A second difference: It was repeatedly emphasized to rabbinic students that they were to “serve” their teacher. The rabbinic tradition lists forty-eight things through which knowledge of Torah is to be acquired. Besides study, careful listening, intelligence, fear of God, joy, and purity of heart, the list also includes “serving the wise.” This “serving” means that the student performs for the teacher all the services that would otherwise be done by a servant or a slave. Thus he washes the rabbi’s feet, serves at and clears the table, cleans the house and the courtyard, goes to the market and purchases necessities. Serving the teacher is an essential part of studying Torah. But with Jesus things were different, in a way that was unheard of in his time. The evangelist Mark repeats these words of his: “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). In its Lukan variant the saying is: “For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27).
Texts such as these distill what Jesus constantly inculcated in his disciples: a new way of being together. He does not allow himself to be served; instead, he is the servant at his disciples’ table. Hence the washing of feet before the last meal, which the evangelist John regards as so crucial that he tells of it instead of the universally familiar words of institution (John 13:1-20).
How different from the rabbinic tradition! And yet one must not be unjust to them, for when they say again and again that a disciple must serve his rabbi their intention was not to have dummies around them to make their lives easier. Their idea, rather, was that those who serve their teacher are constantly in the teacher’s presence, and that gives them the opportunity to learn the correct observance of the Law in practice. For as students accompany their rabbi through the whole day they see without interruption how their master observes the Torah, and so they themselves learn Torah. That is the background of the “serving of the wise,” and it is a very beautiful and moving background.
But we also see here the profound difference: in the Talmudic relationship of teacher and student everything revolves around the Torah. It is to become their way of life. The text of the Torah must be learned by heart. Its interpretation by great scholars must be studied. The practice of living the Torah every day must be rehearsed and memorized down to the smallest detail.
Jesus also taught his disciples and had them practice and internalize the right way of life, and the Torah was by no means absent, as we can see from the Sermon on the Mount. There we find a collection of rules for interpretation, for a right understanding of Torah, and also any number of tangible examples of how Torah is to be grasped and lived now, at the time of its eschatological fulfillment.
And yet for Jesus the Torah has a different position: it is transformed by the message of the arrival of the reign of God.5 Therefore Jesus does not first of all encourage the disciples he gathers around him to study the Torah; he begins instead by creating a new way of being together with them. Under the sign of the now-inbreaking reign of God, human community must also be renewed—finally to become what the Torah had always intended it to be.
And just here we find a third difference between Jesus’ disciples and those of the scribes and rabbis: for them what was crucial was the continuous communication of the traditional teaching and an ongoing close and ever-more-accurate interpretation of Torah. That demanded not only an orderly educational system but also a stabilitas loci, a stability of place in an established house of study—and both the house of study and the educational system required a secure means of support. Most rabbis were craftsmen.
Jesus, on the other hand, did not conduct an established educational operation in rabbinic style; instead, being his disciple meant following him into always-changing situations. But within this constant change, accompanied by its eschatological pressure, there took place a daily exercise, a daily inculcation of the new community of discipleship—involving, for example, the rule that disciples had to forgive one another seventy-seven times a day, that is, constantly (Matt 18:21-22). They could not and must not live together any other way in the reign of God.
There was no stabilitas loci with Jesus. He traveled throughout Israel with his disciples in an unstable, itinerant fashion, totally surrendered to whatever the situation of the approaching reign of God demanded at any particular time. Jesus had no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58).
Our Daily Bread
And what about a secure basis for life? Anyone who wants to know what it was like for Jesus’ disciples would do well to read the Our Father. It is not a prayer for everyone. It is a prayer for Jesus’ disciples and followers. It is their prayer. It distills the whole of what moves them.
In the fourth petition the disciples (in the usual translation) ask for their “daily bread.” This petition in particular seems to suggest that it is a prayer suitable for anyone. After all, people need bread, daily sustenance, always and everywhere in the world. And yet in that respect the fourth petition of the Our Father is much more concrete and situation-bound.
First, we must observe that “give us today our daily bread” is simply an attempt at translation of Matthew 6:11. Where our Bibles read “daily,” the Greek has epiousios, a word that is not attested anywhere in pre-Christian Greek literature. So we must reconstruct what it might mean.
There is much in favor of the suggestion that epiousios does not mean “daily” in a general sense but much more precisely bread for the coming day, the day after this one. In that case epiousios would be derived from epienai (cf. Acts 7:26; 16:11; 20:15; 21:18). Then Jesus’ disciples would be praying in the Our Father solely for bread for that evening and the next day. (In Israel the “following” day begins in the evening, when it grows dark.) Why do the disciples pray only for bread for the next day, for tomorrow?
