CRITICAL NOTES
Romans 12:12. Patient in tribulation.—θλίψις, a pressing together, pressure, from θλίβω, to press. So in Mark 3:9, “lest they should throng Him.”
Romans 12:13.—Partaking of your good things with the needy. You give money; they give faith in God. Hospitality essential in those times to the spread of Christianity.
Romans 12:16.—Mutually mind the same thing. Let there be unity of sentiment. Do not affect the high things of this world. Let not your wisdom be the vain fancy of self-conceit.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Romans 12:13-16
Christian communism and not monastic separation.—The monastic idea might have in it a germ of goodness; but there was in it a selfish spirit going contrary to the divine order, and tending to the dwarfing of human nature. Monastic institutions breed corruption. However pure and well-meaning at first, they decline, and are likely to become hotbeds of immorality. Surely man was not made to be a monk. Alone, man perishes. If he do not perish physically, he perishes intellectually and morally. Monasteries can never produce the highest type of men. If there have been great men in monasteries—and we must admit their presence—the greatness arose not by virtue of the system. If the countenance be an iudex of the man, then the pictures of monks do not speak favourably of the monastic institution as a school for the development of manhood. By separation we are belittled; by true communism we are enlarged. God has set us in families, and there we have a communistic idea. The tribe is an enlarged family; the Church is a divine family; the Church of the firstborn in heaven is a vast family. In the family and in the Church there may be differences, but there should be oneness. Sympathy, feeling together with, binds the family. This should unite the Church; this should bless and glorify the world.
I. Christian communism expresses itself in benevolent deeds.—Christian communism does not declare that there is to be no individual or separate right in property. The Christian Church in its youthful ardour tried the principle and proved it a failure, and did not repeat the experiment. St. Peter did not advocate common rights. Whilst it remained, was it not their own? After it was sold, was it not in their own power? Christian communism means, as we understand it, that one brother is not to spend money in useless extravagance while other brethren are dying of starvation. Can that man be called a Christian who pampers his dogs and his horses, who creates for himself a thousand unnecessary wants, while Lazarus, for whom Christ died, for whom a glorious heaven waits, lies at the gate, full of sores, unfed, untended, and unhoused? The man who does not want to do good can easily raise objections. He can say, If I distribute to the necessity of saints, I may encourage imposture, I may pauperise and prevent the working of self-help. Eleemosynary aid increases the number of voluntary paupers, and is harmful to society. But the man who sincerely desires to be helpful will not create objections. He will find out the saints and minister to their necessities. If the saint turn out a sinner, the benevolent man may comfort himself with the thought that the sinner helped may feel that there is some good in the world. Sometimes we read thrilling tales of the fabulous wealth made by beggars and impostors. Would the writers of those tales exchange places even if the impostors’ proceedings were legitimate? Is the begging profession likely to become overcrowded? We want more practicalness, less selfishness, and more benevolence. “Distributing to the necessities of saints, given to hospitality,” contains a lesson which modern Christianised society has not properly learnt. In connection with the precept let us ask, Is it true that so much as a thousand pounds has been paid for flowers for one night’s entertainment at the houses of certain leaders of London society? Can it be true that a dinner-party given by an American millionairess in London cost no less than four thousand five hundred pounds? Can it be true that, at the same time, thousands upon thousands in London are pinched and drag on a miserable existence? Is it a probable story that the owner of an estate derived an annual income of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds from the property, and had not time to consider the claims of those who helped to make the wealth and who sought redress? The claimants might be mistaken; their course might be wrong; some of their proceedings excite loathing rather than compassion. But surely there might have been consideration. In the interests of humanity we may hope that the story is a fiction. As we look upon starving women and children we may well ask, As for these poor sheep, what have they done? Surely the children are God’s saints, and their necessities ought to be relieved. Recent commotions teach us one sad lesson at least, and it is that Christianity has not leavened the whole of society.
II. Christian communism has a hard lesson for the oppressed.—“Bless them which persecute you; bless, and curse not.” These words lose their primitive significance. The religious persecutor is now harmless; so that we may be allowed to say, No need for soldiers and policemen if this precept were obeyed. No good end is served by cursing persecutors, by maiming overlookers, by burning property. The man who curses does himself and his cause great damage. If agitation be needful, the ruthless destruction of property. can serve no good end. If agitation be needful, why can it not be conducted on peaceful lines? The primitive Church acted on the principle of blessing the persecutors, and it became victorious.
