Sermon on the Mount

by Scot McKnight

  Before we put the second foot in the water, however, it must be observed that praying recited prayers is only one part of prayer. Alongside recited prayers, and our Bible’s Psalter involves the use of set prayers, are personal prayers, spontaneous prayers, breath prayers, and meditative prayers done whenever and wherever we find ourselves. This too is how the Psalter arose: those were personal prayers raised to the level of set prayers.

  For some it is tempting to use only set prayers, while for others it is almost a solemn requirement to use only spontaneous prayers. We need both, and in my Praying with the Church book I use an image from an experience in Italy. In Assisi Kris and I eventually found the famous Portiuncola church of Saint Francis, the small church that Francis restored shortly after his conversion. Today one can see that small chapel but, remarkably, it is in the middle of a large basilica—and these two “churches” illustrate two kinds of prayer. We are to pray our personal and spontaneous prayers in our own little Portiuncola while we are also encouraged to join the large assembly in the basilica as we pray set prayers at set times with the church.

  The Didache, a Jewish Christian document, informs us that the Christians were instructed to pray the Lord’s Prayer “three times a day” (Did. 8:3). This fits with the Jewish custom of three set times of prayer per day. Now turned toward us, this early Christian tradition found in Luke 11:2 as well as the Didache is not good advice but commandment: Jesus expected his followers to use this prayer daily. The early Christians used this prayer daily. The church prayer tradition has always used this prayer daily. We would do well to get back in sync with our Lord’s instructions and the tradition of the church. I say this as one who grew up being taught and then believing that set prayers were for sissies, or to put it more piously, set prayers were nothing more than “vain repetition.” This attitude is profoundly unbiblical and directly contrary to what Jesus taught and the church has always practiced.

  Dale Allison has marshaled evidence in favor of the view that the Lord’s Prayer is an example or a model rather than a set prayer, even if the earliest evidence, as noted above, counters that later evidence. Here are two examples from Allison’s sketch.50 Origen saw the Lord’s Prayer as a form or an outline, and Isaac of Nineveh said that those who say we should “recite the prayer … in all our prayers using the same wording and keeping the exact order of the words, rather than their sense, such a person is very deficient in his understanding.” John Gill, the Baptist theologian, said the variants between the two Lord’s Prayer accounts reveal that it was not a set prayer. But the examples of adding to the Lord’s Prayer probably reveal the opposing viewpoint: namely, once one recited the Lord’s Prayer, one then added personal prayer petitions, which also conforms to how some Jews used the Ha-Tepillah.

  Allison’s final examples also illustrate the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Ambrose urged it be prayed only one time per day, while Cyril of Jerusalem shows its prominence in the Sunday liturgies. John Calvin, who did not think it had to be recited, is nonetheless right in the effects: the Lord’s Prayer is our teacher and from it we learn the art of prayer. “So no-one,” Calvin observed, “will learn to pray aright whose lips and heart are not schooled by the heavenly Teacher.”51 The Lord’s Prayer is designed to control our prayers and provides the substance of our prayers.

  Yes, the Lord’s Prayer is our teacher; and the Lord’s Prayer teaches us what we are to yearn for. Yet how can the Lord’s Prayer accomplish such lofty goals—and learning how to pray aright is a lofty thing indeed—if we don’t memorize it and recite it and let its words work their way into our heart and bones? Perhaps some have learned another way, but the age-old church way is the way of memorizing and reciting—daily—as a way of learning to pray with our Lord and as our Lord. This is perhaps why Luther, who himself had an aversion toward anything pedantic or pompous, said: “Hence it is a very good practice, especially for the common man and for children and servants in the household, to pray the entire Lord’s Prayer every day, morning and evening and at table, and otherwise, too, as a way of presenting all sorts of general needs to God.”52

  Prayer as Aching and Yearning

  In the Lord’s Prayer our desires are reordered into the ways of God and the ways of the kingdom. For seventeen years I taught college students a course called “Jesus of Nazareth.” We begin each class period by reciting the Jesus Creed, and we end each class period by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I cannot tell you the number of times I have repeated, just after our recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, how appropriate a line or two is for what we discussed that day. In other words, I stand with those who see in the Lord’s Prayer an essential guide to the message and mission of Jesus. It falls short, of course, of being a compendium to Christian theology, though some have with ingenuity, if not downright manipulation, tried to wring all of Christian theology from this prayer. That won’t do, but it will do to emphasize that his prayer expresses the heart of Jesus’ kingdom vision. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to pray, not to theologize, but there is a theology at work in the Lord’s Prayer, and that theology is the essence of Jesus’ vision.

  As such, it reorders our desires. We learn in the recitation, memorization, and repetition of this prayer to yearn for God’s glory and for God’s name to be held in highest honor, and we learn to long for God’s kingdom (not ours) and for God’s will (not ours) to be done. Then we learn to yearn and ache for the good of others. We yearn that each person will have sufficient food, that each person will find reconciliation with God through forgiveness of sins, and that each person will be protected and preserved by God’s grace from the snares of temptations and the grasps of evil (or the evil one). When we are done, our desires have been reordered to God and to others, and in having those desires we find ourselves as God made us to be: beings designed to have proper loves, that is, love for God and love for others.

