The Word That Rejected Moses

So he was right to be displeased with the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who loved God with their lips and not with their heart. “Watch out,” he says to the disciples, “for the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy” — not for the Creator’s preaching. The Son hates those who defy the Father, and he does not want his disciples taking such an attitude toward him. Toward him, notice — not toward some other god, against whom hypocrisy of that kind might well have been allowable, the very hypocrisy he wanted his disciples kept clear of. What he forbids is the example of the Pharisees. It was against the one the Pharisees were sinning against that he now forbade his disciples to give offense. [a]

He had just censured their hypocrisy — a hypocrisy that covered over what was in the heart and screened the secrets of their unbelief behind a show of religious duty, since, while they held the key of knowledge, they would neither go in themselves nor let anyone else go in. So he adds, “There is nothing covered that will not be uncovered, nothing hidden that will not be made known” — and he says it so that no one should suppose he was setting out to unveil and make known a god who had been unknown and hidden until now. And when he takes note of their muttering and their jibes about him, “This man drives out demons only by Beelzebub,” he means that all such charges would come out into the daylight and be on people’s lips once the good news was published abroad.

Then he turns to his disciples with these words: “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who can only kill the body, and after that have no more power over you.” They will find, though, that Isaiah had already said, “See how the just man is taken away, and no one lays it to heart.” “But I will show you whom you should fear. Fear the one who, after he has killed, has power to throw into hell” — the Creator, obviously — “yes, I tell you, fear him.”

For my purpose it would be enough here that he forbids offense to be given to the very one he orders men to fear; that he orders men to earn the favor of the one he forbids them to offend; and that the one who lays down these commands belongs to that very God for whom he is procuring this fear, this freedom from offense, this good will. But I can draw the same conclusion from the words that follow: “For I tell you, whoever confesses me before men, him I will also confess before God.” Now those who confess Christ will have to be killed before men, but they will have nothing more to suffer once men have put them to death. These, then, are the people he warned just above not to be afraid of being merely killed; and he gives the warning so that he can attach to it a clause on the necessity of confessing him: “Everyone who denies me before men will be denied before God” — denied, of course, by the one who would have confessed him, if only he had confessed God. And the God who will confess the man who confessed is the very same God who will deny the man who denied him.

Again: if it is the man who confesses who will have nothing to fear after his violent death, then it is the man who denies for whom everything becomes fearful after his natural death. And since what is to be feared after death — the punishment of hell — belongs to the Creator, the denier belongs to the Creator too. What holds for the denier holds for the confessor as well: if he should deny God, he will plainly have to suffer at God’s hands, though from men he had nothing more to suffer once they had killed him. So Christ is the Creator’s, because he shows that everyone who denies him has the Creator’s hell to fear.

Having warned his disciples off denying him, he adds a warning against blasphemy: “Whoever speaks against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.” Now if both the forgiving of a sin and the holding of it against a man have the flavor of a God who judges, then the Holy Spirit, who is not to be blasphemed, will belong to the God who will not forgive the blasphemy — just as the one who, in the passage before, was not to be denied belonged to the God who, after he has killed, also throws into hell. And since it is Christ who keeps blasphemy away from the Creator, I am at a loss to see how his rival could ever have come at all. Otherwise — if by these sayings he is blackening the severity of the God who will not forgive blasphemy and who kills all the way to hell — then it follows that the rival god’s own spirit may be blasphemed and his Christ denied with nothing to pay for it; that there is in fact no difference between worshipping that god and despising him; and that just as there is no punishment to fear for the contempt, so there is no reward to expect for the worship.

When they are “brought before the magistrates” and questioned, he forbids them “to worry about how they will answer”; “for,” he says, “the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.” If a lesson like this comes from the Creator, then the command can belong only to the one who had already given the example. Take the prophet Balaam in Numbers. King Balak sent him out to curse Israel, on whom he was opening a war, and at that very moment Balaam was filled with the Spirit. Instead of the curse he had come to pronounce, he uttered the blessing the Spirit put into him at that hour — having already told the king’s messengers, and then the king himself, that he could speak out nothing except what God should put in his mouth. So these are the brand-new teachings of the new Christ: teachings the Creator’s own servants set going long ago.

But look how plain the difference is between the example of Moses and the example of Christ. Moses steps in of his own accord between brothers who were quarrelling, and rebukes the one in the wrong: “Why are you striking your fellow?” He is rejected by him, though: “Who made you a ruler or a judge over us?” Christ, on the other hand, when a man asked him to settle a quarrel between himself and his brother over dividing an inheritance, refused to help — and in so honest a cause. Well then: my Moses is better than your Christ, since he aimed at peace between brothers and at heading off the wrong being done. But of course Christ must act differently, being the Christ of a god who is merely good and does not judge.

“Who,” he says, “made me a judge over you?” Could he find no other words to excuse himself, and so had to use the very words with which that wicked, godless brother had shaken off the man who stood up for honesty and for duty to God? In short, by using the excuse he approved it, bad as it was; and by refusing to make peace between brothers he approved the act, bad as it was. Or rather — was he not showing how badly he took the rejection of Moses, by using such a word? And was it not his purpose, in a like case of quarrelling brothers, to shame them with the memory of a word so harsh? Clearly it was. For he had himself been present in Moses when Moses heard that rejection: he, the Spirit of the Creator.

I think we have already shown well enough, in an earlier passage, that the glory of riches is condemned by our God, “who puts down the mighty from their throne and lifts the poor out of the dunghill.” So the parable of the rich man will have come from him — the man who congratulated himself on the increase of his fields, and to whom God said: “You fool, this night they will demand your soul of you; then whose will all this be that you have got ready?” It was in just the same way that king Hezekiah heard from Isaiah the sad sentence on his kingdom, when he showed off his treasures and his stores of precious things before the envoys from Babylon.