VIII. THE UNMERCIFUL SERVANT.

 VIII.
THE UNMERCIFUL SERVANT.

“Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, which would take account of his servants. And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him, which owed him ten thousand talents. But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt. But the same servant went out, and found one of his fellow-servants, which owed him an hundred pence: and he laid hands on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay me that thou owest. And his fellow-servant fell down at his feet, and besought him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he should pay the debt. So when his fellow-servants saw what was done, they were very sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done. Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.”—Matt. xviii. 23–35.

 The immediate occasion of this parable is obviously Peter’s question, “How oft shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?” but how Peter’s question springs from the preceding context does not so readily appear. The Natural History of the process in that apostle’s mind was probably something of this sort: The Master had instructed his disciples how they should act in the event of a brother doing them an injury: three distinct steps are indicated, rising one above another like courts of appeal; first, a private remonstrance; if that prove unavailing, then a remonstrance in the presence of one or two witnesses; and lastly, an appeal to the Church. These rules are very specific, and together constitute a complete code on the branch of the subject to which they refer. In the matter of dealing with an offending brother with the view of bringing him to a better mind, you can no further go: if all these efforts fail, you must separate yourself from the offender, lest by continued intimacy you should seem indifferent to his sin. After this the Lord proceeds to give instruction on other subjects, and especially on united prayer. Peter, I suppose, had allowed his mind to be so completely occupied with the question of forgiving injuries, that he failed to follow his Teacher when the lesson glided into another theme. I could suppose him to have been so busy with the thought of injuries received, and the difficulty of forgiving them, all the time that the Lord was discoursing on united prayer, that he scarcely observed his Master’s words. All the more readily might this happen, if the impetuous fisherman had a quarrel with some of his neighbours on hand at the very time, and was exercised in conscience about the duty of bringing it to a close. At the first pause, the current which had been for a time flowing under ground,  burst out on the surface. Taking up and again abruptly introducing the subject which had been for some time dismissed, he asked, as if unconscious that the theme had been changed during his reverie, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?” He wanted to have a number specified, beyond which he should not be bound to forgive repeated offences. In suggesting seven he seems to have had in his mind some Pharisaical formula: probably he thought the allowance was liberal, and expected to be approved for his magnanimity.

The formula, seventy times seven, while it serves to intimate that there is in the law no limit to the exercise of a forgiving spirit, seizes upon Peter’s narrow proposal and makes a show of it openly. It is possible that he may have fallen into a mistake here through the misapprehension of a lesson on the same subject given by the Lord. He may have heard the Master teach, as at Luke xvii. 4,—“If he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent, thou shalt forgive him.” But evidently the number seven in that discourse has substantially the same meaning with seventy times seven here: seven times a day, even when literally understood, includes as much as the absolute seventy times seven. The doctrine in both cases is that it is not lawful to set any limit to the principle and the practice of forgiving injuries.

To repeat, expand, and enforce this lesson, the parable is introduced. The kingdom of heaven is like a man king—ανθρωπῳ βασιλει. Expressly the divine is in this respect analogous to the human. This ruler proposed to take account of his servants. It was not the final reckoning, but a periodical balance. A king is in this respect  like a merchant: he takes account from time to time of his own affairs, and the intromissions of his servants. “Short counts make long friends.”

These servants were not slaves, the property of their master; for afterwards it is assumed that he may sell them, not as an ordinary right, but as the special penalty incurred by an insolvent debtor. A king, in ancient times and oriental regions, entered into pecuniary transactions with his servants on a great scale. One man, who owes all to the personal favour of the sovereign, is the governor of a wealthy province. Bound by no written law, and living at a distance from the seat of government, that servant possesses always the power, and too frequently seizes the opportunity of oppressing the people on the one hand, and defrauding the royal treasury on the other. In many cases fortunate or powerful dependants farmed the taxes of a district, paying, or at least promising to pay, a certain sum yearly to the supreme government, and obtaining authority in return to levy contributions on the inhabitants for their own behoof, sometimes almost according to their own pleasure. Vast sums passed through the hands of these great officers, and vast sums also remained in their hands that should have passed through them.

The amount specified in the parable—ten thousand talents—is very great, of whatever species you may suppose the talent to be. The inquiry which has been prosecuted with a view to determine precisely the value of the talent in this case is difficult, and does not lead to any certain or important result. The question is interesting to Biblical scholars and antiquarians, but the solution of it is by no means necessary to the perception or the application of our Lord’s meaning in the parable. The sense is completely obtained by taking the ten thousand  talents as a vast but indefinite sum. A hundred talents of silver constituted the hire of a great army, 2 Chron. xxv. 6; and notwithstanding the lavish use of gold in the construction of the Tent-Temple in the wilderness, only twenty-nine talents were employed in all (Ex. xxxviii. 24). Besides the distinction between gold and silver, other variations occur in the value of a talent, depending upon time, place, and other circumstances. In any view of its worth, however, the disparity between the sum which this servant owed to the master, and the trifling amount which a fellow-servant owed to him, is as great as the imagination can effectually grasp; larger numbers would not sensibly intensify the impression.

“One was brought to him:” this servant would not have come to the king of his own accord; but he could not escape the interview and the reckoning. Aware of his enormous debt, he would fain have kept out of his master’s way, but could not. God looks on the heart, and grasps the conscience, whether the man will or be unwilling.

The punishment is very severe, but in accordance with law and custom. No complaint is made against the sentence as if it were unjust in principle, or excessive in degree: the culprit appeals only to the mercy of the judge, and thus the righteousness of the verdict is tacitly acknowledged.

His promise to pay means nothing more than his desire to escape. He made the promise, not in the expectation of being able to perform it, but as the most likely means of escaping from punishment. His worship was prompted by selfish fear, not by filial love. He did not know his master’s heart: he thought he would gain his object most readily by leading the king to expect payment in full.

 The king did not grant his servant’s request: he did more; he forgave that servant all. The absolved debtor, as soon as he obtained his liberty, went out, and met a fellow-servant, who owed him an hundred pence. I suppose, if that fellow-servant had come to him while yet he was in his master’s presence, he would not have dared to act the tyrant; but “out of sight, out of mind.” He forgot his own prayer, and his lord’s compassion. He grasped the fellow-servant by the throat and threw him into prison, until he should pay.30 The amount is comparatively small, as is fit between servant and servant: the smallness of the debt brings the cruelty of the creditor out in high relief. His neighbour’s pleading is expressed in the same terms as his own: the sound should have reminded him of his duty.

Fellow-servants observing the outrage were at once indignant and compassionate. They informed their master. The master displeased, pronounced his condemnation in full. He who showed no mercy to his brother, received judgment without mercy for himself.

Before proceeding to the exposition of the parable in its spiritual meaning and application, I shall submit a remark of a general character, bearing on the parables at large, as well as on this in particular, which can be made more conveniently now than at the close.

The more I examine the structure and use of the parable in the teaching of the Lord, the more I am convinced that men make a great mistake when they betake themselves to a single feature of the natural scene as a defence of  some specific and controverted dogma. The rule may be made absolute, or if there are exceptions they are few, that the parables are intended to expand, illustrate, and enforce what is elsewhere clearly taught in the Scriptures, and not themselves to constitute the grounds or evidences of the doctrines. But to whatever extent such a general rule may be applicable, it is most certain that those who run to a corner of a parable and take their stand on it, as impregnable evidence of some doctrine which they hold, are in all cases egregiously mistaken. The controversies, for example, on the question of Church discipline, which were made to turn on the tares among the wheat, and the net that caught all kinds of fishes, are a mere waste of words. Those parables do not afford material for the decision of the question; they do not speak to the point.

In like manner, when theologians gravely refer to this parable in order to prove that after a man’s sins have been all freely forgiven by God, he may yet fall from grace, and the guilt of all his sins be laid upon him at the last, they waste their own time, and trifle with the scripture. True, in this picture you see one whose great debt was all freely forgiven by the master brought back into judgment, and made answerable for the whole amount; but this incidental feature of a human procedure will not bear the weight which men would fain lay on it. This king, whose conduct is represented in the parable, is expressly called a man king. No doubt his procedure in that case is employed to illustrate some laws of the kingdom of heaven; but this is done by analogy. Analogy is not identity; the very essence of it lies in coincidence in some points, with diversity in others; if the two were identical, there were no longer an analogy. Take two pictures of a person printed from the same negative photograph; you do not  say they are like each other, they are the same. It is most dangerous to fasten on any point of the depicted human procedure, and found on it the affirmation that the divine must be precisely the same.

But besides this general consideration demanding caution, there is enough in the parable itself absolutely to refute the notion, that God may forgive a man all his sins, and thereafter lay these very sins all to his charge. It is indeed said in the earlier portion of the parable that the lord of that servant forgave him the debt; but it is as clearly indicated in the close that the debt was not forgiven. The man was cast into prison until he should pay it all; he was held bound for all the original debt, and was punished accordingly. If he was forgiven all that debt, not one penny of it can afterwards be placed to his account; and if it is afterwards placed to his account, the fact proves that it had not been forgiven.

The meaning of the phraseology must be determined by the necessary conditions of the fact. That word of the king, “I forgive thee,” was not a discharge; if it had been, mere justice demanded that the debt discharged should not be charged again. The fact that it was all charged again, proves irrefragably that it was not discharged. The meaning in the light of the facts must be that these terms were offered by the king. His terms are free forgiveness, bestowed in sovereign love by the giver, and accepted in grateful love by the receiver. The servant, as is shown by his conduct, did not accept these terms, and so there was no transaction.

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The key-notes of the parable are found at the beginning and the end. It was spoken in order to show that a man should set no limit to the forgiveness of injuries;  and in order to show this, the parable goes into the deep things of God. It shows that the motive power which can produce in man an unlimited forgiveness of his brother, is God’s mercy forgiving himself. At the close it lays down the law, that the act or habit of extending forgiveness to a brother, is a necessary effect of receiving forgiveness from God. If you get pardon from God, you will give it to your brother; if you withhold it from your brother, you thereby make it manifest that you have not gotten it from God.

As the king determined to take account of his servants during the currency of their work, and before the final winding up of their engagement, so the King Eternal in various ways and at various periods takes account of men, especially of those who know his word, and belong externally to his Church. One by one the servants are brought into their Lord’s presence. The messenger that brings them may be a commercial crisis, a personal affliction, or a revival in the neighbourhood. The King has many messengers at his command, and he employs now one and now another to bring a professing Christian forward to his presence. When one who has contrived to keep out of the way, both of his own conscience and of God, is at length compelled to open his heart to the Omniscient, and fairly look into it himself, he discovers that his debt is unspeakably, inconceivably great. The sum of ten thousand talents in the picture is not an exaggeration; it does not indicate all the guilt which God detects in the conscience, and which the awakened conscience detects in itself. It is a dreadful moment when a sinner is brought face to face with God, and charged with his guilt; it is then that the law performs its terrible yet merciful work of conviction.

 The first purpose that springs in the heart of the alarmed transgressor is to satisfy the demand: Give me time, and I will pay all. Whether he deliberately expects to be able to pay it may be doubted; but one thing is clear, he thinks that nothing else will appease the Master, and he makes the promise accordingly. This is, in point of fact, the first proposal of an alarmed conscience, “I will pay thee all.” The natural history of the process is here.

God does not hold the convicted transgressor to his own rash promise. Treating the criminal, not according to his desert, but according to his need, the Judge announces the terms of his own covenant—a pardon immediate, complete, and free.

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“The same servant went out:” the moment of close dealing between God and the soul has passed: the man who has trembled at the sight of his sin, and the prospect of judgment, has heard the Gospel, and gotten a respite. He goes out from that solemn and searching communion: he is released for the moment from the presence of the Judge, and from the sense of his sin. He glides again into the world. He has not been converted; he has only been frightened. He has not been forgiven; he has only been respited. He has not accepted God’s grace, and therefore is not under law to God. The fright is past, and faith has not taken its place. The heart, after terror had driven the evil spirits out, does not open to the Lord, and therefore the evil spirits come back, and possess the empty room in sevenfold power. As soon as he comes in the way of temptation, the unsubdued carnality of his soul asserts its life and power. A fellow-servant who has in small matters offended him, begs for pardon, as he had done from God, and begs in vain. He  shows no mercy; the fact proves that he has not himself accepted the mercy that was offered by God. If the channel of his heart had really been inserted into the fountain-head of mercy for receiving, mercy would infallibly have flowed in the way of giving, wherever the need of a brother made an opening; if the vessel had been charged, it would certainly have discharged. No compassion flowed from that heart to refresh a fellow-creature in distress, because that heart had never truly opened to accept mercy from God; the reservoir was empty, and therefore the outbranching channels remained dry.31

Beyond all question, the design of the Lord in this parable is to enforce the duty of forgiving one another. In teaching this lesson, he touches matters greater than itself; but these occupy here only a secondary place. The drift of the parable is to take off the artificial limit laid by Peter, and by the Pharisees before him, on the disposition to forgive an offending brother, and to leave it limitless,—infinite, as far as the faculties and the time of men can reach.

I think the substance of the lesson may be expressed in these two words, the practice and the principle of forgiving injuries. These two are in effect the ultimate act and the secret power that produced it. They are at once distinguished and united in that new commandment which Jesus gave to his disciples,—“That ye love one another, as I have loved you” (John xiii. 34). The first  part of that commandment tells what they ought to do, and the second part tells what will make them do it. It is when they place themselves under the power of Christ’s forgiving love to themselves, that they are impelled in turn to forgive each his brother. The duty corresponds to the moving machinery, and the motive to the stream of living water which makes the machinery go.

