Ordinary life is not this simple, of course, for many have faced the decision whether they are to abandon a good job in which they have had ample time to serve God and to work in churches in order to pursue some less lucrative ministry, or hang on to that job and not do that ministry. But Jesus here isn’t into the nuance or the ambiguity of decision. Instead, he offers a woodcut of two options: either you run on the treadmill of money or you live for God. His Ethic from Beyond and Above drives him to confront the disciple with decision.
LIVE the Story
If we return to the introduction to this section, we are reminded again of the kind of life Jesus lived and the enormous differences we now live—and by “we” I’m assuming a comparative affluence in contrast to what he knew. How do we, the affluent, follow Jesus, the poor man?
Hermeneutics of Possessions
I begin with a point of hermeneutics, one that could take books and books to explore. Following Jesus doesn’t mean slavish imitation, as if we were to say, “If Jesus wore sandals, so should we.” Sophisticated and sensitive hermeneutics—not designed to rationalize our behavior or lifestyle but seriously intended to explore how we live out the teachings of Jesus in completely different circumstances, not unlike the way Paul took the gospel into Gentile lands (1 Cor 9:19–23)—requires both challenging our world but also adapting and adopting Jesus’ vision to our world. I hold it, then, as an axiom—or else I’d stop writing right now—that our calling is to follow Jesus in our context rather than to retrieve and re-create his context in our world. What he says about possessions in our text is of direct value in ours; he is not asking us to replicate first-century Galilee but to live out his kingdom vision in our world.
This Does Not Deny the Value of Work and Profit
John Wesley recognized that Jesus’ words could fire up people into behaviors that were irresponsible, and so he made it clear what “Do not store up” did not mean: it did not mean we shouldn’t pay taxes or pay off loans; it does not prohibit providing the means of sustenance; it does not prohibit labor that provides for our families; and it does not prohibit occasionally storing up in order to accomplish what God has called us to accomplish.25 Wesley’s observations draw us back to the first point about hermeneutics: we must learn to use this text in context, and that means wisely and not recklessly. Jesus said these words as an itinerant who was provided for by those who did labor with profit and were able to care for him and his followers (Matt 10:9–15; Luke 8:1–3). The danger for him and his followers was the lure of riches, wealth, and possessions.
The Essence: Simplicity
Craig Keener helps us live out this text in the direction of simplicity; he makes three points:26 (1) If disciples really trust God, they will live as if treasures in heaven really matter; (2) those whose perspective is distorted by materialism are blinded to God’s truth; and (3) one either loves God or money, and those who think they can love both are idolaters. How should we live this out? I make one suggestion: Jesus summons us to simplify our lifestyle to focus on the kingdom.
Eschatological Orientation
A friend of mine is writing a commentary in this series, and he happened to be assigned to a book shaped much more by eschatology than this one. (By “eschatology” I mean what most mean by that term: what will happen in the new heavens and new earth.) As I was reading his section, I began to ask myself personal questions like these: How do I live in such a way that my life is shaped by Jesus’ and the earliest Christians’ perspective on the future? Am I absorbed with an Ethic from Beyond? Is my life too absorbed with the here and now?
The first thing that came to mind is that we need to think about that future more often. I confess I don’t. My mind is tied too much to the here and now and not enough to God’s future kingdom. To be sure, that kingdom in the future will shape how we live now, but there is a yearning for the kingdom at work in Jesus’ prayer (6:9–13) and in the early Christians; we can recover that yearning in part simply by spending more time pondering what God has told us about that future. Praying the Lord’s Prayer often can do this for us, as can routine reflection on the eschatological consummation texts of the New Testament. I like to focus on 1 Corinthians 15:20–28, where God will be all in all; on Philippians 2:6–11, where everyone will bow in worship before Jesus Christ; and on Revelation 21–22, where we have a grand vision of the new Jerusalem, pure fellowship with God and others, where Jesus is at the center of everything (as Jerusalem’s temple was in the first century), and where the bustle of life seems to be endless delight in love, justice, peace, and wisdom.
Pondering that future, I am suggesting, brings us to see what God most wants for us now as followers of Jesus. To see that kingdom as it is, and we gain only glimpses now, drives us to see that what matters and what doesn’t matter are more and more of what we’ve got and want but less and less hassle so we can be freed up to focus on the kingdom of love, peace, justice, and wisdom.
