Perhaps the best-known segment of the teaching of Jesus is that found in what has traditionally been known as the ‘Sermon on the Mount’, Matthew 5-7. In the context of Matthew’s narrative, one could easily get the impression that this was an actual complete sermon of Jesus’, delivered on one occasion. However, Matthew and his community knew that he was deriving this material from a well-known collection of Jesus’ teaching (what we today call ‘Q’) and would not have jumped to this conclusion. By comparing Matthew’s Gospel to Luke’s, we see that Matthew has taken sayings of Jesus from various places in this source, and brought them together and arranged and organized them into what we know as ‘the sermon on the mount’ [See the table comparing Luke 6 and Matthew 5-7 in the notes from the first class.]. This conclusion is based on the fact that, on the one hand, Matthew shows a clear tendency for gathering and arranging Jesus’ teaching along thematic lines, while on the other hand, there is no reason Luke would have taken something like Matthew’s sermon on the Mount and randomly scattered some of it through other parts of his Gospel. [Calvin recognized that Matthew 5-7 is “a brief summary of the doctrine of Christ…collected out of his many and various discourses”, and so this is not just a conclusion of modern critical scholarship!] If there is one point that redaction criticism has brought home, it is that the Gospel authors were not just compilers of traditional sayings: they arranged and edited their material in order to emphasize theological points. This general observation is particularly applicable to the Sermon on the Mount.
Be that as it may, from a literary perspective we find that Jesus’ teaching is compared and contrasted with that of Moses in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus teaches on a mountain, which in itself ties this in to the theme of Jesus as a new Moses. He sits to teach, as was standard practice in the synagogue and other similar settings within Judaism. His words are compared and contrasted with the Law of Moses: “You have heard it said…but I say to you”, and of course, “I have not come to abolish the Law…”
We shall return to this theme shortly, but before getting to that, perhaps it would be helpful to look at some of the different ways that the Sermon on the Mount has been interpreted within different Christian traditions. These are helpfully summarized by Georg Strecker (in his book The Sermon on the Mount: An Exegetical Commentary, Nashville: Abingdon, 1988, pp.15-23), and what follows is based on his longer treatment of this topic, to which students are referred if they want more information. Strecker divides interpretations of Matthew 5-7 into categories essentially as follows (supplemented with information from other sources, in particular Graham N. Stanton, A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992, pp.289-297):
1) The Sermon on the Mount as Elite Ethic (Catholic-monastic type of exegesis)
Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, distinguished between the old law of bondage and the new law of liberty brought by Christ. He taught that not everything that is found in the Sermon on the Mount are precepts that are binding on everyone; some are not commandments but ‘counsels’, a kind of ‘evangelical advice’ which is fully binding only for a limited group of Christians with a special (e.g. monastic) calling. For those living ‘in the real world’, the demands of the Sermon seemed impossible to take literally and to practice daily. And so some of these teachings, like the call to celibacy (i.e. to become eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven), are hard teachings that not everyone can accept (cf. Matthew 19:11-12) .
2) The Sermon on the Mount as Law and Gospel (Pauline-Lutheran type of exegesis)
Luther rejected the interpretation that we have just outlined above, stressing that just as the Gospel of justification by faith is for all, so too the Sermon on the Mount is addressed to all. Reformers like Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin all insisted that the Sermon on the Mount represented the true, correct interpretation of the Law of Moses, which had been obscured in Judaism. Stanton says (p.291) that they emphasized the continuity between the Law of Moses and the Law of Christ than did their Catholic contemporaries.
Luther also rejected what could be called the ‘fanatical’ type of exegesis (which is described and explained in #3 below), which treated the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount as essentially a normative law that Christians are required to live up to. Here, Luther was afraid that the distinction between Law and Gospel would be obscured if not obliterated. For Luther, the main aim of the Sermon on the Mount is to confront the reader with the fact that God’s standard is unreachable and his demands unfulfillable. Those who realize this are thus driven to surrender themselves to be justified by faith alone, apart from works.
Luther’s theology dealt with the problem of how one was to reconcile the demands of the Sermon with life in the real world by formulating his doctrine of the ‘two kingdoms’. Christians live simultaneously within two kingdoms (just as they are simil iustus et peccator, at the same time righteous and sinners). The two kingdoms Luther distinguishes are the kingdom of God filled with grace and mercy, and the kingdom of the world filled with wrath and severity. H. Reinhold Niebuhr asserts that more than any great Christian leader before him, Luther affirmed life in culture as the sphere in which Christ could and ought to be followed; and more than any other he discerned that the rules to be followed in cultural life were independent of Christian or church law, where the Sermon on the Mount would be relevant.
However, he nonetheless believed that these two kingdoms are closely related, and tried to hold them in tension without separating them. The reader may decide whether she or he thinks Luther succeeded on this point. And so, to give examples, Luther could write both a tract entitled “A Treatise on Christian Liberty” celebrating faith and love (“from faith flow love and joy in the Lord, and from love a joyful and free mind that serves one’s neighbors willingly”), and one entitled “Against the Robbing and Murdering Horde of Peasants” which is addressed to the authorities and asks them to “stab, smite, slay whoever you can … here there is no time for sleeping, no place for patience or mercy”.
A good example of Luther’s approach would be to take the example of a Christian who happens to also be a judge. In his capacity as judge, he must punish those who are guilty of theft, but once he leaves the courtroom, if someone steals from him as an individual, he must forgive! It is easy to see how a Christian who adopts this approach could easily feel not only pulled in two directions, but torn down the middle! This also explains how some Christians have felt able to sit by or even participate in the military when their country was engaging in activities that they as Christians may have been unhappy with. In one’s civic duties, one is responsible to the kingdom of this world, so the argument goes. Or to quote Luther’s comment on the Sermon on the Mount, “Christ is not tampering with the responsibility and authority of the government, but he is teaching individual Christians how to live personally, apart from their official position and authority…A Christian should not (use violence to) resist evil; but within the limits of his office, a secular person should firmly oppose every evil”, a ‘secular person’ here being a phrase that includes Christians serving and participating in the secular realm (cf. Stanton, op.cit., p.292).