1. The PRACTICE of forgiving injuries. The terms employed indicate clearly enough that the injuries which man suffers from his fellow are trifling in amount, especially in comparison of each man’s guilt in the sight of God. There is a meaning in the vast and startling difference between ten thousand talents and a hundred pence. Even when the injury is the greatest that human beings are capable of inflicting on the one side, and enduring on the other; even when an enemy has killed the body and ceased then, because he has no more that he can do, it is still a measurable thing. Love in a finite being’s heart may swell high over it, and exult in bestowing forgiveness on the murderer with the victim’s dying breath. In the beginning of the Gospel a vivid example of that very thing stands recorded: “Lord,” said Stephen with fainting heart and failing breath, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” Great as the injury was, according to earthly measurements, the imperfect love that lived in a man’s heart was more than a match for it, and the martyr with his dying breath forgave his murderers. But how rare are those injuries that rise to this extreme height! Most of the injuries with which we are called to deal are small, even in relation to human capacity: they are very often precisely of the size that our own temper makes them. Some people possess the art of esteeming great injuries small, and some the art of esteeming small  injuries great. The first is like a traveller who throws a great many stones out of the burden which he carries, and so walks with ease along the road; the other is like a traveller who gathers a great many stones on the way-side, and adds them to his burden, and is therefore soon crushed by the load.

But more than this: the foolish man who made his burden heavier, retains the redoubled weight upon his back; while the wise man who made his burden lighter, contrives to throw off even the smaller weight that remained. The same spirit that induced the suffering Christian to diminish his estimate of the injury, induces him to forgive even that which remains, and thus he gets quit of it altogether; for to forgive it, is equivalent to throwing it away, in as far as it had power to burden or irritate you. On the other hand, the same spirit which in an irritable man magnified and multiplied the actual injury which he received, prevents him from forgiving the great and exaggerated mass; thus in effect he is crushed under the accumulated weight of all the real injury he has sustained, and all the imaginary injury he has added. The compassionate, loving man, who counted the great injury small, was relieved even of that small remnant by forgiving it: the selfish, unloving man, who counted a small injury great, could not forgive his neighbour, and so was compelled to bear the heavy burden on his heart. In this case that sublime rule of the Scripture takes effect: “To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.”32

 But we must carefully discriminate here, and ascertain what the Lord means by forgiving a brother. There should not be a little, narrow, grudging forgiveness; it should be large, loving, and free. But parallel with forgiveness there must be faithfulness. Faithfulness to the evil-doer himself, and to the community, comes in here to modify, not the nature, but the outward form of forgiving.

For example, there is no virtue in simply permitting a man to wrong you as often as he chooses,—forgiving him and doing nothing more. In the immediately preceding context the Lord has taught that the injured should tell the injurer his fault. Tell him faithfully in secret his sin: if he repent, thou hast gained thy brother: if he do not listen, tell it in the presence of two or three witnesses: if he is  still obdurate, tell it to the Church: and if he refuse to hear the Church withdraw from his company; let him and all the world know that you do not make light of his sin.

Again, in some kinds of injury, it becomes your duty for the sake of the community to aid in bringing the criminal to justice. To bring the discipline of the righteous law upon the criminal, is not revenge: to shield him from its stroke is not love. So far from being necessarily inconsistent with forgiveness, such faithfulness in action may be associated with a Christ-like love to the sinner, and a thorough forgiveness of his sin, as an injury inflicted upon you.

Here is a side on which there is much room for advancement: let us forget the things that lie behind us on this path, and reach forward to higher attainments. In as far as Christians unite faithfulness and tenderness in their treatment of evil-doers, they become “imitators of God, as dear children.”

2. The PRINCIPLE of forgiving injuries. Suppose that the methods for practice are accurately laid down, where shall we find a sufficient motive? Suppose that an unexceptionable machinery has been constructed, whence shall we obtain an adequate force to set it in motion? From an upper spring in heaven the motive power must flow; it can be supplied only by God’s forgiving love, on us bestowed and by us accepted. When, like little closed vessels, we are charged by union with the fountain-head, forgiving love to erring brothers will burst spontaneously from our hearts at every opportunity that opens in the intercourse of life.

The express command of Him who redeemed us is, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” In teaching his disciples how to pray, he linked their promise to forgive  with their plea for forgiveness, so that no prayer of theirs should rise to heaven for receiving pardon unless it were accompanied by an engagement expressed or implied to bestow pardon: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

But there is much more in the connection between receiving and bestowing forgiveness than can be expressed by the conception of yielding to the pressure of a motive. It is not only obedience to a command enjoined; it is the exercise of an instinct that has been generated in the new nature. The method in which this and other graces operate is expressed by an apostle thus: “It is no more I that live, but Christ that liveth in me.” When Christ is in you, he is in you not only the hope of glory, but also the forgiving of an erring brother.

A traveller in Burmah, after fording a certain river, found his body covered all over by a swarm of small leeches, busily sucking his blood. His first impulse was to tear the tormentors from his flesh: but his servant warned him that to pull them off by mechanical violence would expose his life to danger. They must not be torn off, lest portions remain in the wounds and become a poison; they must drop off spontaneously, and so they will be harmless. The native forthwith prepared a bath for his master, by the decoction of some herbs, and directed him to lie down in it. As soon as he had bathed in the balsam the leeches dropped off.

Each unforgiven injury rankling in the heart is like a leech sucking the life-blood. Mere human determination to have done with it, will not cast the evil thing away. You must bathe your whole being in God’s pardoning mercy; and these venomous creatures will instantly let go their hold. You will stand up free.

 Two wheels protrude from a factory, and are seen in motion on the outer wall by every passenger. They move into each other. The upper wheel is large, the under small. From without and at a distance, you cannot tell whether the upper is impelling the under, or the under moving the upper. This question, however, might be settled by an inspection of the interior. By such an inspection it would be found that the larger and higher wheel communicates motion to the lower and smaller. If the upper wheel, which communicates the motion, should stand still, so also would the lower: but more than this,—if the lower wheel, which receives the motion, should by some impediment be stopped, the upper wheel also would stand still.

It is in some such way that God’s goodness in forgiving freely for Christ’s sake our sins, impels us to forgive from the heart those that have trespassed against us. The power is all from above; yet, though we by our goodness do not set the beneficent machinery in motion, we may by our badness cause it all to stand still. It is not our forgiveness accorded to an evil-doer that procures forgiveness to ourselves from God; the opposite is the truth: yet our refusal of forgiveness to a brother prevents the flow of pardon down from God to our guilty hearts. Such is the structure of the covenant. It is only a small part of that covenant that we can comprehend; but, as far as we are able to perceive its provisions, behold, they are very good!

While a few acres of cold barren moorland constitute all your heritage, if a neighbour encroaches on it by a hair’s-breadth, you assert your right and repel the aggression: possibly you may, in your zeal, accuse him of an intention to trespass, if you see him digging his own  ground near your border. While your property is very small, you are afraid of losing any of it; and perhaps you cry out before you are hurt. But if you become heir to a broad estate in a fertile valley, you will no longer be disposed to watch the motions of your neighbour, and go to law with him for a spadeful of moss that he may have taken from a disputed spot.

Thus, while a human soul has no other portion than an uncertain shred of this uncertain world, he is kept in terror lest an atom of his property should be lost; he will do battle with all his might against any one who is, or seems to be, encroaching on his honour, or business, or property: but when he becomes a child of God, and an heir of an incorruptible inheritance—when he is a prince on the steps of a throne, he can afford to overlook small deductions from a possession that is insignificant in itself, and liable to be taken away at any time without an hour’s warning.

In this aspect it is eminently worthy of notice that the disciples, when their Master on another occasion (Luke xvii. 3–5), taught them a similar doctrine on the forgiveness of injuries, immediately exclaimed, “Increase our faith.” They seem to have been surprised by the extent of the demand, and conscious of their inability to meet it. As soon as the duty of forgiving injuries was laid before them in its true magnitude, they were brought to a stand; but they had sense to know wherein their weakness lay, and simplicity to seek in the proper quarter for renewed strength. It was a true instinct that led them, then and there, to plead for an increase of faith. A wider, freer channel for the inflow of God’s compassion into their own hearts,—this is what they need in the emergency, and this is what they get from the Lord.

 The miller, finding that some of the lumps are large and hard, and that the mill-stones are consequently almost standing still, goes quietly out and lets more water on. Go you, and do likewise. When injuries that seem large and hard are accumulated on your head, and the process of forgiving them begins to choke and go slow under the pressure, as if it would soon stop altogether; when the demand for forgiveness grows great, and the forgiving power in the heart is unable to meet it;—then, enter into your closet and shut your door, and pray to your Father specifically for more experience of his forgiving love; so shall your forgiving love grow stronger, and overcome every obstacle that stands in its way. Your heart, under the fresh impulse of pardon to you through the blood of the covenant, will toss off with ease the load of impediments that obstructed for a time its movements, and you will forgive even as you have been forgiven.
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 IX.
THE VINEYARD LABOURERS.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the market-place, and said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way. Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise. And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive. So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first. And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny. But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day. But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last; for many be called, but few chosen.”—Matt. xx. 1–16.

Different kinds of work are required in vineyards at different seasons. In spring they prepare the soil; in summer they prune and tie up the vine branches; and in autumn all the joyous labour of the vintage comes suddenly on. Looking to the circumstance in the parable, that the labourers who began early counted much on having borne the heat of the day, we might be inclined to suppose that the scene is laid in the middle of summer; but the fact that the householder required so many labourers and hired all that he could find, points rather to the vintage in the end of autumn.

The master went out early in the morning to hire labourers. There was some spot, doubtless, recognised both by masters and men, as the common meeting-place for those who needed work, and those who needed workmen,—the Cross or the Buchts33 of that place and day. This husbandman at once engaged all the men that he found, and sent them into his vineyard to begin work at six in the morning,—the first hour of the Jewish day. The terms were arranged beforehand,—a penny a day. The Roman denarius is reckoned equal to sevenpence half-penny of our money; but obviously it was considered the ordinary rate of a labourer’s wages at the time.

Again at nine o’clock the husbandman went to the market-place, and finding some unemployed men, sent them also to work in his vineyard. Again at mid-day,  and yet once more at five o’clock in the afternoon he went out, and finding men on each occasion loitering about the market-place, he sent them also into the vineyard. In these cases, however, as was meet when the day was broken, the master did not promise any specific rate of wages; and the men, thankful for an opportunity of turning to some profitable account a day which would otherwise have been wholly lost, were content to accept whatever he might be pleased to give.

About six o’clock in the evening,—earlier or later according to the season of the year and the consequent duration of daylight at the time,—work in the vineyard ceased for the day, and each labourer, called forward in turn by the steward, received his wages in the master’s presence.34 The steward, acting doubtless under special instructions, called first the men who had entered the vineyard at five, and quitted it at six, and gave each a penny for his hour’s work. Surprised by the munificence of their employer, these men retire towards their homes with silent gratitude. Afterwards those who had laboured one-half, and those who had laboured three-fourths of the day, were called in succession, and each received also a penny. Last of all came the men who had laboured from morning till night. They had been standing near, and had observed that all their fellow-labourers, not excepting even those who had been employed only an hour, received the same uniform reward, each man a penny. As this process was going on, they cherished in silence the expectation that when their turn should come, they would receive more of the master’s money, because they had done more of his work. But the steward, evidently acting  on precise orders, gave each of these men also a penny, and no more. No longer able to conceal their disappointment, although they were well aware that they had no legal claim for more than they had received, they broke out into murmurs against their employer. Of course, he closed their mouths in a moment: he had completely fulfilled his agreement with them, and they had no right to interfere with his spontaneous generosity, whenever and towards whomsoever he might choose to exercise it.

Here, again, the key-notes of the parable are found at the beginning and at the end. The direct and immediate occasion of the discourse lies in Peter’s question at the 27th verse of the nineteenth chapter, “We have forsaken all and followed thee: what shall we have therefore?” But as the parable sprang from Peter’s question, so Peter’s question sprang from an antecedent fact. To that fact, accordingly, we must look as the true ultimate root on which the parable grows.

As Jesus was going about in the Father’s business, attended by the twelve, a young man came running forward to him, bending the knee in token of reverence (Mark x. 17), and asking, “Good master, what good thing shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” Accommodating his lesson to the condition of the learner’s heart, the Lord saw meet, at the close of his discourse, to lay a specific cross on this promising disciple, in order at once to reach and eradicate the specific disease that threatened the life of his soul,—“Sell all that thou hast, and come, follow me.” The young man loved the world more than Christ: compelled to make his choice, he cleaved to the portion that he loved best. When by the sovereign act of the Lord he was placed in such a position that he could not enjoy both portions, he parted with the Saviour and  clung to his wealth. Peter and the rest of the apostles listened and looked on, during this decisive interview: they gazed after the youth, perhaps with tears, as he slowly and sorrowfully withdrew. But their Lord did not leave the impressive fact to sink into their minds in silence: He interposed at the moment, to print the lesson permanently on their hearts, “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of heaven!” “Then answered Peter;”—as usual this impetuous man burst suddenly into a speech upon the point in hand, before he had well considered what he was about to say. For one thing, there is no deceit in Peter’s question; he thinks aloud, and his thought is one of intense and undisguised self-conceit. The spirit of the Pharisee was there, “Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other men.” His heart at this moment was undisguisedly mercenary; his eye was on the main chance. We have done and suffered so much for God; what return may we expect for our services? That young rich man would not part with his portion in this world, in order to follow Christ: Peter, thereupon, made a most comfortable comparison between himself and the undecided youth, and expressed a hope that his own great devotion would not be overlooked in the day of reward.

I sometimes think the Papists acted wisely in making Peter the first Pope. He serves better as a type for them than any one of the twelve, unless they had gone all the way and chosen Judas. None of the true men were so forward as Peter in giving their judgment, or so frequently wrong.