They do so simply because they are traveling through the land with Jesus and in the morning they do not yet know whether anyone will take them in that evening and give them something to eat! Therefore they have to pray to their Father in heaven—since they have left their earthly fathers—for their bread for the next day. They cannot undertake to plan or set aside for the future. They have no time for it. But they may and should pray for bread for one day.
So nothing is prepared in advance for the long haul. The eschatological situation is so acute, the current preaching so primary that planning is impossible. The view barely extends to the next day. So we can describe the original meaning of the bread petition as follows: “Grant that today we will meet people who will take us into their houses and give us something to eat tonight so that our lives, our food are secured for one more day.”
More than that is impossible, but more is not necessary, because Jesus’ disciples are surrounded and sustained by the parental care of God. So their situation corresponds to that of Israel in the Old Testament wilderness narratives. With its exodus Israel abandoned the things that sustained its life in the Egyptian welfare state. A new social order of mutual solidarity was to be begun. In the extraordinary situation of the wilderness God fed his people with manna—according to Exodus 16—but the Israelites were not allowed to store up the manna. Except for the day before the Sabbath they could only gather what they needed for a single day. Exodus 16:4 speaks of the ration for the coming day. It is possible that epiousios is an attempt at a corresponding allusion to Exodus 16:4 in Greek.
But however things developed linguistically, we have a hard time imagining that Jesus could have formulated the petition for bread for the coming day—that is, for only one day—without having the manna story in mind. He knew that his disciples, who were now preaching the reign of God throughout the land “like sheep in the midst of wolves” (Matt 10:16) were, like Israel in the past, in a basically impossible wilderness situation. Moreover, the fourth petition of the Our Father corresponds in part to Jesus’ injunction in Matthew 6:34: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today
’s trouble is enough for today.”
Light Luggage
But it is not only the fourth petition of the Our Father that illuminates the absence of a settled school on the rabbinic model. The so-called equipment rule in Luke 9:3 // Matthew 10:9-10 // Mark 6:8-9 also reflects the itinerant existence of Jesus and his disciples. The disciples are sent out without money, a sack for provisions, a second tunic, a staff, even without sandals.
Many interpreters assert that this harsh and radical equipment rule is about the theme of “modesty of needs” or “humility.” Jesus’ disciples in that case, in their lack of any concern for their own needs are to surpass even the Cynic-Stoic itinerant philosophers, who did wear their philosophers’ cloaks, always had a begging sack with them, and maintained an emergency ration of bread. But is that really the case?
Is not the phrase “modesty of needs” an all-too-transparent attempt to accommodate the Gospel to today’s ideas? The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have a surfeit of civilization and a longing for a “simple life.” It is clear that the deficient equipment of the missionary disciples is meant to be a sign. But was it really just about trumping even the Gentile itinerant philosophers in their poverty? Jesus’ message and practice point in a completely different direction.
The light equipment of Jesus’ disciples is intended to point to the new thing that is happening in Israel. Everywhere in the cities and villages the disciples, when they go there to preach the reign of God, find Jesus’ adherents and sympathizers, “people of peace” (Luke 10:6), who receive them into their houses and provide everything for them.
So the disciples are not alone. Around them the true eschatological Israel is beginning to gather. They are indeed without means, but they have everything. They are indeed poor, and yet they are rich. A group of people throughout the land, all of them seized by the reign of God, trusting one another without reservation, sharing with one another, caring for one another: that is an inexhaustible reserve.
So in the disciples’ equipment rule the point is not primarily poverty or lack of demands. The deficient equipment of the disciples is, instead, an indicative sign pointing to the eschatological-solidary mutuality within the people of God that makes Jesus’ disciples free and available.
This freedom, and the associated trust in help from others, has another side, of course: Jesus’ mission discourse (Matt 10:5-15 // Mark 6:7-11 // Luke 9:2-5 // Luke 10:3-12) takes into account that it could happen that in the evening Jesus’ disciples might not find a house that would receive them, no “people of peace,” but only rejection, hatred, and hostility: “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town” (Matt 10:14-15). So it is bitterly necessary to pray in the morning for the next day’s bread. Jesus and his disciples do not know whether a meal will be set before them in the evening. Many texts in the gospels can only be understood against the background of the eschatological—constantly endangered and yet incomprehensibly blessed—existence of the disciples.
But back to our starting point! We were speaking of the orderly educational institutions of the rabbis, their stabilitas loci, their secure basis. It is probably clear by now that in this respect also we cannot derive discipleship of Jesus from the rabbinic relation between teacher and student. Being a disciple means sharing the fate of Jesus, who had no place to lay his head. It means uncertainty, danger, opposition. It means surrender to the new demands, every day, of the coming of the reign of God. But it also means a new community in Jesus’ “new family.” So Jesus’ call to discipleship cannot be derived from the rabbinic relationship between teacher and student.
Discipleship among the Zealots
But where, then, did Jesus get his call to discipleship if not from the rabbis? We come much closer to the heart of the matter when we look at the charismatic-prophetic freedom fighters in the Judaism of the time. They had something like “discipleship,” and they even used the term.
