Class #4 - The Sermon on the Mount (continued)

[For additional information, try the following link to Joachim Jeremias’ book:

http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showbook?item_id=1118]

The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13)

Since last time, you have had a chance to compare the version here in Matthew with the one found in Luke 11:2-4. How many of you had been aware of the differences previously? What, if anything, is their significance? Which version is original? That there is a literary dependence between the two is strongly indicated by the use of the word epiousios, which is not found anywhere else in Greek literature (except for later on, in texts influenced by the Lord’s Prayer). I’ll bet that in praying this prayer in English, you never asked questions about whether getting it into English, translating and interpreting it, posed any difficulties. Well, that’s what we’re going to think about today.

From Luke, we learn that the earliest form of this prayer was something like:

Father,

Your name be sanctified,

Your kingdom come.

Our (epiousion) bread [could mean ‘necessary’, ‘daily’, ‘for existence’, or ‘for the coming (day)’]

Give us today

And release to us our debts

For we also have released those indebted to us

And do not lead us into temptation.

[For a comparison of different versions, see http://www.bibletexts.com/terms/lordspr.htm]

This is a fundamentally Jewish prayer. The Jewish scholar I. Abrahams gathered excerpts from various Jewish prayers to produce a composite prayer made up of Jewish parallels. It is reproduced here from Davies and Allison’s commentary (vol.1, p.595):

Our Father, who art in Heaven. Hallowed be Thine exalted name in the world Thou didst create according to Thy will. May Thy Kingdom and Thy lordship come speedily, and be acknowledged in all the world, that Thy name may be praised in all eternity. May Thy will be done in Heaven, and also on earth give tranquility of spirit to those that fear Thee, yet in all things do what seemeth good to Thee. Let us enjoy the daily bread apportioned to us. Forgive us, our Father, for we have sinned; forgive also all who have done us injury; even as we also forgive all. And lead us not into temptation, but keep us far from evil. For thine is the greatness and the power and the dominion, the victory and the majesty, yea all in Heaven and on earth. Thine is the Kingdom, and thou art Lord of all beings forever. Amen.

These parallels compiled here artificially do serve to show just how Jewish the form, language, and themes of the Lord’s Prayer are. This should not surprise the reader of Matthew’s Gospel: Matthew contrasts the way Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, not with the way other Jews pray, but with the way Gentiles pray. The single closest prayer that parallels the Lord’s Prayer is the Kaddish, which is prayed in the synagogue after the sermon. Its earliest form may have been something like the following (taken once again from Davies and Allison, ibid.):

Exalted and hallowed be his great name

in the world which he created according to his will.

May he let his kingdom rule

in your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of the whole house of Israel,

speedily and soon.

Praised be his great name from eternity to eternity.

And to this say: Amen.

Yet another important parallel is the abbreviated form of the Eighteen Benedictions found in the Babylonian Talmud, which suggests that Matthew may have understood the Lord’s Prayer as the ‘Christian answer’ to contemporary Jewish prayer. See for example the following prayer, taken from b. Ber. 29a:

Give us discernment, O Lord, to know Thy ways, and circumcise our heart to fear Thee, and forgive us so that we may be redeemed, and keep us far from our sufferings, and fatten us in the pastures of Thy land, and gather our dispersions from the four corners of the earth, and let them who err from Thy prescriptions be punished, and lift up Thy hand against the wicked, and let the righteous rejoice in the building of Thy city and the establishment of the temple and in the exalting of the horn of David Thy servant and the preparation of a light for the son of Jesse Thy Messiah; before we call mayest Thou answer; blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hearkenest to prayer.

[For the full text of the Eighteen Benedictions use the following link:

http://religion.rutgers.edu/iho/prayer.html#eighteen]

Having seen much that puts Jesus’ prayer in the context of Judaism, was there anything distinctive about Jesus’ prayer? In the form Jesus prayed it, it would have begun simply with abba, and this brief, intimate way of addressing God was certainly not typical of contemporary Jewish prayer, although the use of ‘father’ to address and speak of God was common both in Judaism and in other religions. At any rate, Matthew obscures this point by changing it to ‘Our Father in Heaven’, presumably to make the prayer more reverent and more appropriate to be used for communal prayer. At any rate, by doing so Matthew makes the prayer even more typically Jewish. The other distinctive characteristic is the prayer’s eschatological outlook, if one accepts that it has one – this is a point to which we must return shortly.