The reply of our Lord to Peter’s self-righteous demand is twofold. First, he owns and reiterates the truth that all labourers in his kingdom will be rewarded; and next  corrects the abuse of that principle into which a self-pleasing human heart is apt to fall. In the discourse recorded at the close of the nineteenth chapter, he teaches the cheering truth that the Lord will richly reward the services of his people, and in the subsequent parable gives to them and us a solemn admonition against the error into which Peter had been for the moment betrayed.

The positive doctrine regarding compensation for all sacrifices and wages for all work needs only to be read in the memorable words of Jesus, as the evangelist has recorded them here. Notwithstanding the incrustations of ignorant self-righteousness that now and then covered and disfigured their faith, these Galileans have in very deed left all for Christ, and shall all in very deed receive from Christ a hundred-fold. Even Peter’s own decisive life-act,—his consecration to Jesus, was a higher and purer thing than his own foolish words at this time would represent it to have been. It was not with a mercenary eye to a subsequent equivalent that he left his nets and followed Jesus. That self-devotion in the simplicity of faith will be gloriously recompensed, notwithstanding the subsequent slips that dishonour the disciple and grieve the Master; but Peter, and through him all men, must be clearly taught that work done for the sake of the reward is not owned in the kingdom of heaven.35

 Every one that hath forsaken earthly possessions for Christ’s sake shall receive an hundred-fold, and shall inherit everlasting life,—“But many that are first shall be last, and the last first.”

This short antithetic sentence is the very gate by which we enter into the meaning of the parable; if we rightly comprehend it, we rightly comprehend all. It is necessary to determine here the connection between this sentence and the doctrine, which is taught in the immediately preceding verses. While the Lord undertakes that service and sacrifice in his cause will be rewarded, he warns his disciples in the next breath that those who labour longest, or produce the greatest quantity of work, do not in every case, and necessarily, receive the highest reward. In his kingdom the reward is not measured only and always by the length of the service or the quantity of work; many who are first as to the amount of work done will be last as to the amount of recompense received.

A lesson drawn from this scriptural principle may be legitimately addressed to those who are not within the kingdom, but I think the Master in this parable primarily intends to draw distinctions, not between those who are within and those who are without, but between two classes  of genuine disciples,—between those who simply trust in the Lord and serve him in love, and those who, although also in the main believers, allow the leaven of self-righteousness to creep in and mar the simplicity of their faith.36

It is not said that those who are first in the quantity of work shall all or uniformly be last in the measure of reward, but “many” that are first shall be last. Some who are foremost in the amount of service may also be most free from the self-righteous spirit, and some who have laboured least may also receive least if they do their little under the influence of a hireling’s selfishness. The meaning is, that although you be first as to length of time and quantity of labour, if the leaven of self-righteousness mingle in your offering, you will be lowest in the Master’s esteem, and least in the day of reward; whereas, although you be last in point of time, and least in point of service, if you receive all from Christ’s mercy, and render all in love to Christ, you will be higher in the end than some who seemed more energetic and successful workers.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder,” &c. This picture will illustrate the truth which has been declared; the householder represents Christ, the vineyard his kingdom, and the labourers his servants. The main lesson of the parable concerns, not the way of redemption, but the service which the redeemed render to their Lord. The wages of the labourer represent the rewards which Christ confers upon his servants, but this must be taken with certain  explanations and limitations, especially these two,—(1.) That the reward is partly a thing now begun, and partly something that is completed in heaven; (2.) That the value of the reward depends essentially on the disposition of heart with which the workman receives it.

It is not necessary to determine whether the labourers who were first hired, and who laboured all the day, represent the Jews under the first dispensation, or those in the Christian Church who individually are converted in early youth, and continue in Christ’s service throughout a long life, or those who, from special talent, or zeal, or opportunity, do and suffer most for the Lord and his cause. The all-day labourers may represent all these classes, each in turn, and especially the last. We must not understand exclusively by “the first” those who began first in point of time. The term indicates rather those who are first in the sense of being chief or greatest; it points especially to those who were first in rank as having endured the greatest amount of loss, and done the greatest amount of work in Christ’s cause. In the parable it is true those who were first sent into the vineyard, in point of time, were chief among the labourers as to the quantity of labour contributed, but the time is only an accident. The matter truly brought into view is not the time, but the quantity of work. Time is here employed simply as a measure of quantity, for it is obviously assumed throughout that all the men performed equal amounts of labour in equal times. It conduces greatly to a clear conception of the whole lesson when you think of the first and last as indicating those who did and suffered most in Christ’s cause and those who did and suffered least.

Those who toiled only one hour or other larger fraction  of a working day had no contract as to amount of wages; they entered the vineyard and laboured without a bargain. They did not know what wages they would be paid with, but they knew what master they were working for; they were prepared to accept whatever he might be pleased to bestow. In this respect they correctly represent the truest of Christ’s disciples—those little-child Christians whom he sets up as a pattern for others. Those, on the other hand, who were first in point of time, and therefore first in point of quantity, made their bargain before they began. This is like disciples who slide back in some measure from the simplicity of faith and allow a mercenary motive to mingle in their devotions. Especially is it like Peter when, contrasting his own large sacrifices with the refusal of the young man to sacrifice anything, and counting himself first, while he looked down on others as last, he cunningly inquired,—Lord, what shall we get for leaving all and following thee? In answer to his egotistical inquiry, he is informed in plain terms that he is one of those first who shall be last. This, however, according to all the analogy of Scripture, is not, in regard to Peter or any individual disciple, an absolute prediction of what shall be, but a warning of what may be if the same spirit remain.

Our Scottish forefathers at the period of the Reformation suffered much for Christ; some pined long in prison, some died at the stake. These were first, and we who contribute a few pounds to a missionary society, or teach a Sabbath school, or visit some poor families, are last in respect to the quantity of our doing and suffering in the Saviour’s cause. But if any of those first were proud of their sufferings, they will be last in the reward; and whosoever of these last give their mite in  simple love to the Lord that bought them, will be first when he comes to bring home his own.

Such is the structure of the parable that it must express the difference by giving one labourer not an absolutely but a comparatively greater amount of wages than another. The last are recompensed at a higher rate than the first, yet all go home with the same sum of money. But although the labourers are all equal in the absolute amount of wages received, the last are made higher than the first by a distinct addition to the pecuniary recompence—that is, a contented, loving, thankful mind.

See the two groups of labourers as they severally wend their way home that evening. As to amount of money in their pockets, they are all equal: but as to amount of content in their spirits there is a great difference. The last go home each with a penny in his pocket, and astonished glad gratitude in his heart: their reward accordingly is a penny, and more. The first, on the contrary, go home, each with a penny in his pocket, and corroding discontent in his soul: their reward accordingly is less than a penny. Those who know how great a gain is godliness with contentment, and how small a gain is even godliness, when discontent is eating into it like rust, will allow that, while the labourers first and last alike had each his penny, yet the last were first and the first last in the real value of their reward.

Considering that Peter is evidently designated as one of the first who shall be last, I cannot understand the parable otherwise than as showing differences among the disciples of Christ,—differences in simplicity of spirit while the labour lasts, and consequently in the value of the reward when the labour is done. As all the labourers get the wages of a day, so all who are represented by  them, inherit the kingdom: but as one star differeth from another star in glory, so shall it be when Christ comes to gather all his own. They will wear the brightest crowns who thought most of their Redeemer’s goodness, and least of their own sacrifice and work.

The latter clause of the 16th verse, “for many be called, but few chosen,” being evidently attached to the parable as its application by the Lord, demands our earnest attention.37 If we should understand by it, that many hear the call of the Gospel, but few are chosen by God and admitted through regeneration into his family, it would not be possible, as far as I can perceive, to assign to it any proper connection with the lesson of the parable. But by the terms in which this sentence is introduced, it is clearly intimated that it is the very conclusion and kernel, so to speak, of the doctrine which the parable was intended to convey. Whether we shall be able to understand it or not, it certainly must be something precisely in the line of the preceding instructions. In that direction we must seek for its meaning; for it is manifestly introduced as a gathering up in short and condensed form of all that the parable contained.

The exposition suggested by Bengel is simple, consistent, and clear; and it is, I think, correct. Taking the  term “called” as signifying not all to whom the call of the Gospel is addressed, but those only who are effectually called,—not those who only hear, but those who also obey the call,—taking the term in this sense, which is a sober and scriptural view, he finds that this is not a distinction between saved and lost, but between two classes of the saved. The called and the chosen are both true disciples of Christ, and heirs of eternal life, and yet there is some distinction between them. Chosen must here therefore mean, what it did sometimes mean in ancient times, and does often mean still, the best of their kind. We constantly speak of choice or select articles, meaning the most excellent. The phrase, whether used proverbially before Christ’s time or not, is in nature and structure proverbial. He either found it a proverb and used it, or he made it a proverb there and then, for such it essentially is. It seems to have been employed by the Lord on more than one occasion, and differently applied at different times. As we might say among a great number of manufactured articles, all true and genuine, “few are first-rate;” so, among a great number of real disciples, few stand out unselfish, unworldly, and Christ-like, honouring their Lord, and making the world wonder. Most, even of those who are disciples indeed, and shall inherit eternal life, are so marred by self-righteous admixtures, and unsanctified temper, and conformity to the world, that their light is dim and their witness inarticulate. Peter, for example, was one of the called, in that he heard and obeyed Christ, and was saved; but he was not a chosen or choice disciple, when he demanded of his Saviour what he should get for what he had done; or when in the hour and power of darkness, he denied all connection with Jesus of Nazareth. Alas! though there  are many Christians, how few there are who forget the things behind, and press forward till they reach the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.38

Some obvious practical lessons may be appended to the exposition.

1. Judge not. Let a man examine himself rather than his neighbour. When Peter saw the young man refusing to make a sacrifice for Christ, he complacently remembered his own sacrifices, and thought he had done remarkably well. Ah, Peter, Satan desires to have thee that he may sift thee as wheat; but what by the Master’s rebukes addressed to him, and what by prayers poured out for him, he will be saved; yet so as by fire. You left all,  you say, to follow Jesus; and how much was that? a share in a boat and some nets, both probably the worse for wear. Ah, Peter, if you had been as rich as this young man, I am not sure whether you would not have done as he did,—gone away, sorrowful indeed, but away from Jesus!

Disciples of Christ that are poor, should beware of judging the disciples who are rich. You were enabled to break the tie that bound you to the earth; and you see a neighbour struggling with the yoke still on his neck. Be not high-minded but fear. The line that bound you was a slender cord; the line that binds that brother is a cart rope. He, if he is set free at a later day, may be first in the day of reward, and you last.

2. All whom the Lord meets and calls are sent to work, and all go. From the moment they meet the Master till the evening of life’s labour-day, they work for him. They not only labour for the Lord, they labour “in the Lord.” Thus it is not a pain but a pleasure; it is their meat and their drink.

God needs not our work, but we, for our own sakes, need work in his kingdom. He can find other servants; but if we refuse his call we shall never find a “good Master.”

3. The true spirit of a worker is love to the Master, and to the work for the Master’s sake. The moment that a thought of merit glides into the servant’s heart, it brings him down, not indeed from the number of true disciples, but from the highest to the lowest class there.

Among the motives that, in these matters, sway a human heart, there are two forces equal and opposite: one is a humble, broken-hearted consciousness that you deserve nothing, and receive all free; the other is a self-righteous conceit that your valuable services deserve a  great reward. If this latter spirit is the main spring of your activity, it determines your position to be altogether outside of the circle of true believers; if it intrudes more or less as a temptation, and tinges with self-righteous blemishes a substantial faith in Christ, it reduces you from the highest to the lowest rank of disciples, and from the first to the last in the final award of those who serve the Lord.

In one of its aspects the lesson of this parable is parallel with that which is taught by the experience of the penitent thief. Both greatly magnify the patience and long-suffering of God: they record and proclaim, each in its own way, that there is hope at the eleventh hour. But in such a case, a perverse carnal mind frequently turns the grace of God into lasciviousness. Because the mercy of our Redeemer is stretched to the furthest verge of safety to leave room for the outcast to enter, when on the darkening evening of the day of grace he flees at last from the wrath to come; souls cleaving to the dust, take the liberty of stretching their expectations a little further than Christ stretched his offer, and find the door shut, when they come too late. Ah, when the tender Saviour of sinners, by his parable, and the experience of the thief, gives you encouragement to come, although you are late; beware lest you take from his words wrested an encouragement to be late in coming.
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 GROUP—THE TWO SONS, THE WICKED
HUSBANDMEN, AND THE MARRIAGE
OF THE KING’S SON.

Matt. xxi. 28; xxii. 14

The particular lessons which Jesus taught in the course of his ministry, followed in this respect the analogy of his redeeming work as a whole; in most cases his instructions were called forth and fashioned by hard, bold outstanding sins. Some of the brightest jewels which shine in the life of Christ are the pure pearly coverings  which he threw around Pharisaic pride, or Sadducean unbelief, or the self-righteous stumbles of his own disciples. Thus he made the wrath, and the malice, and the deceit of men to show forth his own praise; thus rust-spots were converted into shining pearls; thus human errors, as they sprung up, were seized and choked and buried under a mantle of glorious grace.