The dualist position brought a profound understanding of sin and its redemption by Christ. Its dynamic understanding of the Christ-culture problem was not only more persuasive and realistic but also more inspiring than other static approaches. Nevertheless, Niebuhr points out three insufficient aspects of the dualist approach. First, the dualists open the door to the antinomianism. No matter how morally humans try to live, they still fall short of the divine law as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. This can discourage people from living conscientiously. Second, their predominantly spiritual concern leads them to be culturally conservative. Their focus remains mainly in the religious realm, and social matters are principally left untouched. We can regard as distorted examples of this approach in modern history would be pro-Hitler "German Christians" and not a small number of Japanese Christians during the Second World War. Both of them were schizophrenic in their loyalty to the nation and to Christ. Third, those upholding this approach have a tendency to pay insufficient respect to the positive aspects of God's creation because of their principal preoccupation with Christ's redemption, the radical nature of sin, and spiritual matters. Although it is ultimately temporary, fallen, and needs to be redeemed, it is nonetheless a good creation. Yet this approach has in its favor the fact that it takes more seriously than some other viewpoints the fact that Christians, even if they are not ‘of the world’, really are ‘in the world’. However, the question remains whether the Sermon on the Mount has something to say for the world, or only for the Church. This is a point to which we shall have to return later.
3) The Sermon on the Mount as Realizable Demand (fanatical type of exegesis)
This third type of interpretation is one of the interpretations that Luther and the other reformers opposed. It is typical of the Anabaptist tradition, and essentially views the Sermon on the Mount as offering a code to live by, one that can be realized if one approaches it with complete dedication and abandon to the cause of Christ. On the basis of the Sermon on the Mount, this interpretation rejects all oaths (5:34), all forms of violence (5:39) and thus all forms of military service, and adopts instead a radical love for one’s enemies. Christians likewise are not to hold the office of judge or ruler (7:1). The Christians who adopted this literal interpretation thus opted out of any involvement whatsoever in secular government.
Strecker points to Leo Tolstoy as one prominent example of this approach to the Sermon on the Mount in the modern era. Tolstoy makes the point in several of his works that if only human beings would adopt wholeheartedly the Golden Rule and the teaching that we should not resist evil people, this would bring in the Kingdom of God and essentially a paradise on earth. From the perspective of Lutheran Protestantism, this teaching does not take into account the serious, all-pervasive problem of human sinfulness and fallenness. Yet it does have in its favor the fact that the Sermon on the Mount ends with an emphasis on putting into practice the things that one has heard Jesus teach!
4) The Sermon on the Mount as an Ethic of Attitude (liberal type of exegesis)
This approach essentially rejects the legal aspect of the Sermon on the Mount, and focuses instead on its appeal to individuals to change their attitude and thinking more than their behavior. The demands of the Sermon are, from this perspective, not realizable, and thus they are not to be taken literally, but rather teach the attitude of heart one must have in the Kingdom.
5) The Religious-Historical Horizon of the Sermon on the Mount (historical type of exegesis)
During the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the major advances in Biblical studies came about by taking a historical approach to the Biblical text and seeking to place it in its religious, historical, and cultural setting. Two key figures were Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer. Both emphasized that Jesus was not simply a moral teacher, but in a manner that is not very easily understood today his teaching had a largely eschatological focus. Jesus (like John the Baptist and the earliest Christians) lived and breathed the atmosphere of Jewish apocalyptic expectations, and expected the Kingdom of God to break into human history and bring it to an end in the near future. The ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is thus an ‘interim ethic’: it is teaching about how to live in response to the imminent end. It is not a program for long term social change or a prescription for the life of a community that may continue to exist indefinitely. The Sermon on the Mount, like all the moral and ethical teaching of Jesus, is (when viewed from this perspective) a call to radical repentance in response to the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom.
Other scholars have sought to view the Sermon on the Mount against the background of the Judaism of Jesus’ time, but have focused less on apocalyptic Judaism and more on Rabbinic Judaism. Studying ancient Judaism, it became clear that the demands of the Sermon on the Mount were by no means unique or without parallel in other Jewish sources. And so from this perspective, what remains unique about Jesus is not his ethical teaching, but the conviction that the Kingdom of God is drawing near in his very person. W. D. Davies (in his detailed study, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, Atlanta: Scholars, 1989) showed the points of contact between the Sermon on the Mount and the Judaism closest to its time, namely that of Rabbinic Judaism in the immediate aftermath of the Jewish war and seeking to regroup and found a rabbinic school at Jamnia. Davies argues that the Sermon on the Mount is essentially a Christian answer to the Judaism of this time.
6) The Sermon on the Mount in Dialectical Theology
One of the major serious reactions against liberal theology during the 20th century was what has become known as ‘dialectical theology’, which is another name for the existentialist approach to theology formulated by such great thinkers as Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. For them, the attempt to study the Biblical text in a purely historical manner, without bringing in theological questions, was misguided. This is not to say that historical research does not have a place, and an important one at that, but simply that theological concerns must also be considered. Since there is no way that one can study the Bible without presuppositions, one should lay one’s theological cards on the table and acknowledge that one is studying not just out of an interest in fact, but with a theological agenda as well. This existentialist approach for the most part adhered to the Lutheran understanding of the Gospel, but with a stronger recognition that one is addressed by divine grace through the Sermon on the Mount, and not only by requirements that one cannot live up to.
7) The Peace Movement and the Sermon on the Mount
No discussion of interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount would be complete that did not include the pacifist movement for social change in the modern era. Individuals like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi are but two examples of those influenced by the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount to a radical lifestyle that, while rejecting violence, also challenged head-on the unjust social structures in place in their societies. For those who take this approach, there can be no separation of the Gospel teachings from their social implications, no ultimate separation of religious and social responsibilities. Rather, the call of the Sermon on the Mount is to live out its demands in a radical manner in such a way as to change and transform society.
