1187-52 164. 15. 19-31 189-14 5 their painful shallowness and perversity, in comparison with what they would have been had they lived faithful to the OT teaching, need not here be described. In vv.17-9 Jesus has explained the relation of His Gospel norm to that of the Law and the Prophets. In v.”° He has contrasted His ideal standard of life with that of the Pharisees. And now in the verses which follow, vv.?!-“*, He illustrates how both the OT and the Pharisaic norms fall short of that Divine ideal for men which He has come to estab- lish in the world. As generally enumerated, these illustrations are six in number, concerning: (1) anger, vv.71-6 ; (2) social purity, vv.2"-* ; (3) divorce, vy.*l- 8; (4) oaths, vv.-87; (5) retaliation, vv%*-# ; (6) love for all, vv.**-*8. They illuminate the field of social relations between men by showing what principles are to determine their feelings and their conduct towards one another. These principles we may for convenience designate as the principle of inner righteousness, the principle of unselfishness and forgiveness, and the principle of universal love; although the first comprises really the second and third also.
d. Inner Righteousness.—Mt 57-87 (cf. Lk 1258: %9 1618), The essential difference between the OT system and the Gospel is that between an external code forced upon one from without and an internal life which first develops character and then mani- fests itself in conduct. The OT Law told what a man must do and must not do, mainly the latter ; although it contemplated right motives, it did not generally formulate them or effect them. A man might ‘keep all the commandments from his youth up,’ and yet lack some essential element of righteousness (Mk 1017-2), If it is true that for the childhood of the race an external system of conduct is alone suitable and possible, if a child must be dealt with on the basis of precepts until knowledge, judgment, and conscience qualify him for a basis of principles, the reason for the radical difference between the OT and the NT becomes clear: they belong to different stages of human development. And St. Paul isright in saying that ‘when the fulness of time came, God sent forth his Son’ (Gal 44), The OT was really and pro- perly superseded by the Gospel, which enjoined life by principle, internal as well as external righteousness, true character as well as good con- duct, right thinking and right feeling as the source of all that one is and does.
Consequently, Jesus in His teaching, recorded in these vv.7-*8, does not need to distinguish be- tween the OT and the scribal interpretation or elaboration of it, because His teaching supersedes both * and furnishes the one true and sufficient guide to life. The scribes and Pharisees, to be sure, misunderstood the Law and neglected the Prophets, whereby their religious ideas and prac- tices fell far short of the OT standard. Sometimes Jesus tried to make His contemporaries realize this; cf. Mt 15°-°, Jn 5%. But Jesus did not re- enact the Hebrew Bible, even though it was better than Pharisaism. It was His mission to perfect the Law and the Prophets. He therefore let the OT stand as a monument of previous Divine revelation and earlier human development, giving in its stead
* This is the only possible view, notwithstanding Tholuck’s elaborate argument, Bergrede5, pp. 156-164 [Eng. tr. pp. 154- 159], to prove that Jesus did not offer any ‘correction of the Mosaic Law,’ as He taught only that ‘the righteousness of His disciples must go beyond—not the Mosaic Law, but the legal religion of its representatives’ (his italics). That the right- eousness of His disciples must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus has distinctly said in Mt 520; but that their righteousness need not exceed that commanded by the Mosaic Law, is a statement which Jesus is not reported to have made. Nor could He have consistently so taught, since He came to fulfil the OT, not by re-enacting it but by perfecting it—which is Tholuck’s own view when he is inter- preting Mt 517,
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SERMON ON THE MOUNT
a fuller and better revelation adapted to a higher stage of the world’s progress. Now and then Jesus had occasion to attest the absolute truth and permanent value of much which the OT con- tained ; but these things He regarded as true and valuable, not because He found them in the OT, but because He knew of Himself that they were so. He set up an ideal of religious belief and conduct which was not put together out of the OT (however many resemblances there may have been), or dependent upon the OT for its truth and authority, but was His own creation, resting on the separate foundation of His own immediate perception of Divine truth and human duty. Jesus was not a mere restorer of a former revelation, but_a new authority in the field of religion and ethics, the bearer of a new revelation of God to men. This is the explanation of His words, ‘But I say unto you’ (vv.?% 2 3284. 39. 44) And this is what the people recognized when they testified that ‘he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes’ (Mt 7”).
Jesus’ ideal of human brotherhood is first illus- trated by an exposition of the principle which lay behind the Sixth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ In this Commandment the act of murder was explicitly forbidden, and the-Jews conscienti- ously abstained from murder ; they kept the letter of the precept. But there existed also the spirit of the Commandment, the principle on which it was founded, that brethren should not hate one another ; for it was out of hatred that murder came. Since the Commandment did not explicitly forbid hatred, men had allowed themselves to cherish anger, hatred, and contempt against others without regarding themselves as disobedient to the Law. Jesus set over against this notion the emphatic teaching that all feelings of anger and hate are in themselves sinful, whether or not they take effect in acts of violence ; they fall under the condemnation and punishment of God, since His Kingdom cannot fully come until all men love one another.* And for that reason He adds in vv.2 24 that no act of worship, however sacred (such as