Christ's words of love the reproof of detraction.
St. James is amazed at it, as against nature and one of the deepest aggravations of the sinfulness of sinful speaking, that the tongue, which was made to bless God, a harp to make sweet melody to Him, should also utter evil against God's image man. Nature is true to itself; man alone is untrue. The fountain sends forth one and the same stream, sweet or bitter. Man's tongue alone would fain send forth both sweet praises and blessings to God, bitter and hard and unloving thoughts of men.
I. Evil speaking, which God condemns, involves much besides. There is malice in all evil-speaking; yet it is not only to speak with conscious malice. There is falsehood in most evil-speaking; yet it is not at all to speak with conscious falsehood. Pride, envy, swell it up, waft it on, spread it from mouth to mouth; these aggravate its guilt, but its guilt is not in them. It has its own guilt without them. Its guilt is, that in every form and shape and degree it is a sin against love; and a sin against love is a sin against that which Almighty God, in His very nature, is and loves. Evil speaking springs from a deep, hidden fountain of unlove, gushing forth from the corruption of the human heart.
II. In the day of judgment evil, censorious, unloving words will be of far different account than even good men think here. Other wrong deeds, at most, hurt others' souls only by evil example. Most other sins have something seemingly revolting in them. He who speaks an evil word may, in one word, as far as in him lies, slay countless souls. He sets rolling that which he cannot stop. You would count him a murderer who from a height let loose the fragment of a rock which should bound on and on, and fall among a multitude, although he knew not whom it would crush. Yet, even thus, the evil word let loose may slay love in the hearts of all who hear it, and on and on in all whom it reaches, and in whose hearts it finds consent.
III. The guilt of evil words is not with those only who speak them. Whoso listens to evil is an accomplice in it. Human law adjudges that the receiver is as guilty as the thief. If there were few receivers there would be few thieves. Evil-speaking has an evil conscience, which awakens as soon as it finds no response. "The ready hearer of detraction," says a father, "is the steel to the flint." Without him it is not drawn out. Since that is true, "Of every idle word thou shalt give account in the day of judgment," how much more of biting, unjust, detracting, unloving, untrue words, which most detracting words are!
E. B. Pusey, Parochial and Cathedral Sermons,p. 215.
Reference: Luke 4:23. L. D. Bevan, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 389.