Strecker concludes his brief survey by making two important points (p.23): (1) “[T]here is scarcely a realm of New Testament exegesis in which the danger of erroneous interpretation is so great as in the area of actualizing the Sermon on the Mount”; and (2) “Before its meaning is translated , we must hear its original statement”. This last point is important: before we can get to grips with the implications of the Sermon on the Mount, we must engage in serious historical exegesis, seeking to be clear as to what the Sermon meant (or could have meant) in its original context. But of course, the Sermon is not a single layer, but contains teaching of Jesus, compiled in Q, and arranged and edited by Matthew. And so for our present purposes we shall focus on one particular aspect, namely the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount and the role it plays in Matthew’s Gospel. Before one moves on to ask about how we should live in light of these teachings, it is important that questions about Luke’s version of the same material, and the relationship of both to the historical Jesus, also be asked, and unfortunately this undertaking lies beyond the scope of the present course. However, in terms of the Sermon on the Mount in the context of Matthew’s Gospel, we must still ask some broad questions regarding its role and meaning. Is it intended to be obeyed, or to drive the reader to despair and to throw oneself on the grace and mercy of God? Is it teaching for Christians, or for everyone? Was it a temporary measure, a radical response to the imminent end of the world which cannot be applied as such today, after nearly 2,000 more years of human history have passed? In order to answer these questions, let us return to the text of Matthew’s Gospel to search for answers.
Matthew (unlike Luke) presents this material as having been delivered on a mountain, which as we have already mentioned, suggests a comparison with the figure of Moses. (As we shall see shortly, the content of the Sermon also suggests such a comparison). Mountains were generally thought of as typical settings for revelations to occur, and this general point is important, and not just the specific mountain Sinai. But that Moses typology is Matthew’s main point is suggested by the fact that the phrase which Matthew uses, ‘go up the mountain’, is repeated 18 times in the Pentateuch (out of a total of 24 occurrences in total in the Jewish Scriptures), and most of the occurrences of the phrase refer to Moses [these statistics are given by Dale Allison in his book, The New Moses: A Matthean Typology, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993, pp.174-175]. Similarly, the phrase used at the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 8:1), ‘After he descended from the mountain’, is almost identical with Exodus 34:29, which is the only place where this particular grammatical and verbal combination occurs [once again see Allison, ibid, pp.179-180]. Thus there is sufficient evidence to support the idea that Moses intends the Moses typology that was so prominent in the infancy narrative to carry through into the Sermon on the Mount. (It is of course also prominent in other contexts later on, as for example in the account of the Transfiguration).
If Jesus is being compared with Moses, then does Matthew think of Jesus as essentially a ‘lawgiver’? To at least a certain extent we must answer ‘yes’. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus emphatically upholds the Law, and has not come to abolish it; but nevertheless he gives an interpretation of the demands of Scripture that essentially radicalizes parts of it, and in so doing sets aside others. For Matthew as well, we should note that ‘rabbi’ or ‘teacher’ is not an adequate way of addressing Jesus, in spite of the fact that one of the most important things Jesus does in Matthew’s Gospel is teach! In this Gospel only those who do not believe in Jesus address him in this way: true disciples address him as ‘Lord’. This surely indicates Matthew’s understanding of Jesus and his teaching. In the words Matthew himself uses to conclude the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches with authority, unlike the scribes. In other words, while the rabbis of Matthew’s time give their opinions on the meaning of Scripture, Jesus speaks as a new Moses, one who brings not merely an interpretation of the Law of Moses but a revelation that, while it does not set aside the Law of Moses, radicalizes and thus reinterprets it. And so Matthew’s understanding of Jesus as a new Moses, and of Jesus’ teaching as authoritative in a way that rabbinic interpretation of Torah was not, provide important keys to understanding Matthew 5-7.
The first two verses of the Matthew 5 also give an important indication regarding the audience to whom the Sermon on the Mount is addressed. It is addressed primarily to the disciples, but the crowds are also present throughout. And so any attempt to interpret the Sermon on the Mount in a way that either neglects its character as first and foremost being instruction for followers of Jesus, or denies that it has anything to say to those who are not already followers of Jesus, will shipwreck on these two verses. Nevertheless, the content of the Sermon indicates that it is above all else a presentation of the rigors of following Jesus. [Perhaps one might compare the role of the Law in Judaism with the role of the Sermon on the Mount, and the teaching of Jesus more generally, in Christianity: the teaching of Jesus is ‘for’ the community of the new covenant, but this does not mean it has nothing to say to those outside it. On the other hand, Gundry argues (p.66) that ‘the crowds’ are in fact crowds of followers or disciples, and that it would thus be wrong to distinguish them. At any rate, the content of the Sermon on the Mount itself makes clear that at least the primary audience are disciples, and more specifically the audience of the Sermon in its present form is the Christian community in Matthew’s time]. The word we translate ‘disciple’ in fact means ‘student’, since the only way to learn in this cultural and historical context was discipleship. And thus discipleship has implicit within it learning, and so it is that Jesus gathers his disciples and begins to teach them.
The ‘beatitudes’ refers to those famous sayings of Jesus that in the King James Version start with ‘blessed are…’. However, ‘blessed’ as a translation is not entirely accurate: the term used, makarios, was not a purely religious term in the Greco-Roman world, although within a Jewish context it would obviously have had at least something of a religious significance. But its root meaning is ‘happy’ in the sense of ‘fortunate’ or ‘lucky’. Perhaps the most idiomatic translation of the beatitudes would be something like ‘lucky you’, or (as others have suggested) ‘congratulations’. On the other hand, Jerome Neyrey (following K. C. Hanson) seeks to put these terms in the context of their original setting in a Mediterranean honor-shame culture, and thus he would translate these sayings with ‘honored are those…’ or ‘honorable are those…’ While this is probably not justified at a linguistic level, in terms of cultural implications this view of the beatitudes is right on the money. In their original context, the beatitudes implied a radical reversal of cultural values. They called ‘fortunate’ those who seemed to be the least fortunate, and thus honored those who were considered dishonorable. This is to be seen not only in the esteeming of those who have suffered misfortune (e.g. those who happen to be poor, or who mourn) but also the declaring fortunate of those who would have been not just considered unfortunate but actually actively dishonored by the community: those who were shamed, shunned, and excluded (Matthew 5:11). And so, although the word makarios itself is not always used with a religious orientation, it clearly is used in this way here, since any other interpretation of Jesus’ words would make no sense. As far as the standards of human society were concerned, the meek and the shunned were all unfortunate, and so it is only in God’s eyes and from God’s perspective that one can say they are ‘lucky’ or ‘to be congratulated’ [On this topic see further Jerome Neyrey, Honor and Shame in the Gospel of Matthew, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998, pp.165-169]. There is also presumably an eschatological aspect: in view of the nearness of the Kingdom of God, one can now say ‘the poor (in spirit), the meek, the persecuted are better off’, because God is about to turn the tables.
