Matthew 25:24

Matthew 25:24

Sordid Knowledge.

I. These are very remarkable words. Observe how positively the man speaks: "I knew thee that thou art an hard man." He is quite sure of it, and has no fear of being contradicted even when advancing the plea to his lord himself. Indeed it is his excuse, his hope of acquittal. He trusts to it for safety, so sure is he of his ground. And, indeed, we may easily see, even from the parable itself, much grounds for the charge. Why should the man toil and work with money which was not his own, and vex himself with anxious cares at a master's command? Was not the command hard from this point of view. Might he not well say "I knew thee that thou art an hard man," as day by day he worked and was weary, and faint and full of care? The very force of his answer as a warning seems to lie in the truth of this low reasoning as far as it went. Let the man forget his duty as a slave trusted by his absent master, and start with this mean low opinion, and every after-step would be most logically convincing. But observe, the work though done at his master's command would have been done for himself. His great generous lord entrusted his servants with what seemed to be work for him, but was, indeed, a training in honour and power for them. The niggard spirit, with its low logic could not understand that; but could see clearly the hardships and pain of the work, and refused to work and so lost his own gains, the glorious gains that might have been his.

II. Yet he ought to have done his master's work at all events. The right and wrong of it was not his business. The man was a slave, his business was to obey, and his lord answered him on his own grounds. He was bound to obey as a slave and justly condemned for not doing so. Once begin in a wrong spirit, and every step you take will bring you a more and more certain knowledge that your low, mean thoughts are right. No power of argument could make people walking in a mist believe in a bright sun overhead; they must get upon higher ground to feel it; every step below would but confirm their cold knowledge. So it is with our spirits; we must rise into a higher world of love and honour and faith, living with Christ, looking to His glorious example, following Him in trustful love. Then we shall learn the happiness of His commands; then we shall feel that it is for our own sakes that they are given to enrich and ennoble us.

E. Thring, Uppingham Sermons,vol. i., p. 1.

Of all the powers of which men easily think that they are wholly or almost destitute, and so from whose exercise they think themselves excused, the one most commonly alleged, I think, is the religious power, the whole spiritual faculty in general. The reason why many people are not Christians is that they misrepresent Christianity to themselves, that they have not conceived its simplicity. Am I right when I believe that there is in every man the power to take it in this simplicity, and make it his new life? I do believe so, fully, and for various reasons.

I. The first reason of all is one that is no reason except to him who is already a believer, but surely to him it must come very strongly. It does seem to me that no man can really seem to himself to be living a spiritual life, and not hold with all his heart as a possibility, and long to see realised as a fact, the spiritual life in every soul of every son of man. If I truly thought that there was any one man who really was, as so many men have told me that they were, incapable of spirituality, I should lose my whole faith in the capacity of spirituality in any man.

II. And then, another reason why we have a right to believe that there is in every man a capacity for fundamental and essential Christianity, lies in the fact that the activities of such a Christianity really demand only those powers which in ordinary human life we all hold to be absolutely universal.

III. If thus the spiritual life is something not strange in its essence, but familiar; if its working force consists of the simplest and most fundamental of the powers of humanity brought into contact with, and filled full of, a Divine influence, then another thing which we see continually is not strange. There are certain experiences in every human life which have their power just in this, that they break through the elaborate surface, and get down to the simplest thoughts and emotions of the human heart. And if that heart, laid open, is inevitably, universally spiritual, what does it prove but this, that when the simplest base of any man's life is reached, when the ground above it is torn off by an earthquake, or melted bare by the sunshine of happiness, there is the capacity of spirituality, the soil in which the spiritual seed must grow?

IV. When Jesus Christ, the typal man, appeared, He was not only one who hungered and thirsted, who loved and hated, who dreaded and hoped, who suffered and enjoyed, but He was one whose nature leaped beyond the mere material and grasped the spiritual. To believe in the Incarnation, really to understand Christ, and yet to think that we or any other men in all the world are essentially incapable of spiritual living, is an impossibility.

Phillips Brooks, Sermons,p. 138.

References: Matthew 25:24; Matthew 25:25. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,6th series, p. 177; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times,"vol. ii., p. 181.Matthew 25:28. Preacher's Monthly,vol. viii., p. 107.