In what language would Jesus have prayed this prayer? Despite some arguments in favor of Hebrew, most scholars accept Aramaic as most likely. We can skip trying to reconstruct what the Aramaic original underlying Q might have looked like, since we have already seen that Matthew’s church was a Greek-speaking community, and so they would presumably have prayed the prayer in Greek (although one notes that phrases like maranatha and abba apparently were familiar even to Greek-speaking Christians, since Paul uses them). Yet this question is still important, since there may have been quite a number of Aramaic speakers in the church in Antioch or wherever Matthew wrote.

For those who are interested, Bruce Chilton (Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography, New York: Doubleday, 2000, pp.297-8) translates the prayer back into Aramaic such as was spoken in Jesus’ time. His book is an implausible reconstruction of the life of the historical Jesus, but as a scholar of Aramaic his reconstruction of Jesus’ prayer is still to be taken very seriously:

Abba, yitqadash shemakh, tetey malkhuthakh:

Hav li yoma lakhma dateh,

Ushebaq li yat chobati, veal taeleyni lenisyona.

It is to be remembered that others have suggested other renderings. We have ancient Syriac versions, which means essentially that it is in Aramaic but using a different script. But these versions are translations based on the Greek, and so are not that different from our attempts to reconstruct an Aramaic original underlying the Greek text. We also have relatively modern Aramaic versions – Aramaic is a language still spoken in a few places even today! Also, while we have assumed that Luke’s version is to be regarded as more original, some scholars have disputed this based on the fact that it is possible to translate Matthew’s version back into Aramaic and come up with a form that is rhythmic and flowing. Many different attempts have been made, and to a certain extent it depends what dialect and form of Aramaic one is rendering it into. Ernst Lohmeyer (The Lord’s Prayer, London: Collins, 1965, pp.27-28) produced the following Aramaic version of Matthew’s form of the Lord’s Prayer, closely following the version reconstructed by C. F. Burney, a scholar of Aramaic famous for his work on the Gospels. It reads:

’^abûnan d^ebishmayya

yitqaddash sh^emâk

têtê malkûtâk

yit‘^abêd re‘ûtâk

k^ebishmayyâkib^e’ ar‘â

lachman d^eyômâ

hab lan yômâ dên

ûsh^ebôq lan chôbên

k^edishbaqnan l^echayyâbên

w^elâ ta‘lînan l^enisyônâ

’ellâ paşşînan min bîshâ

Note the similarities and differences between this and Chilton’s reconstruction at the points where Matthew and Luke agree. It is perhaps worth noting that many have managed to translate the Lord’s Prayer into nice, poetic, rhythmic English, and this obviously does not prove that Jesus originally said these words in English! So one must consider not just translatability but also rhyme, closeness of meaning, use of typical idioms, etc.

Excursus: Masculine language and God

Christians of a conservative bent have often found themselves perplexed by recent concerns about inclusive language and language the presents God as almost exclusively male. Generally those most hesitant to discuss the issue as one worthy of serious consideration are men, and this probably says something! Since this was not a concern of Matthew’s Gospel, we will not spend too much time on this topic, but it must be mentioned, since it is very clearly relevant and important to how we today read Matthew’s Gospel.

So let’s put it bluntly: Is God ‘male’? Emphatically not. It clearly does not make sense to think of God as a physical being, and thus to portray God as inherently male or female would be to project our image onto the transcendent God in a way that limits ‘him’. But in that last sentence you see the problem English faces linguistically: we have three pronouns, masculine (he), feminine (she), and neuter (it). If we want to avoid ‘he’, we find that the other options are no better. ‘She’ implies femininity, and there is nothing wrong with that per se, but the pronoun is clearly no more inclusive than ‘he’ and so is simply making God seem less like a different half of the human race. ‘It’ implies God is impersonal, which is likewise problematic. To simply say ‘God’ and ‘Godself’ is awkward and clumsy, although perhaps we could get used to it with time. So my suggestion for those concerned is that perhaps if we spend less time speaking about God as ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘it’ and instead focus on interacting with God and addressing God as ‘you’, we’ll steer clear of the problem to a greater extent, since ‘you’ is a genuinely inclusive pronoun. Also, history shows that those who talk much about God and little with God get themselves into trouble! J