Luke’s version of the beatitudes shows that in Q they were shorter and more concrete than in Matthew’s version. Matthew, in a fashion typical of his use of his sources, has added explanatory phrases to these sayings. So where his source had ‘Happy are you who are poor’, in Matthew it becomes ‘Happy are those who are poor in spirit’. Where his source had ‘Happy are you who are hungry’, in Matthew it becomes ‘Happy are you who hunger and thirst after righteousness’. Is Matthew simply watering down what were originally concrete sayings of judgment addressed to social issues and oppression? The answer is not a straightforward ‘yes’ or ‘no’. While Matthew clearly does ‘spiritualize’ these sayings of Jesus somewhat, it seems clear that they were never simply statements about poverty or hunger in general. It is true that the Jesus tradition has many statements suggesting that the coming of the kingdom will reverse the situation in the present age. But the reference to persecution with which the beatitudes in Q concluded (cp. Luke 6:22) indicates that these words are to be thought of as addressed to Christians who are suffering, not just generally, but on account of their association with Jesus. These words are addressed first and foremost to those who have willingly renounced what they had for the sake of the kingdom. Yet in Matthew’s time, in the setting of a relatively wealthy, urban church, these words addressed to itinerant followers of Jesus no longer spoke so directly. And thus Matthew turns their focus inward to concentrate on inner, spiritual aspects of discipleship. The kingdom of God belongs, not only to those who became poor in order to travel around with Jesus and to help others, but also to those who are ‘poor in spirit’.
Presumably under the influence of Isaiah 61, Matthew developed and expanded the beatitudes he found in his source (presumably four, as in Luke). Isaiah 61 was probably already in the background, but themes from this passage come to the fore also in the beatitudes that are not derived from Q. Davies and Allison (pp.436-437) note the following parallels:
Matthew 5 Isaiah 61
‘Blessed are the poor’ (v3) Good news to the poor (v1)
‘Theirs is the kingdom’ Note the connection between ‘good
news’ and ‘kingdom’ in Matthew
‘those who mourn…will be comforted’ (v4) ‘to comfort all who mourn’ (v2)
‘the meek…shall inherit the land’ (v5) ‘the poor…inherit the land’ (v1,7)
Righteousness (v6) Righteousness mentioned in v3,8,11
‘they will be satisfied’ ‘eat the wealth of nations’ (v6)
‘pure in heart’ (v8) ‘heal the broken of heart’ (v1)
‘rejoice and be glad’ (v11-12) ‘let my soul be glad’ (v10-11)
[Note also that there are interesting parallels between Matthew’s beatitudes in 5:3-12, and the woes in Matthew 23:13-39.] Also important is the fact that, particularly in the beatitudes that Matthew has added, these are no longer simply statements about eschatological reversal of fortunes, but acquire an ethical thrust. While the original beatitudes promised a reward to those who are poor and suffering, Matthew’s version of them has an additional imperative element: the rewards promised to the pure in heart and the peacemakers carry the message: ‘Be pure in heart!’ and ‘Be peacemakers!’ Yet it is probably going too far to call them ‘entrance requirements for the kingdom of heaven’ as Strecker and others do.
What does the phrase ‘poor in heart’ mean? A similar phrase has been found in Jewish literature from the same period in the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1QM 14:7, and Biblical parallels can be found in Psalm 34:18; Proverbs 29:23. It appears to be synonymous with ‘humble’, and an antonym for ‘haughty/proud of spirit’ [see Davies and Allison, vol.1, p.444]. The saying has not lost its eschatological thrust: those who are humble do not already possess the kingdom in any full sense, and so in a sense this saying means something like ‘the kingdom of heaven will be given to the poor in spirit’ (all the other beatitudes have a future tense verb). Davies and Allison also note (ibid, pp.443-444) that by inserting ‘in spirit’ Matthew has not completely changed the meaning of the original, since the poor were generally thought in Judaism to be more pious since they are forced to depend on God. In later times, Jewish Christians called themselves the ebyonim, which is Hebrew for ‘the poor’.
The passive verb ‘they shall be comforted’ is a divine passive: they shall be comforted by God. If we let Isaiah 61 guide our interpretation, the people of God are not to be thought of as mourning simply in a general sense, for lost loved ones or other reasons, but because the people of God are oppressed, because the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer injustice (so Davies & Allison, vol.1, p.448).
This beatitude, which was presumably not in Q, was taken over almost exactly from Psalm 37:11 (as it is found in the Septuagint), and reflects Isaiah 61:7 as well. In Psalm 37, it is clearly the land that the meek/poor/humble/gentle will inherit. The question is, does Matthew intend the same meaning, or has he broadened it so that he quite literally thinks of ‘the earth’? Most assume that he does.
Again, the contrast with Luke (and presumably Q) can be overplayed. Matthew has indeed ‘spiritualized’ the beatitude concerning the hungry he found in his source. But the hungry are hungry precisely because of injustice, because the present age is not as God would have it, and is not as God’s kingdom will be. And so Matthew focuses on the inner attitude of the hungry, and hopefully even of those followers of Jesus who happen to have enough to eat but are aware that others do not. Matthew’s community, as we saw from some of the hints in his Gospel, was probably not poor. There is nothing blessed about having less money or less food in and of itself. But often by translating dikiaosyne as ‘righteousness’ rather than ‘justice’ (for Matthew, unlike Paul, dikaiosyne refers above all else to righteous or just conduct), and by ignoring Luke’s (more original) version of this beatitude, the modern church misses the desperate desire for justice that is expressed here. If it is not a justice that takes up the sword to accomplish its purposes, nor is it simply a passive acceptance that nothing can be done until God brings his kingdom in supernaturally. But to clarify how disciples are to act as children of the kingdom, we must wait until later in the Sermon on the Mount. For the time being, what is clear is that God will satisfy (note again the ‘divine passive’) those who long for justice. God will not allow the wicked to oppress the innocent indefinitely. This promise may have seemed more convincing to its original readers, for whom the end still seemed near, than it does to we today who are aware that 1,900 more years of human injustice have been carried out. The point is that those who long for justice will be satisfied because, sooner or later, God will establish the justice of whose absence they are not painfully aware.