  Is Calling God “Father” Patriarchal?

  I want to end this sketch of the Lord’s Prayer with an excursus on a debated topic. Charles Talbert, in a brief but insightful discussion of this question,53 contends that language has two primary connotations: one relational and one political. In the first, a label—in this case calling God “Father”—describes a relationship. That is, God relates to us as a father relates to one of his children, and we are children as children relate to their parents or to a parent. In the second, one uses language to project onto the canvas of the cosmos one’s beliefs, or one’s cosmological world imposes language on the way we talk. Thus, to say God is a father is to project God as a father in the political landscape of the world, or we use “father” because, like fathers in this world, we get to impose power on others the way fathers impose on children.

  But Talbert contends biblical language does not work politically, or else goddess language would have emerged from matriarchal cultures. But it didn’t; it emerged from patriarchal cultures. Thus, the political approach to the biblical language for God isn’t helpful. Talbert further argues that a relational view of language transcends sexuality in the Bible, for God is often described in maternal images, not the least being that God can cry out like a woman in travail (Isa 42:14). He then suggests that God is called “father” in the Bible because of Israel’s experience of God and because Jesus taught us to. Neither of these elements has anything to do with making God male or a sexual being.

  Talbert has adequately discussed the language of the Bible and mined the sources to show that the language was not sexist in the way many talk today, but he has only gone halfway round the track. The issue is as much today as it was then. That is, “father” today evokes a kind of paternalism or male authority that creates problems in understanding what God is like in the Bible. We are in need of sensitivity training here, and I would urge us to spend more time explaining both what fatherhood meant in that ancient world, where intimacy and authority were combined but where authority could be unquestioned, and what fatherhood evokes today, where once again authority can be unquestioned a
nd abusive.

  I don’t think any term—and family language is at the heart of the biblical vision of God—will escape the problems of abuse. Instead, the teacher of Scripture is called to teach what the Bible says, apply it ruthlessly against abuses, and at the same time embody a godly fatherliness (or motherliness) so that children can both see the Bible’s vision and experience the love and intimacy of the family—from fathers and mothers. This approach, in other words, calls into question many cheap and authoritarian views of parenting in our world and draws us to reform society on the basis of what God is like. So I would urge us to double our efforts to restore what “father” means and embody it in our world so that the day will come when the term “father” will never evoke abuse or authoritarian behaviors.

  Notes

  1. KNT: “don’t pile up a jumbled heap of words!”

  2. KNT: “Don’t bring us into the great trial, but rescue us from evil.”

  3. For an excellent source on Hellenstic and Roman religions, see E. Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 148–317.

  4. Instead of an indefinite temporal clause with the subjunctive (introduced by hotan), 6:7 has a subordinating (perhaps temporal) participle (proseuchomenoi).

  5. As an example, in Lucius Apuleius’s famous novel, The Golden Ass, a prayer begins to “O Queen of heaven” and then proceeds to wonder which god is being addressed: “if you are Dame Ceres … or Celestial Venus” (Apuleius, Golden Ass [Metamorphoses] 11.2 [ch. 47]). In Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the emperor Domitian imprisoned a man for failing to mention that he, Domitian, was son of Athene (7.24).

  6. From: www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Catullus.htm#_Toc531846759.

  7. The “keep on” is an unsuccessful attempt to translate the combination of the present participle (proseuchomenoi) alongside the aorist subjunctive (battalogēsēte). There is too much time emphasis in the “keep on.” I suggest “In your praying, do not babble like the Gentiles.”

  8. See Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:587–88.

  9. So Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:205; Wesley in Kinghorn, Wesley on the Sermon, 157. Also Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 308; France, Matthew, 241, who calls it “the Pattern Prayer.”

  10. Variation between Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the Lord’s Prayer does not prove the prayer was not recited, any more than variation in other set prayers in Judaism, like the Amidah, shows they weren’t recited. Variations reveal both a fixed prayer but willingness to shorten or lengthen according to context. There is no good evidence that the followers of Jesus didn’t recite this prayer, and the entire history of the church counts in favor of reciting it.

  11. Didache 8:2–3 says to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day and uses the words of Matthew: “pray thus.” This becomes our earliest commentary on the Lord’s Prayer as given in Matthew and indicates, as I’ve said, the use of the Lord’s Prayer as recited prayer.

  12. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:599–600. Thus, I stand here with Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 145.

  13. S. McKnight, A New Vision for Israel: The Teachings of Jesus in National Context (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 49–65; Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 711–18.

  14. J. Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (London: SCM, 1967), 11–65; idem, The Central Message of the New Testament (London: SCM, 1965).

