Читать книгу To Hear the Word - Second Edition - John Howard Yoder - Страница 10

It is customary to designate as “Sermon on the Mount” chapters 5–7 of Matthew’s Gospel, which appear as one uninterrupted discourse. This is the first such block of such material to be reported at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry; it is also the longest. Luke 6:17–49, a briefer passage containing parallel material, is sometimes designated “Sermon on the Plain.” It too stands (in addition to 4:16–21) as a kind of “platform” statement at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry.

I shall be analyzing five fragments of this material, looking at both the Matthean and the Lucan versions. My concern shall not be to lift from them a catalogue of sample statements about proper behavior, although such specimens are given. My intention is rather to see these examples as representing the mentality and the world vision within which Jesus calls his disciples to a new style of life.

The entire text of the “Sermon” has come to be taken as the most dramatic specimen of the way in which the presence of Jesus reverses all the otherwise dominant value patterns of society. For the past century, the understanding of this text in the West has been under the impact of the simple literal argument of Leo Tolstoy, whose intellectual and spiritual conversion came about by taking this text seriously and seeing in it a condemnation of the moral laxity and betrayal of Christendom. In a host of ways, interpreters since Tolstoy2 have circled around the text, proposing alternative ways to understand its simplicity. We cannot, in this connection, even survey the variety of reinterpretations3 that make the meaning more spiritual and more distant, more idealist, or more symbolic; but when we see all this reinterpretation going on, we can be warned.

This text being neither parabolic nor poetic, our goal should be the most straightforward interpretation possible. We need therefore to direct a special suspicion to traditions of interpretation whose intent or effect is to divert our attention from taking these words of Jesus as a call to us, here and now.

A text we know is most likely to speak to us tomorrow if it says something it did not say yesterday. So it is the interpreter’s task to turn a suspicious eye to any well-established convention of interpretation, even the best-intentioned. For this reason I shall phrase the following subtitles in a tone of critical disengagement.4

The Beatitudes and Woes (Matt 5:3–11; Luke 6:20–26)

What Jesus does not mean when he says that the poor are blessed

The hearer’s first mental reflex is to transpose “Blessed are those who . . .” into some form of “You ought to be. . . .” So Jesus would be promising us God’s reward if we would do the right kinds of things and be the right kind of people. Then the Beatitudes would be simply a back-handed oriental way of saying, “These are eight basic virtues” or, “These are eight kinds of good deeds.” Many sermon series use our passage that way.

But that will not work. The things of which Jesus says “Blessed are those who . . .” are not all things that one can by an act of will set out to do. One does not make oneself poor or make oneself thirsty for righteousness, or make oneself mourn, or even make oneself pure in heart. Jesus is describing a set of ways of being, or states, or conditions in which people already find themselves. He is not saying, “If you become thus, you will get a reward for it.” He is saying, “There are some people who are already thus: good for them.”

The Greek term makarios, which is translated “blessed,” does not apply first to people who are praised or people who get a reward for achievement, but to people who are fortunate, even “lucky.” So the reversal of values that God’s new regime brings is described in terms of the reversal of the categories of people who will be well off when the Kingdom comes. Those who are poor will be well off, because in the Great Reversal5 they shall be provided for. Those who mourn will be consoled. To fill in the contrasts from Luke’s version, those who are rich will lose their wealth.

The presupposition of all this is that the coming of the Kingdom whose approach Jesus has just announced (Matt 4:17, “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand”) is socially real. To “repent,” as the exchanges between John the Baptist and his listeners had already made clear, means not only to confess one’s sinfulness, or to be remorseful about one’s failures, but to change one’s pattern of life in order to reflect a change of worlds or of lords. So the presupposition of the Beatitudes is the proclaiming of the Kingdom. The Beatitudes are good news because of the Kingdom. They are the Gospel.

Some people are poor: good for them, for the Kingdom is coming and they shall receive it as their inheritance;

Some people are peacemakers: good for them, because in the coming Kingdom it will be manifest that they are like God their Father.

Some people are meek: good for them, for in the coming Kingdom their kind will be in charge;

Some of you are rich: too bad for you; you have had all you will get.