Again, a divine passive is used: the merciful will be shown mercy by God. This is not simply a question of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. In Matthew’s Gospel, the Golden Rule also becomes the basis for the final judgment: As you do unto others, God will do unto you.
The references to persecution for the sake of Jesus, like the reference to being salt and light, indicates clearly that this is teaching for Christians. Perhaps Matthew was not fully aware that by making the crowds be present in his narrative for the Sermon on the Mount, he would create confusion for later generations. But when a renowned teacher instructed his disciples, it would often be in a place where others were or could be present (the modern, Western idea of privacy did not exist, and in many Mediterranean cultures today it still does not), and so this is certainly realistic. What is important for the interpreter is to recognize that the discourse assumes that those who follow this code live among others who do not: and so their light is to shine before those people.
The riddle of the salt: salt gives saltiness, so if salt loses its saltiness, there is nothing else to ‘salt’ it with!
Before attempting to tackle this passage, it is important that we consider some of the more general issues that are raised in interpreting it, and most importantly, that we allow ourselves to become at least somewhat aware of the presuppositions we bring to the text. Almost anyone who reads Matthew’s Gospel today reads it with Paul in mind, and so whether we like it or not, we have a tendency to interpret Matthew in light of Paul, and either to harmonize what he says with Paul’s teaching about the Law, or otherwise to drive a wedge between them so that some regard Matthew’s view of the Law as ‘anti-Pauline’. But it is crucial that we ‘let Matthew be Matthew’, as Klyne Snodgrass has emphasized, and so I want to draw on an article by him in order to at least clear the way and to have a clear idea of what we do and do not know for certain about Matthew’s view of the Law (see further on this subject Snodgrass’ article, “Matthew and the Law”, SBLSP 1988, pp.536-554, on which the section that follows is based):
Important questions about Matthew, Jesus, and the Law of Moses:
1) Did Matthew know Paul’s teaching? This is a crucial question. In this very passage we are about to study, some exegetes have felt there is anti-Pauline polemic. Paul was renowned for having claimed that circumcision and other commandments do not apply to Gentile believers. Is Matthew reacting against this here? If so, is he reacting against a misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching, or against Paul’s teaching itself? The same sort of question arises when studying the Letter of James, where the knowledge of and relationship to Paul’s teaching that is felt to be presupposed will have a profound effect on one’s interpretation. If one sets Matthew’s Gospel in Antioch in Syria in the latter part of the first century C.E., it is highly improbable that there would have been no awareness of Paul’s teaching and of the issues it raised. And so one may ask how the Sermon on the Mount relates to the Gospel. Is it intended to drive people to the Gospel by showing how unable they are to meet God’s standard? Or does the Sermon on the Mount presuppose that the reader already is aware of God’s grace? And if so, does it also presuppose a different, more optimistic view of human nature than Paul’s?
2) What may we conclude from silence? There is no mention of circumcision, which was an issue in Paul’s Gentile mission. What do we conclude from this silence? That they did continue to practice circumcision, or that they did not? Do you think that Matthew’s Christian community was still a part of the synagogue? We saw that there seems to be evidence pointing in two directions, but nowhere are we given a decisive indication one way or the other. One’s conclusion about this can influence one’s understanding of the Law in Matthew’s Gospel. If they were within the synagogue, they presumably lived much like their fellow non-Christian Jews. If they were not, they may have had much more significantly different practices without necessarily mentioning them in the Gospel.
3) How is Matthew 5:17-48 to be interpreted? It is the key passage for understanding Matthew’s view of the Law of Moses, and Snodgrass calls 5:17-20 an “exegetical mine field” (p.539). He asks: “Why does Matthew have ‘the Law or the prophets’? What does plhrwsai [plerosai: usually translated as ‘to fulfill’] mean? What is the relationship of the four sayings in this section? Does 5:19 interpret 5:18 or 5:17? What is the relation and meaning of the two ewV [= ‘until’] clauses in 5:18? Does 5:18d refer to the death and resurrection of Jesus? Are the least commands a reference to Jesus’ commands? Does 5:19 mean there is ranking in the Kingdom or does it refer to exclusion from and entrance into the Kingdom? Do all four of these sayings present a unified thought or are parts of them intended to counter other parts?…Does Matthew present Jesus as abrogating the law?” (Snodgrass, ibid., p.539). Snodgrass notes that this last question about the abrogation of the Law is the most important one. And so this leads on to another question:
4) “How antithetical are the antitheses?” They use the Greek word de, which can mean either ‘but’ or ‘and’. The stronger word alla which is an unambiguous ‘but’ is not used, but these sayings tend to be interpreted as though alla was used. Interpreters have suggested that all, some, or none of them actually contradicts the Law. So do they in fact set aside the Law of Moses, or just rabbinic or popular interpretations of it?
5) How do these teachings relate to eschatology? Is it possible to hold such a loose view of clothing and other material concerns precisely because the end is expected to be very soon? Some would take eschatology as the key to interpreting the whole of the Sermon on the Mount, even the Lord’s Prayer.
6) Are all the teachings in the Sermon on the Mount to be taken literally? Most assume that sayings like ‘If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off’ are examples of hyperbole. Is much of the Sermon on the Mount similarly hyperbolic? If so, how much of it? (See for example 5:18,22,29-30,39,43). And if it does not expect the reader to practice everything literally, then is its aim more to do with changing attitudes than about specific actions?
7) What is the relevance of the love command, of Hosea 6:6, and of the material in chapters 23-24 of Matthew to these questions?
8) Is Matthew consistent? By this question two things could possibly be meant. One is that it is possible that Matthew held views that were not internally coherent, either in a dialectical tension with one another of which he was fully aware and which he was happy to leave unresolved, or he could have been unaware that there was such a tension. It is also crucial to remember that what seems contradictory to us may not have seemed so to him: he may have held underlying beliefs and presuppositions which brought diverse statements into harmony with one another. Another possibility is that Matthew has included material from different stages in the development of his and his community’s thought. In this case, the tensions may reflect development in Matthew’s thought and tensions in his literary work, rather than actual tensions in his theological perspective when he wrote the Gospel. And so one’s assumptions about how consistent Matthew was and may be expected to have been, and about how to deal with any apparent tensions that may be found, will affect one’s interpretation.
