For a man’s lustful glance at someone else’s wife to be equated with the act of adultery is just as drastic as the demand that disciples leave their families. Jesus demands of the one group an absolute and unbreakable fidelity to their spouses (Matt 5:31-32) and of the others absolute and unbreakable fidelity to their task of proclamation (Luke 9:62). This means that Jesus regards the concrete way of life, whether marriage or discipleship for preaching, as sacred. Both ways of life are only possible in their radical form in light of the brilliance and fascination that emanate from the reign of God. But above all, neither way of life exists in isolation and independent of the other. The disciples, as they travel, are sustained by the aid of the families that open their houses to them in the evening, and the families live from and within the new family that began in the circle of disciples.
Two-Level Ethos?
Thus there is no two-level ethos, one of perfection for the apostles and disciples and a less perfect one for the rest of the people of God. We must admit, certainly, that there is one text in the gospels that seems to presume such a two-level ethos: the story of the rich man who came to Jesus with the question of how he could “inherit eternal life” (Mark 10:17-22). Jesus points him to the Ten Commandments. The man responds: “I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus looks at him, embraces him, and says, “’You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:21-22).
Matthew has reworked the Markan text. The phrase “you lack one thing” has been rewritten to “if you wish to be perfect” (Matt 19:21). The gospel story of the rich young man has had an extraordinary influence throughout the history of the church: again and again it has given men and women the strength to abandon their bourgeois existence and begin an alternative life of discipleship in community. The history of the founding of many religious orders began with this text. The Matthean phrase, “if you wish to be perfect,” however, has also given rise to the idea that there have to be two orders of life in the church: that of the perfect, who live the life of discipleship, and that of the less-than-perfect, to whom only the Ten Commandments and the love commandment apply.
But that kind of two-level ethos does not do justice to the text. Neither Mark nor Matthew is formulating norms for the people of God here. The story is about a concrete case. Jesus says “sell what you own” to a particular person who has come to him searching and dissatisfied. Jesus’ demand is addressed to him personally. It is a call to discipleship. Obviously, in the minds of the evangelists this text is also transparent for the later church: there will be many callings to follow, to discipleship, to radical abandonment of possessions. But these calls will also always be specific callings for individuals and not a law for everyone.
This becomes still clearer if we consider the closing words of Matthew’s interpretation. Behind the word “perfect” stands the Hebrew adjective tmim, which means “entire,” “undivided,” “complete,” “intact.” Being perfect in the biblical sense, when applied to persons, thus means living wholly and entirely in the presence of God. The rich man in the story had kept his wealth separate from his relationship to God, and therefore something “more” was required of him. Jesus wants his “whole [self].”14
And “wholeness” or “integrity” of the self is again not a privilege of disciples alone. The poor widow who puts in two copper coins, in contrast to the rich who give only part of their excess to the temple, gives away everything she has. She gives “what is hers” entirely (Mark 12:41-44).
This “wholeness” is different for everyone. For one it can mean abandoning everything. For others it can mean remaining at home and making one’s house available to Jesus’ messengers. Perhaps for a third it can even mean only giving a cup of fresh water to the disciples as they pass by. Everyone who lives her or his specific calling “entirely” lives “perfectly.”
The more closely we read the gospels, the clearer it constantly appears that the various ways of life under the reign of God do not arise out of accidental circumstances but are essential to the Gospel. They spring not only from the practical-functional point of view that Jesus could not possibly have traveled through Israel with thousands of followers, and they did not derive solely from the fact that only a relative few in Israel became his disciples. We have to look deeper. Ultimately, the variety of callings is a precondition for the freedom of every individual within the people of God.
Every individual has her or his own history, with an individual ability or inability to see, an individual freedom or lack of freedom. This individual history corresponds to the calling of each person. Only those who see are called. And no one is called to something that is completely outside his or her sphere of possibilities. Not everyone can be called to everything, but the various callings can work together to form the whole of the people of God.
The division of the church into perfect and less-than-perfect, into better and normal, into radical ethos and less radical ethos, ignores the unity of the people of God and the organization of all its members toward the same goal.
Chapter 7
Jesus’ Parables
It is impossible to talk about Jesus without mentioning his language—not whether he spoke Aramaic, and also Hebrew or Greek. That question can be quickly answered: in Galilee, that is, where Jesus grew up, people spoke a West-Aramaic dialect. It was no different in Jerusalem, apart from a somewhat different accent. Aramaic was the common language, and it was also Jesus’ everyday language. The gospel tradition gives us only a few of the Aramaic words Jesus used: for example, ’abba’ = my father (Mark 14:36), gehinnam = hell (Mark 9:43), ’elohi = my God (Mark 15:34), ’ippetach = open! (Mark 7:34), kepa’ = rock (John 1:42), qorban = sacrificial offering (Mark 7:11), mamona’ = property (Matt 6:24), pasḥa’ = Passover (Mark 14:1), rabbuni = my lord (Mark 10:51), reqa’ = fool (Matt 5:22), telita’ qum = little girl, get up! (Mark 5:41).
