The passage: Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy. Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you for my sake; rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for your reward in heaven is great, since so they persecuted the prophets before you. (Matthew v. 7, 10, 11, 12.)
Mercy cannot get in where mercy does not go out; the outgoing makes way for the incoming. God takes humanity’s part against the man, who must treat others as he would have God treat him. The Lord says that if we forgive men their trespasses our heavenly father will forgive ours, and if we do not, he will not. In the prophecy of the Son of man’s judgment he represents himself as saying that what we have done to the least of his brethren, we have done to him.
But the demand for mercy is far less for the sake of the man who needs mercy than of the man who must show it: it matters little whether his neighbour is merciful to him, but it is life or death whether he is merciful to his neighbour. The greatest mercy to a man is to make him merciful, so if he will not be, God’s mercy must compel him. In the parable of the king taking account of his servants, the unmerciful debtor is delivered to the tormentors until he pays all he owes. The king had forgiven him, but since he would not pass the forgiveness on to his neighbour, the only way to repay in kind, the king withdraws it. If we do not forgive men, our trespasses remain; for how can God send away a sin that a man insists on keeping? God is merciful, and we must be: there is no blessedness except in being like God, and it would be unmerciful to leave us unmerciful. The reward of the merciful is that by their mercy they become able to receive the mercy of God, indeed God himself, who is Mercy.
To draw men to taste and see, the Lord links reward with righteousness. He would have men love righteousness, but how can they without knowing it, or keep loving it without growing knowledge of it? To draw them toward it, and to encourage them against the disappointments of endeavour, he tells them simply that in doing it there is great reward. No one should start back at this, saying virtue is its own reward: virtue is a reward, and no other is worth mentioning beside it. A man may mistake the promised reward, but he must still have it or perish. Who will feel deceived by overfulfilment? Would a parent deceive his child by saying, “You will have a great reward if you learn Greek,” foreseeing the boy’s delight in Homer and Plato, now a valueless waste to him? When the reward comes, will the youth feel aggrieved that it is Greek and not bank-notes?
The nature of the promised rewards is hardly to be mistaken, yet the foolish remarks one hears make me wish to say that the Lord is neither proclaiming an ethical system nor blundering by calling it righteousness to do a good thing for what it will gain. When he promises, he states a fact to encourage his disciples to meet the difficulties of doing right and so learning righteousness; he aims to make men righteous, not to teach philosophy. I doubt that those who set aside his teaching because of the reward mentioned are as anxious to be righteous as to prove him unrighteous; otherwise they would take more care to represent him truly, and would not want the man the world confesses its best, and whom they perhaps confess their superior in conduct, to be found less pure in theory than they. Must the Lord hide from his friends that they will have cause to rejoice in their obedience, and tell them only the horrors of persecution, not the sweet sympathies that will help them through, or that where he was going they should go also? He could not ask more righteousness than he does: that they be perfect as their father in heaven is perfect. But not to help them by word of love, deed of power and promise of good would have shown him far less a brother and saviour. It is the enemy of righteousness who increases the difficulties of becoming righteous and lessens those of seeming so. Jesus desires no righteousness for the pride of it, any more than for advantage; so while requiring a purity the man cannot beforehand imagine, he gives all the encouragement he can. He will magnify victory not by difficulties, of which there are enough, but by completeness. He will not demand the loftiest motives of a soul far from lofty; it must grow to them. He will hearten the child with promises, and fulfil them to the contentment of the man.
Men cannot be righteous without love, and to love a righteous man is the best, the only way to learn righteousness. The Lord gives us himself to love, and promises his closest friendship to those who overcome.
God’s rewards are always in kind: “I am your father; be my children, and I will be your father.” Every obedience opens another door into the boundless universe of life. As long as the world continues to be made by God, righteousness can never fail of perfect reward; before it could, the government would have to pass into other hands.
The idea of merit is not essential to reward. Jesus says the lord who finds his servant faithful will make him sit down to meat and serve him, and also that when we have done all we should say we are unprofitable servants who have done only our duty. Reward is the rebound of Virtue’s well-served ball from the hand of Love; a sense of merit is the most sneaking shape self-satisfaction can take. God’s reward lies closed in all well-doing: the doer of right grows better and humbler, nearer God’s heart as nearer his likeness, and more capable of God’s own blessedness and of inheriting the kingdoms of heaven and earth. To be made greater than one’s fellows is the offered reward of hell, and involves no greatness (a man might be set above all his fellows and be so much less than before); to be made greater than oneself is the divine reward, and real, for no one can rise a hair’s-breadth above himself without rising nearer God. The reward itself, then, is righteousness; and the man who was righteous for such a reward, knowing what it was, would be righteous for righteousness’ sake, though that would not yet be perfection. But I must distinguish no farther now.