With these broad questions in mind, we may now turn our attention to this controversial and difficult, but crucially important and rewarding passage.
vv17-20 These verses are particularly crucial, and they will determine one’s understanding of the whole rest of the chapter. In view of the fact that Matthew includes these words here, before going on to his famous antitheses, we may presume that Matthew is here giving an interpretative key for what follows. Jesus’ teaching is different from the Law of Moses. Some presumably imagined what Matthew here emphasizes they are not to imagine: that Jesus has come to abolish the Law. Matthew thus wants to make clear that this is a misunderstanding of Jesus’ teaching. He has come not to abolish but to ‘fulfill’. What does this mean? Does it mean he came to practice and live out the whole Law? Does it mean he came to show its true intention, in a way that nonetheless makes the Law of Moses superfluous now that the fulfillment is here? In v18 we are told that not even the smallest letter or stroke of a pen will disappear from the Law, until ‘all is fulfilled’. Again, this could be taken in two ways: It could mean ‘never’, or it could mean that once Jesus has completed his work it will be set aside, or it could mean that when the Kingdom of Heaven has fully come, the Law will then have finished its purpose and will thus no longer be necessary. The second alternative is remarkably similar to Paul’s teaching, which considered that in Christ the Kingdom has dawned, the Gentiles are being included and thus the Law of Moses is no longer the basis for the covenant relationship between God and his people.
However, in view of vv18-20, it seems clear that Matthew does not envision any of the commandments in Torah being set aside. Rather, what is called for is a greater righteousness. This ‘greater’ is an important recurring term in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus teaches a righteousness that is greater than that of the Pharisees and scribes. Some commandments are greater or weightier than others. So while Matthew does not have exactly the same view of things that Paul does, he is not a legalist either. He may tithe his mint and cumin, but he knows that what is most important is love for God and for one’s neighbor. He continued to frequent the Temple as long as it stood, but he knows that what God really wants is mercy and not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6). This didn’t mean that sacrifice was unimportant for Matthew, any more than it meant that for Hosea. It was simply a prioritizing. In the case of Paul, this prioritizing is carried further, so that ‘minor issues’ like circumcision and food laws are relativized to the point of being completely optional. This is not Matthew’s view of things, but both he and Paul are working from the same principles, and agreed on points that were clear in the teaching of Jesus. It was just that on the basis of Jesus’ teaching they drew out rather different implications. For Matthew, one is to prioritize commandments as Jesus taught, but one is not therefore to neglect the least of the commandments. Perhaps vv19-20 show Matthew’s understanding quite clearly: someone like Paul, who neglected lesser commandments, might be considered least in the Kingdom of Heaven; but the scribes and Pharisees who keep the details but do not prioritize and thus neglect the weightier matters will not enter the Kingdom at all.
Matthew now introduces a series of 6 antitheses, after which he regularly inserts sayings of Jesus on the same or similar themes. It will be helpful to isolate the antitheses and to look at them together before going on to look at each one separately. [The quotations below are from the RSV translation]
5:21-22 "You have heard that it was said to the men of old, `You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, `You fool!' shall be liable to the hell of fire.
5:27-28 "You have heard that it was said, `You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
5:31-32 "It was also said, `Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that every one who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
5:33-34 "Again you have heard that it was said to the men of old, `You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.' But I say to you, Do not swear at all,…
5:38-39 "You have heard that it was said, `An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil…
5:43-44 "You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies…
Please note from the outset that the commandments being discussed (apart from the fourth and the second half of the sixth) are all found written in the Torah. It is clear that it would be inappropriate to understand Jesus to mean ‘God told you…but I tell you’, so that Jesus is essentially saying ‘I know better than God’. There are thus two possible interpretations of these antitheses: Either the weak adversative de should be translated ‘and’, so that Jesus is go beyond the teaching of Scripture rather than setting it aside; or alternatively, Jesus might be saying that Moses said these things to the people because they could not tolerate the whole truth, but now Jesus is revealing the complete will of God. The latter option finds support in Matthew 19:8, where Jesus says that the subject of the third antithesis here, divorce, was permitted by Moses because of the hardness of the Israelites’ hearts, but was not the perfect will of God. This statement is radical! It apparently undermines the authority of the Law of Moses as not expressing the will of God perfectly! This was a shocking step, and later Jewish Christian groups took the idea further, claiming that there were parts of the Jewish Law that had been added by Moses but which were not original and thus of divine inspiration and authority. Could Matthew be attributing such a view to Jesus?
When one realizes a few points about the character of these particular commandments, it becomes possible to find a solution. The commandment regarding divorce does not require divorce, but simply legislates an existing practice, to insure that women are treated fairly and given proof that they had been married and then sent away, so that they would have the possibility of remarriage or at least of something other than a disgraced reputation. It nowhere suggests that people should divorce. Similarly, the principle known as the lex talionis, “An eye for an eye”, placed limits on punishment and revenge: in repaying someone for the wrong they have done to you, if they blinded you in one eye, then you are to do no more than to blind them in one eye. This, at least, was the origin of the principle. Finally, the final ‘antithesis’, in mentioning ‘…and hate your enemies’, is not restating a Biblical command so much as ironically following through the possible implication that could be drawn: love your neighbor and hate everyone else!
With these points in mind, it seems best to translate these sayings with ‘and’ rather than but. Jesus is teaching about the greater righteousness of his Law, which goes beyond the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, and demands more than even the Law of Moses, without thereby contradicting the Law of Moses. And so we have:
1. The Law said do not murder, and I say do not even hate
2. The Law says do not commit adultery, and I say do not even look lustfully at a woman
3. The Law says give a certificate if you divorce, and I say do not divorce (except…)
4. The Law says do not swear falsely, and I say you’re better off not swearing at all
5. The Law says no more than an eye for an eye, and I say do not repay evil with evil
6. The Law says love your neighbor, and I say love even your enemies
And so it seems that, while Jesus probably did say something that relativized the Law of Moses, it did so over against principles inherent in God’s creation itself and in God’s character. The very conclusion of this part of the Sermon on the Mount appeals to the principle of imitating God: Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect (5:48). Neyrey (Honor and Shame in the Gospel of Matthew, pp.190-211) notes how Jesus was radically departing from the values of the culture he lived in. To reply in kind when one was called a name, to use an oath to settle matters of honor, to take revenge on those who had insulted one’s own or one’s family’s honor – all of this was of crucial importance in an ancient Mediterranean cultural context. And so Neyrey calls the chapter of his book that deals with Matthew 5:21-48, “Calling off the honor game”. This was a radical step, in ways that are not as obvious in a North American cultural context, where the principle (even if it is not always followed) is that one should ignore bullies and name-callers. The idea that “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” would have been incomprehensible and alien to Jesus’ contemporaries, and yet it is something along these lines that he seeks to teach his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel.
