It has been observed that intense cold will produce very much the same effect as fervent heat. The ring of iron that surrounds a wheel, being exposed to keen frosts during a long winter's night, will produce a sensation and an effect on a sensitive skin very much the same as that the same ring will produce, if heated in the fire when the smith takes it from the furnace to hammer it on the anvil. Intense cold and intense heat thus often produce, in a manner that might be easily explained, the same effect. But it is true in the realm of mind and heart, as well as in the region of matter, that opposites do often produce similar effects. Hatred and love have this in common, that the object of love and the object of hatred are equally in the thoughts of the person loving or hating. He that loves would not forget the object of his love, and he that hates cannot; and so the same result appears from the keenest hatred and the warmest love. The text illustrates this thought. Two classes are here described as following the steps of the Saviour and constantly attending them: those that were attracted to Him because they liked to hear His word; and those who hated Him and His word, and yet, under the spell of an irresistible fascination, could not forsake Him. The Pharisees and scribes were as constant in their attendance as the publicans and sinners who gathered together to hear Him.
I. Why did the publicans and sinners draw near to Christ? (1) First of all and this is the simplest thought because He did not frown them away. He did not scorn them, as the Pharisees and scribes did. He was willing to let them come near. (2) The publicans and sinners came near to Christ, not simply because He was willing to allow them to approach Him, but because they heard from Him words which they heard from no one else. They heard Him and marvelled; for He spake as one having authority, and not as the scribes. As it was with Christ, so must it be with the Christian Church, if she would be faithful to her Lord. If we have reached the time when publicans and sinners are afraid to come near us, we have need to look to ourselves and ask the reason.
II. Notice the fascination connected with envy and hatred and opposition that is indicated in this second verse. The Pharisees and scribes, noticing how the publicans came round Christ, murmured. They thought themselves the best people of the day. A very strict sect were they, very observant of all ecclesiastical order, very careful in their observance of the prescribed feasts, very exact in tithing all their property, making their prayers and keeping the feasts very duly. These people thought it a very hard thing, that this man should allow these unlettered, ignorant people to come so close to him. They said, "This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them." You see there is an intensified charge. It was bad enough to receive them, but it was ten times worse to sit down and eat with them. "That miserable collector of taxes, that apostate Jew, that man who is a badge of submission to Rome that he should come and be received and allowed to sit down at the same table; and that poor woman surely if this man were a prophet he would know what manner of woman it is that is touching him for she is a sinner." That is the spirit of the Pharisees and the scribes. Let us search ourselves, for that spirit is not yet cast out of the Christian Church.
J. Edmund, Penny Pulpit,new series, No. 543.
The crowds which gathered about our Lord in the course of His mission were eminently representative of the various phases of Jewish life and thought. They consisted of men drawn from all ranks and classes of society. Women and children and stained outcasts are at the least equally among His intimates with social magnates and learned men. There is no discriminating Shibboleth to sift the miscellaneous gathering. No eclectic followers are permitted to check free access to the Master. There is no "fencing of the tables" at which He sits; no rebuff for ignorance; no rejection of humility and wretchedness. The net is cast abroad and its sweep is undiscriminating and universal. Of all these types of society, that of the Pharisee is perhaps the most marked, and the characteristics of it have acquired most popular recognition. We may recognise several distinct ideas associated with it.
I. One is that of exclusiveness or spiritual pride. If there is one great practical lesson, before all others running through the teaching of Christ, and imparting a principle of radical change into the scheme of life, it is summed in these words, "The last shall be first and the first last." This doctrine is the first step in the organisation, so to say, of the kingdom of heaven. This is the first in order of all those paradoxes which constitute the sum of Christianity. It was this which, in the first centuries of its spread, was such an outrage upon society at large, such an enigma to the dispassionate observer, and, as Gibbon has justly observed, was one great element of its triumph. The outcast was no longer an outcast. The despised and rejected of men has become the very pattern of the noblest life. And herein lay the essential antagonism to the spirit which possessed the Pharisee. Exclusion was his ideal. He clung to it as his heaven-conferred heritage. Christ broke down the walls of partition. The kingdom of heaven came not to a favoured few, not to the elect or the predestinate, but to all.
II. Another note or characteristic of the Pharisaic type is formalism. Formalism may be explained as an exaggerated stress laid upon ceremonial, upon formularies, and upon ordinances as the elevation, in short, of the mechanism of life in comparison with the life itself. It is not to be supposed that all, or indeed the greater part of those in whom this tendency exists, are making an ostentatious display of righteousness, or are assuming a disguise to cloke their hidden propensities, nor yet that they are themselves conscious of the unsubstantial nature of the manifestations of their religious life. There are but few, I suppose, who do not at times succumb, out of sheer weariness, to the temptation to rest content with seeming instead of being, to substitute a mechanical goodness for genuineness of life, a conventional orthodoxy for the unquiet pursuit of reality. There is a petty and stagnant life, the backwater, so to say, of the enlarged activities and sympathies of the world (a kind of village existence), in which, from the absence of all scale, unessential things assume a factitious importance, and the activity, for want of a nobler outlet, finds vent in trifles. That there is a compatibility of genuine piety, and the most narrow formalism, is a fact which meets us at every turn. But in proportion as knowledge becomes complete, as darkness melts into light, in such proportion are the means and outward expression of life lost sight of, swallowed up in the complete freedom of life itself. This was the lesson of St. Paul to the Judaizers of Galatia. It is not the sacrament, he says; it is not circumcision which availeth aught, it is faith; not the form, but the essence; not the letter that killeth, but the spirit that giveth life life and liberty, unity of life beneath the multiplicity of forms. And in the recognition of this lies the Christian brotherhood, the veritable communion of saints. If we learn to recognise that this communion is not bounded by the limits of a sect, nor by outward forms, nor by articles of belief, nor by modes of government, but that it is a unity underlying the fragments of Christendom, we shall have been purged of the leaven of the Pharisee, we shall have been made meet to sit down with Christ in the company of publicans and sinners.
C. H. V. Daniel, Oxford and Cambridge Journal,Feb. 26th, 1880.
References: Luke 15:1. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xiv., No. 809; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iii., p. 108; Ibid.,vol. xv., p. 52.Luke 15:1-2, Church of England Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 53.Luke 15:1-7. H. Calderwood, The Parables,p. 18. Luke 15:1-10. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 201; Ibid.,vol. xiii., p. 139; Preacher's Monthly,vol. i., p. 370; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. ii., p. 346. Luke 15:1-32. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 229. Luke 15:2. T. T. Carter, Sermons,p. 63; Homilist,vol. vi., p. 356; T. Birkett Dover, A Lent Manual,p. 44; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. iv., No. 219; vol. xi., No. 665; Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 239; G. Bainton, Ibid.,vol. xvi., p. 250; J. Baird, The Hallowing of Our Common Life,p. 77. Luke 15:3-7. A. B. Bruce, The Parabolic Teaching of Christ,p. 259. Luke 15:4. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. ii., p. 223.Luke 15:4; Luke 15:5. Ibid.,vol. iv., p. 225.Luke 15:4-6. Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Gospels and Acts,p. 101.Luke 15:4-7. Ibid., Sermons,vol. xxx., No. 1801; S. A. Brooke, Church of England Pulpit,vol. i., p. 345; Homilist,new series, vol. 1, p. 359. Luke 15:5. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year,vol. ii., p. 37. Luke 15:7. J. E. Vaux, Sermon Notes,3rd series, p. 8.