Here in Matthew’s Gospel, we encounter a group of three parables, the two sons, the wicked husbandmen, and the marriage of the king’s son, connected with each other historically in a consecutive report, and logically as successive steps in the development of one argument. The portion, chapters xxi. xxii. xxiii., is the compact record of a single scene. Approaching by the Mount of Olives, Jesus entered Jerusalem in a simple but significant triumphal procession, heralded by the hosannahs of the multitude, which, if for the most part neither intelligent nor permanent, were sincere and spontaneous. Arrived in the city he at once made his way to the Temple, and there assumed an unwonted and severe authority. The mercenary profaners of the temple he cast out; the blind and lame he healed. On the way to and from Bethany, where he lodged for the night, the fruitless fig tree withered under his word. Next morning as he was teaching in the temple, the heads of the Jewish external theocracy, stung to rage by his words and deeds on the preceding day, formally demanded the exhibition of his authority, as a preliminary step to the violent suppression of his work. Jesus knew the hearts of these men; he knew that while, in virtue of their office, they affected to expound and apply the divine law, and to rule the people in accordance with it, they were at once ignorant of God’s word and tamely subservient to the passions of the people. To tear off, or rather to compel  them with their own hands to tear off their cloak of hypocrisy, he addressed to them that question of wonderful simplicity but wonderful power, The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven or of men? Knowing that if they should confess the divine origin of John’s mission they would thereby establish the Messiahship of Jesus to whom John had borne witness, and that if they should deny it they would forfeit the favour of the people, they answered, We cannot tell, meaning, It is inconvenient to express an opinion. As they could not venture to pronounce whether a ministry which had left its impress deep on the whole land, was a human usurpation or a divine mission, they had obviously no right to sit in judgment on the credentials of Jesus. When on this point they were condemned out of their own lips the Lord, rising now more into the stern dignity of judge when his ministry was drawing to a close, advances against the discomfited and stunned hierarchs, with another, another, and yet another stroke, unveiling the hypocrisy of their religious profession, predicting the consummation of the crime, the murder of the Father’s well beloved, which they were already cherishing in their hearts, and denouncing finally the doom which in the righteous government of God should fall upon themselves and their city.39 Such are the occasion, the places, the object, and the nature of the three parables which Jesus spoke that day in the Temple, and the Evangelist Matthew has recorded in this portion of the word. The first is the parable of —
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X.
THE TWO SONS.

“But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto him, The first. Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him.”—Matt. xxi. 28–32.

“To the first he said, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard.” The first was none other than the one whom the father first met that morning. To have intimated whether he was the elder or the younger, would have introduced a disturbing element, and obscured the meaning of the lesson. There is no question here between elder and younger, or between Jews and Gentiles. At all events, if those who maintained a place within the theocracy are distinguished from those who stood without its pale, we must conceive of the Father approaching on this occasion from without towards the centre, coming in contact first with those who were excluded as aliens, and afterwards reaching the inner circle, who counted themselves the seed of Abraham.

This son, rebellious in heart, and not trained to cover his disobedience under a smooth profession, meets his father’s command with a rude, blunt refusal. I think the  humble husbandman had received a similar answer from the same quarter more than once before. This is not the first unseemly word which the young man had spoken to his father: neither himself nor his wickedness has grown to maturity in a day. The habit of dishonouring his parents had sprung from a seed of evil in his infancy, and grown with his growth until he and it had reached full stature together. The father seems not to have spoken a word in reply. Probably he knew by experience that an altercation on the spot would only have made matters worse: perhaps he sighed, perhaps he wept as he turned gently round and went away. I do not know how often and how long he had meditated on the grand practical question for a father, when he should be severe, and when he should show indulgence. May God guide and help parents who have disobedient sons; they need much patience for bearing, and much wisdom for acting aright.

“But afterward he repented and went.” There is much in these few simple words. He repented; perhaps his father’s silent grief went to his heart at length and melted it. He saw himself in his true colours, and loathed himself for his sin. The son, who probably obtained a glimpse of his father’s tears, wept himself in turn, and, as the best amends he could make, went silently into the vineyard, and did a good day’s work there. Thus, when Jesus, suffering, bearing reproach before Pilate’s judgment-seat, looked on Peter sinning, Peter went out and wept. When he was called to suffer for Christ, he had rudely answered, “I will not;” but afterwards he repented and went—to work, to witness, to suffer, to die for the Lord whom he loved.

Perhaps the father, from beneath the cottage eaves, saw the son on the brow of the hill toiling in the noon-day  heat,—saw and was glad. The value of a day’s labour was something; but it was as the small dust of the balance in comparison with the price he set on the repentance and obedience of his child. I suppose there was a happy meeting at night when the son came home. I suppose the father was a happy man as he saw the robust youth wiping the sweat from his brow, and sitting down to his evening meal.

“He came to the second, and said likewise.” The second son had an answer ready, sound in substance and smooth in form. It was a model answer from a son to his parent: “I go, sir,” said the youth, without hesitation or complaint. I am not sure that the father was overjoyed at the promptness and politeness of this reply: probably he had received as fair promises from the same quarter before, and seen them broken. At all events, this young man’s fair word was a whited sepulchre; he did not obey his father. Whether he fell in with trivial companions on his way to the vineyard, and was induced to go with them in another direction, or thought the day too hot and postponed the labour till the morrow, I know not; but he said, and did not. It was profession without practice. The tender vine-shoots might trail on the ground for him till their fruit-buds were blackened; he would not put himself to the trouble of tying them up to the stakes, although the food of the family should be imperilled by his neglect.

Now comes the sharp question, “Whether of them twain did the will of his father?” The answer is all too easy. The light is stronger than is comfortable for those owl-eyed Pharisees, who were prowling about like night-birds on the scent of their prey. The sudden glance of this sunbeam dazzles and confounds them. In utter  helplessness, they confess the truth that condemns themselves; they say unto him “The first.”40

In the first example the Lord represents chief sinners repenting; and in the second, the form of godliness without its power. The publicans and harlots, who had forsaken their sins and followed the Saviour, sat for the first picture; the chief priests and elders, who concealed their thirst for innocent blood under a mantle of long prayers and broad phylacteries, sat for the second.

Let us look first to the two distinct and opposite answers, and next to the two distinct and opposite acts.

The answers.—That of the first son, “I will not,” was evil, and only evil. It is of first-rate practical importance to make this plain and prominent. Looking to the son in the story, we see clearly that the answer was outrageously wicked: it was an evil word flowing from its native spring in an evil heart. Looking next to the class of persons whom that son represents, we find they are the openly and daringly ungodly of every rank in every age. This son, when he rudely refused to obey his father, meant what he said; he was not willing to obey, and he plainly said so. This represents those who have neither the profession nor the practice of true religion; they neither fear God nor pretend to fear him.

At this point, among certain classes, a subtle temptation insinuates itself. In certain circumstances, ungodly  men take credit for the distinct avowal of their ungodliness, and count on it as a merit. They are not, indeed, submissive in heart and life to the will of God; but they do not tell a lie about the matter; they make no pretension. The frank confession, that they are not good, seems to serve some men as a substitute for goodness. By comparing themselves complacently with fellow-sinners of a different class, they contrive to rivet the fatal error more firmly on their own hearts. Observing among their neighbours here and there a rank hypocrite, they compare his sanctimonious profession with his indifferent sense of honesty, and congratulate themselves that they are not hypocrites.

Well, brother, suppose it were conceded that you are not a hypocrite; what then? If you have lived unrepenting, unforgiven, unchanged; if with your whole heart and habits you have departed from the living God, and not returned to him through the Mediator,—will all be atoned for and made up by the single fact that to all your other sins you did not add the cant of a hypocrite? It is true, a hypocrite is a loathsome creature; but his badness will not make a profane man good. When he is cast away for his hypocrisy, it will be no comfort to you as you keep him company that it is for open ungodliness, and not for lying pretensions to piety, that you are condemned. Hypocrites are, indeed, excluded from the kingdom of God; but it is a fatal mistake to assume that, provided you are not a hypocrite, you will be welcomed into heaven with all your vices on your back.

I scarcely know a more subtle or more successful wile of the devil than this. Many strong men are cast down by it. You don’t pretend to be good; well, and will that save you? What comfort will it afford to the lost to reflect  that they went openly to perdition, in broad daylight, before all men, and did not skulk through by-ways under pretence that they were going to heaven?

The answer of the other son was evil too, if you look not to its body, but to its spirit. There is no reason to suppose that it was, even at the moment, an act of true obedience to his father. “He said, I go, sir; and went not:” he said one thing, and did another, an opposite; but there is no ground for believing that he meant to go when he promised, and afterwards changed his mind. His smooth language was a lie; and his subsequent conduct showed, not that he had changed his mind when his father was out of sight, but that he concealed it while his father was present. It is worthy of notice, that although the first son changed his mind after he had given his answer, there is no intimation of any change having passed on the second son, between his answer and his act. By its silence on this point, the narrative leads us to infer that the purpose of the disobedient son was the same while he was promising well as when he acted ill. The course of the life flowing full in the direction of disobedience, proves that the expression of the lips which ran in the opposite direction, was a lie; it was like a glittering ripple caused by a fitful breeze, running upward on the surface of the river, while the whole volume of its water rolls, notwithstanding, the other way.

Thus is even the worship of hypocrites worthless: Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. The want of the subsequent obedience shows that the promise was not true.

Thus at first both these sons were in a false and unsafe position. Their characters were not the same,—were not  similar: they differed in thought and word; but the difference, in as far as their answers were concerned, indicated only varieties of sin. Legion is the name of the spirits that possess and pollute the fallen; but all the legion do not dwell in every man. Different temptations tinge different persons with different hues of guilt. At the time when the father uttered his command, the character of the first son was bold, unblushing rebellion; the character of the second was cowardly, false pretence. The one son neither promised nor meant to obey; the other son promised obedience, but intended not to keep his word.

In the first instance, therefore, there is no ground for preferring the one to the other. While they stood severally in their father’s presence, and before either had repented of his sin, they were both, and both alike evil. The blasphemer has no right to boast over the hypocrite, and the hypocrite has no right to boast over the blasphemer. In either case it is a body of sin, but there is a shade of difference in the colour of the garments. The one pretends to a goodness which he does not possess; and the other confesses, or rather boasts, that he is destitute of goodness. They measure themselves by themselves; and therein they are not wise. The one thinks his smooth tongue will save him; and the other counts himself safe because he has not a smooth tongue.

We come now to the ultimate act of either son. The first, after flinging a blunt refusal in his father’s face, repented of his sin. The turning-point is here. A change came over the spirit of the man, and a consequent change emerged in his conduct: his heart was first turned, and then his history. The honesty of his declaration—the absence of duplicity in giving his answer, would not have  justified him before either God or man. He repented; he turned round. He grieved over his sin; he was sorry that he had disobeyed his father. Repentance immediately brought forth fruit after its kind. He went into the vineyard, and laboured there with a will all day at the kind of work which he knew would please his father. These two things go always in company, and together make up the new man—they are the new heart and the new life.

The grieved father would weep for joy, as he looked up the precipitous hill-side on which the terraced vineyard hung, and saw there the head and hands of his son glancing quickly from place to place among the vine plants. Thus there is joy in heaven—deep in the heart of heaven’s Lord—over one sinner that repenteth. Among the vines that day work was worship: the resulting act of obedience—fruit of repentance in the soul, was an offering of a sweet-smelling savour unto God.

The other son promptly promised, but failed to perform. The first was changed from bad to good, but the second was not changed from good to bad. No change took place in this case, and none is recorded. It is not written, that having promised, he afterwards repented and did not go. His promise was not true; at the moment when it was made, the youth did not intend to work, and therefore it required no change of mind to induce him afterwards to spend the day in idleness.

This son represents, in the first instance, those Pharisees who were then and there compassing the death of Jesus. They ostentatiously professed that they were doing God service; yet they were spreading a net for the feet of the innocent, and preparing to shed his blood. Wearing broad phylacteries, making long prayers, and offering  many sacrifices, they were, notwithstanding, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another. With their lips they honoured God; but in works they denied him. These, in as far as they are here represented, were evil first and last. In the second son we have an example, not of a man who meant to do good changing his mind and ultimately doing evil, but of a man who, notwithstanding his fair profession, meant evil at the beginning and perpetrated it in the end.

Nor are these lessons of the Lord limited to one private interpretation: the lesson of this parable was not exhausted when the Pharisees died out. As surely as the thorns, and the tares, and the lilies to which Jesus on various occasions alluded in his lectures, grow on the ground at this day, and have grown there through all the intervening generations—so surely the various classes of human character which he rebuked, warned, or encouraged in his ministry, have their representatives going out and in amongst us in the present day. It is meant that in this glass all the self-righteous to the end of the world should see themselves; their profession is fair, but their life is for self, and not for God.

In the stratified rocks many species and genera of plants and animals are found in a fossil state which are not found in the flora or fauna of our present earth; but the human characters that were fixed and stamped as by photograph in the Scriptures are not so far removed from the men and women who now live on the earth. No species has become extinct; and even the minuter characteristics of distinct varieties remain legible still.

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Here spring two distinct warnings to two distinct classes, with corresponding encouragements attached, as  shadows follow solid bodies in the sunlight;—to the Publicans and Harlots first, and next to the Pharisees of the day.

1. There is a class amongst us answering to those publicans and sinners to whom Jesus was wont to address the message of his mercy. Alas, they may be counted by thousands and tens of thousands in the land! They are the drunkards, the licentious, the profane, the false, the cruel,—those who abandon themselves to a vicious life, and do not take the trouble of attempting to hide their sin under a cloak of sanctity. They gratify every lust, and crucify none. They live without God in the world. The key-note of their being is, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.

To all this class the parable proclaims a warning. A rank, soporific superstition has crept over these free and easy spirits,—a superstition as dark and deceitful as any of the inventions of Rome. Men seem actually to persuade themselves that their very wickedness will supply them with a passport into heaven. They seem to expect that they will be made pets in the great day, because they made no pretension to saintship; and that they will be fondled by the Judge as they have been by their boon companions, because hypocrisy cannot be reckoned among their sins. It is a false hope. Free thinking, free living brother, if I saw you about to put to sea in a ship which I knew to be affected with dry-rot in the timbers of the bottom, I would warn you with all my energy, that I might save your life: when I see you preparing to launch into eternity leaning on a lie, I cry vehemently, Beware, lest you be lost for ever! Without holiness no man shall see God. The absence of a hypocritical pretension to holiness will not be accepted instead of holiness. All who go away to the judgment-seat without holiness will be  shut out of heaven—alike those who thought they had it, and those who confessed that they had it not. It was all right at last with the profane son in the parable; but mark, he repented and obeyed. God’s invitation to the wicked is, Turn and live; but the promise contains in its bosom the counterpart threatening, If you turn not you shall die. It was not the bold, frank declaration of disobedience that made the first son all right: it made him all wrong. It was his change,—his passing out of that state, as if he had passed from death unto life, that saved him.