The first two topics are linked in two ways. Both derive from the Ten Commandments, and both delve deeper to seek to address the root causes of the prohibited actions, rather than merely legislating about the actions themselves. Anyone who simply calls his brother names will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and in the end to God’s judgment. As regards adultery, Jesus says that if you can’t control your body, then you should not simply say ‘I can’t help myself’: you would be better off maiming yourself to prevent yourself from sinning, than to have your whole body but come under God’s judgment. Remember that these things were said in a culture where being maimed or crippled was not just an inconvenience, but meant being reduced from someone who can work and maintain his family’s honor, to one who is forced to rely on begging. And so one is to give up one’s own honor rather than do what God considers dishonorable.
These two are linked inasmuch as both involve excluding what the Law permitted, and both do so on the basis of an appeal to the nature of creation. At Qumran a similar rejection of divorce on the basis of the teaching of Genesis is found; and as regards oaths, the principle is that human beings cannot change the things they swear by, and so they might as well not bother. In the case of divorce, Matthew includes an exception clause that the other Gospels do not. He is presumably interpreting Jesus’ teaching on this subject as part of the rabbinic debate between the schools of Hillel and Shammai. Hillel said that burning the breakfast was sufficient grounds for divorce; Shammai said only unfaithfulness or the like was sufficient grounds. Matthew takes Jesus to be agreeing with Shammai. But what was the exception clause referring to? The Greek word porneia refers to ‘sexual immorality’, but this is vague. Does it mean ‘adultery’? Does it mean ‘if it is found that the bride was not a virgin’? Does it mean ‘in the case of those who married and then found that their marriage was to a relative within the bounds prohibited by the Law of Moses’? The topic has been studied much, and most commentaries will treat the topic in some detail.
The relationship between these two is quite clear. The most interesting point in this section regards the question of ‘turning the other cheek’ and the other two practical examples of what it means not to ‘resist the evil person’ or ‘the evil deed’ by applying the rule of ‘an eye for an eye’. Traditionally, Jesus has been considered to be teaching passivity: be a doormat, and let people walk all over you. But is this really what Jesus meant? Is that the sort of approach to life Jesus himself had? An interesting alternative has been suggested, one that takes Jesus to be teaching a ‘third way’ which does not engage in violent struggle, but nor is it passive. This is the approach to non-violent resistance that people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi adopted based on Jesus’ teaching. Let us see if it fits Matthew 5:39b-42. [This subject is dealt with in some detail in the book The Love of Enemy and Nonretaliation in the New Testament, edited by Willard M. Swartley, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992. The chapter by Walter Wink is the most relevant for the present passage].
With someone who will not call the police, gently pretend to hit someone on the right cheek. You will probably find that you most naturally go for the left cheek, and yet Matthew specifically mentions the right cheek here. To strike the right cheek, you either had to use the back of your right hand, or hit with your left hand. Both of these actions would be inappropriate in any kind of ‘fisticuffs’ between people of equal status in an ancient Greco-Roman setting. The left hand was ‘unclean’, as it still is in the Middle East today, and a backhanded slap then as now was an expression of insult and superiority. And so we may take this to refer to a blow delivered by a superior to an inferior. It is a slap given by someone who has power to someone who does not, to humiliate that person. The aim is not to injure the person physically, but to humiliate him. But if this is the case, then what happens if the powerless person turns the left cheek? He is not simply saying ‘Please, please, hit me again’. He is saying ‘Hit me again, but hit me as an equal: I’m a human being, just like you’. And so while not resorting to violence, he is taking control of the situation and challenging his oppressor.
The fact that the setting is explicitly said to be that of a law court is probably significant. It suggests that here too it is a case of persons who are not social equals: a creditor and a poor person who has given his garment in pledge (see Exodus 22:25-27; Deuteronomy 24:10-13,17; Amos 2:7-8 for the background). Walter Wink’s words on this passage are extremely thought provoking, and are worth quoting at length (the quotation is from his article, “Neither Passivity nor Violence: Jesus’ Third Way (Matt. 5:38-42 par.)”, pp.107-108, in the book mentioned slightly earlier, The Love of Enemy and Nonretaliation in the New Testament):
Why, then, does Jesus counsel them to give over their undergarments as well? This would mean stripping off all their clothing and marching out of court stark naked! Imagine the hilarity this saying must have evoked. There stands the creditor, covered with shame, the poor debtor’s outer garment in the one hand, his undergarment in the other. The tables have suddenly been turned on the creditor. The debtor had no hope of winning the case; the law was entirely in the creditor’s favor. But the poor man has transcended this attempt to humiliate him. He has risen above shame. At the same time, he has registered a stunning protest against a system that spawns such debt. He has said in effect, “You want my robe? Here, take everything! Now you’ve got all I have except my body. Is that what you’ll take next?”
Nakedness was taboo in Judaism, and opprobrium fell not on the naked party but on the person viewing or causing one’s nakedness (Gen. 9:20-17). Nonobservant Jews apparently took his taboo lightly, however. By stripping, the debtor has brought the creditor under the same prohibition that led to the curse of Canaan. We can imagine him parading naked into the street. His friends and neighbors, startled, aghast, inquire what happened. He explains. They join his growing procession, which now resembles a victory parade. The entire system by which debtors are oppressed has been publicly unmasked. The creditor is revealed to be not a “respectable” moneylender but a party to the reduction of an entire social class to landlessness and destitution. This unmasking is not simply punitive, therefore; it offers the creditor a chance to see, perhaps for the first time in his life, what his practices cause, and to repent.
