God had all the time been longing to give him.
The truth is that the heavenly Father never spoils his children. He does not shower us with gifts whether we want them or not, whether we are ready for them or not. Instead he waits until we recognize our need and turn to him in humility. This is why he says Ask, and it will be given you, and why James added, ‘You do not have because you do not ask.’ Prayer, then, is not ‘unseemly’; it is the very way God himself has chosen for us to express our conscious need of him and our humble dependence on him.
2. Prayer is unnecessary. This second objection arises more from experience than from theology. Thoughtful Christians look round them and see lots of people getting on fine without prayer. Indeed they seem to receive without prayer the very same things that we receive with it. They get what they need by working for it, not by praying for it. The farmer gets a good crop by labour, not prayer. The mother gets her baby by medical skill, not prayer. The family balances its budget by the wage-earning of dad and perhaps others, not by prayer. ‘Surely,’ we may be tempted to say, ‘this proves that prayer doesn’t make an ounce of difference; it’s so much wasted breath.’
But wait a minute! In thinking about this question, we need to distinguish between the gifts of God as Creator and his gifts as Father, or between his creation-gifts and his redemption-gifts. It is perfectly true that he gives certain gifts (harvest, babies, food, life) whether people pray or not, whether they believe or not. He gives to all life and breath. He sends rain from heaven and fruitful seasons to all. He makes his sun rise on the evil and the good alike. He ‘visits’ a mother when she conceives and later gives birth. None of these gifts is dependent on whether people acknowledge their Creator or pray to him.
But God’s redemption-gifts are different. God does not bestow salvation on all alike, but ‘bestows his riches upon all who call on him. For, “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” ’ The same applies to post-salvation blessings, the ‘good things’ which Jesus says the Father gives his children. It is not material blessings that he is referring to here, but spiritual blessings—daily forgiveness, deliverance from evil, peace, the increase of faith, hope and love, in fact the indwelling work of ‘the Holy Spirit’ as the comprehensive blessing of God, which is how Luke renders ‘good things’. For these gifts we must certainly pray.
The Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus taught earlier in the Sermon, brings together both kinds of gift, for ‘daily bread’ is a creation-gift, whereas ‘forgiveness’ and ‘deliverance’ are redemption-gifts. How is it, then, that they can be combined in the same prayer? Probably the answer is this. We pray for daily bread not because we fear we will starve otherwise (since millions get their daily bread without ever praying for it or saying grace before meals) but because we know that ultimately it comes from God and because as his children it is appropriate regularly to acknowledge our physical dependence on him. We pray for forgiveness and deliverance, however, because these gifts are given only in answer to prayer, and because without them we would be lost. So prayer is not unnecessary.
3. Prayer is unproductive. The third problem is the obvious corollary to the second. People argue that prayer is unnecessary because God gives to many who do not ask, and that it is unproductive because he fails to give to many who do. ‘I prayed to pass an exam, but failed it. I prayed to be healed of an illness, and it got worse. I prayed for peace, but the world is filled with the noise of war. Prayer doesn’t work!’—This is the familiar problem of unanswered prayer.
The best way to approach this problem is to remember that the promises of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount are not unconditional. A moment’s thought will convince us of this. It is absurd to suppose that the promise ‘Ask, and it shall be given you’ is an absolute pledge with no strings attached; that ‘Knock, and it will be opened to you’ is an ‘Open, Sesame’ to every closed door without exception; and that by the waving of a prayer wand any wish will be granted and every dream will come true. The idea is ridiculous. It would turn prayer into magic, the person who prays into a magician like Aladdin, and God into our servant who appears instantly to do our bidding like Aladdin’s genie every time we rub our little prayer lamp. In addition, this concept of prayer would place an impossible strain on every sensitive Christian if he knew that he was certain to get everything he asked. ‘If it were the case’, writes Alec Motyer, ‘that whatever we ask, God was pledged to give, then I for one would never pray again, because I would not have sufficient confidence in my own wisdom to ask God for anything; and I think if you consider it you will agree. It would impose an intolerable burden on frail human wisdom if by his prayer-promises God was pledged to give whatever we ask, when we ask it, and in exactly the terms we ask. How could we bear the burden?’
Perhaps we could put the matter in this way: being good, our heavenly Father gives only good gifts to his children; being wise as well, he knows which gifts are good and which are not. We have already heard Jesus say that human parents would never give a stone or snake to their children who ask for bread or fish. But what if the children (through ignorance or folly) were actually to ask for a stone or a snake? What then? Doubtless an extremely irresponsible parent might grant the child’s request, but the great majority of parents would be too wise and loving. Certainly our heavenly Father would never give us something harmful, even if we asked for it urgently and repeatedly, for the simple reason that he gives his children only ‘good gifts’. So then if we ask for good things, he grants them; if we ask for things which are not good (either not good in themselves, or not good for us or for others, directly or indirectly, immediately or ultimately) he denies them; and only he knows the difference. We can thank God that the granting of our needs is conditional—not only on our asking, seeking and knocking, but also on whether what we desire by asking, seeking and knocking is good. Thank God he answers prayer. Thank God he also sometimes denies our requests. ‘I thank God’, writes Dr Lloyd-Jones ‘that He is not prepared to do anything that I may chance to ask Him … I am profoundly grateful to God that He did not grant me certain things for which I asked, and that He shut certain doors in my face.’
c. The lessons we learn
Prayer sounds very simple when Jesus teaches about it. Just Ask …, seek …, knock …, and in each case you will be answered. This is a deceptive simplicity, however; much lies behind it. First, prayer presupposes knowledge. Since God gives gifts only if they accord with his will, we have to take pains to discover his will—by Scripture meditation and by the exercise of a Christian mind schooled by Scripture meditation. Secondly, prayer presupposes faith. It is one thing to know God’s will; it is another to humble ourselves before him and express our confidence that he is able to cause his will to be done. Thirdly, prayer presupposes desire. We may know God’s will and believe he can perform it, and still not desire it. Prayer is the chief means God has ordained by which to express our deepest desires. This is the reason why the ‘ask—seek—knock’ commands are in the present imperative and in an ascending scale to challenge our perseverance.