Jesus heard Hebrew in the synagogue when the Sacred Scriptures were read. Probably he knew long passages from the Hebrew Bible by heart. And fragmentary knowledge of Greek was probably indispensable for him as a worker in the building trades. It is possible that Jesus worked for years in Sepphoris, which was only about four miles from Nazareth. That city had been completely destroyed after an insurrection; this was done by the Roman legate Publius Quintilius Varus, the later loser of the so-called Varus battle in Germania. In the time of Jesus, Sepphoris was rebuilt on Herod Antipas’s orders.
Creative Language
But none of that is what we mean by Jesus’ “language.” We are referring to his speaking style, his way of putting the reality of the reign of God into words. It would be revealing if Jesus had used an imprecise, vague, or bombastic style. In that case we would simply say, “Your speech betrays you.” But the case is exactly the opposite. Jesus’ language was accurate. It was specific and precise. It was concise and pointed. There was not an ounce of extra fat in it. For example, one day while he was speaking, a woman in the crowd interrupted and shouted at him: “Blessed the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nursed you” (Luke 11:27). In many translations and commentaries this shout is entitled “benediction of Jesus’ mother.” But that simply misses the point of what the woman was saying, because it is Jesus himself who is being called blessed here; this is done by exalting his mother. That is good oriental style (and not unknown in Greek culture, either). In the East one praises someone by praising his or her mother and abuses someone by slandering her or his mother.1 But how does Jesus respond to this shout of “blessed the womb that bore you”? He answers: “Rather: blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:28).
What is that all about? An official correction of what the woman had said? Certainly not! The woman had paid Jesus a compliment. As a polite oriental gentleman, Jesus offers a compliment in return. The woman, after all, had been l
istening to him. Therefore, she herself is being called blessed.
But at the same time Jesus’ answer contains a very tactful clarification. He does not praise this woman alone as blessed but includes all the listeners in his reciprocal compliment. Certainly he could not say, “Rather: blessed are you who hear the word of God and keep it,” because Jesus cannot tell whether everyone in the crowd is keeping God’s word. Therefore the indirect “blessed are those” is altogether appropriate here. And yet that by no means exhausts what Jesus’ clarification contains, for he not only opens the reciprocal compliment to a larger group of people, ultimately the “new family” now coming to be in Israel (cf. Mark 3:35). No, he also indicates that “hearing” alone is insufficient. “Doing” has to follow. Ultimately he even says: it is not a matter of admiring me as a person but of doing the word of God.
How many words have I just used, and had to use, to explicate Luke 11:27-28! Jesus was better. He said it all in a single brief statement that could scarcely have been formulated more succinctly. A polite return compliment—and yet at the same time a whole block of theology, for this little statement made it clear to everyone that the listeners, when they heard Jesus, were hearing the word of God itself.
Obviously such brevity and exactness are also connected to the catechetical aims of the later gospel tradition: Jesus’ words and parables were used for preaching and baptismal instruction after Easter. For that purpose they had to be compressed and divided and shaped in such a way that they could be easily remembered. The strict form of many of these texts thus rests on the necessities of the later tradition.
But that by no means explains everything. Jesus himself must have had an extraordinary command of language; it comes through everywhere. It was so powerful that it also shaped the language of his disciples and those who handed on his tradition. Masters of language like G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers point explicitly to this unique quality of Jesus.
A Precise Observer
The degree to which the language of the historical Jesus continues to permeate the tradition is shown by a phenomenon that runs throughout the whole gospel tradition: Jesus’ words and parables betray a deep love for reality. They reveal a careful observation of things and people. And beyond all that they are richly imaginative and inventive. How unforgettable are the words, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the reign of God” (Matt 19:24). Anyone who has heard this saying about the proverbially largest animal and the proverbially smallest hole will never forget it—not only because it is so terribly vivid, but also because of its illusionless severity. Obviously it does not mean to say that in principle there is no salvation for rich people—one hundred percent of them. This kind of language is not interested in statistical accuracy. Its intention is to disturb, to shake us awake, to make us uneasy, to break through the icy armor of human indifference. We can see how uncomfortable it is from the fact that medieval theologians asserted that there was a narrow gate in Jerusalem that was called “the needle’s eye.” That drew all the sting from Jesus’ words. But that gate was an invention. It never existed. It was the offspring of the imagination of an Irish monk in the eighth century.2 Jesus wants to disturb his listeners. Therefore he loves paradox and has no hesitation in saying, “how can you say to your [sister or brother in faith], ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matt 7:4-5).
Another example of the vividness, brevity, and keenness of Jesus’ language: in 1945 the complete “Gospel of Thomas” was discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Its existence was already known from individual quotations in the church fathers. It was probably written around the middle of the second century. Because of its gnosticizing tendencies, it was rightly excluded by the church from the canon of Sacred Scripture from the start. It contains a saying about the Pharisees: “They are like a dog sleeping in the cattle manger: the dog neither eats nor [lets] the cattle eat” (GThom 102). A Greek proverb is at the root of this. It speaks of unbearable people who can neither enjoy anything themselves nor let anyone else have enjoyment. Jesus, who apparently was much more educated than many exegetes allow, adopted the proverb and put it in a new context, for there is parallel content in Matthew 23:13 // Luke 11:52. Jesus was using similar familiar words when he said, “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:22) or “doctor, cure yourself!” (Luke 4:23).
So Jesus quotes. But how pointedly and disturbingly he quotes! If the subject were not so serious one could almost hear in the image of the dog in the manger a trace of Jesus’ humor: we only have to imagine how the cattle try to feed and cannot because the dog will not leave his comfortable spot in the manger. That, says Jesus, is just how the people’s theological teachers lie on the sources of knowledge. But they themselves do not live out of those sources and they prevent others from reaching that knowledge. Jesus apparently was a close observer.
And so it is with all his images and parables. It is astonishing how much “world” we find in Jesus’ parables and similitudes. Here is the world of rulers and politicians, businesspeople and great landowners, just as we also find the world of housewives and poor day laborers, fisherfolk and farmers. One must simply read the text against the grain. It is necessary to probe the sentences to see what realities they contain in order to see, behind the text, the narrator Jesus, deeply participant and carefully observant.
Here we have a story about a rich man’s banquet (Luke 14:16-24), and there one about how a poor woman looks for a lost coin (Luke 15:8-10). Here we read how a great mustard bush grows out of a little mustard seed (Mark 4:30-32) and how a small amount of sourdough leavens a huge quantity of dough (Matt 13:33). Here is a description of how a victim of assault lies in his blood, and a priest and a Levite pass by and simply look away (Luke 10:30-35). Here a terrorist prepares for his attack (GThom 98), and there a manager who has been fired for good cause secures his living for coming years with a clever trick (Luke 16:1-7).
The Corrupt Manager
The parable in Luke 16:1-7 is especially revealing because it shows that the early church already had problems with Jesus’ parable material. A whole series of commentaries has been attached to the parable (Luke 16:8-13), all of them relating to the keyword “mammon.” Their purpose is to explain the parable, protect it against misunderstandings, and draw the right conclusions from it. But Jesus does not “protect” his challenging language. He uses daring images for the reign of God. And he tells stories that do not sound at all pious. For example, this one about the corrupt manager:
There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, “What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.”
Then the manager said to himself, “What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.”
So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, “How much do you owe my master?” He answered, “A hundred jugs of olive oil.” He said to him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.” Then he asked another, “And how much do you owe?” He replied, “A hundred containers of wheat.” He said to him, “Take your bill and make it eighty.” (Luke 16:1–7)
A pious story? No, this is a story of a crime. It tells of a double betrayal. It takes place in the Palestine of the time. There, in Jesus’ time, the rich land in the valleys belonged to the “state” or a few very rich owners of large estates. Most of the latter lived elsewhere—in Antioch, Alexandria, or Rome—and had managers to take care of their property.
The manager in Luke 16 embezzles the goods entr
usted to him. He manages the money right into his own pocket. The owner apparently has no way of inspecting the books. He is exploited by his manager by every dishonest art in the book. But then, one day, someone fingers the manager. Who, the story does not say. The manager is then given a date by which he must lay all his accounts on the table.
The manager knows that he cannot conceal his embezzlement. He also knows that he is going to lose his position and has no chance of finding another. His future looks ruined.
Therefore he undertakes a new betrayal, and now more audaciously than before: he calls in his master’s various debtors and has them rewrite their bills in their own favor and against the interests of his employer. In this way he lays obligations on people who will support him later. He creates “the right of hospitality” for himself. Obligations of this sort played an extraordinary role in antiquity. There was no such thing as insurance, and there was no social welfare system like ours. Obviously, the deceitful manager has the debtors come to him one at a time; there must not be any witnesses to such business. The amounts are extraordinarily high: a hundred jugs of oil are about 3,600 liters, the yield of some 145 olive trees. The quantity of wheat is similarly high.
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