But to this class the parable speaks encouragement as well as warning. So great is God’s mercy in Christ that even you are welcome when you come; the gate stands open; the Redeemer from within is calling chief sinners in, He has pledged himself to cast no comer out because of his worthlessness. Nor does the freeness of his grace prove that the prodigal’s sins are small; it proves only that the forgiving love of Christ is great.

2. There is still a class corresponding to the Pharisees, and to these the Lord in this parable conveys both warning and encouragement.

The essence of the Pharisaic character, under every variety of form, consists of these two things,—an exact and laborious observance of external religious duties, and a heart satisfied with itself while it is devoted to the world. The species is described for all times and places in the Apocalyptic Epistle to the Church in Sardis: “Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead” (Rev. iii. 1). There is a profession of godliness wanting its power; Christ’s name comes readily to the lip, but the god of this world possesses the heart and controls the life.

There is encouragement to the Pharisee as well as to  the publican to turn and live. There is no respect of persons with God; the Pharisee was as welcome to Christ as the publican, if he would come. A Pharisee and a publican went up to the temple at the same hour to pray; the publican returned to his own house pardoned and at peace with God, while the Pharisee went home still unreconciled and under condemnation: but wherefore? Not that God was more willing to forgive the publican than to forgive the Pharisee; but because the Pharisee did not ask forgiveness. He would have obtained it if he had asked it: his self-righteousness was his ruin.

Thus in the end of this parable, the Lord intimates to the Pharisees that the outcasts whom they despised are entering the kingdom of heaven before them. This does not mean that the way is made more easy, the gate more wide, to the licentious and profane than to the hypocrite,—it intimates merely that in point of fact the profane were then and there hastening in through the gate which stood open alike for all, while the self-righteous were standing aloof. The intimation, moreover, is made, not in order to keep these Pharisees back, but to urge them forward. The Lord desires to provoke them to jealousy by them that were no people. These despised outcasts are going in before you; arise and press in now, lest the door be shut. It was not because they were publicans and harlots that they were saved, but because they believed and repented under the preaching of John; and it was not because the others were Pharisees that they were still unsaved, but because even with the example of fellow-sinners repenting and believing before their eyes, they, thinking themselves righteous, would not repent and believe.

God delights as much to receive a Pharisee as to receive  a publican. When a self-righteous man discovers himself at last to be a whited sepulchre, and counting his own righteousness filthy rags, flees to Christ as his righteousness, he is instantly accepted in the beloved.

If I could be admitted, in the body or out of the body, to a vision of the saints in rest, I would like to creep near the spot where two saved sinners chance to meet,—the man who wrote this narrative of Christ’s ministry, and the man who preached Christ to the Gentiles. I would fain listen for an hour to the conversation of Matthew the publican and Saul the Pharisee when they meet in the mansions of the Father’s house. Their loving argument, I could imagine, would sometimes run high. Matthew will contend that the grace of their common Lord has been most conspicuously glorified in his own redemption, “for,” he pleads, “I was all evil and had nothing good, I had neither inside purity nor outside whitening. I had neither the seemly profession without nor the holy heart within. I was altogether vile; and in me therefore is the grace of God glorified most.” Paul, on the other side, will contend, with his keen intellect perfect at last, that he was the chief sinner, and that consequently in his redemption a more decisive testimony is given to the abundance of the Saviour’s grace. After describing his own hardness and blindness and unbelief, he will add, as the crowning sin of man, the crowning glory of God,—While I was thus the chief of sinners, I gave myself out as one of the greatest of saints.

It may be hard to tell whether of the two mountains is the more elevated; but one thing is clear,—both are covered by the flood. The blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanseth us,—the profane and the self-righteous alike,—cleanseth us from all sin.
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 XI.
THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN.

“Hear another parable: There was a certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country: and when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of it. And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants more than the first: and they did unto them likewise. But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son. But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir: come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him. When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen? They say unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons. Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder. And when the chief priests and Pharisees had heard his parables, they perceived that he spake of them. But when they sought to lay hands on him, they feared the multitude, because they took him for a prophet.”—Matt. xxi. 33–46.

In the case which this parable represents, the owner did not continue to reside on the spot and cultivate his own vineyard; “he let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country.” This lease, granted by a non-resident proprietor, throws an interesting light on the habits of the place and the time. In regard both to the tenants and the terms, the information, though very brief, is very definite. The vineyard was let not to one capitalist, who might employ labourers to do the necessary work, but to a kind of joint-stock company of labourers who proposed to cultivate the property with their own hands for the common benefit. It was stipulated, moreover, that the rent should be paid not in money but in kind. It is the system known in India at this day as ryot-rent; the cultivator undertakes to give the owner a certain fixed quantity yearly from the produce of the farm, and all that is over belongs to himself.

The structure of the parable in its later stages presupposes a country in which the central government is paralyzed, and the will of the strongest has usurped the place of law. With us it requires an exercise of imagination to conjure up a scene in which these events could possibly occur; but in those regions such anarchy was not uncommon then,—is not uncommon now. It is probable that the annals of our own empire in India could supply some parallel conflicts between the privileged superiors and the actual cultivators of the soil.

The proprietor, being personally absent from the country, employed agents to demand his stipulated share of  the produce at the proper season from the tenants in possession. The tenants, presuming on the distance of the superior, and the difficulty which he must necessarily encounter in any attempt to enforce his rights, not only refused to fulfil the conditions of their lease, but also assaulted the messengers who made the demand; they beat one, and killed another, and stoned a third. Obviously, they determined from the first to retain the whole produce of the vineyard for themselves. They do not seem to have laid their plans with much care: there is more of passion than of policy in their conduct. It is the ordinary practice of those who break the laws of God or of man, to grasp madly a present pleasure, and refuse to think of coming vengeance. Having heard of the treatment which his agents had received, the proprietor despatched another party more numerous, with the view probably of overawing the refractory peasants by a display of strength; but the second mission was as cruelly and contemptuously rejected as the first. The proprietor, still unwilling to bring matters to an extremity, adopted next an expedient which he hoped would subdue the rebellion, without imposing on him the necessity of punishing the rebels. Keeping out of sight for the moment his rights and his power, he appealed confidingly to their hereditary reverence for the family of their chief; he sent his son, and sent him unarmed, unattended.

The conduct of the husbandmen at this point is unintelligible, if you suppose that the country enjoyed a regular government, and that the men had deliberately adopted a plan. In order to account for the circumstances, you must suppose that the central government was paralyzed, and that these men were as stupid as they were wicked. Great criminals are often blind to their  own interests: their blunders generally lead to their conviction.

The murder of the heir by these greedy tenants, in the vague hope of obtaining the property, is a probable event. To show that the scheme was not skilfully devised, does not by any means prove that the crime was not actually perpetrated. The owner was absent; no display of irresistible power was made to their senses; they were not in the habit of nicely considering the remote consequences of an act, and an overmastering passion completely paralyzed at that moment a judgment which was feeble at the best.

From this point the close of the tragedy is self-evident; the Lord accordingly does not further prosecute the narrative. Here the Pharisees are invited to pronounce judgment upon themselves; nor do they hesitate to accept the challenge. Whether in simplicity, as unconscious of the Teacher’s drift, or in exasperation as knowing that by this time his drift appeared to the whole company all too plain, may not be certain; but in point of fact they gave the answer without abatement and without ambiguity: “He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard to other husbandmen which will render him the fruits in their season.”

No serious difficulty occurs in the interpretation of this parable, and, consequently, no considerable differences of opinion have arisen among interpreters regarding it. The main lines of the lesson cannot be mistaken; but there is need of careful discrimination in some of the details.

Frequently in the Scriptures the seed of Abraham, called by God and endowed with many peculiar privileges, are compared to a vine, or to the aggregate of vines  in a vineyard. I shall here point to three examples of this usage, in order to show that, notwithstanding an obvious general resemblance, they differ from each other and from this parable in the specific purposes to which they severally adapt and apply the analogy:—

1. Isa. v. 1–7: “Now will I sing to my well-beloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. My well-beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill. And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes? And now go to; I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof and it shall be eaten up; and break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down. And I will lay it waste: it shall not be pruned nor digged; but there shall come up briers and thorns: I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant: and he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.”

The vineyard, with its slope to the southward, and rich soil, and careful cultivation, and secure defences, and convenient apparatus, represents the people whom God chose and cherished. The drift of Isaiah’s parable is to show the exaggerated wickedness of that  favoured nation. The vineyard brought forth wild grapes,—those sour grapes which set on edge the teeth of him who tastes them (Ezek. xviii. 2). Israel lived like the heathen, and thus the care bestowed upon them was thrown away. As a punishment for its ungrateful return, the vineyard was laid waste; the kingdom and polity of Israel were destroyed by the decree of God, and through the instrumentality of the king of Babylon.

2. Ezek. xv. 2–5: “Son of man, What is the vine tree more than any tree, or than a branch which is among the trees of the forest? Shall wood be taken thereof to do any work? or will men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon? Behold, it is cast into the fire for fuel; the fire devoureth both the ends of it, and the midst of it is burnt. Is it meet for any work? Behold, when it was whole, it was meet for no work: how much less shall it be meet yet for any work, when the fire hath devoured it, and it is burned?”

Here Israel is compared, not to a vineyard, but to a single vine; and the special characteristic selected for purposes of instruction is the uselessness of the vine tree as timber. Cultivated only for the sake of its fruit, if it prove barren, it is not only no better than the trees of the forest, but much worse. Forest trees are useful in their own place, and for certain purposes; but a vine, if it do not bear fruit, is of no use at all. No man can make a piece of furniture from its small, supple, gnarled stem and branches. The wood of the vine is fit for nothing but to be cast into the fire, and, therefore, a fruitless vine takes rank far beneath a forest-tree; thus an apostate and corrupt Church is a viler thing than the ordinary secular governments of the world. Such obviously and notoriously is ecclesiastical Rome to-day.

 3. Ps. lxxx. 8–15: “Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt; thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it. Thou preparedst room before it, and didst cause it to take deep root, and it filled the land. The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars. She sent out her boughs unto the sea, and her branches unto the river. Why hast thou then broken down her hedges, so that all they which pass by the way do pluck her? The boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it. Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine; and the vineyard which thy right hand hath planted, and the branch that thou madest strong for thyself.”

Again Israel is represented as a vine; but in this case the features brought into prominence are its former flourishing condition and great extent compared with its present desolation. By the removal of the protecting fence, the wild beasts of the forest were permitted to trample at will on its feeble and lowly boughs. The picture sets forth the ruin of Jerusalem through the withdrawal of God’s protecting hand, and the consequent irruption of hostile nations.

In all these cases the vine, or aggregate of vines, represents the privileged persons who constituted the kingdom of Israel or Church of God, as it then existed in the world. In the first example, the wickedness of Israel is represented by the bitterness of the fruit which the vineyard produced; in the second, the unprofitableness of Israel is represented by the want of fruit on the vine; and in the third, the sufferings of Israel are represented by the inroads of the wild beasts upon the wide spread, tender, unprotected vine.

Our parable differs from all three as to the point where  its lesson lies. It is not a case in which a favoured vineyard produces bad fruit; it is not a case in which a vine bears no fruit; it is not a case in which a vine that might otherwise have been fruitful is trampled down by wild beasts for want of a fence. It is a case in which, after the vineyard has brought forth its fruit, the cultivators who have charge refuse to render to the owner the portion of the produce which is his due. The difference is important: it determines clearly the main line in which the interpretation of the parable should proceed.

By the vineyard with all its privileges, I understand the ordinances of Israel as appointed by God, and the people of Israel in as far as they were necessarily passive in the hands of their priests and rulers. The husbandmen manifestly represent the leaders, who at various periods had usurped a lordship over God’s heritage. Extraordinary ambassadors were sent from time to time in the owner’s name, to demand the stipulated tribute,—prophets such as Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, men not of the number, or in the confidence of the ordinary rulers, but specially commissioned by the Supreme, to approach them with reproof and instruction. The established authorities of the nation, exercising their office for their own pleasure or profit, rejected the counsel and assaulted the persons of the messengers. Some were imprisoned, some driven into exile, and some put to death. Successive embassies, sent in successive ages, met with similar treatment, until, in the fulness of time, Christ the Son became the messenger of the covenant. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. Already those Jewish rulers who listened to this parable, were laying their plans to cast this greatest prophet out of the city, and to crucify him.

 The owner of the vineyard said, “They will reverence my son.” The expression is natural and appropriate in the lips of a human proprietor; but obviously when it represents the purpose of God, it means only that such reverence was claimed, and such reverence was due. The omniscient knew beforehand that the Jewish rulers would not yield even to this last and tenderest appeal. The expectation of the husbandmen that when they should have murdered the heir, the property should become their own, does not point to any definite, well considered plan by which the wicked expect to gain a permanent portion by rejecting the Gospel; it indicates merely the blunt determination of the carnal mind to grasp and enjoy God’s bounties while it despises and rejects his grace. To crucify Christ by the hands of the Romans, or to crucify him afresh through unbelief, was and is a short-sighted policy.