It is also to be remembered that for many today (and presumably this was true in Jesus’ and in Matthew’s time too) ‘father’ does not immediately conjure up images that are pleasant and appealing. I remember talking about God with a friend in high school. He was for the most part uninterested and skeptical, but at one point he wrote to me that perhaps his problem with thinking about a heavenly Father had to do with his strained and unhealthy relationship with his own (earthly) father. ‘Father’ is a helpful image and metaphor, but it can also be a problematic one. God as ‘father’ is not absent (although he is presented as divorcing Israel in the Old Testament, and as banishing his children!). God is not a child abuser (although Andrew Lloyd Webber again is of a different opinion, as expressed in Jesus Christ Superstar). The image of Father is not the only one used in the Bible, and if it ceases to convey the ideas it was intended to then it either must be redeemed or replaced. And so for those in appropriate cases, I would have no objection to them praying to God as a heavenly Mother. But this is not something to be done lightly. The idea of a ‘divine Mother’ has down the ages been associated with the worship of nature. This does not therefore make the concept inherently inappropriate, but it does carry connotations that cannot be taken over directly into Christianity without fundamental beliefs being affected thereby. Yet there is also Biblical basis for the use of feminine language in the portrait of Wisdom in the Jewish Scriptures, and of Jesus speaking to Jerusalem like a hen wishing to gather her chicks under her wings (Luke 13:34). No language that conveys appropriate ideas about God are inappropriate, but we must always keep in mind that all our language about God is inadequate, metaphorical, and in danger of being turned into an idol far less than the reality of God ‘himself’.

2. Hallowed be your name

What does this phrase mean? Surely God’s name is holy in and of itself! What could it possibly mean to pray that God’s name be ‘sanctified’ or ‘hallowed’? Perhaps the point already made about ‘divine passive’ verbs will shed some light. This prayer does not suggest that God’s name should become holy of its own initiative, any more than the line that follows suggests that God’s Kingdom will come by itself of its own accord. No, it is God who sanctifies his name, and who brings in the Kingdom. And so this prayer is for God to bring about the sanctification of God’s own name. Now we still face the question: What does that mean?

Ezekiel 36:22-23 probably provides the clearest background. There, God says that the divine name has been profaned (i.e. treated as a common, unclean thing, and so by extension dishonored) before the nations by Israel. And so God will act in such a way that his name will once again be sanctified (i.e. set apart, and thus be extension reverenced and honored). Elsewhere in Jewish prayers, the idea of God sanctifying or hallowing his name parallels the idea of God being magnified or glorified. So the idea is essentially, to express it in other words, that God act so as to cause his name to be reverenced, respected, and honored by human beings. The Hebrew verb in certain forms could mean ‘to reveal or cause to be recognized as holy’, and this is presumably the meaning here. It is not that God’s name is not intrinsically holy. But God has associated his name with his people, and their lack of holiness reflects of God himself. And so God will act to cause his name to be honored and revered as it should.

This is, it is presumably clear, a dangerous and terrifying prayer to pray! As those who have associated themselves with God, and with whom God has associated his name, it is above all else because of us, because of our disobedience, that God’s name is spoken badly of or not held in high esteem. Christians themselves must surely be one of the strongest arguments against becoming a Christian or believing in God! This prayer, for those familiar with the background in the Hebrew Bible, implies a recognition that God’s name is disrespected first and foremost because of us, and so it is a prayer that implies repentance. For its earliest prayers, the arrival of God’s eschatological kingdom was imminent. And thus to pray that God intervene in a decisive manner to cause his name to be honored, and presumably also to punish those who bring it dishonor, could not be done unless one had either a very contrite or a very callous attitude.

3. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven

This prayer continues the idea of the previous line: the coming of the kingdom was what would silence those who dishonor God. Matthew adds a second line alongside that found in Luke, which can be taken as an explanation of what it means for the kingdom to come. The underlying Aramaic word for ‘kingdom’ would have been malkût, which essentially means reign or rule. Jesus is not speaking primarily about setting up a state (which is what modern English speakers think of when they hear ‘kingdom’), but about the reign or rule of God being established. And so when Matthew adds ‘your will be done - as in heaven, (so) also on earth’, he is not making a radical change to the prayer, but (as was his custom, as we see from his reworking of traditional material throughout his Gospel) simply explaining its meaning.