The reward of mercy is not often of this world; the merciful seldom receive mercy in return from their fellows, and perhaps not much gratitude. Yet being children of their father in heaven, they will go on showing mercy, even to enemies. They must give like God, and like God be blessed in giving.
There is a mercy in the endeavour to share with others the best things God has given: those who do so will be persecuted, reviled and slandered as well as thanked, loved and befriended. The Lord not only promises the greatest reward; he tells his disciples the worst to expect. He shows them the fair countries they are bound for and the truth about the rough weather and hardships on the way, so that they will not choose in ignorance, and he strengthens them for coming difficulty by teaching them its real nature. All this prepares them to take his yoke and labour with him in his father’s vineyard. They must not imagine that serving his father will make their work easy; they will only find the reward great. Nor must they fancy, when evil comes, that something unforeseen has befallen them. It is just then that their reward is near: when men revile and persecute them, they may know they are blessed. Their suffering is ground for exceeding gladness. The ignominy leaves the name of the Lord’s Father written on their foreheads, the mark of the true among the false, of children among slaves. For all who suffer for the world, persecution is the seal of their patent, a sign they were sent: they fill up what is lacking of Christ’s afflictions for his body’s sake.
Let us look at the similar words the Lord spoke later to his disciples, in the presence of thousands on the plain, together with his lament over those who have what they desire: St Luke vi. 20-26.
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, shut you out of their company, reproach you and cast out your name as evil for the Son of Man’s sake. Rejoice that day and leap for joy, for your reward in heaven is great; their fathers did the same to the prophets.
But woe to you who are rich, for you have had your consolation. Woe to you who are full, for you will hunger. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers treated the false prophets.
Here he uses the word hunger without limit. Every true want, every genuine need, every God-created hunger is provided for in the idea of the universe; but any attempt to fill a void otherwise than the Heart of the Universe intended can only be a woe. God forgets none of his children, the naughty any more than the good: love and reward for the good, love and correction for the bad. The bad will trouble the good but cannot hurt them; the evil a man does his neighbour works for the neighbour’s good, while the doer must mourn. This is a cause of jubilation to the neighbour, not for the evil done to the doer (over that there is sorrow in heaven) but for the good it brings him. The poor, hungry, weeping and hated may lament as if God had forgotten them; but he is all the time caring for them. Blessed in his sight now, they will soon know it. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh”: welcome words from the Saviour’s glad heart, comfort even to laughter! The poor, the hungry, the weeping, the hated and persecuted are the powerful, opulent, merry, loved and victorious of God’s kingdom, to be filled with good things, to laugh for very delight, to be honoured, sought and cherished!
But alas for those who have their poor consolation in this life, who have yet to learn what hunger is, whose laughter is the crackling of thorns, who have loved the praises of men: the rich, the jocund, the full-fed! Silent-footed evil is on its way to seize them. Dives must go without; Lazarus must have. God’s education uses terrible extremes. There are last that shall be first, and first that shall be last.
The Lord knew what trials, even tortures, awaited his disciples after his death, and that they would need every encouragement to keep their hearts strong, lest in some moment of dismay they deny him. If they had, where would our gospel be? If none are now ready to be crucified for him, alas for the age to come! What a poor travesty of the good news of God will reach their doors!
Those our Lord felicitates are all children of one family, and every blessing comes of the same righteousness. A disciple blessed in any one thing has every other already or on its way, for he is on the way to receive the very righteousness of God. Each good thing opens the door to the next, and so to all the rest. But as if these assurances were not large enough, as if any condition might discourage some humble man with a sense of unfitness, and he say, “Alas, I am proud, neither poor in spirit nor meek; at times I am not at all hungry after righteousness; I am not half merciful and am quick to feel hurt and indignant: I am shut out from every blessing!” the Lord, knowing the multitudes who can urge nothing in their own favour and sorely feel they are not blessed, looks over the wide world of his brothers and sisters and calls aloud, including every living soul with the one qualification of unrest or discomfort: “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”