Generosity and stinginess in God’s kingdom.

Matthew 6.22-23, Luke 11.34-36.

Some of Jesus’s teachings tend to get skipped entirely. Sometimes because they’re too hard to understand—and they’re not really; we just need to learn their historical context. Today’s Sermon on the Mount passage is one such example.

And sometimes because we just don’t like them. Libertines hate what Jesus has to say about still following the Law, ’cause they don’t wanna. Hypocrites hate what Jesus has to say about public acts of devotion, ’cause it’s way easier to do that than produce good fruit. Ingrates hate what Jesus has to say about loving the “unloveable,” forgiving the “unforgivable,” and going the extra mile. Mammonists hate what Jesus has to say about money—and today’s passage is about money, so it’s likewise one such example.

Yep, it’s about money, not opthamology. But because people are unfamiliar with what ancient middle easterners meant by “good eye” and “evil eye”—and presume they’re about what Romans and westerners mean by it, and think they have to do with all-purpose blessings and curses—we interpret this passage all kinds of wrong. Or claim it’s too obscure, and skip it, and focus on the verses we understand, and like better.

Well. In Matthew, right after saying we oughta keep our treasures in heaven, Jesus says this:

Matthew 6.22-23 KWL

22“The body’s light is the eye.

So when your eye is clear,

your whole body is illuminated.

23When your eye is bad,

your whole body is dark.

So if the light in you is dark,

how dark are you?”

Luke 11.34-36 KWL

34“The body’s light is your eye.

{So} whenever your eye is clear,

your whole body is illuminated too.

Once it’s bad,

your body is dark too.

35So watch out

so the light in you isn’t dark.

36So if your whole body is illuminated,

without having any parts dark,

the whole will be bright—

as if a lamp could shine lightning for you.”

In both gospels the King James Version uses these words to describe the eye:

• Ἁπλοῦς/aplús, “all together,” is translated “single.”
• Πονηρὸς/ponirós, “bad,” is translated “evil.”

Why? ’Cause that’s how William Tyndale translated it, and that’s what the Geneva Bible went with. It was tradition. The translators were simply following the tradition handed down by the Vulgate, which turned aplús into simplex/“single,” and ponirós into nequam, “wicked.” Thanks to St. Jerome’s inaccurate interpretation in the 390s, Christians misinterpreted this passage for centuries, and continued to misinterpret it this way even after they learned ancient Greek for themselves and tried to retranslate it into English.

These are middle eastern idioms. Jerome translated those words literally, and thought he was right to; and a lot of translators likewise think they’re right to translate idioms literally. They’re not. Idioms need to be interpreted. Literal interpretations of idioms always give people the wrong idea. If I describe an eager student as “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” then have that phrase translated into Chinese, my poor Chinese friend would be stunned to hear she has a tail at all, much less a bushy one. And wait, doesn’t she have brown eyes?…

By aplús and ponirós, Jesus meant how I translated it: A clear eye. One with neither blurry vision nor cataracts. Or a bad eye; not an evil one, though it might certainly feel evil to you when your eyes don’t work. When your eyes are cloudy, vision’s a problem, and you’re gonna be in the dark. When your eyes are healthy, you see just fine: Light could enter your body “as if a lamp could shine lightning for you,” Lk 11.36 which interestingly is exactly how 19th-century arc lamps worked.

But even so, Jesus isn’t trying to teach anatomy. “Clear eye” and “bad eye” aren’t literally about eyes. They’re about generosity and stinginess. This is, as I said, a teaching about money.

Treasures in heaven.

Matthew 6.19-21, Luke 12.33-34.

In Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, after he finished objecting to hypocrisy in giving to charity, in types of prayer, and in public fasting, he moved on to talk about wealth and money.

You’ll notice the three verses in Matthew I’m gonna point to today, don’t by themselves nail down precisely how we’re to stash our treasures in heaven. That, we actually have to pull from Jesus’s parallel teaching in Luke: Give to charity. And if you know your Old Testament, you might remember this proverb:

Proverbs 19.17 NKJV

He who has pity on the poor lends to the LORD,

And He will pay back what he has given.

Jesus’s first-century audience would’ve known that one… and Jesus’s 21st-century audience had better learn that one.

Matthew 6.19-21 KWL

19“Don’t hoard wealth for yourselves on earth,

where moths and corrosion ruin it,

where thieves dig for it and steal it.

20Hoard wealth for yourselves in heaven,

where neither moth nor corrosion ruins,

where thieves don’t dig for it nor steal it:

21Where’s your wealth?

Your mind will be there too.”

Luke 12.33-34 KWL

33“Sell your possessions and give to charity.

Make yourselves a wallet which never wears out.

Infallible wealth in the heavens,

which a thief can’t come near, nor moth destroy.

34“Where’s your wealth?

Your minds will be there too.”

This passage has been greatly nullified by our culture. Y’see, we have banks and insurance. Nowadays, if our minds are on our money, it’s only because we don’t have those securities; we have too much cash in our wallets, and fear someone might steal it, or we own valuables in a neighborhood full of thieves. Back then, such things were a constant fear—“Is my money secure?”—because the ancients had to secure their own wealth. Neither financial institutions, nor the government, would do it for ’em. Wasn’t their job. Wasn’t anyone’s job.

Americans tend to take property rights for granted. The ancients weren’t so naïve. If the king wanted your stuff, he’d take it. Land, cattle, wives. You remember Abraham was regularly worried different kings would swipe his wife from him—’cause kings did that. Ge 12.12-13, 20.2 Even though Abraham was powerful enough to muster his very own private army to rescue his nephew.