Once again, this was not something one could pray for lightly. It is a prayer that involves the one who prays it. The arrival of God’s kingdom would involve his will at long last being done perfectly on earth. His kingdom would include those who had sought to obey his will even prior to the kingdom being fully established on earth. And so to pray this is to align oneself with God’s will, to commit oneself to obedience as one who expects to belong to the coming kingdom rather than excluded from it. The close connection with the reference to the coming of the kingdom, and the fact that the Greek is literally ‘let your will happen/come to pass’, shows that the request is eschatological and not simply moral in character. While Matthew would not have sharply divided the two, nonetheless it is important to stress that this is essentially a request that the world end, and not simply a request that people be nice to each other while life goes on as it did before.

4. Give us today our ‘daily’ bread

This prayer is so commonly prayed and so familiar that I imagine you’ll be shocked to learn that it contains a word in Greek the meaning of which is uncertain. It literally reads “our epiousion bread give to us today”. The Greek word epiousios does not occur anywhere in Greek literature prior to this point, and afterwards occurs only in Greek literature influenced by the Gospels. Origen in the second century recognized this and concluded that the Gospel authors themselves had made is up. From our perspective, we should say that Q made it up and Matthew and Luke took it over from that source. What are the options in interpreting it?

1) One option is to take it as being from epi tên ousan hêmeran, and thus meaning ‘for the present day’. This option is unlikely, since it makes the petition redundant: “Give us today our bread for the present day” (it fits Luke’s Gospel even less well, since Luke has “Give us each day…”).

2) Another option is to derive it from epi + ousia. This would mean ‘for existence’, and thus the petitions would mean: “Give us today our bread necessary for existence/for survival”.

3) A third option derives the adjective from hê epiousa hêmera, “for the following day” or “for the coming day”, which if spoken early in the morning could mean something like “for the day that is dawning”. As Jeremias and Brown note, the ‘coming day’ could be understood in an eschatological sense, “Give us today the bread of the future”, which would mean something like “Give us today the bread of the coming messianic banquet.” A variation on this option understands the word in the same manner as option three, but emphasizes that the adjective modifies bread rather than an implied day. This interpretation also suggests the phrase could have an eschatological meaning, and thus Donald Hagner translates it: “Give us today the eschatological bread that will be ours in the future” (Matthew, vol.1, p.149). However, as Strecker rightly points out (The Sermon on the Mount, Nashville: Abingdon, 1988, pp.117-118), one must ask seriously whether one could ever consider it appropriate to ask that God give eschatological bread today. And so if one is to maintain this interpretation, perhaps one would have to suggest that the bread that is asked for is a present provision that foreshadows the eschatological bread, just as Jesus’ meals with his followers were considered to foreshadow the meals of the messianic banquet in the coming kingdom. In a sense, this interpretation is no more surprising than that in the Jewish prayer mentioned earlier it should be asked that God bring his kingdom “speedily, in our lifetime.” Perhaps modern Westerners find the arrival of the end today unsettling, but I doubt that ancient Mediterranean Jewish peasants would have felt the same way. How members of the congregation in Matthew’s slightly more wealthy, urban church may have felt is another question.

It is generally accepted as being more likely from a linguistic perspective that (3) is correct to take the adjective as deriving from epienai and thus meaning ‘coming’ and thus ‘future’. This would also fit well with the eschatological emphasis of the rest of the prayer, and of the Sermon on the Mount, and of the Gospel as a whole. This is not to say that the idea of a ‘daily ration’ is completely absent. It is to be found in one of the closest parallels in the Hebrew Bible to the idea expressed here, namely Exodus 16, the story of the provision of manna. Since Jewish literature expresses an expectation for an eschatological return of the manna in the end times, such an allusion would also fit, and so one need not necessarily play off the present needs interpretation and the eschatological interpretation against one another. Yet that epiousion has an eschatological thrust can perhaps be seen from the point that most clearly makes the interpretation ‘for the present day’ unlikely: the redundancy of having an emphatic ‘today’ in conjunction with another phrase that means ‘for the present day’. And so, if one rejects option (2) above, then one is left with either “Give us today our bread that is to come” or “Give us today our bread of the coming (day)”. And this, even if taken to be primarily about present earthly needs, would probably also have been understood to have at least some connection with the coming kingdom, the manna, and perhaps also the Lord’s Supper and Jesus’ table fellowship during his ministry, which foreshadowed the meals that would follow in the messianic kingdom. And so perhaps we should suggest that the request is for real bread to meet the present need, but what early Christian could have asked for this, in the context of an expression of longing for the kingdom to come and righteousness to be done, and not thought of the Christian hope that God will bring his kingdom in which all shall eat and be satisfied, in which the hungry shall be filled?