The counter-cultural newness and the concrete realism of the good news of the coming new regime inaugurate a new age in which things are true that were not true before. Jesus is not merely raising by a degree or two the intensity of the general moral idealism with which all good people try, when they can, to be a little more loving. Nor is he escalating the divine demand in an intentionally unrealistic way in order to make us all recognize that we are sinners. For none of these was a Messiah needed.

Jesus is bringing to pass in his person the newness of the age in which God’s righteousness is operative among those who hear it proclaimed. The reversal of values is not first of all new information or new potential or new motivation on the moral level; it is first of all a whole new world, in which this radically different style of relating to others “comes naturally.”

The “social theme” with which we are to begin is not new information about the good society, nor new motivation to set about building it, but rather the Word that the Kingdom is upon us. Is it thinkable that we might take guidance in daily life from another social system than the one we see in place?

Love of the Enemy (Matt 5:38–48; Luke 6:27–36)

What Jesus does not mean when he says, “But I say to you”

Some views of the Sermon have taken it as the central expression of a fundamental contradiction between the morality of the Old Testament and that of the New. Such an interpretation is understandable, since there are differences between the two Testaments, and since some of them have to do partly with the structures of social justice: with nationhood and the state, violence and the offender.6 But it would be a mistake to read these six contrasts between the “Old” and the “New,” the last two of which are on the theme of violence and the enemy, as if they were meant to dramatize a polarity between the two Testaments.

Jesus says explicitly in the introductory paragraph (Matt 5:17ff.) that his intent is “not to destroy but to fulfill” the real meaning of the law. Each of the six specimens, in a different way, exemplifies how the Old is not rejected but radicalized or deepened or clarified in the application made by Jesus. The prescription of the former law, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” had not meant so much that vengeance is divinely demanded as that such retaliation as is demanded by the aggrieved and permitted by law must be limited to the measure of the offense and no more. It is this restraining intent that Jesus “fills full” as he sets aside all vengeance and illustrates the abandonment of that kind of response to conflict with the counter strategy of the other cheek and the second mile.

Similarly the commandment to love the neighbor is in no way done away with by the Sermon. Jesus universalizes its meaning by including even the enemy in the definition of the “neighbor” to be loved. “Neighbor” here, as in most other languages than English, means anyone with whom we have to do, the representative “other” person with whom we are dealing, and not a person especially close to us. There is no person to whom neighbor love does not apply. Specifically the enemy becomes the test of whether our love for neighbor is authentic. Loving those who are close to us (“neighbors” in the English sense) is characterized by Jesus as the morality of “sinners” or “gentiles.”

The life-style that Jesus rejects is thus not selfishness in the sense of a failure to love anyone, so that the devotion of someone who makes a sacrifice on behalf of posterity or client or nation should be praised as virtuous. The most destructive kinds of selfishness, especially on the level of institutional injustice, are those that have their root in the claim to be altruistic. They claim to need, in the name of some cause, some human solidarity, some bearer of rights, to exclude another person or category of people from their loving concern. The more clear we are that our own intentions are “just,” that they constitute “rights,” or that the hostilities in which we are involved are on behalf of some legitimate beneficiary, the more unquestioning we become about the unworthy means we are ready to use for that higher cause.

It would take little moral profundity to reject purely personal selfishness. What Jesus rejects is every ground for dealing with a fellow human being as if he or she were an exception to the obligation to love. This does not mean, in some idealistic way, saying that we have no enemies, or refusing to recognize them as such. It means the opposite: we are to name the relationship as one of enmity and then to express love within it.

Imitating the Father (Matt 5:45–48, Luke 6:35–36)

What Jesus does not mean by “Be perfect”

The thought that we might be like God the Father is not a frequent one in the New Testament. Small wonder that it has seemed shocking or frightening, so that efforts to interpret such a simple and sweeping phrase have gone in several directions.

One meaning of “Christian perfection” has seen it as a distant target, an “ideal,” to be achieved only at the end of a lengthy process of growth and self-discipline whereby the seeker after perfection develops character, sets aside lesser values, and lives only for God and God’s cause in a growing wholeness of consecration. Such understandings of perfection have been at home especially in the religious life, in mysticism, and in the literature of devotion, both Catholic and Protestant.

Another view, more widely represented in middle America, sees “perfection” not as the end of a long process of human effort but as a unique gift of divine grace offered to those who will accept it in faith. This view is represented in those evangelical denominations called “Wesleyan,” amid continuing debate about whether and if so how clearly John Wesley really meant this kind of experience when he wrote about “perfection.”

