14And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Sond from the Father, full of grace and truth. 15(John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) 16For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.e17For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18No one has ever seen God; the only God,f who is at the Father’s side,g he has made him known.
(44) The Moral Law [continuing on the heels of the extended portions posted above.]
Of what use then is the law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth,–to waken in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence, namely, of God in us, requires of us,–to let us know, in part by failure, that the purest effort of will of which we are capable cannot lift us up even to the abstaining from wrong to our neighbour. What man, for instance, who loves not his neighbour and yet wishes to keep the law, will dare be confident that never by word, look, tone, gesture, silence, will he bear false witness against that neighbour? What man can judge his neighbour aright save him whose love makes him refuse to judge him? Therefore are we told to love, and not judge. It is the sole justice of which we are capable, and that perfected will comprise all justice. Nay more, to refuse our neighbour love, is to do him the greatest wrong. But of this afterwards. In order to fulfil the commonest law, I repeat, we must rise into a loftier region altogether, a region that is above law, because it is spirit and life and makes the law: in order to keep the law towards our neighbour, we must love our neighbour. We are not made for law, but for grace–or for faith, to use another word so much misused. We are made on too large a scale altogether to have any pure relation to mere justice, if indeed we can say there is such a thing. It is but an abstract idea which, in reality, will not be abstracted. The law comes to make us long for the needful grace,–that is, for the divine condition, in which love is all, for God is Love.
This already is much longer than the shorter paragraph Lewis excerpted, and yet still doesn’t include some paragraphs after that will bring us to tomorrow’s quote. Lewis must have been desperate to keep his short book from becoming a volume and so excercised extreme selectivity. It must have agonized him, because this sermon is full of so much more.
I wonder if those who show the least grace toward those who do not believe as they do tend to be those who formerly did not believe themselves? I find ex smokers show the least empathy for those still smoking. I have no tolerance for second hand smoke but that doesn’t keep me from understanding the physical unease of the deprived smoker as well as the ever greater public condemnation they receive.
That seems likely as a part of human nature. I bet we have less sympathy in any area where we either were or deemed ourselves successful. Teachers are (or should be) routinely aware of this. The particular math concept seems blazingly obvious to me who’s rehearsed and taught it many years over, so why can’t the student in front of me just see it?! Even if I did struggle the same as them on my first several exposures to a challenge, I tend to forget my struggles and only dwell on my eventual successes. And my sympathy for the strugglers tends to dry up if I don’t remind myself of this.
In order to fulfil the commonest law, I repeat, we must rise into a loftier region altogether, a region that is above law, because it is spirit and life and makes the law…
And since I inadverdantly already included the above in yesterdays extended inclusion, I’ll just jump to the next one here as well.
(46) Upward toward the Center
“But how,” says a man, who is willing to recognize the universal neighbourhead, but finds himself unable to fulfil the bare law towards the woman even whom he loves best,–“How am I then to rise into that higher region, that empyrean of love?” And, beginning straightway to try to love his neighbour, he finds that the empyrean of which he spoke is no more to be reached in itself than the law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot keep the law without first rising into the love of his neighbour, so he cannot love his neighbour without first rising higher still. The whole system of the universe works upon this law–the driving of things upward towards the centre. The man who will love his neighbour can do so by no immediately operative exercise of the will. It is the man fulfilled of God from whom he came and by whom he is, who alone can as himself love his neighbour who came from God too and is by God too. The mystery of individuality and consequent relation is deep as the beginnings of humanity, and the questions thence arising can be solved only by him who has, practically, at least, solved the holy necessities resulting from his origin. In God alone can man meet man. In him alone the converging lines of existence touch and cross not. When the mind of Christ, the life of the Head, courses through that atom which the man is of the slowly revivifying body, when he is alive too, then the love of the brothers is there as conscious life. From Christ through the neighbours comes the life that makes him a part of the body.
It is possible to love our neighbour as ourselves. Our Lord never spoke hyperbolically, …
A question about loving a Pharisee or a Sadducee: Jesus à la the Good Samaritan (or the Good Samaritan à la Jesus ; - ) would have had empathy for, helped and loved a waylaid one along the dangerous highway even knowing what they were, but would he have been ‘loving’ by giving him a platform, allowing him on the stage, so to speak, in effect endorsing him?
That brings up an interesting point, Dale. So if we had asked Jesus to continue that story of the Good Samaritan, and speak of how the rescuer and the rescued might have continued (or not) to relate to each other weeks or years later, after the whole tragedy is but a memory; let’s say the Jewish fellow remains at odds with his Samaritan neighbors - except perhaps his “one friend” that had rescued him. How do you see that relationship developing?
If some crisis in his life and consequent aid from Jesus dissolved his resolute opposition to Jesus and spiritual matters, that’s one thing, but we know how it turned out when those whose hearts weren’t similarly softened and remained adamantly and explicitly opposed, don’t we.
Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can he given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons are always from above downwards
… and @jpm , as may touch upon a post you made several days ago, I’ll also paste below the extended paragraphs that include the above snippet from Lewis. I think it all maybe begins to address some of what you brought up?
But while it is true that only when a man loves God with all his heart, will he love his neighbour as himself, yet there are mingled processes in the attainment of this final result. Let us try to aid such operation of truth by looking farther. Let us suppose that the man who believes our Lord both meant what he said, and knew the truth of the matter, proceeds to endeavour obedience in this of loving his neighbour as himself. He begins to think about his neighbours generally, and he tries to feel love towards them. He finds at once that they begin to classify themselves. With some he feels no difficulty, for he loves them already, not indeed because they are , but because they have, by friendly qualities, by showing themselves lovable, that is loving, already, moved his feelings as the wind moves the waters, that is without any self-generated action on his part. And he feels that this is nothing much to the point; though, of course, he would be farther from the desired end if he had none such to love, and farther still if he loved none such. He recalls the words of our Lord, “If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?” and his mind fixes upon–let us say–one of a second class, and he tries to love him. The man is no enemy–we have not come to that class of neighbours yet–but he is dull, uninteresting–in a negative way, he thinks, unlovable. What is he to do with him? With all his effort, he finds the goal as far off as ever.
Naturally, in his failure, the question arises, “Is it my duty to love him who is unlovable?”
Certainly not, if he is unlovable. But that is a begging of the question.
Thereupon the man falls back on the primary foundation of things, and asks–
“How, then, is the man to be loved by me? Why should I love my neighbour as myself?”
We must not answer “Because the Lord says so.” It is because the Lord says so that the man is inquiring after some help to obey. No man can love his neighbour merely because the Lord says so. The Lord says so because it is right and necessary and natural, and the man wants to feel it thus right and necessary and natural. Although the Lord would be pleased with any man for doing a thing because he said it, he would show his pleasure by making the man more and more dissatisfied until he knew why the Lord had said it. He would make him see that he could not in the deepest sense–in the way the Lord loves–obey any command until he saw the reasonableness of it. Observe I do not say the man ought to put off obeying the command until he see its reasonableness: that is another thing quite, and does not lie in the scope of my present supposition. It is a beautiful thing to obey the rightful source of a command: it is a more beautiful thing to worship the radiant source of our light, and it is for the sake of obedient vision that our Lord commands us. For then our heart meets his: we see God.
I’m sorry-there are some I’ve not commented on till now. Thank you for these posts!
Is MacDonald being hyperbolic in saying that Jesus never spoke hyperbolically ?
I’ve been thinking on the reasons for love. We’re interesting creatures–we need a rule, it seems, to love unselfishly. We commit to love in marriage–I remember a friend admitting that they loved their spouse because they promised. As a parent, I realize more that I love my children because it is right, and that they won’t fulfil my desires as a child (nor I theirs as a parent). A speaker I once listened to talked about the various levels of happiness–first level was food; second, for the sake of a neighbor; and so on, till we learned more to do something like delighting in what God delights in. Lewis talked in “Surprised by Joy” of how the more he sought for joy in selfish pleasures, the more he lost it–the “Northernness” was an example. It was, I think, by refocusing on God that he found it more. My children and I are happier when we don’t expect fulfillment, and do only the duty we were asked to do. When we realize life is tough, it’s when we find gratefulness for what we have. It’s among the poorest people we often find the happiest.
Here’s a quote from MacDonald that has come back to me on and off, over the years
A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician.
Thank you for these meditations. I’m still struggling through them, and wanting to make sure I understand his thoughts.
I wondered about that too! Because if speaking of people having logs in their eyes or speaking of the unforgiving servant as owing their master what (I seem to remember somebody having calculated) would have been the equivalent of millions of today’s dollars (or was it even billions!) - if none of that counts as using hyperbole, than I’m not sure what could!
There is also the camel needing to go through the eye of a needle …I’ve heard people come up with all sorts of ‘explanations’ of this (like …there was this gate at Jerusalem called ‘the needle’) - or rather farfetched stuff, which I think is no more than a silly attempt to ‘rescue’ some expression from needing to be considered as hyperbole [or even worse: an attempt to de-fang and domesticate what Jesus intended to be a dangerously important warning for us]; but on the whole, extreme sayings seem to be Jesus’ motif; so my thought is, he meant it to sound as extreme as it sounds, and we’d better just attend to the reason why! --that’s what I think would characterize MacDonald’s attitude here.