Simplification
This makes me think that simplification is the natural response to a kingdom vision. In that kingdom we won’t be hoarding or storing up treasures but instead living in the bounty of God’s gracious provision so we can enjoy what he wants for us: to serve God and to serve others. This sort of vision, an ethic shaped by knowing what the future will be, does indeed trade in a motivation by reward. Again, some are bothered by this, but Dale Allison tosses cold water all over that concern: “For [Jesus] the issue was not whether there would or should be reward. For him the issue was: whose reward matters—man’s or God’s?”27
But Allison, probing the centrality and incalculable nature of love, probes further by suggesting that Jesus’ ethical vision is not amenable to the scales and balances of calculating one’s merits. He points to 6:3; 20:1–16; 25:31–46 as a reminder. So, while we may live for the reward of that kingdom, not as a way of getting more but as a way of being closer to God, we don’t do so in some kind of crass calculations of what we are doing in light of what we will get. But neither is this altruism: at the heart of Jesus’ ethical vision is a motivation to live before God and in light of God’s revealed future; that is, it is an Ethic from Above and Beyond.
This drives us toward simplicity and focus, toward voluntary acts of cutting back and even stepping into poverty instead of accumulating possessions. It is not that we need to abandon the city to dwell in the desert with Saint Anthony or in the ghettos with those who are so called, but, as Ronald Sider and others constantly remind us, if the kingdom vision of Jesus doesn’t reshape our approach to possessions, then we are not living out the kingdom vision. If we are living to the end of our means (and here I’m speaking to the affluent West, and excluding the unemployed) and have little for the poor, if we are extending our budgets and giving only from what is left over, and if we have not cut back on how we live, then we are not embracing the kingdom vision of Jesus.
The call, I am suggesting, is toward simplicity and not toward intentional, radical poverty. Jesus constantly benefited from the wealth and possessions of others (read, e.g., Luke 8:1–3, or consider that he dined in the homes of others), and that means he wasn’t against wealth so much as against hoarding, nor was he against possessions so much as for those who had them to use in service to others.
Mammonolatry
Long ago Ralph Martin wrote a short sketch of what the New Testament says about money. I summarize it in his warning about mammonolatry.28 Money has a way of freezing our hands and feet and stiffening our hearts; it has a way of becoming, like Gollum’s ring, something we cannot do without and that becomes the focus of our attention. Jesus knew the danger of money. Ralph Martin defines it this way:
This sin may be defined as the spirit of grasping greed and acquisitiveness, the insatiable longing for more of material possessions and a consequent lack of contentment and absence of trust in God our Father who has promised to supply all needful things to His children (Matthew 6:32).
This is why, Martin observed, Jesus personifies “mammon”
in this text. He makes it a god alongside the one true God and says, “Take your pick, and you only get to pick one.” Then Martin says, as if he is writing a commentary on Matthew 6:19–24: “The acid test is not what we say, but what we do; not what we promise in words, but what we actually give in money.”
Martin went on to explore some principles of Christian stewardship, focusing especially on 2 Corinthians 8–9, by which he meant giving money to God through the local church and through various ministries. Here are his points. It all begins with God’s gracious gifts to us, made visibly clear in the incarnation and in the depth of humiliation by the Son of God; the most important offering we make is ourselves; our giving is to be prompted by God’s grace but should be voluntary, eager, cheerful, and sacrificial; we are to give according our ability and to encourage equality; we are to be scrupulously honest; and a sincere care for others breeds a bond of love between givers and the recipients, all of which leads to the praise of God.
Martin is right on: because money wants to be a god, Jesus calls us to an entirely different agenda in this world as we seek to embody the kingdom now, because of what we see it will be like in the new heavens and new earth.
Simplicity, then, is learning to lean forward toward the kingdom in all we do, whatever it might be that God calls us to do.
At Northern Seminary recently, in a class devoted to the gospel in the book of Revelation, I mentioned the powerful, sometimes violent, bizarre, and grotesque imagery in Revelation. I explained that we need not make one-to-one correspondences between imagery and God’s intended realities. In my explanation I made an analogy to the brilliant author Flannery O’Connor, who used some of the most bizarre and violent imagery of any American writer.29 One of my students, Ashley, suddenly came alive, as if the analogy gave her a handle on how to read Revelation. Had we had more time, we could have gone on and on about Flannery and her use of what is often called “Southern grotesque” imagery, but the one dimension of her life I would have wanted to dwell on (which has nothing to do with Revelation!) was her simplicity. She lived on a farm in an out-of-the-way place in Georgia, and she and her mother tended some animals, including peacocks. She worked in a simple study in a simple home on a budget that permitted both of them to get by.
This was the way for her to express her devout, God-fearing faith. And part of that life was bearing with the awful pain of lupus that took this gifted writer’s life far too early. Lorraine V. Murray’s life of Flannery O’Connor30 tells the story of a correspondence with T. R. Spivey, who asked her about how to experience God’s grace. Flannery wrote: “You have to practice self-denial.” Murray continues: “For her that meant immersing herself in writing: ‘I never completely forget myself except when I am writing.’ ” Murray’s next words reveal Flannery’s simplicity: “She also practiced self-denial by giving money to charity rather than spending it on herself. Flannery had money to give only because, like a true monastic, she did not require much to live on—not because she had a great surplus of cash.”
