Luminescence, Volume 1. C. K. Barrett
door, and the way, are narrow indeed. They are a single person. This is true to the record of Jesus as we know it. The challenge of his message was ever sharpened to its finest point in his own person. In the last resort, the question of discipleship was always the personal question of relationship with him. To those who followed, he was the center of their loyalty; they followed him. To those whom he offended he was himself the focal point of the offense; his weakness and obscurity, his suffering and death were the root of the objection. He propounded no shibboleths, insisted on no party line; but he called people to loyalty to himself. That was the way to life. And it still is.
There are at least some here who know that the wide scope of Christian history and the narrow scope of Christian doctrine mean not a little to me. I spend most of the hours of every day trying to understand and teach them. But it is not these things which construct the intolerant and nearly intolerable challenge of the narrow door. It is Christ himself that you must reckon with.
“FREELY YE HAVE RECEIVED, FREELY GIVE”—Matthew 10.8
[Preached forty one times from 9/21/41 at Ocker Hill to 11/26/97 at Bishop Auckland]
I am not proposing to say much about the original setting in which these words stand in the Gospel tradition. The situation as given by Matthew is clear enough. In the early part of his ministry Jesus had gathered about him a little group of followers. Now he was sending out this same company to do the work for which he had called them. They were splendidly equipped for their mission. He had showered upon them his own gifts, and they had power to heal diseases, and to exorcise demons. But they were not to hug these gifts to themselves, or use them to their own advantage. “Freely ye received, freely give.” It is an epigram of the miracles of feeding. Jesus hands food to the disciples, and the disciples to the multitudes. They were to use their healing powers. They were to pass on the proclamation they had heard. They had learned that the Kingdom of God was near. They were to manifest the signs of the nearness to those whom Jesus could not personally reach.
The sentence penetratingly reveals the two sides of the disciples of Jesus. They are receivers and givers. This dual relationship governs our lives as Christians. We must receive from God; if we do we shall naturally give. If we do not, nothing on earth will make us give. It must govern also our preaching. The preacher must remember that his hearers are both to receive and to give. And if he withholds from them the Gospel gift, he will plead with them in vain to give themselves to the Gospel service of the Church.
The word is ours as much as it was the disciples. It is addressed to us also. It was this text which freed Francis of Assisi, and sent him forth on his mission of giving. Only we are more fortunate than the disciples. For them the distinction was temporal. After receiving from Jesus they had to leave him in order to give. But now he is with us, both in our receiving and our giving. Nor need I say much to associate these words with a harvest festival. “Freely ye have received.” I know that farming and gardening need capital. I know that they demand a good deal of labor. But none of that can detract from the freedom of God’s giving. Without his gift, our money and our toil would bring no fruit. This harvest is his gift, and the most valuable of gifts.
And again, freely give. It is always a comfortable illusion to think that the words of the Bible are always to be taken in a spiritual sense. More often than not they are very literal. They are what a Christian saint once said he was—grossly materialistic. They are grossly materialistic precisely as Charles Kingsley was. He was a saint and a mystic but he was interested in servers.10 And the Bible talks pointedly about cups of water, clothes, visiting prisons, and curing the sick. “Therefore freely give.” Not just a dole of vegetables once a year. Give your time and strength and money in serving the sick and the needy, in reorganizing our social life. But let us come back to the real exposition of the text. It suggests three things.
FREELY
If I wanted to choose one word to describe the Christian good news it might be the one word freely. The Gospel is God’s free gift to humankind. It is simply the fullness of his treasury flung open to us. There is enough for all our needs, and we can have what we want. There is no need here for that tragic cry of human despair—not enough. Not through God’s beggarliness but through our sinfulness and silliness there are many things in the world of which there are not enough. Not enough money, not enough clothes, not enough food. Men and women and children are rotting to death because we cannot or will not pass on God’s abundance to them. You can see it in a score of pictures. The empty cupboard, the empty pocket, the ship lost at sea, and there is not enough room in the lifeboats. Not enough tombs and graves. Now with God there is enough. There is enough for the physical needs of human beings. It is only our folly and sin that wastes our surpluses. And there is more than that. Many are the outcasts, the despised, the forsaken in this world; but in God there is enough for them. There is love enough, not only for good people but for folk like me. There is room enough, room enough at his feast not only for the people you would expect, but also for the sick, the maimed, the halt, the blind. There is grace enough to deal with all our sin.
“Grace there is my every debt to pay,
Blood to wash my every sin away
Power to keep me spotless day by day” (H. H.Booth)
Or better:
“Plenteous grace with thee is found, grace to cover all my sin” (Charles Wesley)
I looked up the word freely in the concordance, to see what the Bible makes of it. Here are some examples:
Hos 14.4—“I will heal their backsliding; I will love them freely.”
Take it in the context of Hosea’s message. Israel has acted like a faithless wife, has gone off with her lovers, only to come back miserable and wretched. And here is the grace of God; in spite of it all, “I will love them freely.” Freely as the Father’s love of the prodigal son.
Rom 3.24—.” . . all have sinned. . . . Having been justified freely, by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.”
Here is the fruit of God’s free love—justification. He restores us to free discourse with himself.
Rev 22.17—“The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life freely.”
From the first page of the Bible to the last, God cannot speak without inviting—“come buy wine and milk, without money and without price.” The living water that cleanses and refreshes is ours for the taking.
God gives freely, he gives to people who have nothing and deserve less. There is nothing to bring in our hands. We don’t have to be clever, we don’t have to be strong, we don’t have to be good. God gives to us simply for love of giving.
YE RECEIVED
But did we? We are often too proud to take things for nothing. It is possible to sit under the sound of the Gospel for years, and never receive. There is no doubt of God’s willingness to give, but often there is grave doubt of our willingness to take. The hard heart of the Pharisee who thinks God has nothing to give him is the most dangerous thing in the world. Let us look at some of the things Christ offers and ask if we have received them.
There is little doubt of our readiness to receive God’s gifts of food—his harvests. It is when he tells us that humans don’t live by bread alone, that we begin to be suspicious. You can eat without committing yourself; you cannot enter into a personal relationship with God without committing yourself deeply.
John 14.27—“Peace I leave to you, my peace I give to you.” It’s a useful thing to have in these days. The peace that sits quiet and serene in the midst of turmoil and confusion; the peace that is calm and unafraid whatever happens. The peace that says “therefore we will not fear, though the earth be removed.” There is no doubt that Jesus left this peace to his disciples. Look at them. Peter sleeping in prison the night before his execution. Paul, the only man unafraid in the great storm scene in Acts. Augustine looking out at the