Whenever the Lord uses extreme language, it much mean because the thing he wishes us to begin to see must itself be … extreme … probably in the extremest sense possible! So while it is silly to literally think of a log in someone’s eye, it isn’t at all silly to think that perhaps our own sin really is that extreme as we nitpick at a brother’s sin. So … maybe hyperbole in one sense, but perhaps not at all hyperbole in terms of Jesus’ intended point of focus. I mean … we really do owe God ridiculously more than could ever be paid in money, right - so if anything, one could even claim the ‘millions of dollars’ is really an understatement.
It seems to me that I’ve read something from MacDonald in other contexts about hyperbole, but I can’t recall where those were or what he said.
I suspect he would say the Lord was hyperbolic whenever he needed to be in order to help people understand what they need to see. Here might be an interesting contrast to think about: Perhaps where the parables were meant to at least partially hide or obscure, hyperbole (if it is indeed that) is meant to make something over-the-top-blindingly-obvious. A kind of ‘shouting’ as it were: “Hey - if you folks get nothing else from what I’m saying, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE at least just understand this!”
One of the [many] pitfalls of our device-connected world that so many of us are immersed in is that we become enculturated to a mental diet of the most scintillatingly captivating entertainment; we expect nothing less than stellar mental stimulation and education from material that, after all, has risen to the top of favorite public attention amongst the avalanche of competition. Any meme we see is immediately catchy and witty - anything less or that has any flaw to speak of, immediately is classified as ‘drivel’.
I’m glad that my own marriage and formidable ‘kid-raising’ years happened prior to much of these present obsessions of ours … because … pity the newly marrieds today who must inevitably discover they are married to … a real person. And any kids they have will end up being … real kids. Meaning, you’re going to have to learn how to (at the very least - occassionally!) be bored with each other, how to accept that most of the words uttered in your household will not be the scripted, witty brilliance that we’ve mistaken for our entertainment birthright.
What I hear MacDonald offering as a ‘beyond this’ kind of thought, though; is that love is not (and never in its true form was) a kind of drudgery. The ‘duty’ of it may be the only skeleton there during long seasons - yes. But if it is to be love as God intends and created, it will not remain that way, and we can have a very active role in helping it not remain that way; by at least working toward making ourselves more loveable, and even helping others too in that same quest. There can be real and healthy flesh on that skeleton of duty. When we finally see it all as God sees it, there will no longer be any thought of duty; not because duty is gone, but because we have infinitely superseded and surpassed it.
This is so often true among those who ardently want to love and serve God by bringing others to do the same. From the outside it seems as if dishing out God’s word in rebuke evokes in the rebuker the indignation he imagines to be God’s attitude toward any who do not recognize his rightful authority. But the pettiness of insisting on respect for the manner in which one attempts to convey God’s word is all that the hearer in the encounter receives. The rebuker may inject that at least he has done his best to do God’s will but there comes a point when it may be better to assess how adequate that best has been. If the one who rebukes does so only from duty and respects God primarily out of fear, it is doubtful he is ready to convey the love God offers - probably because he himself has not been able to properly receive it.
Dang I may have jumped in too soon just as the exchange between you and Randy got good. But now I have Santa duties to perform beginning in the kitchen. Enjoy the day!
No fears of interrupting anything good, Mark! You’re part of what makes exchanges here good in the first place! Happy Santa duties.
I think this is an important insight. Nobody wants any received love to come from a sense of duty alone. And in fact we are rather sensitive about being the recipients of such ‘love’ - and rightly so. How impoverished must any believer’s thoughts of God be that such highest of loves - the source of Love itself, could be thought to be reduced to that.
Just now ran across these lines from the book “The Baron’s Apprenticeship” that you put me on to, Randy!
Instead of blaming as a matter of course the person who does not believe in a God, we should think first whether his notional God is a God that ought, or a God that ought not to be believed in. Perhaps he only is to be blamed who, by inattention to duty, has become less able to believe in a God than he was once: because he did not obey the true voice, whencesoever it came, God may have to let him taste what it would be to have no God. For aught I know, a man may have been born of so many generations of unbelief, that now, at this moment, he cannot believe; that now, at this moment, he has no notion of a God at all, and cannot care whether there be a God or not; but he can mind what he knows he ought to mind. That will, that alone can clear the moral atomosphere, and make it possible for the true idea of a God to be born into it.
The above passage was all in reference to the main story character who has grown up with mainly antagonistic thoughts toward his theistically religious culture because of his perceptions of the people in his community and how he saw them representing such a God (also through his step dad’s non-believing eyes). And this character is falling in love with a woman for the first time - though he’s only just coming into contact with this new-for-him thing called ‘love’.
I like this … pretty much typical Macdonald…that doing your duty has the godly, not just common, grace of communing with God. He also notes that God is not removed by some gnostic knowledge, but meets us where we are. In other portions of the book, he notes that the protagonist Richard can be more noble in terms of duty and love to fellow man than many who take on God’s label. Thanks