The two models just named have in common with the evident meaning of the teaching of Jesus that they seek to describe something that is possible. A third classical approach is to see in this text an impossible demand: Jesus calls us precisely to do what he knows we cannot do. He demands of us that we be flawless, sinless. He demands it not because he expects it but because he knows it to be unattainable. He wants to leave us no excuse or escape before the humiliating recognition of our sinfulness. The purpose of moral teaching generally, and therefore also—especially—of the Sermon on the Mount, is not first to instruct us but to condemn us, bringing us to our knees, driving us to recognize that we can be acceptable before God only by grace.7

Each of these interpretations of “perfection” is solidly rooted somewhere else in the thought and piety of the people who then bring it from there into this passage. In the text itself, however, when taken straightforwardly, the context makes evident that to be “perfect” is something far more simple and, although not easy, not by definition impossible. We are called to be nondiscriminatory in our love just as God does not discriminate. Discriminating in favor of those to whom we are closer is something that the Gentiles, the tax-collectors, the “sinners” do; the contrast is with God, whose benevolence aids the evil and the good alike (Matt 5:46), whose generosity is extended to the “ungrateful and the selfish” (Luke 6:35).

Most of our discussions of social justice center upon the debates about what is a desirable goal and who should lead us toward it. Jesus asks a prior question: For whom do we want what we want? Whose welfare do we seek to serve? Do we recognize a moral priority to the needs and claims of our adversaries in the social system? If not, we do not initiate the search for social justice were Jesus does, namely at the point of the fundamental flaw in our community. That flaw is not that food is scarce, nor that every individual is self-seeking. It is that we have acquiesced in a truncated understanding of community, according to which certain adversaries are excluded from the range of our mercy.

One of the reasons that the misunderstanding identified above could persist was the tendency in our culture to see “love” as an emotion whose grasp upon us is pre-rational, a given kind of empathy or a bond with a claim on our sentiments, powerful to move our decisions toward the needs of those whom we “love.” Romantic or erotic understandings of love as drive are only the extreme forms of this. Familial and cultural, ethnic and national forms make the same kinds of claim. They affirm a loyalty that is not reasoned, not a decision but a given, a loyalty that by its nature is part of a wider social selfishness, rather than ennobling adversaries. What Jesus says is not that we have or should cultivate that kind of “love,” in the sense of an emotional attachment, toward people with whom we have nothing human in common. It is that we should (and can) seek their welfare and serve their needs, whoever they be.

The Power of Praise and Forgiveness (Matt 6:9–15; Luke 11:2–4)

What it means not to heap up empty phrases

When we lift the “Our Father” or “Lord’s Prayer” out of the text of the Sermon and take it simply as a standard outline for prayer in common worship, we get the impression of a series of seven petitions, each of them meaningful in its own right, but with no special internal connections among them, except that (logically enough) they begin and end with the honor of God, with our own needs in the middle. Closer attention, however, yields a less scattered impression, and focuses more upon a commitment to concrete righteousness on the part of the one who prays.

Jewish thought holds that since the revelation of God’s holiness has been received most adequately in the form of gracious commands (Torah), therefore to recognize and proclaim the holiness of God is not an action of mere cultic adoration or mystical contemplation. To “sanctify the Name,” to proclaim the holiness of God, is most fittingly to obey God. Especially it means obeying God in a context where obedience must be a matter of costly choice. “To sanctify the Name” in fact became, in later Jewish thought, the standard designation for martyrdom.

When we take account of the place of parallelism in Hebrew prayer and poetry, we see that the first three petitions are three facets of the same thing. That God’s Name is sanctified, that God’s Kingdom comes, that God’s will is done on earth as in heaven are three formulations of the same reality for which we pray. The three together constitute one massive petition, one superscription over the entire prayer, asking for the doing of God’s will among us, which is the way for “the Name”8 to be glorified. The prayer, together with the other words of Jesus in the same context about prayer (Matt 6:2–6), turns its back on ceremony and on inner contemplation, in favor of concretely lived-out holiness.

