Sermon on the Mount

by Scot McKnight

  The sweep of the Gospels, not to mention 6:25–34, where Jesus points a long finger at consumerism and preoccupation with money and possessions, suggests that when Jesus says, “Give us today our daily bread,” the word today suggests we are not to worry about tomorrow or about storing up food but to trust God for what we need that day. We perhaps need to remind ourselves that the followers of Jesus were not wealthy with pantries and refrigerators filled with food.

  The Forgiveness (6:12) and a Clarifying Commentary (6:14–15)

  Forgiveness is difficult at the personal and pastoral level, and the twofold reason is because Jesus was so forceful about its necessity for his followers and we find forgiveness so demanding and difficult. We attend to the words of 6:12 as well as the commentary on those words in 6:14–15, words probably added by Matthew on the basis of Mark 11:25–26.35

  We begin with the obvious: what Jesus says strikes the Christian as backward and conditional, and we are tempted to fill in the blanks. But what Jesus says in 6:12 as a petition to God is what Jesus says elsewhere in 7:1–5 and in 18:21–35. What Jesus forcefully focuses on his kingdom vision for his followers can be summarized in these two lines, and they summarize both 6:12 and 6:14–15:

  We are to forgive others.

  If we don’t forgive others, God won’t forgive us.

  Verse 12 is a prayer request: forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us. In other words, the appeal to God for forgiveness is rooted in our forgiving others. For most of us this seems backward because it seems to make God’s forgiveness conditioned on our forgiving others. But that’s what Jesus says! Matthew 6:14–15, which interrupts the flow from 6:13 to 6:16–18 (but 6:7–13 is an interruption already, and 6:14–15 interrupts further), repeats this. It is likely that Matthew added this as a footnote, or a clarifying comment, by grabbing Mark 11:25–26. Forgiveness from God and our forgiving others are tied together by Jesus. This jars our Christian sensibilities, but that is precisely why Jesus says it as he does: we need to hear how connected our forgiveness and God’s forgiveness are—not so we will go about trying to earn our forgiveness by forgiving others but so we will see the utter importance of being people who forgive.

  In our faith we are taught that the real #1 is God has forgiven us, so the real order, and implied by Jesus, is this:

  1. God has graciously forgiven us (of much greater sin/s).

  2. Therefore, we are to forgive others to extend God’s grace.

  3. If we don’t forgive others, we show we are not forgiven.

  4. Forgiven people forgive others.

  5. But our forgiveness does not earn God’s forgiveness.

  These five points can be taken as a rough-and-ready sketch of the process of how God’s gracious forgiveness finds a moral compass of forgiveness in the life of the follower of Jesus without compromising the priority of grace; I am confident it is consistent with the kingdom vision of Jesus, and it is confirmed by Matthew 18:23–35.

  We are bound in any teaching on forgiveness to speak to the seeming conditionality of how forgiveness works, and this can be taken as a footnote to #1 in the paragraph immediately above. This is where this prayer partakes in Jesus’ Ethic from Above, forcing us to see God’s demand, and an Ethic from Beyond, showing that new creation is already at work. In the Bible God is good, gracious, loving, and forgiving; God offers forgiveness. But Jesus’ intent in this passage is not to frame a forgiveness ethic in the deeper forgiveness by God. Instead, Jesus’ aim is to demand forgiveness of his followers and threaten them with God’s judgment if they don’t become forgiving people. His theory, then, is that forgiveness is reciprocal.36

  Jesus is teaching a kingdom perspective on how to deal with those who have sinned against us. Since the kingdom is a world of reconciliation, kingdom people are to forgive. He doesn’t need the above five points to make his case. He reduces the five points in order to sharpen the rhetoric of his concern. He’s staring into the face of fellow Israelites who don’t know the grace of enemy love and who want to appeal too quickly to the lex talionis or who want to become judges like God (7:1–5; cf. Jas 4:11–12). Moreover, that same audience needed to hear that forgiveness is the way kingdom living works. Those who genuinely love others forgive. Those who don’t are not kingdom people.

