《The Sermon Bible Commentary – Matthew (Vol. 3)》(William R. Nicoll)
21 Chapter 21
Verse 3
Matthew 21:3
I. Our Lord's words illustrate, first of all, the deliberateness with which He moved forward to His agony and death. When He sent the two disciples for the ass and the foal which were tied up in the street of Bethphage, He was, as He knew, taking the first step in a series which would end within a week upon Mount Calvary. Everything, accordingly, is measured, deliberate, calm. It is this deliberateness in His advance to die; it is this voluntariness in His sufferings which, next to the fact of His true Divinity, gives to the death of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ its character as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.
II. Our Lord's words illustrate, secondly, the exact nature of His claims. "If any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, "The Lord hath need of them." Now, what is the justification of this demand? It is a question which can only be answered in one way—namely, that Christ was all along the true owner of the ass and the foal, and that the apparent owner was but His bailiff. He claims what He has lent for a while, He resumes that which has always been His own; we hear the voice of the Being to whom man owes all that he is, and all that he has—"whose we are, and whom we serve."
III. Our Lord's words show how He can make use of all, even of the lowest and the least; nay how, in His condescension, He makes Himself dependent on them for the fulfilment of His high purposes. It was of the ass and of the colt at Bethphage that He Himself said, "The Lord hath need of them." The ass and colt, insignificant in themselves, had become necessary to our Lord at one of the great turning-points of His life; they were needed for a service unique and incomparable, which has given them a place in sacred history to the very end of time. They were to be conspicuous features in that great sacrificial procession—for such it was—in which He, the prime and flower of our race, moved forward deliberately to yield Himself to the wills of men who today can shout "Hosannah" and who tomorrow will cry "Crucify." The needs of God. It was surely too bold an expression if He had not authorized us to use it. And yet there they stand, the words "The Lord hath need of them." He needed that ass and that foal in the street of Bethphage.
H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxi., p. 209.
References: Matthew 21:3.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 241; J. M. Neale, Sermons for the Church Year, vol. ii., p. 80. Matthew 21:4.—C. Kingsley, Sermons on National Subjects, p. 1. Matthew 21:4, Matthew 21:5.—G. Butler, Cheltenham College Sermons, p. 20.
Verse 5
Matthew 21:5
I. Not the Law only, but the Prophets also, did our Lord with the greatest carefulness fulfil, that no one mark or tittle of the letter should fail of the Word of God. "All this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee," etc.
II. "When He was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this? And the multitude said, This is Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee." This was the answer of the multitude, for the common people were not ashamed of the lowly Nazareth and the despised Galilee. What a wonderful contrast is this to His next appearing, for which we daily wait; when all the dead shall be moved at His coming and all the living; when the sun, moon, and stars shall fall, and earth and heaven shall take wing before His face, and when there will be no more asking, "Who is this?" for all shall know Him!
III. When He came in so much meekness without, and with so much sorrow of heart within, He showed by a remarkable sign what was the occasion of that sorrow. "He went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold," etc. The lesson is, that it is of the very utmost importance how we keep holy the House of Prayer. Worship God aright, and all will be well. Come before Him without fear, and all your life will be as a city over which Christ weeps.
I. Williams, Sermons on the Epistles and Gospels, vol. i., p. 1.
References: Matthew 21:5.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii., No. 405; vol. xviii., No. 1038; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. xvii., p. 284; J. C. Hare, Sermons in Herstmonceux Church, vol. i., p. 79.
Verse 10
Matthew 21:10
What think we of Christ?
I. The merely humanitarian view of the person of Christ involves in it: (1) the gravest intellectual difficulties. There was something peculiar in His intellectual solitude: the difference between Him and other thinkers was not such as, for example, between Shakespeare and other authors. You know all through that Shakespeare belongs to the same species as the others; but Christ constitutes an entire genius by Himself. Compare the Sermon on the Mount with the utterances of the most exalted teachers, and say if it be conceivable that He who delivered it was no more than a Jewish country artisan, whose life had been spent in one of the lowest villages of the most illiterate portion of the land. (2) But the difficulties which beset the humanitarian view of the Saviour's person from the intellectual side are as nothing compared with those which it has to encounter on the moral. Remember the honesty and integrity by which He was characterized, and then say how these qualities are to be reconciled with the claims which He put forth as One who had come down from heaven for the express purpose of teaching celestial things, if these claims were not well founded. (3) Note the testimony of history to the Deity of Christ. It is the nature of moral evil to propagate itself. Christ turned the tide for all after-time, and today the sole corrective agents at work upon the moral and spiritual condition of men may be traced to Christianity.
II. But now, supposing that we all receive Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, what then? What is involved in that reception? It involves: (1) that we should implicitly believe His teachings. It is a mockery for one to say that he believes in the Deity of Christ, and then to cavil at his words or to deny their truth. (2) If we believe that Jesus Christ is the God-Man, there is involved in that an obligation to rely alone on His atoning work for our salvation. (3) If we receive Christ as the God-Man, there is involved in that reception an obligation to obey His commandments. The practical rejection of our Lord's Divinity by the disobedience of our lives is a more prevalent heresy than the theoretic denial of His Deity, and it is far more insidious and pestilential.