Like his ancestors, like his listeners and like Matthew, Jesus assumed—as we do not since the cultural triumph of philosophical monotheism—that God’s control of history is contested. When addressed to the victorious Sovereign of the universe and of Christendom, the petition “May your name be sanctified, may your will be done,” seems to be asking for something to happen that can hardly help happening: thus prayer becomes submitting to and lining oneself up with the way things are. But in Jesus’s world, God’s sovereignty is not yet confirmed and God’s name is not yet widely hallowed. The other “gods” are still around, and are apparently winning. To pray, “Your name be hallowed; your will be done” is not an acceptance of evident reality, not the liturgical celebration of a settled cosmology, but a battle cry. It is a word of hope in defiance of the powers.

The first petition directed toward ourselves acknowledges our dependence upon God to meet our need for bread: a theme to which Jesus returns later in Matthew 6. The second petition is unique in the prayer in that it is conditional. The forgiveness we request corresponds to the forgiveness we have extended to others. This is the only portion of the prayer to be commented upon afterward by Jesus (vv. 14ff.). The same point is made as well in Luke 6:37 and in Matthew 18. The duty constantly to forgive is linked directly with our own constant need to be forgiven. Translators and commentators have not finished discussing whether the forgiveness in question is most fittingly understood as beginning with concrete financial obligations (“debts”) and then extending by analogy to other offenses and kinds of guilt or “trespass,” or whether it should be the other way around. In either case it is central that everyone who prays is committing herself or himself to live from and toward a quality of relationships in which one can be free from the bondage of past obligations and offenses. Not all debts have to be paid by me or to me; not all offenses need to be avenged or punished. We accept from God the grace of remission, and we commit ourselves to live out that grace as we relate to those who have incurred obligations toward us. It is not enough then to see in this prayer a petition for social justice; it is even more a petition for and commitment to social grace, to liberation from obligations actually incurred through our need, weakness, and guilt. Already in the Psalms the pious Hebrews had praised God for not remembering our trespasses. Jesus’s disciples commit themselves by thus praying to become instruments of that same quality of gracious forgetfulness. Does this have something to say about society’s treatment of offenders?

The other theme is protection from temptation. The petition is not that we may be made strong to face temptation successfully, but that we be saved from testing. There is no interest in braving the Tempter’s power, no sense that moral character would be formed or demonstrated by flirting with the edges of evil.

In the Greek one cannot distinguish between “evil thing” and “evil One.” Although most translations have favored the former, it might well be the latter that is meant. This would again make two sentences more nearly parallel: “Do not lead us into a time of trial; save us from the Tempter.” This petition acknowledges vulnerability and dependence in a world predisposed to foster our disobedience.

Our last observation is as profound as it is formal. The prayer is consistently in the plural. We pray together for our bread, our forgiveness, and our protection from temptation. The agent of Christian petition is the community, not the lonely soul or the moral hero. Likewise, then, the sanctifying of the Name and the doing of his will on earth as in heaven are collective activities, as we pray for and do them.

Seeking First the Kingdom (Matt 6:25–34; Luke 12:22–31)

How not to take no thought for the morrow

The concrete meaning of the warnings against preoccupation with material security has been rendered less accessible to us by some of the short-circuited ways it has often been read, sometimes in order to be applied sincerely and sometimes in order to set it aside as unrealistic. Since the birds and the flowers are fed without their thinking about it, and since the Old Testament reports that the prophet Elijah was once fed by ravens, there are those who think that Jesus was promising some kind of nature miracle, some new gift of manna, as an alternative to sober economic planning. Then obviously such “trust in God” would not be something we could reproduce in our culture. Thus by making the meaning radical we make it irrelevant.

But that was not Jesus’s point. The concrete and credible meanings of Jesus’s words were confirmed by the life of the circle of disciples who had literally left economic security behind and were already experiencing material support from the common fund. Already in this life, Jesus later taught (Mark 10:29ff.), those who forsake other communities and securities find in the Kingdom fellowship new possessions and new families. Thus the first impact of the promise that the morrow will take care of itself was not about ravens but about Jesus. It called people to join his itinerant commune. It summons us to make real among ourselves the new economic solidarity of those who consider nothing their own and who share according to need.9

The further analysis of what it means to trust God for survival is pointed up by the parallel, already accentuated by Leo Tolstoy and Reinhold Niebuhr, between the renunciation of selfish economic security in Mathew 6 and the renunciation of violence toward the enemy in Matthew 5. Both chapters exemplify renouncing the habits of thinking from the perspective of controlling the situation for good, and of beginning with one’s own rights. The most entrenched defenses of inequitable social systems in our time are not the unabashed selfishness of criminal types, but the consciously justified “legitimate self-concern” of good people, and the assignment to oneself of the responsibility to make sure that things do not come out still worse, whereby people claiming to do justice maintain things the way they are, because the alternative would be worse.

