Luke 17:1

Then said he unto the disciples,— Having been derided by the Pharisees as a visionary, and insulted on account of his doctrine concerning the pernicious influence of the love of money, our Lord took occasion to speak of affronts and offences,— Σκανδαλα, stumbling-blocks, provocations to sin; and though he represented such things as highly useful in respect of the exercise and improvement which they afford to holiness and virtue; and unavoidable by reason of the pride, anger, revenge, malice, and other jarring passions of men, he did not fail to set forth their evil nature in their dreadful punishment. To understand our Lord in the passage before us, it is necessary that we attend to an obvious distinction. All offences or temptations are not of the same nature; some of them are things in themselves sinful; others of them are things innocent: Jesus speaks of the first sort; nor has he denounced against the authors of them a greater punishment than they deserve; because to their own intrinsicmalignity such things have this added, that they prove stumbling-blocks to others; and so are of the most atrocious nature. When the other sort of offences happen to be mentioned, they are spoken of in milder terms: if the offence be given to a fellow-Christian, the person guilty of it is peculiarly blamed for wanting that love towards his brother, which the Christian religion enjoins. If it be given to a heathen, he is charged with being deficient in due concern for the glory of God: in the mean time, it must be observed on this head, that though the weakness of well-meaning persons,—who, by relying on our example, may be led to imitate us in things which they think sinful,—is a strong reason in point of charity, why we should forbear those actions, however innocent, (unless we are under the greatest necessity of doing them;) yet the perverseness of malicious minds, that are apt to misrepresent things, does by no means lay any obligations on a good man to forbear what he finds convenient for him, provided he himself knows it to be innocent; for the difference of the persons, who are apt to be affected by our example, greatly alters the case of offences, and our behaviour with relation to them. See the note on Matthew 18:5.