When the Lord of the vineyard cometh he will destroy those wicked men, and will let out the vineyard unto others. The interpretation of this turning-point is given to the Jewish rulers in full, and without concealment. “The kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (ver. 43). The polity of the Jews was crushed by the Romans, and the charge of the Church fell into other hands. The “nation” that has succeeded to the kingdom is constituted on a different principle, and held together by different bonds. It is not after the flesh, but after the spirit that citizenship is obtained in the Christian commonwealth; henceforth, the partakers of Abraham’s faith are the seed of Abraham to whom the covenant of promise pertains. The worship and ordinances of God’s house were transferred to the apostles and their followers, neither as Jews  nor as Gentiles, but as the disciples of Christ. A new nation (εθνος) is constituted of those who are born again; of those the kingdom consists, and under their charge its affairs will be carried on until the Lord come again.

The personal and permanent application of the lesson is obvious.

A rich vineyard, planted and fenced to our hand, has been let out to us by the Maker and Owner of the world. Civil and religious liberty, the Bible and the Sabbath, the Church and its ministry, have been provided and preserved for us by our Father’s care. We are permitted to enjoy all for our own benefit, under deduction of a tribute to the Giver. Our offerings cannot directly reach him, but he has made them payable to the poor.

When Christ the messenger of the covenant stands at the door and knocks, a worldly heart within refuses to admit him. The carnal mind is enmity against God, and therefore resists the claim which the Mediator bears: its language is, “We will not have this man to reign over us.”

The lesson bears also upon the gradual corruption of the Christian Church in the first centuries, and the absolute apostasy of the lordly hierarchy at Rome. At the Reformation the kingdom was in part taken from that faithless priesthood; but they retain vast multitudes in bondage still. The Lord reigneth; and the time will come when every yoke shall be broken, and the Church set free to serve the Lord alone. The vineyard will one day be delivered from the tyranny of usurping tenants, and its fruit fully rendered to its rightful Lord.

Ah, my country, I dread the punishment of thy unfaithfulness! The same righteous God, who cast out the Jews and admitted the Gentiles, reigneth still. On the same principle he has taken the kingdom from Asia Minor and  Greece, and given it to this island of the sea. Alas, if we render not to him the fruits of his vineyard, he may take our privileges in judgment away, and give them to another nation, perhaps to Italy—emancipated, regenerated Italy (Rom. xi. 19).

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This parable is remarkable for the codicil taken from the Old Testament and attached to it by the Lord on the spot and at the moment. The picture of the tenant vine-dressers usurping possession—driving off the owner’s servants and slaying his son, although transparent in its meaning and pungent in its reproof, does not contain all that the Lord then desired to address to the Pharisees. It pleased him to employ that similitude as far as it reached; but when its line had all run out, he seized another line that lay ready in the Scriptures to his hand, and attached it to the first, that by the union of the two he might make the reproof complete. The first type taken from human affairs is not broad enough to represent the kingdom of God at a crisis of its conflict. The son whom the proprietor sends on an embassy to the vine-dressers, points to Christ sent by the Father to his own Israel. The terrestrial fact serves to show that the son was put to death by the rebels in possession, but there its power is exhausted; it has no means of exhibiting the other side of the scene,—that this son rose from the dead, and now reigns over all. The parable, when it came to its natural conclusion, left the lesson which it had begun to teach abruptly broken off in the midst,—left a glory of the Lord unrevealed, and a terror to wicked men unspoken. That he might proclaim the whole truth, and leave his unrepenting hearers without excuse, the Lord proceeded then and there to demand of them, “Did ye  never read in the Scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner?”

The parable of the husbandmen has already shown that the Son was rejected by the favoured people to whom he was sent; and this grand text from the Old Testament Scriptures, which the Scribes well knew, shows further that he whom the official but false builders rejected and cast down, was accepted and raised up by God. Whom they refused, dishonoured, and slew, him God raised up and made King upon his holy hill of Zion.41 It is a dreadful discovery for those husbandmen to make, that the Son whom they murdered lives, and has become their Lord. Nothing is more appalling to criminals than to be confronted with their victim,—living and reigning. Hence the agony of Joseph’s faithless brothers when they discovered that Joseph was their judge. Herod beheaded the Baptist in the intemperate excitement of a licentious feast, that he might keep before his nobles the word which he had rashly pledged to a fair, false woman: but Herod was not done with John when John’s body, tenderly buried by his disciples, lay silent in the grave. Many times by night and day the king saw that gory head again lying on the charger—it would not go out of his sight. The creaking of a door, or the sighing of the wind among the trees, seemed the footfall of the Baptist stalking forth to reprove him. When an attendant reported to Herod the miracles of Christ, reporting at the same time that some took Jesus of Nazareth for Elias, and some for another prophet, he had his own opinion on the point; he knew better, and  in a whisper, with pale face, and starting eye-balls, and trembling limbs, he said to his informant,—“It is John the Baptist whom I beheaded” (Mark vi. 14).

It is a fearful thing for his murderers to fall into the hands of this living God. It is a fearful thing to see him whom you have crucified afresh coming in the clouds to judge the world in righteousness.

Further expanding this conception regarding the chief corner stone, the Lord transfers from another scripture (Isa. viii. 14, 15), the prophecy spoken of old on this very point,—“And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.” We seem to mark here a change in the character of Jesus. Sterner and more stern he becomes, as in his prophetic office he approaches the subject of his own kingly judgment. His eyes pierce these hypocrites, and they quail before him. As his witnessing approaches its close, he draws the two-edged sword from its sheath and holds it before the time over the naked heads of his enemies, if so be they may even yet fear and sin not. For his own holy purposes he lays aside for a moment his gentleness, and appears as the Lion of the tribe of Judah. The last days of the Mediator’s ministry on earth are now running: it must now be decided whether his own will receive or reject him. The leaders of Israel stood before him, with all their crooked purposes revealed to his eye; the plot was ripening to take his life away. Laying aside the style of a meek Beseecher, he assumes the aspect of a just Avenger; already we seem to see the wrath of the Lamb gathering on his brow. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry; as yet, his wrath is kindled but a little; in that day, it will burn like fire. Why has it been kindled a little before the time? Mercy has lighted this premonitory  fire. This terror of the Lord, like all the others that he sends in the day of salvation, is employed as the means of persuading men. He not only receives all who come at his invitation, but sends out foreshadowings of judgment to drive from their unbelief those who refuse to yield to gentler means. Many of the forgiven, on earth and in heaven, are ready to tell that after they had long resisted his tender invitations, they were overcome at last by gracious terrors launched against them by a loving Saviour.

The Jews were familiar with these ideas connected with the corner stone. The prophecy in the aspect of a promise they readily understood, but here the other and opposite side of it also is displayed.

The picture—for it is by itself a short parable—represents a great stone at rest. In Alpine valleys, close by the root of rent, rugged, precipitous mountains, you may often see a rock of vast dimensions lying on the plain. In magnitude, it is itself a little hill; and yet it is only a stone that has fallen from the neighbouring mountain. Suppose a band of living men should rush with all their might against that stone, they would be broken and it would not be moved. If they retire and repeat the onset, the rock lies still in majestic repose, while their feeble limbs are mangled on its sides, and their life-blood sinks into the soil at its base.

The next part of the conception, which the imagination can easily form at will, is precisely the reverse of the first. The rock rises now into mid-heaven, hovers over the assailants for a while, and then falls upon their heads. Here, as in the other case, the human adversaries of this rock are destroyed, but their destruction is wholly different in degree and kind. In the first case, they were broken;  in the second, they are grinded to powder.42 The words in the original are very specific, and the translation is remarkably accurate. The term employed to indicate the injury which men inflict upon themselves when they resist the Redeemer in the day of grace, conveys the idea of the crushing which takes place when a man strikes swiftly with all his force against a great immoveable rock; the term which indicates the overwhelming of Christ’s enemies by his own power put forth in the day of judgment, conveys the idea of the crushing which takes place when a great rock falls from a height upon a living man. The one calamity is great in proportion to the weight and impetus of a man; the other calamity is great in proportion to the weight and impetus of a falling rock. Both the rejection of Christ by the unbelieving in the time of grace, and the rejection of the unbelieving by Christ when he comes for judgment, are bruisings; but the second is to the first, as the power of a great rock is to the power of a man. The first bruising, caused by a man’s unbelieving opposition to Christ under the Gospel, may be cured; but the grinding accomplished by the wrath of the Judge when the day of grace is done can never be healed. There remaineth no more sacrifice for sin.

There are only two ways. This stone lies across our path from edge to edge. It is not possible to be neutral, so as to be neither for Christ nor against him: we must either accept or reject the Son of God. In the prophecy to which the text refers (Isa. viii. 14, 15,) it is intimated that “He shall be for a sanctuary, but for a stone of  stumbling.” The mighty one stands on our life path, and we cannot pass without coming into contact with him. If we flee to him for refuge, he is the sanctuary in which we shall be safe; if we fall on him, in a vain effort to escape, we shall stumble, and fall, and perish.

As a general rule, it is in the present life that he bears the weight of sinners striking against him; and in the life to come that those who rejected him here, must bear the weight of his judgment.

But some do not relish this doctrine; those who heard it directly from the lips of the Lord resented it keenly, and many resent it still when it is taught from the Scriptures. In our day men do not often expressly find fault with the teaching of Jesus as it is recorded by the Evangelists: they prefer to blame the ministers who take up and echo their Master’s words. People fondly grasp one side of God’s revealed character and use it as a veil to hide the other from themselves. The tenderness of God our Father is employed to blot out from view the wrath of God our righteous Judge. Since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were; where, therefore, is the promise of his coming?

A great rock is lying on the plain: the cultivators have ploughed and the cattle have grazed round it since the flood. Standing beside it, and reverting to its possible history, you give scope to your imagination and ask, What if it had fallen, or should yet fall on me? The bare conception makes you shudder: you are fain to shake off the reverie and compose yourself by the reflection that the rock, fixed to the spot by the laws of nature, cannot move to harm you.

But the Judge of the quick and the dead, though likened to a stone as to crushing power, is not like a stone  in its silent still inertia. He liveth and abideth for ever. He bears now,—has borne long. The Almighty God does not move himself to hurt those who are his enemies, any more than the rock which has slept half buried in the valley many thousand years. But he will not thus bear for ever: he will come to judge the world. He will come as the lightning comes: then blessed will all be who shall have put their trust in him, while he waited, through the Gospel, to be gracious. “When the Son of man cometh” the second time, “shall he find faith on the earth?” He will then find only the faith which his first coming generated; for his second coming creates no new faith. Then, it is not “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved;” but “a fearful looking for of judgment.”
←Contents

 XII.
THE ROYAL MARRIAGE FEAST.

PART I.—THE WEDDING GUESTS.

“And Jesus answered, and spake unto them again by parables, and said, The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son, and sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come. Again, he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell them which are bidden, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and my fatlings are killed, and all things are ready: come unto the marriage. But they made light of it, and went their ways, out to his farm, another to his merchandise: and the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy. Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage. So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all, as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests. And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding-garment: And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding-garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.”—Matt. xxii. 1–14.

A question has arisen and been largely canvassed, on the relation between the parable and one43 recorded in Luke xiv. 16–24 regarding a certain man who made a great supper and bade many. Around this subject much useless and some mischievous debate has accumulated. The criticism which assumes that only one discourse on the subject was spoken by Jesus, and that consequently two reports of it differing from each other, cannot be both correct, is impertinent and trifling. It is a pedantic literalism contrary to experience and to common sense. It rests upon the assumption that a public Teacher who taught the common people daily, on the margin of the lake and in private dwellings, in the Temple at Jerusalem and in the sequestered villages around, never repeated with variations in one place the substance of a lesson which he had given in another. Even in the immense profusion of nature every plant is not in all its features different from all others; two individuals or species are found in some respects the same and in some respects different. The two walk together as far as they are going the same way, and separate when each approaches his own peculiar and specific terminus. This combination of identity and difference pervades creation; and you may observe the same characteristics in the scheme of Providence. Two men during a portion of their life-course suffer the same troubles and taste the same joys; but at a certain point in their progress their paths diverge, and they never meet again in a common experience. Look even to the history of any citizen whose life is public, and you will find that by speech, or writing, or act, he prosecutes  his objects by a mixture of sameness and diversity. His address in the high court of the nation, and his address to his rustic constituents in a distant province, will be found in some features similar and in some different: yet the address in either case will be found an independent and consistent whole, corresponding to the character of the speaker and the circumstances of his audience.

This “Teacher sent from God” was wont in later lessons to walk sometimes over his own former footsteps, as far as that track best suited his purpose, and to diverge into a new path at the point where a diversity in the circumstances demanded a variety in the treatment. This is the method followed both in nature and revelation,—the method both of God and of men.

“A certain king made a marriage for his son,” the two important features here are the royal state of the father, and the specific designation of the supper as the nuptial feast of his son. It may be quite true, as some critics say, that because the greatest feasts were usually connected with marriages, the epithet “marriage” was sometimes applied to any sumptuous banquet; if in the Scriptures or elsewhere we should find a banquet denominated a marriage feast, while from the circumstances it appeared that no marriage had taken place, we should experience no difficulty in explaining the apparent incongruity. But in this case there is no reason for adopting the exceptional, and the strongest reason for retaining what is confessedly the ordinary and natural signification of the term. The conception of the Redeemer as the bridegroom, and his redeemed people as the bride, lies too deep in Scripture and protrudes too frequently from its surface to leave any doubt concerning the allusion in the parable. The feast, introduced into the story for the  sake of its spiritual significance, is the marriage supper of the king’s son.