As you can see, we pray often and in a simple way for ‘daily bread’, but the interpretation and meaning of the phrase is anything but simple, and since the Gospels use a word not found anywhere else, the truth is that we shall never be certain of the meaning.

5. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven those indebted to us

Luke uses ‘sin’ at one point instead of ‘debt’, and in so doing he is replacing a familiar Jewish idiom with a term and concept more familiar for Greek-speaking readers. The idea of God canceling debts (which could have brought to mind the Sabbath or Jubilee year) as we have also cancelled the debts others owe to us is unlikely to be entirely future, since Jesus spoke of forgiveness as a present reality; nevertheless, an eschatological aspect that has the future judgment in view is also to be taken into consideration.

6. And do not bring us into temptation/testing, but deliver us from evil

For those concerned about harmonizing this with James 1:13, which says that God does not tempt people, two considerations are important. First, there is the fact that the verse does not attribute the testing or tempting to God, but sees God’s providential hand at work in determining whether or not one ends up being tempted. Second, if the rest of this prayer is taken to have an eschatological thrust, then this should probably be seen here too. In this case, the meaning might be something closer to “Do not bring us into the time of tribulation, but deliver us from the evil one”. Davies and Allison write after arguing for this interpretation that this petition “is a request for God’s aid in the present crisis, a plea for divine support that one may not succumb to the apostasy which characterizes the last time of trouble (cf. Mt 24.5,9-14)” (Matthew, vol.1, p.614). The final adjectival noun can be taken as either masculine or neuter, and thus can mean either ‘evil’ or ‘the Evil One’. Both interpretations have a long history in Christianity, and so for the most part one must decide the matter based on what one feels to be more likely and more coherent in the context of Matthew’s thought and emphases as a whole.

The concluding doxology is not found in the original text, as is shown by its absence from the earliest manuscripts. It is first found in Didache in a shorter form: “For yours is the kingdom and the power forever”. Prayers normally concluded with doxologies, and there were basically two types of prayer: those with set doxologies, and those to which one appended one’s own doxology. It seems that by the end of the first century, it was becoming standard that one end the prayer by saying ‘Yours is the kingdom and the power forever, Amen’, to which a mention of ‘glory’ was eventually also added, and became a set part of the liturgical use of the prayer, which in turn influenced the manuscript tradition. See any major exegetical commentary on the Greek text for further details.