“Taking thought for the morrow” is the claim that it is my right or my duty to exercise control over others—control first of all over the social system, and therefore control over other persons—in the name of a relative justice that is better than something else that I fear, and in which, not so incidentally, my own rights will be taken care of first.

A pietist or a pre-scientific social thinker might say more simply that defending my rights means not trusting God. A more sophisticated analyst would add that it means not trusting other people, not trusting dialogue and forgiveness, not trusting conflict resolution and due process; claiming instead that one has no choice but to manipulate, to use non-dialogical power, and to accumulate and preserve one’s own economic advantage at the cost of wider sharing. “Taking thought for the morrow” is what some call “an ethic of responsibility.” We must control events because God won’t. Its basic moral mood is utilitarian. It puts security above solidarity. It privileges one’s own party in calculating the common good.

Thereby we have backed into a functional definition of what “trusting God” would mean in concrete social terms. It would mean that our calculations of the common good would not begin by privileging our own perspective, and would not be used to assign to ourselves or to our party the authority to impose our vision or our rights on others by authority or by applying greater power. To trust God is then to trust in dialogue and due process, repentance and the common search. Does this have something to say about economic justice and “national security”?

There is a deep commonality between the daring to share that is enjoined for the disciples’ economic life (Matthew 6) and the love for enemy that is commended in the realm of conflict. Both risk themselves at the hand of open process over which one is ready to relinquish control.

Proclamation and prayer derived from the coming of the Kingdom give reason to trust that such renunciation is not going to be generally suicidal, though it may situationally be costly. Heralding the Kingdom (Matt 3:2; 4:17; 10:7) and the commitment in prayer to its coming (6:10) do not replace sober planning with blind faith, nor social analysis with unthinking obedience. They change the calculation of common good. They place realism in a framework of faith and hope.10

Further suggested readings:

Bauman, Sermon on the Mount

Crosby, Spirituality of the Beatitudes

Crosby, Thy Will be Done

Davies, Setting of the Sermon on the Mount

Hunter, Design for Life

Jeremias, Sermon on the Mount

Minear, “Bible’s Authority in the Congregation.”

1. Previously published as “Jesus’ Life-Style Sermon and Prayer.” There is some overlap with the chapter, “Political Axioms of the Sermon the Mount,” in my Original Revolution, 34–54.

2. Tolstoy, What I Believe. Tolstoy expanded his argument in several fuller exegetical works on the Gospels.

3. The best surveys of the great diversity of perspectives are McArthur, Understanding the Sermon, and Bauman, Sermon on the Mount. Further sources are provided in the bibliography.

4. One very important component of interpretation—which the format of an essay like this, based on the lectionary and limited in length, must lay aside—is the critical consideration of the contexts, both literary and historical. Some such matters were dealt with more adequately in the other text named in note 1 above. [This footnote is missing from the first edition. —Ed.]

5. “The Kingdom is at hand” characterizes the first preaching of John and the first preaching of Jesus, just before our text. “Great Reversal” is one way to characterize the mood of that proclamation.

6. This notion of a shift between the testaments is especially at home in the post- and anti-Constantinian renewal movements: i.e., the Czech Brethren, the Anabaptists, and Tolstoy.

7. Classical Lutheran theology described this as the usus elenchthicus legis, the “condemning use of the law.” A rough analogy to that is found in Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought about the “relevance of an impossible ideal.”

8. Jewish reverence for the proper names of God prescribed that those names not be pronounced. Thus the noun “Name” came to be used as substitute for the unspoken proper names. Therefore to “sanctify the Name” means to ascribe holiness to God himself, and in later rabbinic thought it came to mean suffering for that witness.

9. See my Body Politics, 14ff.

10. [See bibliography for complete title and publication details. —Ed.]