Murray recounts how little she made from her books, how little the family farm brought in as income, and how she—by now a well-known author—would travel (in pain, often mentioned in her letters with humor) to speak at colleges for the small fee so she could pay bills. She once received more than a normal amount for speaking, and she used it to buy her mother a refrigerator. She checked out books from libraries so as not to spend more money, and she once earned an $8,000 grant—which would have been two years for most, but she announced she could make that last five years.
I wonder if we need to immerse ourselves more in the stories of people like Flannery O’Connor, who, out of their devotion to Christ, lived on less so they could live a fuller life of love for others.
Notes
1. KNT: “Show me your treasure, and I’ll show you where your heart is.”
2. KNT: “honest and clear.”
3. KNT: “evil.”
4. KNT: “darkness doesn’t come any darker than that.”
5. R. J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity (Dallas: Word, 1997).
6. See appropriate texts in Keener, Matthew, 228–34.
7. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 138.
8. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 166.
9. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:217.
10. The words used are “where moths and vermin destroy” (NIV). Many translations have “moth and rust.” For discussion, see Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:629–30; Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 157. The Greek term brōsis means “eating” or even “decay,” but the issue is what is doing the eating/decaying, and many think James 5:2–3’s use of “corrosion” (a different Greek term, ios) tells us what is doing the eating/decaying. But this term brōsis might mean a living organism (cf. Isa 51:8; Mal 3:11), like a grasshopper, a worm, or, as in the NIV, a more general idea like “vermin.” If the two doing the destroying are creatures instead of natural aging, then what is being eaten/decayed is probably clothing or food, in which case the “treasures” are clothing or food. This image is then doubled with the image of thieves breaking through the walls; most of the area in Galilee had homes built of stone, but also some of wood and earth (mud bricks). On this K. Galor, “Domestic Architecture,” in C. Hezser, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 420–39.
11. Kapolyo, “Matthew,” 1123.
12. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 168. He mocks the great idol Mammon: “The best guards and courtiers he can assemble are moths and rust” (169).
13. Michael Joseph Brown, “Matthew,” True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (ed. B. K. Blount et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 94.
14. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 142–45; idem, “The Eye Is the Lamp of the Body (Matthew 6:22–23 = Luke 11:34–36),” NTS 33 (1987): 61–83. Guelich leans toward the extramission theory (Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 329–32). France (Matthew, 260–61) opts for a more general idea: eye and light and body need one another. Quarles seeks to undo the whole approach of Allison; Quarles, Sermon on the Mount, 244–46.
15. The Trinity 9.3.3.
16. See also Betz, Sermon on the Mount, 449–51.
17. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:217–18.
18. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 365–67.
19. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 158; France, Matthew, 261–62.
20. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 331–32.
21. Cf. Deut 15:9; Prov 22:9, and esp. for us Matt 20:15.
22. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:643. On Jesus and possessions, McKnight, New Vision for Israel, 187–93; M. Hengel, Property and Riches in the Early Church: Aspects of a Social History of Early Christianity (trans. J. Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974); C. Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Material Possessions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); S. E. Wheeler, Wealth as Peril and Obligation: The New Testament on Possessions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). See also A. Sivertsev, “The Household Economy,” J. Pastor, “Trade, Commerce, and Consumption,” and G. Hamel, “Poverty and Charity,” in C. Hezser, ed., Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life, 229–45, 297–307, 308–34.
23. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 192.
24. The Jewish Annotated New Testament, at 6:24 (p. 14).
25. Kinghorn, Wesley on the Sermon, 205–7.
26. Keener, Matthew, 230–34.
27. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:634.
28. R. P. Martin, Worship in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 80–86. I quote from pp. 82, 84.
29. Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988).
30. Lorraine V. Murray, The Abbess of Andalusia: Flannery O’Connor’s Spiritual Journey (Charlotte, NC: Saint Benedict Press, 2009), quoting from p. 188, italics added.
Chapter 16
Matthew 6:25–34
LISTEN to the Story
25“Therefore I tell
you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?1
28“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor2 was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire,3 will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,4 and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”5
Listening to the text in the Story: Genesis 1–2; Exodus 16; Psalm 19; Matthew 10:9–15; 1 Peter 5:7.
God is the Creator and Sustainer. Too often we believe like theists (a personal God) and act like deists (a distant, impersonal, noninteractive, uninvolved god). We say we believe in God, trust in God, and are sustained by God; but in our actions we do everything for ourselves, trusting in ourselves and anxious about the providence of God, which unravels our theism. We believe that God not only gives life but is life itself, and that belief means that every breath we take and every moment of life we live comes from and is sustained by the creator God. Without venturing into pantheism (all is God) or a softer version in panentheism (God is in all), the Christian faith affirms that all of life in the entire cosmos is from God and is sustained by God. God, then, is actively at work in all of life.
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