The king sent forth his servants, not on this occasion to give the first invitation, but to warn those who had been previously invited that the time had come, and the preparations been completed. It is obviously assumed, and analogies are not wanting to justify the assumption, that those whom the king desired to honour were informed of that desire before the day of the feast, and that another message was sent to each, after everything was ready, requesting his immediate attendance in the palace of the king. This feature of the transaction is not explained or defended in the narrative; it is silently taken for granted as at least sufficiently common to be well understood.44

This peculiarity of the invitation is important in connection with the severity of the punishment which was subsequently inflicted on the recusants. They did not repudiate the invitation when it was first addressed to them. By retaining it, and enjoying the advantage of being accounted the king’s guests during the interval, they pledged themselves to attend the marriage festival, and honour their sovereign by their presence. Their abrupt refusal at the eleventh hour, after all was ready to receive them, partook of the nature both of breach of engagement and disloyalty. “They would not come.”

 A second message was sent, more specific and more urgent: but the men met the importunate kindness of the king with contemptuous mockery: “they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise.” A portion of them carried their opposition beyond supercilious neglect into blood-thirsty enmity; “the remnant took his servants and entreated them spitefully and slew them.”

“But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city.” As far as appears from the narrative, those who affronted the king by neglect, and those who put his messengers to death, received the same punishment. Although the cruelty perpetrated by some of the conspirators was an aggravation of their guilt, the crime for which they suffered was one of which all alike were guilty,—the crime of despising the king’s invitation, and pouring contempt upon his authority.

The transaction may have had great political significance. It was a combination among the aristocracy to thwart the king and dictate to him a line of policy. They meant by their absence in mass to leave him without support, that he might be compelled to court them on their own terms. In such a case only two alternatives are open to the supreme magistrate: he must either submit to the aristocracy and buy them back at their own price, or supersede them by a bold appeal to the common people. Suppose that in this country the Lords should by compact refuse to attend Parliament, for the express purpose of extorting concessions in favour of themselves by bringing the process of legislation to a stand: the sovereign, in that case, must either submit to the terms of the refractory nobles, or by prerogative create a new  peerage from the plebean ranks. Such, on a minute scale and in a simple form, was the course adopted by the king in this ancient oriental drama.

He destroyed their city: it was the king’s own city, but he loathed it because of the rebellion of its inhabitants. He took no pleasure in its streets and palaces when their moral glory had departed. The loss of so much property was a small loss; the gain for the discipline of unborn generations was unspeakably great. The overthrow of the city in which the rebels dwelt would make children’s children shudder at the thought of apostasy. The sacrifice of a material interest in order to afford sanction to moral laws is the highest wisdom of government, both human and divine. This principle was adopted on the largest scale after the first rebellion, when the earth was cursed for man’s sake.

The king took his servants into his counsel. They had suffered in his cause, and he will not conceal from them what he is about to do. “Go ye therefore into the highways,”—the public places of resort, as well the city’s streets as the roads that traverse the country,—“and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage.” In the first instance the invitation was limited to the class who had a prescriptive right to appear at court; when these by their perversity had excluded themselves, the king in his sovereignty extended the invitation generally to the common people,—to persons who previously possessed no right of admission, but who obtained the right then and there by the free act of the sovereign.

The servants did as they were instructed. They understood and executed their commission according to its letter: they brought in “bad and good.” As they were not instructed to institute an inquiry into the character  or social position of the persons whom they should invite, they made no distinction; they swept the streets to fill the royal halls.

At this point the parable becomes logically complete, and its lesson may be exhibited apart from the addition regarding the wedding garment which immediately follows. It will be more convenient, accordingly, to prosecute the exposition of the earlier portion by itself, and leave the latter portion to be treated afterwards as substantially a separate lesson.

The parable, as far as we have hitherto read it, repeats and extends the warnings previously given regarding the spiritual privileges which the Jews enjoyed and abused, the judgments which had been and still would be poured out upon the nation, and the successful proclamation of the Gospel to the Gentiles, when the natural seed of Abraham should have in rebellious unbelief rejected the offers of their Lord.

The marriage festival made by the king in honour of his son, points manifestly to redemption completed in the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ. Banquets had before this period been provided by the king, and enjoyed by the favoured circle of his guests; much advantage was possessed by the Jews over the Gentiles in every way, but especially in that to them were committed the oracles of God. But the feast depicted in this parable was the last and best; it was the way of salvation in its completed state. As the king made known his intention before it was carried into effect, and intimated to the guests that they would be summoned as soon as the preparations were complete; so a period of preparation, and promise, and expectation intervened between the incarnation and the sacrifice of Christ. To  the Jewish commonwealth the promise was made in the birth of the babe at Bethlehem, and they were invited to be upon the watch for the moment when the kingdom should come in its power.

When the fulness of time had come, the Lord himself undertaking the work as well as assuming the form of a servant, carried to the chosen people the message, “Come, for all things are now ready.” His immediate followers and their successors repeated and pressed the invitation. It is worthy of notice that the servants, when they went out with the commission of the king, did not announce the feast as a new thing, then for the first time made known; they spoke of it as that which was promised before, and actually offered them; they summoned those who had previously been fully informed that the feast was provided for their use. These favoured but unthankful people were not taken at their word; after the first refusal, another and more urgent invitation is sent. The successive reiterated mission of the servants to the class who were originally invited, may be understood to point to the ministry of the Lord and the seventy until the time of the crucifixion, and the second mission of the apostles after the Pentecost, and under the ministration of the spirit. Both invitations were neglected and rejected by the people to whom they were sent; Christ came unto his own, and his own received him not.

Significant are the differences in the treatment which the message and the messengers received from different classes within the privileged circle of the first invited. We learn here the solemn lesson that though there is much diversity in the degrees of aggravation with which men accompany their rejection of the Saviour, all who do not receive him perish in the same condemnation. At  first no distinction is made between class and class of unbelievers; of all, and of all alike it is recorded, “they would not come.” But when the offer became more pressing and more searching, a difference began to appear, not as yet the difference between the believing and the unbelieving, but a difference in the manner of refusing, and in the degrees of courage or of cowardice that accompanied the act. The greater number treated the message lightly, and preferred their own business to the life eternal which was offered to them in Christ; while a portion, not content with spurning away the offer, persecuted to the death the ambassadors who bore it. The fault of those who are first mentioned takes the form of indolent, frivolous neglect, rather than of active opposition. They were occupied with many other things, and therefore could not attend to this one; they were bent on prosecuting their own gains, and therefore set no value on God’s favour.45

These two, ungodliness and worldliness, are always found in company; but it is sometimes difficult to determine which of the two goes first, and draws the other after it. You seldom meet a man who neglects this great salvation, and neglects also the gains and the pleasures of life. Those who forget God follow hard after another lord, although they may be unable to detect or unwilling to confess their own idolatry. No man can serve two masters; but every man practically serves one. It may not, however, be easy in any given case to discover whether a man pursues some particular pleasure because  he is determined to abide far from Christ, or is kept far from Christ because his heart is pre-engaged to some worldly lust. In the case which the parable exhibits, this point has not been expressly determined. When the second and more urgent message arrived, demanding their immediate attendance on the king at the marriage of his son, those men departed in an opposite direction, each to his own business; but it remains an open question whether their hearts were first so glued to the farm and the merchandise, that they could not be persuaded to take from these engrossing pursuits as much time as would suffice to attend upon their sovereign; or whether there was first a determination to resist the sovereign’s call, and that they then introduced the business as an excuse, and fled to it as a welcome occupation.

It may have been either or both; but in the circumstances I think it was primarily the latter of the two. In the hearts of those men lay a deep design against the authority of the king; but it would have involved serious risk to have flatly refused his reiterated invitation. They had actually incurred a grave responsibility, and they were disposed to lighten it somewhat by interposing a plausible excuse. Troubled, moreover, by the gravity of their step they were fain to seek refuge from reflection by plunging into the ordinary avocations of life. I think it was not an excessive zeal for agriculture and trade that really prevented them from attending on the king that day; but a consciousness of having conclusively offended the king that drove them for relief into agriculture and trade. On the spiritual side of the parable, in like manner, the excessive devotion to business which occupies some men, and leaves not a shred either of their hearts or lives for Christ, may be in many cases not a primary affection,  but the secondary result of another and deeper passion. When Christ has often knocked at the door, and the inhabitant soul within has as often refused to open, there is no longer peace in the dwelling that has been barred against its Lord. He who has rejected the merciful offers of a merciful God, does not afterwards sit at ease; every sound that in moments of solitude falls upon his ear, seems the footstep of an angry God, returning to inflict deserved punishment. When one has distinctly heard the Saviour’s call, and deliberately refused to comply with it, he thenceforth experiences a craving for company and employment. He cannot endure silence or solitude. When he stands still, he seems to hear the throbbings of his own conscience terrible as the ticking of the clock in the chamber of death. To be alone is unendurable, because it is to be with God. To escape from this fiery furnace, he hastens to plough in his field or sell in his shop. In such a case, the worldliness, even when it runs to the greatest excess, is not the primary passion, but a secondary refuge,—the trees of the garden among which the fallen would fain hide from the Lord God.

But in some cases the disease may first approach by the other side: love of the world may be the earlier matured and more imperious passion. The farm and the merchandise may become the soul’s first and fondest love; and that love possessing all the soul’s faculties, may cast or keep out Christ and his redemption. If you suppose those invited guests to have been previously wedded to the idolatry of covetousness, worshipping gain in secret as their god, you can easily comprehend how they should grudge a day taken from traffic in order to honour their king; so in the interpretation of the parable, when riches or pleasures increase, and the possessor sets his heart upon  them, he has already obtained his portion, and will not cast it away for Christ; he will mock the messengers who bring the distasteful proposal.

Among the invited guests, however, there is another class who treat the king’s servants in another way. The first class made light of the message; the second murdered the messengers. It is intimated that while the bulk of those to whom the Gospel was preached, neglected the offer and busied themselves with earthly gains, some rose against the preachers and persecuted them unto the death. These last, however, seem to have been in point of numbers an inconsiderable minority,—“the remnant entreated them spitefully and slew them.”

There were persecutors in the earliest days of the Gospel, and there have been persecutors in every generation since. The Pharisees plotted that they might put Jesus to death: Saul of Tarsus at a later date was their willing tool in a desperate effort to quench the life of the infant Church in the blood of its members. After he was turned, and the mighty stream of his life compelled to flow like a river of water in the opposite direction, a constant succession of cruel men has been kept up in this restless, sin-stained world, whose life-work is to crucify Christ in his members. The unchanged, unrepenting hierarchy of Rome, successor not of Peter the apostle, but of Saul the persecutor, does yet all that it can and dare to treat spitefully and slay those servants of the king who invite them and the world to the marriage-supper of the King’s Son.

But the crucifiers of Christ are not all shedders of human blood. Deadly enmity to the truth and its publishers may be manifested where stakes and fagots are out of fashion and inconvenient. The soul of the persecution  which the parable represents lies in entreating spitefully the king’s messengers, because they loathed the invitation, and were irritated by the urgency wherewith the servants, remembering their sovereign’s command, felt themselves constrained to press it on every man they met. In our own day, it does not require extraordinary sagacity to perceive the same spirit in the relish and readiness with which certain classes catch up a cry against any one who, not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, has discharged his commission in full.

But when you add together both classes of open antagonists—those who shed the blood of Christians, and those who merely calumniate them, you have only a very small company before you. On the one side I see a little flock,—those who meekly receive Christ; on the other and opposite side I see also a little flock,—those who loudly proclaim by word and deed, “We will not have this man to reign over us:” but there is a multitude, whom no man can number, in the midst, who neither accept the king’s message nor persecute the servants of the king. The character of the company on either extreme is distinctly marked, and easily seen. Those have manifestly closed with Christ’s offer, and are accepted through faith; these, on the other hand, have considered the offer, and proved their rejection of it by killing its bearers. But the multitude in the middle have not taken a decisive part; they have remained apparently in a state of equilibrium. As yet they have not indeed actually and personally closed with the Redeemer as their own; but neither on the other hand have they determined and proclaimed that they will not accept him. They have not moved to either side to take a decisive part for or against the Lord.46 This feature of  their condition and their history helps to deceive and so to destroy them. If the condition of the world and the law of God were such that all would be safe in the great day who did not blaspheme Christ’s name, and mock his Gospel, and put to death his ministers, this multitude in the middle might remain where they are at ease. But this is not the state of the case; life and death for us depend on our knowing and not mistaking the state of the case here.

To all the multitude in the middle the word of a merciful and faithful God proclaims, In order to be saved, it is necessary that you should arise, and turn to the right hand, and join the company there who have gladly welcomed the Son of God as their Saviour; but, correspondingly, in order to be lost, it is not necessary that you should arise from your state of indifference, and join the scoffer’s ranks. To be saved you must flee to the refuge; but to be lost, it is enough that you remain where you are.

In the Theocracy, the Hebrew nation were the hereditary nobles. It is said of them in the Scriptures that they are a people near unto God (Ps. cxlviii. 14). They enjoyed a right of entry into the king’s presence. Having, in virtue of their birth-right, a perennial invitation to the royal festivals, they needed only a message as a matter of course, demanding their presence when the feast was prepared. The Gospel of grace complete in Christ is obviously the feast to which the house of Israel were in the fulness of time specially summoned. When they refused to come to the banquet, the Provider was displeased,  but not put about: the Omniscient knows his way. He never permits his purposes to be thwarted: He makes the wrath of man to praise himself, and the remainder of that wrath he restrains.

In the beginning of human life and of God’s moral government on earth, the enemy seemed to triumph. Creation was thrown out of joint; the being made in God’s image was defiled by sin. But although the garden of Eden was emptied, God was not left without a witness in the world: sin abounded, but grace did much more abound. In like manner, at a later stage of the divine administration when the favoured vine became barren, another was brought out of Egypt and planted in its stead. When Israel rejected Christ, God rejected Israel, and called another people to be his own. “We have Abraham to our father,” said the Jewish leaders to the Baptist when his lessons began to gall them, “We have Abraham to our father,” meaning thereby to intimate that they alone were the chosen people, and that failing them God would have no children on the earth. How did John answer this boast? “Think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father; for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham” (Matt. iii. 9, 10).