W. M. Taylor, The Limitations of Life, p. 127.
References: Matthew 21:10.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. ii., p. 364; J. O. Davies, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxii., p. 241. Matthew 21:12, Matthew 21:13.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iv., p. 181. Matthew 21:13.—B. F. Westcott, Expositor, 3rd series, vol. v., p. 458; R. Heber, Parish Sermons, vol. i., p. 1. Matthew 21:15.—S. Cox, The Bird's Nest, p. 194; Outline Sermons to Children, p. 124; A. Macleod, Talking to the Children, p. 237. Matthew 21:15, Matthew 21:16.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxx., No. 1785; Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 208. Matthew 21:16.—W. Wilkinson, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 205. Matthew 21:17.—W. H. Jellie, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 230. Matthew 21:17-22.—Parker. Inner Life of Christ, vol. iii., p. 99. Matthew 21:18-20.—G. W. Butler, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 298; Parker, Hidden Springs, p. 98. Matthew 21:21.—H. W. Beecher, Sermons, 1st series, p. 536.
Verse 22
Matthew 21:22
These words are said to us as God's children. This is the one condition of our asking and having. "Ask," our good Lord would say, "your Father as His children, believing in Him, trusting in Him, hoping in Him, trusting yourselves with Him."
I. It is not, then, said to those who will not live as God's children. He who will not live as God's child makes himself wiser than God. He chooses what God chooses not; he frames to himself a world of his own, and makes its laws for himself. He contradicts or disbelieves the goodness of God, in that he chooses what God refuses, refuses what God chooses.
II. It is not said as to things which we cannot ask as God's children. To covet passionately the things of this life, even without actual sin; to long to be above those around us; to desire to be admired, thought of; to have a smooth easy course, to be without trial,—this is not the temper of God's children. To gain these things might be to lose the soul.
III. We are not children of our heavenly Father if we forgive not from our hearts each other their trespasses; and therefore any secret grudge, any mislike of another, any rankling memory of injury, hinders our prayer being heard.
IV. If we ask not earnestly, we either do not really want what we ask for, or we mistrust that God will give it, and do not really look to Him as our Father.
V. There are many degrees of asking, many degrees of obtaining. God willeth to win thee to ask of Him. He will often give us things more than we could look for, that we may remember how He heareth prayers, and ask Him for what He is yet more ready to give, because it is more precious for our eternal good. He draws us on as earthly parents do their children to trust Him in a more simple, childlike way. Pray, and thou shalt know that God will hear thy prayers. Pray as thou canst, and pray that thou mayest pray better. The gates of heaven are ever open that thou mayest go in and out at thy will. He Himself, to whom thou prayest, prayeth for thee, by His voice, by His love, by His blood. How can we fail to be heard, when, if we wish, God the Holy Spirit will pray in us, and He to whom we pray is more ready to give than we to ask?
E. B. Pusey, Sermons for the Church's Seasons, p. 372.
The Miracles of Prayer.
Can man change the mind of God? Will God, on the prayer of man, change any part of that wondrous order which He has impressed on His fair, visible creation?
I. God does through man's acts become other to him than He was before. The returned soul knows that not only is its whole self changed towards God, but that the relations and actions of God towards it are also changed. And this change has often been wrought by Jesus through the prayers of others. Which are greatest, the miracles of nature or the miracles of grace? Which is the greatest interference (to use men's word)—to change passive, unresisting nature, or man's strong, energetic, resisting will, which God Himself so respects that He will not force the will which He has endowed with freedom, that it might have the bliss freely to choose Himself? And yet these stupendous spiritual miracles are daily renewed. The love of the Church, of the pastor, the mother, the combined prayers of those whom God has inspired with the love of souls, draw down on the prodigal soul many a wasted or half-wasted grace, until at last God in His providence has laid the soul open to the influence of His grace, and the soul, obstructing no more the access to Divine grace, is converted to God and lives.
II. Whether the whole sequence of natural phenomena follow a fixed order of Divine law impressed once for all upon his creation by the almighty fiat of God, or whether the proximate causes of which we are cognizant are the result of the ever-present action of the Divine will, independently of any such system—these are but the ways of acting of the Omniscient. The difficulty lies in the Omniscience itself, which knew all things which were not as though they were. Who doubts but that God knew beforehand that awful winter which cut off half a million of the flower of French chivalry? But whether that winter, which stood alone in the history of Russian climate, came only in the natural sequel of some fixed laws, or whether it was owing to the immediate fiat of God, the adaptation of these natural phenomena to the chastisement of that suffering host was alike exact, the free agency of its leader was alike unimpaired.
III. Once more, the availableness of prayer has been contrasted with the availableness of human remedies; its unavailableness has been insisted upon, if combined with human sloth. Who bade separate trust in God from the exertions of duty? Certainly not He who, even in His highest concerns,—the salvation of our souls,—bade us work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in us, to will and to do of His good pleasure.
IV. One soul there is for which thy prayers are absolutely infallible—thine own. Before thou hast uttered the prayer, so soon as through the grace of God thou hast conceived it in thy heart and embraced it in thy will, it has ascended to the Eternal throne. Already it has been presented to Him who in all eternity loved thee and formed thee for His love. It has been presented by Him, Man with thee, who, as Man, died for thee, who, in His precious death, prayed for thee, Man with thee, but also God with God. How should it fail? Thy prayer cannot fail, if thou, through thine own will, fail not thy prayer.
E. B. Pusey, Selected Occasional Sermons, p. 295.
References: Matthew 21:22.—E. B. Pusey, Parochial and Cathedral Sermons, p. 273; J. H. Evans, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. xvi., p. 69.
Verses 23-27
Matthew 21:23-27
Why Christ could not make His Authority known to the Pharisees.
I. John had said to the Pharisees, "Bring forth fruits meet for repentance, and think not to say unto yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham." They were saying within themselves, "We have Abraham to our father," while they had no likeness to Abraham. They were wrapping themselves up in a comfortable security, while they had a sense of inward hollowness. They were exulting in the profession of faith in an unseen God; they were not believing in the unseen God.