After the prayer, Matthew includes the teaching of Jesus recorded in Mark 11:25, which expresses the same idea as the prayer for forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer. He also talks about not doing one’s acts of piety so as to be seen, just as he did prior to the Lord’s Prayer, so in a sense this material on a common theme forms a sort of ‘bracket’ or ‘frame’ for the prayer. It is perhaps difficult for those unfamiliar with the cultural context of the first century Greco-Roman world to understand how radical this teaching is. Outside of Judaism, there wasn’t even a concept of charity. Within Judaism, it only existed because one could think of God as a sort of heavenly patron of the poor, and thus God would repay those who helped them. But even within Judaism the idea that one should actively hide one’s piety from others so that one is doing it solely as an act of devotion to God was something striking, because of the generally shared cultural assumptions of that time. The whole culture was based on competition between males for honor. 5:16 and 6:1 are able to be reconciled only in this context: one may allow to be observed those good works that will attract glory not to oneself, but to God, the ‘heavenly Patron’. The idea in the latter passage is put in precisely these terms: one must choose one’s reward: honor from human beings, or honor from God. No one, to my knowledge, had played the two off one another as opposites in quite the way Jesus does here. Nevertheless, elsewhere (in Judaism in particular; see the book of Job, and see also Luke 17:7-10) one finds an emphasis on not doing things for the sake of reward, an idea that Matthew appears not to espouse. See for example the tractate in the Mishnah m. Abot 1:3, which attributes the following maxim to Antigonos of Socho: “Be not like servants who serve the master on condition of receiving a gift, but be like servants who serve the master not on condition of receiving”. Perhaps Matthew (and likewise Jesus) is simply being pragmatic, and recognizing that in this sort of cultural context, one cannot simply wean people overnight of all their assumptions, and so it is the most important step that they move their focus from rewards given by human beings to the rewards given by God. (See further the discussion of Davies & Allison, vol.1, pp.633-634). At any rate, as I’ve emphasized before, if Matthew does not expect people to act completely selflessly, neither does he simply hold out a ‘heavenly’ carrot in front of people to ‘bribe’ them into doing what is right. No, in 6:14-15 we see a characteristic of Matthew’s understanding of the basis of final judgment: as we have done to others, so God will do to us. This is the ‘Golden Rule’ taken up and applied as a universal principle that applies to the final judgment, and not just to the question of how we want other people to treat us [see also Matthew 7:1-2]. The return to the theme of final judgment and forgiveness serves to highlight the eschatological character of the prayer for forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer.

Matthew 6:19-34 - God, Wealth, and Worry

Here, following on a theme perhaps related to that of ‘daily bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer, Matthew includes teaching on where one should keep one’s treasure. Not only were corruption and destruction real possibilities, but thieves could quite literally ‘dig through’ and steal, since the most common way of protecting one’s treasure was to bury it under the floor of the house. Archaeology has regularly confirmed this. [Just as an aside, modern readers of Jesus’ parable of the ‘talents’ are usually unaware that the assumption in that cultural context regarding what one should do with treasure entrusted to someone by another was that one ought to bury it. The parable thus runs directly contrary to conventional wisdom]. Like what preceded it, this section also has to do with honor, since wealth and honor were strongly interconnected. Once again, the disciples are taught that they must choose where their honor will be: here, from other people, or from God in his kingdom.

Heaven should not be thought of here as ‘a place people go to when they die’. As we’ve already seen, heaven is always associated with God and his kingdom, and is regularly a cipher for God, a way of avoiding speaking directly about God, as in the phrase ‘the kingdom of Heaven’. So the choice is not exactly between ‘here and now’ or ‘after you die’ (as in the traditional contrast between ‘pie in the sky when you die’ and ‘steak on your plate while you wait’). It is between ‘on the earth’ in the present to be seen and praised by men, or ‘in heaven’ with God to be ‘cashed in’, honored and rewarded when he brings his kingdom in in the not-too-distant future. So, to put it briefly, ‘in heaven’ here essentially means ‘with God’. Another way of paraphrasing Matthew in more contemporary language would be to say “What you value determines your values”.

[Just as an aside, I remember laughing at a warning in a Romanian hotel room advising those staying there to deposit their values in the safe in the lobby for safety! There must be an illustration in this somewhere…]

On sources here in this passage, one can see clearly Matthew’s dependence on Q. None of the sayings in this section is found in Mark, while all of them (apart from 6:34, which is found only in Matthew) is found in Luke (cf. Davies and Allison, vol.1, p.627):

Matthew Mark Luke__________

6:19-21 - 12:33-34

6:22-23 - 11:34-36

6:24 - 16:13 [N.B. here the agreement is very close indeed]

6:25-33 - 12:22-31

6:34 - -

Luke’s order is probably closer to the original. Matthew has grouped together sayings relating to money. He presumably indicates from his inclusion of the saying in vv22-23 here that he understands the ‘healthy’ eye to be a ‘generous’ eye, which is another of the word’s meanings.