The revolt of the Maccabees against the Seleucids began when Mattathias, a Jewish priest, called for battle against the Hellenistic destroyers of the Jewish tradition. He assembled fighters with the cry, “Let everyone who is zealous for the law and supports the covenant come out with me!” (1 Macc 2:27). The account in 1 Maccabees continues: “Then he and his sons fled to the hills and left all that they had in the town. At that time many who were seeking righteousness and justice went down to the wilderness to live there, they, their sons, their wives, and their livestock, because troubles pressed heavily upon them” (1 Macc 2:28-30).
What follows is a typical freedom struggle against the Syrian occupation force, conducted mainly with guerilla tactics from the mountains and wadis of the Judean wilderness. And from that point on, charismatic leadership figures steadily appeared in Israel and set off popular movements. One of them was Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37), the founder of the Zealot movement.6 Another was called Theudas (Acts 5:36), and still another Luke simply calls “the Egyptian” (Acts 21:38). What did these guerillas or the pseudo-prophets who called the people into the wilderness have to do with Jesus?
To begin with, apparently quite a bit, because they too were about the reign of God. Josephus writes of Judas the Galilean: “Under his administration [i.e., that of the procurator Coponius], a Galilaean, named Judas, incited his countrymen to revolt, upbraiding them as cowards for consenting to pay tribute to the Romans and tolerating mortal masters, after having God for their lord.”7
The Zealots (zealot = fanatic) were thus concerned about Israel’s faith. As once the prophet Elijah, with burning zeal, had demanded a choice between YHWH and Baal, so Judas the Galilean demanded that Israel choose between the God of their ancestors and the divine Roman emperor. For the Zealots, then, the fight against Rome was a matter of faith. They passionately called people to enter into the true faith as they saw it. They could only imagine Israel as a state ruled by God alone. Therefore they called all Israel to follow them, which in the great majority of cases meant leaving home and household and removing to the wilderness. Charlatans within or alongside the Zealot movement, like Theudas and “the Egyptian,” even promised their followers showy messianic miracles, eschatological miracles in the wilderness.
At first glance the correspondences with the Jesus movement are striking: the theme of the reign of God, the demand for faith, the call to discipleship to the point of endangering one’s own life, the unconditional surrender of property and goods for the cause of God, and above all the eschatological horizon. Here we are much closer to the phenomenon of discipleship than with the rabbis. Above all, it is historically certain that these movements were contemporary with the Jesus movement; the rabbinic practices we spoke of before can only be derived from later sources.
But despite these parallels that seem so striking, discipleship of Jesus is something different. Jesus and his disciples were far removed in their thinking and acting from the Jewish freedom fighters. Jesus, when he was asked whether it was permissible to pay Roman taxes, emphatically affirmed that it was. When people tried to draw him into a political trap with this problem, the subject of such heated discussion in Israel at the time, he made a distinction: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). “The things that are God’s”—that is something different. That is not battle with weapons for a theocratic state, which is what Zealot fanaticism longed for. “The things that are God’s” or “what belongs to God”—that is one’s whole existence; that is faith in the “today” of the Good News; that is turning back to that message and to a nonviolent community in Israel that is now beginning.
For according to Jesus, God does not want Israel to be a people that fights, like all others, to assert itself as a nation. God wants a people in which the peace of God and God’s kind of rule become reality. That is the reason for
the unbelievably sharp demand for nonviolence in the Sermon on the Mount: “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile” (Matt 5:39-41). The Zealots demanded precisely the opposite. They said: don’t take it! Fight back! Don’t help the Roman soldiers (for example, by carrying their baggage for miles)! No, help us in the underground to arm against the occupation force!
When Jesus talks about nonviolence he is first of all placing a clear distance between himself and the fighters-for-God in his time. That the disciples, in accordance with the equipment rule described above, were to take no staff, no shoes, and no money with them was not only an indicative sign of the eschatological-solidary community in the people of God. It was intended, beyond that, to make visible the difference between them and the Zealot God’s-army types: someone who does not even have a staff cannot protect himself. He is defenseless. And someone who has no shoes on her feet cannot even flee, given the stony soil of Palestine, if she is attacked. This is a sign of pure nonviolence that positively shouts its character. All of it goes contrary to the Zealots and their ideology of a military theocratic state.
But also the fact that the disciples were to have no money in their belts was directed against the Zealots, because they collected and extorted money for their struggle against the Romans. None of that had anything to do with modesty of demands or asceticism. Jesus simply did not want his disciples to be confused with rebels against Roman rule.
Free Discipleship
Thus nonviolence signals the fundamental difference between Jesus and the Zealots. But that difference is also indicated by the idea of freedom. What does that mean?
Jesus of Nazareth Page 11
