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 it with a converse so that loving your neighbor includes hating your enemy. That means you draw 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