v22-23 - The eye as the lamp of the body

This verse is obviously difficult to understand. To start with, there is a real danger that interpreters will read this verse in light of modern understandings of eyes and vision. In the first century, no one knew that eyes were like windows, allowing light in. On the other hand, there are many references to eyes as like lamps, as having their own light within them. And so this saying does not warn against cataracts that will prevent light getting into the body. It warns about ‘generous’ and ‘evil’ eyes as they show the light or darkness that is within. In the first century, as in many Mediterranean cultures today, there was great concern about being given the ‘evil eye’. An evil eye is one that is covetous, that causes harm, and here we are told that this has to do with one’s inner state. The eye is taken as reflecting what is in the heart. The sort of eye you have should be a ‘generous’ one, reflecting the inner light one has within one’s heart. To take eye and heart here literally and attempt to reinterpret the words of Jesus based on a modern, medical and scientific understanding of the eye (not to mention the heart!) is unlikely to produce a coherent interpretation, and anachronistically reads back our understanding today into a saying based on a different worldview. However, taken as a metaphor (which, at any rate, is what it was primarily in its original context anyway), it still makes sense. The way you look at others shows what is in your heart. You can look to give, or to take. You can look to do good, or harm. And so even if no longer related to a particular understanding of how eyes function, this metaphor is still intelligible and applicable: your eyes show a lot about what is inside you, whether it be light or darkness, generosity or evil.

v24 - Serving Two Masters

The problem with serving two masters is clear: one may have conflicting demands made upon one by the two, and will then have to choose. To ‘love’ or ‘hate’ could be literal, but may also be used in the broader sense of ‘loving more’ and ‘loving less’, as it is in Luke 14:26 (see also Genesis 29:30-33; Deuteronomy 21:15). Matthew reproduces the Aramaic word mammônâ’, the emphatic state of the noun mammon which means ‘property’ or ‘wealth’.

vv25-34 - Worrying about tomorrow

Tomorrow was probably as far ahead as most ancient Mediterranean peasants ever were likely to worry. They did not live in a world where one could make long-term plans. Life was not under their control in anything like the way it is to people in modern North America. It is relatively easy for an American to say ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow’. For most people, there is reasonably good job security, a regular paycheck. The farmers produce an abundance of food using modern technology. Few reading these words in North America have any real understanding of what they mean. They are spoken to people who live on the edge of starvation, in poverty, most of whom spent their lives struggling to get the land to produce enough for them to pay their taxes and landlords and hopefully have just enough left over to survive for another year. This is the context of these words, as it would have been the context of the petition about bread in the Lord’s Prayer. Even if there and here there is an eschatological element, bread was not for the original hearers of these words simply a convenient thing to put the contents of a sandwich between. Hard, rough, dark bread made from unsifted flour was a staple of their diets. Most of the hearers would not have been concerned about the ancient equivalent of their car breaking down, making them inconveniently late for work. They would have been worried about their only donkey dying and not having an animal to help with the work. This could make the difference between survival in abject poverty and total starvation. Having lived in Romania, when I see people getting stressed about slightly long lines at the checkout at WalMart, I feel like screaming “You have no idea what worry is! You have no idea how easy your lives are!”

Jesus’ teaching here is twofold. On the one hand, he emphasizes that the cost vs. effectiveness ratio of worry is very poor. We worry about all sorts of things that might happen, or that will probably happen, that are beyond our control. We may in fact take years off our lives and damage our health and give ourselves ulcers by worrying, and may cloud our ability to think straight about our problems; but one thing worry rarely does is actually help us solve problems! So worry does not help. But this is not all Jesus says: he says not to worry because the heavenly Father, who takes care of the flowers and the birds, will take care of us in the same way.

Excursus: Prayer and Providence in the Modern World

Belief in divine providence as traditionally understood within Christianity is severely challenged by the discoveries of modern science. It is not that it becomes impossible to believe that God acts in the world, but simply that we are much more aware of the intricate web of cause and effect and of the interdependence of the many things that happen in our world. We today know that there are a lot of things that we would call ‘natural causes’ that can affect the birds and the flowers: droughts, weather patterns, human freedom being used in an unwise or even cruel way, lack of concern for the environment. In a world in which we know that birds and flowers can become extinct, what does it mean to believe in providence?