Thus, before we ask, we must know what to ask for and whether it accords with God’s will; we must believe God can grant it; and we must genuinely want to receive. Then the gracious promises of Jesus will come true.
4. Our attitude to all men (12)
The logic of the ‘so’ or ‘therefore’ (oun) with which this verse begins is not plain. It may look back to the previous verse and imply that if God is good to all who seek him in prayer, his children must be good to all likewise. Or it may refer further back to the Judge not command, and take up the underlying argument against censoriousness and hypocrisy. In any case it seems that Jesus uttered this principle at different times and in different contexts, for in Luke’s version of the Sermon it comes immediately after the three little cameos which illustrate the command to love our enemies. Certainly such love is beyond us apart from the grace of God. It is, in fact, his own love and is one of the ‘good things’ he gives us through his Holy Spirit in answer to our prayers.
Much has been made by various commentators of the fact that the Golden Rule is found in a similar—but always negative—form elsewhere. Confucius, for example, is credited with having said, ‘Do not to others what you would not wish done to yourself;’ and the Stoics had an almost identical maxim. In the Old Testament Apocrypha we find: ‘Do not do to anyone what you yourself would hate,’ and this, it seems, is what the famous Rabbi Hillel quoted in c. 20 BC when asked by a would-be proselyte to teach him the whole law while standing on one leg. His rival Rabbi Shammai had been unable or unwilling to answer, and had driven the enquirer away, but Rabbi Hillel said: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to anyone else. This is the whole law; all the rest is only commentary.’
Because this is the best-known example of the supposed parallelism between the Jewish Talmud and the Sermon on the Mount, a further comment may be in place. Some have gone so far as to claim that everything in the Sermon is also in the Talmud, plus a great deal more. Professor Jeremias reacts in this way: ‘That is exactly the case: that in the Talmud “a great deal more” is to be found, and that one must seek the grain among a great deal of chaff, the scanty golden grain that may be compared with the words of the Sermon on the Mount.’ Alfred Edersheim, writing towards the end of the last century, was even more outspoken. He agrees that there is ‘wit and logic, quickness and readiness, earnestness and zeal’ in the Talmud, but at the same time there is a real ‘contrariety in spirit and substance’ between it and the New Testament. Indeed, ‘taken as a whole, it is not only utterly unspiritual, but anti-spiritual’.
Returning to the Golden Rule, there is really an enormous difference between the negative and rather grudging maxim of Hillel (‘Do not do to others what is hateful to you’) and the positive initiative contained in the instruction of Jesus (‘Do to others what you wish they would do to you’). Even then it may sound a rather low standard, like ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. Actually, however, it is a high standard because self-love is a powerful force in our lives. Edersheim called such neighbour-love ‘the nearest approach to absolute love of which human nature is capable’. Also it is a remarkably flexible ethical principle. Self-advantage often guides us in our own affairs; now we must also let it guide us in our behaviour to others. All we have to do is use our imagination, put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, and ask, ‘How would I like to be treated in that situation?’ As Bishop Ryle wrote, ‘It settles a hundred difficult points … It prevents the necessity of laying down endless little rules for our conduct in specific cases.’ Indeed, it is a principle of such wide application that Jesus could add, for this is the law and the prophets. That is, whoever directs his conduct towards others according to how he would like others to direct theirs towards him has fulfilled the law and the prophets, at least in the matter of neighbour-love.
We noted at the opening of this chapter that the Christian counter-culture is not just an individual value-system and lifestyle, but a community affair. It involves relationships. And the Christian community is in essence a family, God’s family. Probably the two strongest elements in our Christian consciousness are an awareness of God as our Father and of our fellow-Christians as our brothers and sisters through Christ, although at the same time we can never forget our responsibility to those outside the family whom we long to see brought in.
So in Matthew 7:1–12 Jesus has introduced us to these basic relationships. At their centre is our heavenly Father God to whom we come, on whom we depend and who never gives his children other than good gifts. Next, there are our fellow believers. And the anomaly of a censorious spirit (which judges) and of a hypocritical spirit (which sees the splinter in spite of the plank) is that it is incompatible with Christian brotherliness. If our fellow Christians are truly our brothers and sisters in the Lord, it is inconceivable that we shall be anything other than caring and constructive in our attitude towards them.
As for those outside the family, there is the extreme case of the ‘dogs’ and ‘pigs’, but they are not typical. They are an exceptional group of stubborn people who are ‘dogged’ and even ‘pigheaded’, one might accurately say, in their decisive rejection of Jesus Christ. Reluctantly we have to drop them. But if verse 6 is the exception, verse 12 is the rule, the Golden Rule. It transforms our actions. If we put ourselves sensitively into the place of the other person, and wish for him what we would wish for ourselves, we would be never mean, always generous; never harsh, always understanding; never cruel, always kind.