The Golden Rule And Its Corollaries
THE GOLDEN RULE AND ITS COROLLARIES
MATTHEW 7:1-12
The opening verses remind us that if we want to improve other people, we need to start with ourselves.
The Golden Rule (7:12) is the quintessence of the greater part of these twelve verses. Our Lord was not the first teacher in Israel to sum up “the law and the prophets” in such terms as these, although the earlier formulations of the Golden Rule are negative rather than positive. For example, a generation earlier, Rabbi Hillel said to a proselyte who asked for a brief summary of the law: “What is hateful to yourself, do not to another; that is the whole law, everything else is commentary.”
The exhortation against judgment (7:1-2) forbids not a judicious discernment but a censorious spirit which delights in finding fault with others. The picture of a man with a log in his own eye volunteering to remove a splinter from his brother’s eye (7:3-5) is a delightful sample of our Lord’s humor. A proper use of discernment is enjoined in 7:6, which incidentally is an example of chiasmus; the swine will trample the pearls underfoot and the dogs (pariah dogs, of course) will bite the hand that feeds them, even if it be with consecrated meat. This injunction does not refer specifically to the withholding of sacraments from the unworthy or unbelieving; still less is it (as some contemporary exegetes have suggested) a judaizing warning against offering the blessings of the gospel to Gentiles. It means, more generally, that spiritual mysteries are not to be pressed on those who are unready or unwilling to appreciate them.
The encouragement to prayer in 7:7-11 reaffirms the teaching of 6:5-15, and does so by means of the “how much more” argument which Jesus loved to use. If even a reluctant and sleepy head of the house will rise at midnight to give his neighbor three loaves for the sake of peace (Luke 11:5-8, immediately preceding the Lukan parallel to our present paragraph); if even an unjust judge will give an importunate widow her rights to avoid being pestered to death (Luke 18:1-8); if even earthly fathers, sinful men though they are, give their children food when they ask for it and do not put them off with useless or dangerous substitutes, how much more will God, the heavenly Father, give his children good things, not harmful things, when they ask him? Therefore “ask …, seek …, knock.”