  Back now to the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer. The petition to forgive finds its first-century life in the kingdom vision of Jesus to become forgiving people. So important to Jesus is forgiving others that he teaches his followers to ask God for forgiveness for themselves and others because we are grace-receiving and grace-giving people. Such an appeal to one’s own virtues, righteousness, and morality is consistent with a long string of prayers in the Psalms, and though the language may grate against our grace-shaped nerves, that language never expunges the priority of God’s grace. These words are designed to sharpen the edge of the need to forgive others, beginning with the Roman enemies. Jesus teaches his followers to ask God to forgive their “debts,” and this metaphor “debt” is interpreted in the surrounding verses and parallel.

  Matthew 6:12 uses “debts.”

  Matthew 6:14–15 uses “sin/trespasses.”

  Luke 11:4 uses “sins.”

  We’ve already mentioned this, but it needs to be said again. In the world of Judaism there were two major ways to express the implications of sins and trespasses: burdens and debts.37 If sin incurred a burden, a person wanted it lifted. Forgiveness in that world is the removal of a burden. The second way to express what incurred from sin was a debt. This opened a new linguistic game for how forgiveness worked: for the debtor, what one needed was cancellation of the debt or credits to compensate the debt. This kind of debt language, which was perfectly common to Jews of Jesus’ day, also produced a way of expressing good moral deeds: they were seen as merits or credits.

  Again, this does not mean Judaism was a works-based religion but that it chose to express sins and the removal of sin in that kind of language. Jesus, too, expressed himself in this kind of language, and he does not thereby imply a works-based religion. So, while we are prone to critique Judaism as a works religion because of its debt-merit language, we are prone also to relieve Jesus of such a charge when he speaks of heaven as a reward (which is debt-merit language that correlates one’s “reward” from God to one’s behaviors). We need to be more honest. Jesus talked like his contemporaries.

  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven (5:12).

  … for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven (6:1; cf. vv. 2, 5, 16).

  When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, “Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first” (20:8).

  As we release Jesus from the charge, so we ought to release Judaism from the accusation. What perhaps pokes us in the eye in this issue is that Judaism doesn’t have a prayer seeking for God’s forgiveness that is as conditional as the Lord’s Prayer.38 I’m not saying that Judaism didn’t have pockets of works-shaped religion, but so also does Christianity. What goes alongside any kind of compensatory language in the Bible is a God who is gracious, who acts first to establish covenant, who redeems and transforms and restores, who in that covenant redemptive model exhorts the people of God to live obediently, and then who rewards them for their behaviors.

  The Temptation and the Evil One (6:13)

  At one level, the sixth petition seems preposterous. Does Jesus really mean we are to ask God to pave the road of life in such a way that we are never tempted? I wonder how many millions of Christians have prayed this sixth petition without ever thinking of the shocking nature of its words if taken at face value. Interpreters tend to assume this request hinges on the meaning of two words: the meaning of “temptation” and the meaning of “the evil one.”

  What does it mean to ask God not to lead us into “temptation”? Since the word peirasmos, used here, means either “test, trial” or “temptation,”
one could also render it, “Lead me not into the test, or the trial.” The word itself doesn’t decide for us but context does, and this leads to the question of why God would test/tempt, or even more, could God tempt/test. While it is possible that God could test, which is the whole point of the wilderness wanderings of Israel and was recently the experience of Jesus (Matt 4:1–11), both Jewish and Christian tradition affirm both the utter goodness of God as well as the impossibility for the good God to be complicit in evil. This is clearly taught in James 1:13: “For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone.”

