CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Mark 12:39. Uppermost rooms at feasts.—Chief places in the suppers—the most important meal of the day, and the most fashionable entertainment.
Mark 12:40. Greater damnation.—A heavier sentence or doom than that awaiting other sinners. Christ always denounces the hypocrite as a villain of double dye.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Mark 12:38-40
(PARALLELS: Matthew 23:13-39; Luke 20:45-47.)
Character and conduct of scribes denounced.—
I. Their loud professions of sanctity and their ostentatious devotions are censured.—Long prayers may sometimes be the outcome of deep feeling and many needs; they may, as in the case of the scribes, be a cloak for sin. Long robes, like long prayers, may be a profession with which nothing spiritual corresponds.
II. Their love of pre-eminence is blamed.—Both in “Church and State” they loved to be supreme, and in all social relations they sought the honour which cometh from man.
III. Their cruel rapacity is held up to obloquy.—The bereaved and defenceless were their victims.
IV. Christ predicts the condemnation of such sinners, and at the same time puts the people on their guard against them.—Against the wrongs and cruelties, the assumptions and errors of such pretenders, the Good Shepherd would fain protect His feeble and defenceless sheep.—J. R. Thomson.
OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Mark 12:38-40. Needful cautions.—I. In that our Lord warns the common people, and His own disciples too, to beware of following the evil and corrupt life and example of the scribes, we may gather that there is much danger of infection to the people of God by the evil and corrupt lives of such as are called to be public pastors and teachers of the Church, when they do not live answerably to this calling, but loosely, profanely, wickedly.
2. Christians must take heed of being corrupted by the evil example and practice of such as are outwardly called to the ministerial office, and yet are men of corrupt and vicious life. Though they may and vicious life. Though they may and ought to hear the doctrine preached by such, and to embrace and follow it, so far as they preach the truth (Matthew 23:3), yet they must beware of following the evil example and practice of such pastors.—G. Petter.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 12
Mark 12:38-39. The Synagogue of Ambition.—There is the Synagogue of Ambition, whose bond of union is the lust of place and of power. Let Diotrephes be its representative, who “loved to have the pre-eminence,” and whom St. John censured for this ambitious temper, which tempted him, though nominally a member—perhaps a minister—of the early Church, violently to reject the best Christians. What are not men ready to do to gratify an inordinate and insatiate ambition! You know how the old Romans built their military roads. They projected them in a mathematical line, straight to the point of termination, and everything had to give way, there could be no deviation. And so on went the road, bridging rivers, filling up ravines, hewing down hills, levelling forests, cutting its way through every obstacle! Just so men set their lust upon self-emolument, some height of ambition, the attainment of place, rank, power, and hew their way toward it, not minding what gives way. No obstacle is insurmountable; health, happiness, home-comfort, honesty, integrity, conscience, the law of God, everything is sacrificed to the god of ambition.
Mark 12:40. A devourer of widows’ houses.—In the town of L—resided a prosperous and pious sadler. He had a wife, but no family; and at her entreaty he took into his home a boy, a relative of his own. The wife tended him, mothered him, taught him. He learned the business, and grew up to his manhood. Before that time the wife became a confirmed invalid from rheumatism, and soon lay helpless in one room, when her husband was stricken with acute disease and lay dying in another. Under solemn promise to the dying man, and with great shew of piety, the young man secured that all the property should be left to him, solemnly pledging himself to care lovingly for that invalid wife to her last day. No sooner was the husband laid in his grave than that young man turned the poor invalid out of house and home, and even compelled her to find money among her friends with which to purchase the very furniture she brought to the home at her marriage. And, broken-hearted, the poor woman soon died in a stranger’s shelter. They say that man is prosperous to-day. Who of us would change lots with that “devourer of widows’ houses”?
Prayers judged by weight, not length.—God takes not men’s prayers by tale, but by weight. He respecteth not the arithmetic of our prayers, how many there are; nor the rhetoric of our prayers, how eloquent they are; nor the geometry of our prayers, how long they are; nor the music of our prayers, the sweetness of our voice; nor the logic of our prayers, nor the method of them; but the divinity of our prayers is that which He so much esteemeth. He looketh not for any James with horny knees through assuidity in prayer; nor for any Bartholomew with a century of prayers for the morning, and as many for the evening; but St. Paul, his frequency of praying with fervency of spirit, without all tedious prolixities and vain babblings, this it is that God makes most account of. It is not a servant’s going to and fro, but the despatch of his business, that pleases his master. It is not the loudness of a preacher’s voice, but the holiness of the matter and the spirit of the preacher, that moves a wise and intelligent hearer. So here, not gifts, but graces in prayer, move the Lord. But these long prayers of the Pharisees were so much the worse because thereby they sought to entitle God to their sin, yea, they merely mocked Him, fleering in His face.—J. Trapp.