  15. Thus, see Old Testament texts like Pss 68:5; 103:13–14; Isa 63:15–16; Jer 31:9, 20, the famous avinu malkeinu (“Our Father, our King”) lines in classic Jewish prayers, like Ahabah Rabah and The Litany for the New Year, and texts like 4Q372 fragment 1:16.

  16. See my New Vision for Israel, 27–30, with correction from Pennington in the next note.

  17. On kingdom of heaven see esp. J. T. Pennington, Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 13–37.

  18. The third person singular imperative is used, in passive form, to read: “May your Name be hallowed,” instead of a second person singular imperative, which would have been “(You) hallow your Name.” Perhaps the third person is used out of reverence, which the passive voice could also indicate, or perhaps the third person does open it up more for human inclusion and responsibility. I’m inclined toward the former view. There is, of course, moral implication for the one who so addresses God, but had Jesus wanted this to be a moral imperative, he could have said it directly, as in “May your people hallow your Name.”

  19. So Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 289; Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 148. But see Luz, Matthew 1–7, 317–18; France, Matthew, 246, focuses on the human dimension.

  20. Martin Luther, An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer for Simple Laymen (Luther’s Works 42: Devotional Writings, v. 1; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 27–37.

  21. This view is classically connected with Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (ed. J. Bowden: Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).

  22. C. H. Dodd, The Parables of Jesus (London: Religious Book Club, 1942).

  23. Ladd, The Presence of the Future.

  24. A good example is R. T. Kendall, The Sermon on the Mount (Minneapolis: Chosen, 2011).

  25. Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God; McKnight, King Jesus Gospel, 93–100; idem, One.Life, 27–34.

  26. See here N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008).

  27. Luz, Matthew 1–7, 319–22. Already with Jerome we read of debates on the meaning of the term translated “daily” (epiousios): see Jerome, Matthew, 88–89.

  28. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 125.

  29. Strecker, Sermon on the Mount, 117–18.

  30. Luther, Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, 52–53. Later Luther narrows this to Jesus himself, dispensed through Word and sacrament.

  31. The etymology of this rare term favors this last view: “coming day.” The Gospel of the Nazarenes, a second-century Jewish Christian text, uses the word mahar, which means “of tomorrow.”

  32. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 127.

  33. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:209–10; Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 293, 312; France, Matthew, 247–49; Keener, Matthew, 220–22.

  34. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 150.

  35. The words are not connected to the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:1–4.

  36. France, Matthew, 249–51.

  37. The best discussion of the various images of sin in the Bible is J. Goldingay, “Your Iniquities Have Made a Separation between You and Your God,” in Atonement Today (ed. J. Goldingay; London: SPCK, 1995), 39–53, who explores nine terms for sin in the Old Testament.

  38. Both Ha-Tepillah and Avinu Melkenu plead for forgiveness from God but do not condition forgiveness on our forgiving others. But, as Allison cites the texts (Sermon on the Mount, 128), there is connection between God’s forgiveness and our forgiving others at Sir 28:2; m. Yoma 8:9; b. Šabbat 15b; Roš Haššanah 17a. And he also cites Col 3:13.

  39. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:213.

  40. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:612–14.

  41. R. E. Brown, “The Pater Noster as an Eschatological Prayer,” in his New Testament Essays (Garden City, NY: Image, 1968), 265–320.

  42. With Luz, Matthew 1–7, 322; Keener, Matthew, 223–24.

  43. Apo tou ponērou is neuter in the general sense but masculine in the Evil One sense.

  44. So Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 314. See also Luke 22:28–32. But there is counterevidence as well: see Luke 6:45; Rom 12:9.

  45. T. Tiessen, Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in Our World? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), with an exceptional chart on pp. 363–64 that sorts out the options.

  46. For an excellent sketch of this topic, see D. Lamb, God Behaving Badly (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 135–52.

  47. Luther, Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, 144.

  48. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:204.

  49. For my own jo
urney into set prayers at set times, see my Praying with the Church.

  50. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 132–33.

  51. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:205.

  52. Luther, Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, 145.

  53. Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount, 112–15.

  Chapter 14

  Matthew 6:16–18

  LISTEN to the Story

  16“When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites1 do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 17But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face,2 18so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

  Listening to the text in the Story: Leviticus 16:29–31; 23:26–32; Psalm 35:13–14; Isaiah 58.

  Fasting has a colorful history both in the Story of the Bible and in the Story of the church after the apostles, and some of that history can be found in the sharp criticisms of Luther.3 But the colorful history of fasting in the church has substantively reshaped what we find in the Bible.4 The most influential understanding of fasting today is the instrumental theory. In the simplest of terms, this theory teaches that we fast in order to gain some benefit. The most commonly promised benefits are spiritual growth, suppression of sins, improved health, and a much better chance of answers to our prayers. Some even contend that many Christians haven’t realized higher levels of spirituality because they do not fast. This more instrumental view is a fixed part of the church tradition, including Calvin, who said: