Why did Christ warn of false teachers so early in His ministry?
Christ’s earliest warnings included calling his followers to beware of false prophets, both within and without the Church.
Christ’s earliest warnings included calling his followers to beware of false prophets, both within and without the Church.
Editor’s Notes
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The following passage, read on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, is taken from Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount. This Sermon was delivered early in Christ’s public ministry, after the first Passover and our Lord’s initial preaching and miracles.
It comes amidst Our Lord’s injunctions to have confidence in God, and to be cautious in judging others. We should note, however, that one cannot “beware of false prophets” without judging that someone is or is likely to be such. Thus, the idea that one must assume the best of an evident false prophet, or await the intervention of authority before acting accordingly, is not correct.
Although it is a short Gospel passage, Fr Coleridge discusses it over three chapters. What follows is the serialisation of the first part.
In this first section, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ forewarns us of the deadliest external danger to the Church: false teachers.
That Satan’s preferred method is not persecution, but infiltration through corrupted ministers.
Why Christ’s warning came so early: because the gravest threats appear in the guise of piety.
The False Prophets
The Sermon on the Mount (To the End of the Lord’s Prayer)
Chapter XV
The False Prophets. St. Matt. vii. 15—20;
Story of the Gospels, § 34
Burns and Oates, London, 1878
Read on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Our Lord’s second warning
The first warning which our Lord gives, in this last portion of His Sermon on the Mount, has been considered in the foregoing chapter. The lesson which it teaches us practically, is to pray for and seek, in every possible way, such a strengthening of our faith as may enable us very clearly indeed to see the truth on which the vigour and unceasing perseverance of our exertions after perfection must depend, that is, the truth that salvation is a difficult task and one in which a great many fail.
Our Lord now turns to another head of danger which He foresaw as likely to cause immense mischief in His Church, and in the battle for salvation, which was to be the great occupation of His children.
This second danger, quite as formidable as the blindness as to our spiritual perils to which we are so prone, was to come from without. It was to be a chief feature in the Christian system, as it had been in the Jewish system, that men were to be trained and instructed, in the way of life and of the service of God, by others like themselves, who had received commission to be guides, pastors, and teachers. The Church was to be very jealous and careful in the selection of such guides. She was to train them very carefully, she was to confer on them a sacred commission, guaranteed by solemn rites and sacramental grace, and she was to watch continually and most vigilantly over their lives and their doctrine.
But all this would not be enough to shield the faithful from the danger of false teaching and erroneous guidance, whether from the defection of her real ministers or the usurpation of their office by others. For it was to be one of the prime devices of Satan to corrupt the teachers, to send his own emissaries in their place, to pervert, if he could, first their hearts, and their doctrine, and then their lives, so that they might teach falsehoods instead of truth, or at least contradict by their examples the holy doctrine which their lips conveyed.
Later on, when our Lord was taking leave of His teaching office among men, and predicting the latter days of His Church on earth, or at least what was to happen after His own departure, He added other lines to the picture which He here draws; as for instance, the circumstances of persecution, betrayal, dissension, and other calamities which were to try the children of the Church. But now, so soon after the beginning of His Ministry, although a great part of the fulfilment of what He is saying was not to take place immediately, still He warns them at once of this terrible danger, and gives them at once the remedy which would enable them to defend themselves against it.
The false prophets
‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
‘By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be cut down and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.’
There are a number of points for consideration presented by this passage, but we may first of all dwell for a moment on the persons of whom our Lord may have been immediately thinking when He gave this warning to the multitude of disciples to whom the Sermon on the Mount was delivered.
Our Lord had already warned His followers that the justice which would be required in them, as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, must exceed the justice of the Scribes and Pharisees. These persons, as has often been said, were the most religious and learned of the sacred nation of the Jews, and were held on that account in the greatest veneration among the people. Up to the time of which we are speaking, they had not very openly taken a part against our Lord. He had retired from the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, less than a year before this time, on account of some apparent tendency to hostility on their part, and this was the human reason which seems to have brought about the fulfilment of the prophecy which St. Matthew quotes, about the land of Galilee, as the scene of the shining of the great light which Isaias had foretold.1
But our Lord’s retirement from the immediate neighbourhood of the capital had had some effect in securing for Him, during the months which had since elapsed, a time of quiet though most active preaching, in Galilee, which had led to the formation of the large body of disciples who followed Him from place to place, as well as to the great effect which His preaching and miracles had produced upon others. To all human appearance, He was likely to gather around Him the materials of a flourishing Church out of the inhabitants of Galilee, and to continue His term of preaching without serious molestation.
Opposition to his teaching
But all this was only appearance. Already He foresaw the storm which burst on His next appearance in Jerusalem, at the approaching feast of the Pasch, and the relentless malice with which, from that date onwards, He would be pursued. The words in which the warning in the text is conveyed were literally fulfilled in the case of His Galilean disciples, though they are true in every age and under all circumstances of the Church.
Between the time of which we have just spoken and His next ascent to Jerusalem, and thus, even before He had clashed, as He was then to clash, with the prejudices of the Pharisees and others about the Sabbath, we find a number of Scribes and Pharisees sent down from Jerusalem with the apparent object of watching Him, and taking note of the character of His teaching. This may not have been with any definite purpose of hostility, but we find that soon afterwards, when He had openly broken with their traditions about the Sabbath by the cure of the man at the Probatic Pool,2 it became the object of the rulers at Jerusalem to bring about His destruction, and that when He again retired to Galilee, they pursued Him by their emissaries, who gave Him no peace, and even went so far as to form an alliance with the Herodians to put Him to death.
During the whole of the second year of our Lord’s teaching, He was continually haunted by the active opposition of these enemies of His, who were represented by priests and Pharisees sent down on purpose from Jerusalem, and of whom we cannot doubt that their main object was to turn away from Him the favour and admiration of the people. For this purpose they used every effort to calumniate Him and lower Him in the public estimation.
For this purpose, as we may judge from the statements of the Evangelists concerning them, they used the authority which their religious character gave them; they alleged objections of a religious kind against His teaching and practice, thus representing themselves as zealous of the law, and as desirous of keeping the people from falling into the snares of false doctrine. To the very end their malice against Him was cloaked under the name of zeal for the law, and at last they put Him to death as for blasphemy.
Our Lord looking to the future
Our Lord may well have seen the immense danger to the souls of His disciples among the multitude, from this false teaching, veiled as it was under the appearance of religion and strictness of practice as to outward observances. He never seems openly to have denounced the priests as such, but only under their titles of Scribes or Pharisees, which did not involve of necessity their sacred character.
At the present time their assaults on the faith of the disciples were as yet future, and He therefore in this passage speaks of them in still more general terms, such as suit not only their case, but that of the thousands of others who were to succeed them in all ages, in carrying on the work of Satan against the Gospel teaching of the Church.
He describes them as false prophets who come to solicit the confidence of the faithful in the clothing of sheep, being all the time ravening wolves, eager for the destruction of souls and for their own satisfaction in what they might gain by making them their dupes.
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The False Prophets
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St. Matt. iv. 15, 16; Isaias ix. 1.
St. John v. 1, seq.