  This means the word “temptation” must mean “test” if God is the one “leading.” But this is where “deliver” rescues us, for the word “lead” gains clarity in the next verb, rhysai, “to rescue,” which means to deliver both from and out of or to preserve (see, e.g., Matt 27:43; Luke 1:74; Rom 7:24; Col 1:13; 1 Thess 1:10; 2 Thess 3:2; 2 Tim 3:11; 2 Pet 2:7, 9). As a result, this petition is not so much about God’s not leading us into testing or about God’s leading us into temptation, but about God’s protecting and rescuing us from temptation (or testing). In fact, this approach encourages us to read this temptation as a request not to endure what Jesus endured in his test in Matthew 4:1–11. In this case, then, “lead us not into temptation” could be understood as an equivalent to the apostle Paul’s famous line in 1 Corinthians 10:13:

  No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.

  Thus, this request is about preservation from sin in temptation.

  But using the seventh to interpret the sixth petition does not resolve the meaning of “temptation.” Does it mean moral “temptations”39 or divine tests (Gen 22:1–19) or the eschatological40 “test” or “tribulation”? Many scholars today, not the least of whom is Raymond Brown, contend that the Lord’s Prayer is thoroughly eschatological—that it is a prayer shaped entirely by the prospect of an imminent arrival of the fullness of the kingdom.41 It is hard to gainsay such a reading of history for it is part of the earliest Christians’ way of thinking; but when one reads history like this, the eschatological dimension—because it becomes so all-pervasive—seems to diminish. I’m inclined to think that temptation/test and the evil one are, like bread and sins, ordinary dimensions of ordinary life for those who follow Jesus.42

  This leads us to “evil one” or to “evil.” Is “deliver us from evil” referring to deliverance from sin in general, or is this about Satan, the evil one?43 In the gospel of Matthew, ho ponēros can refer to the evil one (see 5:37; 13:19, 38) and in another prayer of Jesus this expression refers to Satan (John 17:15),44 but the evidence is not as clear as some think. For example, in 2 Timothy 4:18 Paul prays that the Lord will “rescue” (same word) him from every “evil” attack, and Didache 10:5 prays the church may be saved from evil—and this in contrast to love. Evidence then can be brought in to support both views.

  These two petitions, at the safest level, are about aching that one’s fellow followers of Jesus will live morally holy and loving lives and will be rescued through trust in God from temptations and from evil or the wiles of the Evil One. What Peter says in 1 Peter 5:8 confirms this interpretation: “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”

  A brief note on the doxology. Readers of most editions of the Bible will find a note that the best and earliest manuscripts do not have the commonly recited doxology at the end of the Lord’s Prayer: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen” (KJV). Neither does Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:1–4 have a doxology. Those words appear to have been formed on the basis of 1 Chronicles 29:11–13 by someone later than Jesus and the writing of the gospel of Matthew; the doxology was added to the Lord’s Prayer in public prayer, and then was gradually added to the text of the New Testament itself. We recite them today because the public recitation of the Lord’s Prayer seems incomplete without such an ending.

  LIVE the Story

  Whenever we talk about prayer, major questions arise, even if this is not the context in which to attempt answers to them. And since I’ve extended my limits already in a more extensive commentary on the passage, I’m already running short of space. But still, we ask, why pray? Does prayer make a difference, and if so, how?45 Is God changeable?46 How should we pray, and is there a better way to pray? It is too simplistic to propose, as Luther once did, that prayer does not enter into some form of an interactive relationship with God. Thus, he writes:

  The reason He commands it [prayer] is, of course, not in order to have us make our prayers an instruction to Him as to what He ought to give us, but in order to have us acknowledge and confess that He is already bestowing many blessings upon us and that He can and will give us still more.47