Although those privileged Hebrews rejected him, Christ did not remain a king without subjects, a shepherd without a flock. In the exercise of the same sovereignty through which he chose Abraham at first, he passed over Abraham’s degenerate posterity and called another family. This family was Abraham’s seed, not by natural generation, but in the regeneration through faith. Of these stones he raised up children to Abraham, when the natural children of the family had through unbelief shut themselves out. “Go to the highways:” Christ commanded his  apostles to begin at Jerusalem indeed, but he did not enjoin,—did not permit them to continue holding out their hands to a disobedient and gainsaying people; the alternative was embodied in their commission, If the Jews do not receive you, go to the Gentiles.

It becomes us to stand in awe before these deep things of God: their fall became our rising. In the channel through which a running stream is directed upon a mill wheel the same turning of a valve that shuts the water out of one course throws it into another, that had previously been dry; thus the Jews by rejecting the counsel of God shut themselves out, and at the same moment opened a way whereby mercy might flow to us who were afar off.

The servants went out and did as they were bidden. Peter went to the house of Cornelius, and in that lane of the world’s great city found a whole household willing to follow him to the feast his royal master had prepared. Soon thereafter Paul and Barnabas, Silas, Titus, Timothy, and others traversed the continents of Europe and Asia, bringing multitudes of neglected outcasts into the presence and the favour of the king.

“They brought in good and bad.” This is a cardinal point in the method of divine mercy, and therefore it is articulately inserted in the picture. The scene is taken from life in the world; the conceptions accordingly, and the phraseology correspond with the circumstances. In society at large, and in every section of society such as the rich or the poor, two classes are found distinguished by their moral character, and in ordinary language designated the good and the bad. The thought and the style of ordinary life are adopted in the parable, and every reader understands easily what is meant. Every great community has its virtuous poor and its vicious poor. The invitations  of the Gospel come to fallen human kind, and to all without respect either of persons or of characters. Apart from Christ and prior to regeneration the distinction between bad and good is only an earthly thing: in God’s sight and in prospect of the judgment, there is none good, no not one. There are not two roads from earth to heaven: there is only one gate open, and by it all the saved enter. It is not the man’s goodness that recommends him to God’s favour: the worst is welcome through the blood of Christ, and the best is rejected if he approach by any other way. Nor does it follow thence that the Judge is indifferent to righteousness; that which the unreconciled offer to him as righteousness is in his sight sin; and the fact of offering it as a ground of justification aggravates the offerer’s guilt.

PART II.—THE WEDDING GARMENT.

We have here two parables in one. In their union and relations they resemble the two seed-stones which are sometimes found within one fruit, attached to each other, and wrapped in the same envelope, but possessing each its own separate organization, and its own independent germ of life. The parable of the prepared, offered, and rejected feast, and the parable of the wedding garment, although actually united in the Lord’s ministry and the evangelic record, are in their own nature distinct, whether you consider the secular scenes delineated or the spiritual lessons which they convey.

When the wedding was furnished with guests the king came in to see them. The representation is in strict accordance with the relations of the parties and the customs of society both in ancient and modern times. When a citizen entertains his equals he must himself be first in  the festal hall to welcome the guests as they successively arrive; but when a sovereign invites subjects to his palace he appears among them only when the company have all assembled.

The instant that he entered the festive hall the king saw there a man who had not on a wedding-garment. Although this is the turning point of the parable, it is represented with extreme brevity. The great central facts are recorded with the utmost distinctness, but all the surrounding circumstances are in silence assumed: no explanation is given, and the reason doubtless is that no explanation is needed. Some customs and allusions connected with the scene remain obscure to us, after all that modern research has done to illustrate them, but the lesson which our Lord intended to teach stands relieved in clearest light and sharpest outline, like distant mountain tops when the sun has newly set behind them. Some points regarding which we might desire information are left in the shade, but in as far as the story is necessary to unfold and perpetuate the spiritual lesson, it is accompanied with no doubt and with very little difficulty.

1. The wedding garment was something conspicuous and distinctive. As soon as the king entered the room he detected the single man who wanted it in a great company of guests.

2. It was not a necessary part of a man’s clothing, but rather a significant badge of his loyalty. The primary use of the symbol was neither to keep the wearer warm nor to make him elegant, but to manifest his faithfulness.

3. The want of it was, and was understood to be, a decisive mark of disloyalty. The man who came to the feast without a wedding-garment endorsed substantially the act of those who had proudly refused to comply with  the king’s invitation. It was the same heart-disobedience accompanied by a hypocrisy that would fain commit the sin and yet escape the consequences.

4. The question whether a wedding-garment was proffered to every guest as he entered, out of the royal store, is attended with some difficulty. The preponderance of probability seems to lie with those who think that these decorations were freely distributed in the vestibule to every entrant, in some such way as certain badges are sometimes given to every one of a wedding party amongst ourselves in the present day. But the point is not of primary importance. From what is tacitly assumed in the narrative it may be held as demonstrated alternatively that either the king gave every guest the necessary garment, or it was such that every guest, even the poorest, could on the shortest warning easily obtain it for himself. Two silences become the two witnesses out of whose mouths this conclusion is established,—the silence of the king as to the grounds of his sentence, and the silence of the culprit when judgment was pronounced. The judge does not give any reason why sentence should be executed, and the criminal does not give any reason why it should not. On both sides it is confessed and silently assumed that the guest had not, but might have had, the wedding-garment on. If there had been any hardship in the case the king would have vindicated his own procedure, and the condemned guest would not have remained speechless when he heard his doom.47

 From the circumstances in which that motley company was collected and introduced into the palace, we may safely conclude that no kind of clothing, however torn and mean, would have been counted a disqualification. Over the whole surface of the scene is spread the proof that nothing in the character or condition of the attire which a street porter or a field labourer might happen to wear, when he was intercepted on the highway by the king’s messengers, and hurried away to the palace without an opportunity of visiting his own home, could possibly have been a ground of exclusion. When such persons in such circumstances were invited to the banquet, assuredly the king was prepared to welcome them, as far as dress was concerned, precisely as his servants had found them. No man forfeited his place at that table on account of any defect in the quality or condition of the clothing which he wore when he unexpectedly met the messengers and was suddenly hurried away to the feast. Thus far, treading on firm ground, we tread surely.

Alike from the facts of the case, from the analogy of others, and from the corresponding spiritual lesson as elsewhere declared in Scripture, we conclude with confidence that the wedding garment was a well understood distinctive badge, expressive generally of loyalty, and specifically constituting and declaring the wearer’s fitness for sitting as a guest at the marriage supper of the king’s son. In appearance it must have been conspicuous; but its value may not have been great. It was not the inherent worth of the material but the meaning of the symbol that bulked in the estimation of both the entertainer and his guests. It may from analogous cases be shown to be probable that a loyal heart could have easily extemporized the appropriate symbol out of any material that lay next  at hand. Where there is a will there is a way. Italian patriots at the crisis of their conflict with multiform oppression, and while the strong yoke of the despot was still upon their necks, contrived to display their darling tricolor by a seemingly accidental arrangement of red, white, and green among the vegetables which they exhibited in the market or carried to their homes. Nay more, the loyalty of a loyal man may in certain circumstances be more emphatically expressed by a rude, extemporaneous symbol, hastily constructed of intractable materials, than by the most elaborate and leisurely products of the needle or the loom. In such cases, the will of the man is everything; the wealth of the man nothing. The meanest rag suddenly thrown across the shoulders, arranged so as unequivocally to express the wearer’s faith may be a better evidence of loyalty than the richest silks of the East.48

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Let us now endeavour to appreciate and express the spiritual lesson. True to nature on the earthly sphere the parable represents the invitation, the assembling of the guests, and the entrance of the king, as three several and successive acts; but in the processes of the spiritual kingdom these three operations advance simultaneously. Some are in the act of hearing the invitation,—some are accepting it and going to the feast,—some are sitting at the  table under the inspection of the king,—all at the same moment. The process is like the habit of some species of fruit trees, on which flowers, green berries, and ripe fruit may be seen at the same time; the flowers of this season become the green berries of the next, and the green berries of this season become the ripened fruit of the next; and thus a constant succession is maintained. In like manner, as the generations pass, all the processes of Christ’s kingdom are simultaneously carried forward.

The guests who have come at the call of the servants, and taken their places at the table of the king, are those who hear the Gospel and fall in with its terms,—who adopt Christ’s name and enrol themselves among his people,—who hope in his mercy and commemorate his death. Herein they are broadly distinguished from those who made light of the message, and those who persecuted the messengers; but it is not yet certain whether they are forgiven and renewed. The profession which they have made distinguishes them from those Jews who refused the invitation, and those Gentiles who have not yet heard it; but among those who thus far comply with the call, another distinction must still be made. That goodly heap must be tossed up and winnowed yet again, that the chaff may be driven before the wind, and only the wheat gathered into the husbandman’s garner.

As in the parable, we are not informed what were the shape, size, colour, or material of the wedding garment, but only that it was necessary that every guest should wear it; so we do not find here any specific doctrinal instruction as to the method of redemption and the decisive characteristics of believers. We learn from the parable that every sinner must simply comply with God’s terms in order that he may be saved; and elsewhere in Scripture  we are fully taught what these terms are. An abundant answer to the question, “What must I do to be saved?” is recorded by the Spirit: the only point regarding it which this parable teaches, is that a sinner must abandon his own method, and fall in with Christ’s. The meaning of the man who sat at the feast without a wedding garment seems to have been, “I am my own master, and I shall work my own way to heaven:” the meaning of the men who meekly wore it was, “We are not our own; we are bought with a price; our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, but the Lord is our righteousness.”

Thus the lesson of the parable concentrates itself at last upon a point; but that point is the turning-point of life or death to men. Is any one disposed to complain that it stakes all upon an opinion? It does, and why not? One man’s opinion is that his own righteousness, especially when he has gotten time to improve it, may be safely presented in the judgment, and ought to satisfy the judge. Another man counts all his efforts vile, as lacking the vital element of love, and at God’s command places his trust wholly in Christ his substitute: the first does deepest dishonour, the second gives highest glory to God. A man’s opinion on a trifling subject, may be of trifling import; but a man’s opinion—his mind on how he may be just with God, is the greatest and most pregnant fact in creation. Opinion here is nothing less and nothing else than the attitude of a fallen creature towards his Maker and Judge: one opinion is the alienated heart of a rebel, another is the glad trustfulness of a dear child.

If the head of a Hebrew family, on the dread night of the Exodus, had said within himself, What shall I gain by sprinkling a lamb’s blood upon my door-posts? Or, if a conspicuous mark be necessary, may not the blood of  this animal suffice, that was killed for the use of my family in the ordinary way? If moved by some self-confident speculations regarding the constancy of nature, he had entered through the portals of the twilight into that awful night, he would have perished while his neighbours were preserved: not that a lamb’s blood had power to save, but because this man refused to take God’s way of being saved, and trusted in his own.49

The rest may be expressed in few words. He saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment. Here, first of all, it is not intimated that ordinarily there is only one hypocrite in a large company of professors: it is no part of the Lord’s design in this parable to tell us whether the false members of the visible Church are many or few. The single point on which the Master has fixed his eye is the certainty that the false will be detected: the parable does not reveal their numbers, but it assures us that none of them shall escape in the crowd. If the representation had been that a large proportion, say a half or three-fourths of the guests, had been detected at the table without the appropriate symbol of loving loyalty to the king, the omniscience of the visitor, and the certainty of the criminal’s doom would not have been so clearly and strongly expressed. That the king’s eye instantly  detects the undecorated guest, although he is only one in a multitude, is the most emphatic warning that could possibly be conveyed to the unbelieving. None who live without Christ in the world shall be permitted to glide into heaven with the crowd in the great day. The constancy of nature is sometimes wielded as a weapon of assault against revealed religion: it will one day strike a heavy blow on the other side. When a mixture of wheat and chaff is thrown up in the wind, the solid grains drop down on the spot, and the light chaff is driven away. You never expect, in such a case, that to please some fancy of yours, the solid grain will fly away on the wings of the blast, and the chaff drop down at your feet. The constancy of nature prevents. Well; by a law as constant and changeless—a law of the same God, reigning over the world of spirit, “the wicked is driven away in his wickedness, but the righteous hath hope in his death” (Prov. xiv. 32).

He was speechless. The judgment will be so conducted that the condemned will be compelled to own the justice of their sentence. Conscience, brought again into contact with God, will be awakened and restored to the exercise of its functions; like a mirror it will receive and repeat the decree of the Judge. Persecutors were wont to gag their victims while they burnt them; it was found necessary to put iron on the tongues of the witnesses, to make them silent while they suffered. No such clumsy device is needed in the assize which the righteous God will hold upon the world. Conscience swelling within will stifle the complaint of the guilty. The courage of the despiser will fail: the last poor comfort of the blasphemer, to hurl against the judgment seat the last despairing, defiant word, will be taken away. The history of the fact written by divine prescience before the time, makes no mention of what the  condemned will say. The record simply runs, “These shall go away into everlasting punishment.”

“Outer darkness:” tell us in detail what the condition the outcast will be, and what will be the constituents of their suffering? We cannot. Rome has impiously traded upon this weakness of humanity. She has parcelled out her purgatory, as we delineate this upper world on a map. This is the machinery whereby she is enabled to traffic in the souls of men. No; that condition lies in outer darkness; I cannot see through the veil, and tell the specific sufferings that lie beneath it. My Lord has told me that it is in outer darkness; but he has covered it from my sight. He hath done all things well. He often warns us that the wicked shall be cast away; but he never tells us the particulars of their torments. For teaching about this terror let me listen to his word; for safety from it, let me hide in his bosom.
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