11.02 Our Lord's treatment of sin
II. Our Lord’s Treatmentof Sin
It is characteristic of our Lord’s shall we dare to say? original and most searching treatment of sin, that in the parable before us He selects as the type of the man involved in this great mistake not the open and avowed sinner, not the thoughtless man of the world, but the conscientious and exemplary professor of religion. Here is a man, not only of conspicuous integrity and probity of life, but a man who gives more than ordinary signs of his devoutness. He fasts twice in the week; he gives a tenth part of all that he gets to God. And yet, this man carries his sin into his very religion. His religion not his mind or his flesh but his religion, is the sanctuary of his sin. The sin reveals itself in his very prayer. His prayer is an act of self-congratulation. The real tragedy of the man is that his plight is worse than that of the open and avowed sinner. For his sin is in his very soul. There is no hope for him; for the one great lie that utter untruthfulness to eternal facts which is involved in any sort of self-satisfaction is lodged in his inmost spirit.
We turn to the other the publican; a miserable object, doubtless, a member of a discredited class. We see him standing afar off, with downcast eyes, beating his breast, groaning in the bitterness of his soul, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” He is conscious that he wishes to be nearer to God, but that he is hopelessly far from Him. He knows that only the pitiful mercy of God can possibly reach and raise him. And yet, just because he is self-condemned and owns his utter dependence upon the mercy of God, for that reason, there is an infinity of hope for him. In his inmost spirit there lies the one great truth. He goes down to his house justified.
1 There is no question that this way of thinking and speaking is not congenial to our modern religious temperament. We do not naturally think and speak in a severe way about the fact of sin. It is related of that great Christian, Mr. Gladstone, that he was once asked what was the great want of modern life, and that he replied slowly and reflectively we can almost hear him saying it “Ah, a sense of sin; that is the great want of modern life.” When we turn back to the life and letters of those from whom we have inherited the great traditions alike of the Evangelical and of the Catholic Revival, we are startled, we are almost shocked, by the strength and severity of their language about sin. We feel that it must be exaggerated, it is so strangely unlike anything that we can bring ourselves in these days to use; and yet they had a depth, an earnestness, a steadfastness of character, a devotion to our Lord, a sense of the Divine Love, which are strangely lacking in us who speak so easily about our sins. The truth is that man’s conception of God is always coloured by his own habits of thought and feeling, and it may be that we have come to think of God as exhibiting upon a vast scale the sort of easy compassionate indulgence which we claim for ourselves and extend to others. We have isolated and exaggerated the great truth of the Fatherhood of God, robbed it of its strength and power, and concentrated ourselves only upon what is easy and comfortable to us in the thought. We have turned away, by a sort of instinct, from all that makes the New Testament what it is stern, searching, and severe.
TAGS: [Parables]