Perhaps the best way to look at this question is to ask what it means to continue to pray the Lord’s Prayer in the modern world. If we take the prayer “Give us today our bread that is coming” (or whatever it in fact means) at face value, as a prayer about our everyday needs, then what does it mean to pray this prayer in the United States today? Presumably we do not expect God to simply rain down bread from heaven onto our tables, absolving us of the need to work. Bread is not something most of us make, but something we buy. So are we praying that the bread-makers’ union will not go on strike? Are we praying for job security so that we can work to earn money to buy bread? And if so, do we mean thereby that we expect to be exempted from the effects of a changing economy and of life in a capitalist, industrial, democratic society? Romanian Christians who prayed this prayer through the 1980s still had to wait in long lines to get bread. Many people in other countries pray this prayer and do without, sometimes because the fields that could be used for growing food are used instead to grow coffee or drugs, which can be sold to buy weapons to wage the ongoing civil war. The Earth is capable of producing enough for everyone, if the resources are used rightly. And so we today who pray this prayer must, as in the other petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, recognize that it is not just about asking God to act, but also about recognizing that we must be part of the answer to the prayer. Until the kingdom comes, we determine the opinion others have of God’s name. Until the kingdom comes, it is up to us to do God’s will in our own lives and communities. And until we feast at the messianic banquet, it is up to us to do our part to ensure that the resources God has provided for us through natural means on this planet are shared in a fair and equitable way with all its inhabitants. We do not think that God intervenes to carry stray cats hit by cars to an angelic veterinarian. God has made a world in which competition for scarce resources is part of how the diverse and well-adapted forms of life on this planet have come to exist as we now know them. This is not to say that God is absent, but it is to recognize that we must take seriously the kind of world God chose to make, one that makes room for human freedom and human responsibility. The book of Genesis presents humankind as responsible for stewardship of the natural realm. We are not to ask God to do those things that we are responsible for so that we may be off the hook from doing them ourselves.

And so we need to recognize our own responsibility in being answers to this prayer. This in no way negates the prayer’s force. I remember when my wife and I lived in the U.K. and were struggling to make ends meet since we were both students at Bible college. One day, my wife heard a sound, opened the door and found that someone had slipped an envelope (which turned out to have money in it) through our letterbox. Since she hadn’t heard or seen anyone walk past, she said “It must have been an angel.” My reply was that if it was an angel, then it was a miracle; but if God managed to get a person to do it, then it was an even greater miracle! Seeing the kingdom spread in the present involves seeing God’s will be done on earth as in heaven. It means aligning ourselves with God’s will. And so as the early Church fathers recognized, prayer has more to do with changing us than with changing God.

Let’s take one more example of how worry is ultimately self-defeating, and how Jesus’ teaching speaks to a world which is aware of much more science than any of Jesus’ original hearers, and which involves a different lifestyle that Jesus’ original hearers. Stress relates to the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism that all animals have. It is an instinct that is necessary, and without which animals would hang around much too long while predators approach. Adrenaline has enabled people to lift cars single-handed off of a loved one trapped underneath. Most of the time, this mechanism that we have all inherited serves us well. This mechanism is not part of the ‘sinful nature’ – it is something we need to survive. But when we worry about things that we do not need to worry about, worry becomes a lifestyle, and what was an important contributor to survival becomes something that actually undermines us. The ‘fight or flight’ mechanism evolved to enable organisms to respond to the only kind of stress there is in the animal kingdom: predators. And so what it does is shuts off the digestive, reproductive, and immune systems and channels all energy into running or fighting for survival. But what happens when one worries constantly in the modern world about one’s job? Worry becomes a lifestyle, the digestive system is affected, and one develops ulcers. Or the immune system is affected, and one finds oneself coming down with colds more often. Or to take another example, those who worry about not being able to have a child may find their reproductive system affected, so that the worry becomes literally self-defeating. The ‘flight or fight’ mechanism serves the purpose it evolved for very well: there is no point in finishing digesting lunch if you will not live to eat again, no point in keeping the reproductive system running if you are about to die. By channeling all energy into an immediate survival effort in the short term, this biological instinct can save our lives. But when we short-circuit the system by worrying constantly and making it a habit of lifestyle, we damage ourselves, and sometimes even undermine our chances of achieving whatever it is we are worrying about. Jesus’ teaching about worry does not reflect the modern understanding of the world, but I think we can see how it is very applicable indeed in our context today.

FOR NEXT TIME:

Read Matthew 7-10, with the help of the commentary.