  Undoubtedly this is true, but it is inadequate as a basis for our theology of prayer. The biblical facts are clear: God’s changeability, not the least of which is to withdraw judgment upon repentance, is more often part of the biblical narrative than the rather rare comment that God is unchangeable, which pertains to God’s utter faithfulness to promises. Good examples include Exodus 32:14; Psalm 106:45; Amos 7:3–6; Joel 2:13–14; and Jonah 4:2. Other biblical facts are also clear, though it is not often clear how we ought to bring them into a cohesive and compelling order: humans are in some sense free, with the stronger position believing in libertarian free will, while at the other end we have some form of compatibilism. As Calvin expresses this compatibilist view, which is undergirded by a view not unlike the citation from Luther above: “Keep hold of both points, then: our prayers are anticipated by Him in His freedom, yet, what we ask we gain by prayer.”48

  I affirm what Tiessen calls the redemptive intervention model, in which God’s overall plan is established and known to God while granting freedom within that plan. In this model, prayer changes things, and I believe the biblical models of prayer, from Abraham to David to Elijah to Isaiah to Jesus to Paul and the early churches, affirm this interactive model in which prayer sometimes alters the path of history within the overall plan of God in response to the prayers of God’s people. The upload from this theoretical sketch is that our yearning and our aching for God’s name to be hallowed, for God’s kingdom to come, and for others to experience the blessing of God can prompt God to actions that satisfy those yearnings and aches.

  The Lord’s Prayer as Our Prayer

  Perhaps the most neglected feature of the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon is that the long-winded prayers of the Gentiles form the foil for Jesus’ prayer. In other words, the Lord’s Prayer is a short and to-the-point prayer over against long prayers. Short prayers are good prayers. But again we need circumspection: there are lengthy prayers in the Bible that are commended, and Jesus prayed all night on occasions. The shortness of the Lord’s Prayer, then, is not an instruction that all prayers on all occasions must be short, but that the long and gassy prayers of the Gentiles do not enter into the presence of God as does the Lord’s Prayer.

  The Lord’s Prayer marks God’s people. In the context of the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon and at Luke 11:1–4, its possible presence in 2 Timothy 4:18, but even more in Didache 8, the Lord’s Prayer both formed and became a prayer that marked off the followers of Jesus from other groups in Judaism and the broader Roman world. Luke 11:1 informs us on the context of the Lord’s Prayer. As Jews of Jesus’ day had Ha-Tepillah (recited two to three times per day according to tradition), and as John’s disciples had their prayer (Luke 11:1), so the Lord’s Prayer is the distinctive prayer for the followers of Jesus.

  This leads to the focus of this section: the Lord’s Prayer is meant to be recited whenever the follower of Jesus prays.49 This observation derives from the grammar of Luke 11:2: whenever you pray, say this [or, recite this]. What this means in the Jewish world is that at the se
t hours of prayer, which are almost certainly morning, midafternoon, and evening, the followers of Jesus either added the Lord’s Prayer to Ha-Tepillah, or they replaced Ha-Tepillah with the Lord’s Prayer. We are not to think every whisper of a prayer had to be accompanied with a Lord’s Prayer. The facts are that the first-century Jew lived in a world where piety was marked by pausing three times a day (cf. Ps 55:17; Dan 6:10; Matt 6:5–6; Acts 3:1) and saying one’s prayers, adding to them one’s personal prayer requests.

  Anyone who has been to Israel or been among the Orthodox Jews, or who has experience with a Muslim community, knows that set times for set prayers is an old, old tradition. It was pervasive among the Jewish community in the first century. To this day monastic communities pray at set times, and Kris and I have been the accidental beneficiaries of such prayer times. Once we entered a basilica in Norcia in order to cool off from the searing heat of Umbria only to discover a concert of prayer as the Benedictine monks chanted their morning prayers—in Latin of course! This experience of set times and set prayers is growing among many Protestant Christians in the world today, the sales of Phyllis Tickle’s three-volume Divine Hours confirming this movement. A simple form of set time and set prayers is the recitation of the Jesus Creed as well as the Lord’s Prayer, followed up by one’s own personal prayers. The most typical times for such prayers are upon awaking, at noontime, and in the evening after dinner.