III. Christian communism teaches sympathetic projection.—“Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” The man who has true sympathy throws himself into the position of others. He projects himself, or part of himself, into the position of the other self. This state is reached by the few, for our own sorrows are greater than the sorrows of others. Tears flow freely at the graveside of our loved ones. How often we can talk, and even laugh, as we follow other loved ones to the burial! Poetry can touch us as it sings “Somebody’s darling lies there”; but how callous we often are as some-body’s darling, not being our darling, is being let down into the tomb! If we cannot weep with the weepers, we often find it more difficult to laugh with the laughers. “Rejoice with them that do rejoice.” Rejoice that my defeat leads to the victory of somebody else. I have tried for years to produce a good painting, to write a taking book, to compose popular sermons. I have failed; and can I rejoice when I learn that my friend has a painting hung in the gallery, or that the publishers have paid him handsomely for his work, or that the crowds are listening to his eloquence every Sunday? “Rejoice with them that do rejoice.” I can laugh with the laughers, if the laughter have no reflection on my failure; I can rejoice with the joyful, if there be no reason for the working of envy. Thus I often find it easier to rejoice with the joyful who live ten miles away than to rejoice with the joyful who is my next-door neighbour. Laughter is contagious. Alas that sincere rejoicing with others is not always contagious! We can only sincerely “rejoice with those that do rejoice” as we are “of the same mind one toward another.” Mind-sameness is not intellectual monotony. “The same mind” does not preclude the idea of different mental proclivities. The working man, the business man, the professional man, the scientific man, may all “be of the same mind one toward another.” “The same mind” refers to the emotional rather than the intellectual side of man’s nature. The same mind pervading the community would produce glorious harmony; the same mind stretching through all ranks and classes of men would bind all together.
IV. Christian communism looks downward.—“Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate.” The communism of the world is the opposite of this. It minds high things if they can be made subservient to its own enrichment. The man of low estate becomes a communist, a socialist, a member of the Fabian Society. Then he sets to work to level down the high things, and to level up with those high things himself, a man of low estate. If St. Paul were to rise from the dead, and were to say in a London drawing-room, where the crush is great to get in touch with the high things of modern society, “Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate,” he would be regarded as a very objectionable character; and if he cared, would pass a very unpleasant evening, if indeed no worse fate were awarded him “Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate.” Humanity’s high things are often enough divinity’s low things. Men of low estate were the Pauls and the Peters; men of high things were the wretched Neros. Time has strange reversals; and what is great and noble in our time may be little and ignoble in some after-time. What a conclusion! “Be not wise in your own conceits.” It is good to be wise; it is bad to be conceited. The truly wise will consider the position and claims of others. The self-conceited and self-opinionated see little beyond their own small spheres. These are the people to be shut up in monastic seclusion.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 12:16-17
Our duty to equals.—Hooker’s great principle may perhaps be applied to the moral as well as the ceremonial question—that the omission of a point in Scripture does not decide against it, but only throws us upon the law of reason in the matter. We cannot judge from the comparative omission of this or that class of duties in Scripture, that therefore anything is decided as to its importance. Thus the New Testament says comparatively little about duties to equals, and enlarges upon duties to inferiors. But we may not infer from this that duties to equals do not rank as high and are not as trying a class of duties as those to inferiors or to sufferers. What may be called the condescending life was comparatively a new branch of morals; it therefore demanded a prominent place. This is not a subject altogether without a special interest in the present period of our Church, during which this branch of Christian work has been so largely developed.… It is impossible not to see that numbers who never would have been happy in any other way have been made happy and satisfied by the habitual exercise of compassion.… Montaigne says there is a spice of cruelty in compassion, because it requires pain to gratify its own special nature. There being, however, this peculiar affection in us, which was obviously of such immense practical power for dealing with this world as we find it, … how was it that the old world so entirely over-looked this wonderful practical instrument?… And we may remark how paganism has blunted and suppressed even the natural virtues.… Many have fled from the bitterness of active life to seek repose in the ministration to inferiors. They have fled to the realm of compassion for peace. A great man gone is contemplated in all the softening light of pity, which, as we are told, is akin to love. And yet we know if the man were to rise to life again, immediately every old jar would come back. Life would rob him at once of the refining hue; it would lower; it would vulgarise again. The condescending life is a devoted life, but it is at the same time a protected life. The hardest trial of humility must not be towards a person to whom you are superior, but towards a person with whom you are on equal footing of competition. Generosity is more tried by an equal than by an inferior. To leave the realm of compassion for that of equality is to leave the realm of peace for that of war. Compassion is a state of peace.—Mozley.