The “powers that be” literally stand on their dignity. Nothing depotentiates them faster than deft lampooning. By refusing to be awed by their power, the powerless are emboldened to seize the initiative, even where structural change is not immediately possible. This message, far from being a counsel to perfection unattainable in this life, is a practical, strategic measure for empowering the oppressed, and it is being lived out all over the world today by powerless people ready to take their history into their own hands.
Jesus provides here a hint of how to take on the entire system in a way that unmasks its essential cruelty and to burlesque its pretensions to justice, law, and order. Here is a poor man who will no longer be treated like a sponge to be squeezed dry by the rich. He accepts the laws as they stand, then pushes them to the point of absurdity, and reveals them for what they have become. He strips nude, walks out before his compatriots, and leaves this creditor, and the whole economic edifice that he represents, stark naked.
We are so familiar with the generalized metaphor of ‘going the extra mile’ that we have in English, and which derives from this verse, that it would be easy to miss its literal origins. In the Roman Empire, soldiers had the right to conscript anyone from the local subject peoples and to make that person carry his load for him up to a maximum distance of one mile. There are edicts from this period and much later as well, placing limits on the requisitioning of labor, animals, and other property from subject peoples, which simply shows that this privilege was regularly used and abused by soldiers. And so Jesus is referring to a familiar part of life for people in Judea and Galilee, people once again without power who are being taken advantage of by the powerful.
So what would the effect have been of going the extra mile quite literally when one was conscripted? One could not resist effectively by violent means, and the result would only be bloodshed. But try to picture the shocked look that would have come across the face of a Roman soldier when a Jewish conscript reaches the end of the mile and turns to him and says ‘No, that’s OK, I’m happy to help you go further’. In a sense, he is taking the power from the Roman system and its representative in the particular soldier in question. Now the oppressed person has the advantage and the initiative: “I’m not helping you because you make me, I am helping you because you need help and I am that sort of person.” It is sometimes suggested that the soldier would have been worried about getting into trouble – but to me it certainly seems unlikely that the mighty Roman system would even take seriously the complaint of a mere peasant farmer, never mind look into the case of an individual who willingly offered to go further. But what it would have done is turn the tables on the oppressor, exposing the nature of the system and the way it treats people as less than human, and this challenge would certainly have made an impact on the soldier who experienced it. And the oppressed person would have recovered some measure of dignity as well, however slight.
It is the fact that all three elements in this section can be read in this way that makes this case convincing. If only one or even two points held up to close scrutiny, this would not be enough. But if all three examples fit, then it makes sense to take these as teachings regarding how to resist oppression without recourse to violence.
In order to understand the assumptions of a culture based on an honor-shame values system, one need only travel to a country which still has it and spend some time with Christians there. What you will find is that, in many cases, the presuppositions that Jesus is here seeking to uproot are still to be found, even after 2,000 years. The idea that one should act expecting no reward or honor from others in this life whatsoever was radically alien to the cultural context in which Jesus and Matthew lived. Even today in our own society we rarely see our own ulterior motives for wanting the opportunity to make a long, loud prayer in church. We may follow Jesus’ teaching in these verses and keep our giving a secret: but deep down we sure wish someone would find out, and are almost relieved if someone does!
The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) Compare this with Luke 11:2-4
For more information see Joachim Jeremias' book at http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showbook?item_id=1118
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:
’abűnan debishmayya
yitqaddash shemâk
tętę malkűtâk
yit‘abęd re‘űtâk
kebishmayyâkibe’ ar‘â
lachman deyômâ
hab lan yômâ dęn
űshebôq lan chôbęn
kedishbaqnan lechayyâbęn
welâ ta‘lînan lenisyônâ
’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.
See also the following links:
http://pw1.netcom.com/~aldawood/aramaic.htm
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-aramaic.html
More important for studying the form of the prayer as we have it is the question of its overall focus. That Matthew’s Gospel has a strong eschatological and apocalyptic focus is clear (in fact, Matthew’s Gospel formed the basis for Albert Schweitzer’s view of the historical Jesus in terms of ‘thoroughgoing eschatology’), and we have seen that many take this to be a major emphasis in the Sermon on the Mount. So does this emphasis pervade the Lord’s Prayer also? Perhaps the best thing will be to examine the prayer and then to decide after we have done so; however, it is important that we raise this question before beginning, so that we are looking out for indications of an answer.
1. Our Father in heaven
So begins the world’s most famous prayer, in its most famous form. The Aramaic abba was a term of familiarity, although this has sometimes been overplayed by comparing it with the English ‘daddy’, which is not an accurate equivalent. Abba is not ‘child-speak’, like ‘da da’, but is a respectful yet familiar form of address, for which ‘dad’ in modern English is not really an adequate equivalent, since we can at times address our fathers today with a lack of respect and reverence that was punishable by death in Old Testament times! So the problem is not so much one of translation and linguistics, as one of cultural differences and ideas of ‘father’ that do not completely overlap.
Matthew’s use of ‘Our Father in heaven’ was something of an obvious change to make in a Gospel that aims at instructing the Christian community on how to live the life of discipleship. But Luke’s version also assumes that this is a prayer that the disciples (plural) will pray, and thus represents a prayer that expresses not individual interests but that of the group. And thus, since both closeness and reverence were implicit in the understanding of father in Matthew’s historical and cultural setting, one should not see any significant change in the meaning from Q’s shorter to Matthew’s expanded way of addressing God. If anything, it makes explicit what is implicit: by addressing God as our Father, it recognizes that the fatherhood of God has implications for the way we view one another: if God is our Father, then we as brothers and sisters should be united in our prayers and in our relationships and in our attitudes one towards another. Likewise by making explicit that it is the heavenly Father who is being addressed, Matthew ensures that God is approached with appropriate reverence and awe. ‘Father in heaven’ or ‘heavenly Father’ is a typical Matthean phrase. But the fact that Luke has it once, and in close proximity to the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:13), indicates that Matthew is emphasizing and elaborating a theme that ultimately is to be traced back to Jesus himself.
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 malkűt, 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 tęn ousan hęmeran, 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 hę epiousa hęmera, “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.
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.
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.
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’.
Tomorrow was probably as far ahead as most ancient Mediterranean peasants ever were li