God mitigated this by having, “Don’t steal” Dt 5.19 apply to kings and commoners alike. True, it’s way harder to get justice when the king’s doing the thievery, like when David ben Jesse stole Uriah’s wife, or Ahab ben Omri stole Naboth’s vineyard. The LORD had to personally intervene, because nobody else could.

And in Jesus’s day, Israel wasn’t ruled by a proper king. It was ruled by Roman puppets. You could appeal to the Romans, but good luck getting justice if you didn’t have citizenship; the Romans would treat you just like Americans treat illegal aliens. (Well okay, crucifixion is way worse than how ICE treats foreigners. But still.)

So if you had wealth, you had to secure it. Just like paranoid people do today. Better build a strongroom in your house, or find a clever way to disguise or hide it. Lots of people simply buried it in a hole in the ground, just like the worthless steward in Jesus’s story of the talents. Mt 25.25 Or that buried treasure in Jesus’s other story. Mt 13.44 Hey, if nobody knows where your hole is, thieves can’t dig it up. (The KJV decided to translate διορύσσουσιν/diorýssusin, “dig through” as “break through”—a common enough way to get into a flimsy wooden house in the 17th century, but much harder to do with the solid stone houses of the first century.)

And even so, after all the precautions they took to make sure nobody could find or get at their wealth, the wealthy would worry. ’Cause any disaster could destroy it. Invading armies, or some covetous noble, could grab your land. Earthquakes could flatten your buildings. Determined looters, or even just a fire, could gut your house. Any possession could be lost. Easily.

It’s the very reason we invented insurance. Pay a little each month or year, and your possessions are protected and guaranteed? Brilliant. Now the only thing we need worry about is whether we have enough money.

So we need to climb into the first-century mindset about money before we can really understand Jesus. Imagine you’re in a really bad neighborhood, you’re not carrying a gun or taser or pepper spray, and for some crazy reason you’ve got a roll of $10,000 on you. How secure are you gonna feel about that money?

Got that mental picture? Good. Now imagine having that worry all the time.

When you fast, keep it private.

Matthew 6.16-18.

Believe it or don’t, some Evangelicals have no tradition of fasting. I run into ’em from time to time. When I talk fasting, they’re quick to reject it with “That’s an Old Testament thing” and “Jesus never told us to fast.”

True to both. In all of scripture, the LORD never commanded fasting; anyone who claims otherwise is taking the verses out of context. Fasting has always been voluntary; nobody has to fast. But certain churches do promote it. Might be a Daniel fast at the beginning of the year, a Lenten fast before Easter, an Advent fast before Christmas, a partisan fast before Election Day. But regardless of peer pressure, nobody has to fast. They’re voluntary customs. You can opt out. Don’t even need special permission from your clergy… although every year when St. Patrick’s Day falls in mid-Lent, many a Catholic who wants to get plowed will beg their bishop for a one-day pass.

The way Jesus talks in his Sermon on the Mount, he totally expects his followers to fast. Because his audience was full of Pharisees, whose custom was to fast twice a week. Jesus may not have expected them to keep fasting at that same rate—although according to the Didache, ancient Christians totally did. Didache 8.1 Either way Jesus did expect them—and us—to fast every once in a while.

Jesus himself fasted in the desert. While he was notorious for ignoring customary Pharisee fast days, he never did ban fasting. Never declared it a done-away-with custom. It’s in the Sermon on the Mount, remember? “When you fast” means you’re gonna fast. Sometimes.

If you don’t—if you never engage in any hardcore prayer practices, which is precisely what fasting is—don’t expect your relationship with God to grow as quickly as it does among Christians who do fast.

I know, I know: “But some of those ‘hardcore Christians’ are really hypocrites.” Yes they are. Jesus definitely forbids that sort of behavior. Really it’s his only rule about fasting: Don’t show off; don’t do it to look extra pious. Do it for real, and do it only for God.

Matthew 6.16-18

16“When you fast, don’t be

like the sad-looking hypocrites who conceal their faces

so they look to people like they’re fasting.

Amen! I promise you this

is the compensation they receive.

17You who fast:

Fix your hair and wash your face,

18so you don’t look to people like you’re fasting,

except to your Father in private.

And your Father, who sees what’s done in private,

will pay you back {in the open}.”

“In the open” in verse 18, same as verse 4, was added to the text in the fourth century, and found in the Codex Washingtonianus and the Textus Receptus. It’s not in the oldest copies. Yet since Jesus is described as bringing us our compensation at his return, Rv 22.12 he may very well repay us in the open.

Sad to say, a lot of fasting Christians don’t follow this rule; they totally let everyone know we’re fasting. Like our families and fellow Christians. And sometimes pagans, like coworkers and waiters and anybody whom we tell, “Oh I can’t eat that; I’m on a fast.” Well aren’t you the holy one.

Jesus wants us to keep our mouths shut about this. It’s nobody’s business we’re fasting. It’s a private matter, between us and God, and that’s it. Keep it as confidential as if you just soiled your pants: Tell nobody unless you absolutely have to. Got it?

Prayer’s one prerequisite: Forgiveness.

Mark 11.25, Matthew 5.23-24, 6.14-15, 18.21-22.

Jesus tells us in the Lord’s Prayer we gotta pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” (Or “Forgive us our debtors”; either way.) He elaborates on this in his Sermon on the Mount:

Matthew 6.14-15 KWL

14“For when you forgive people their trespasses,

your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

15When you don’t forgive people {their trespasses},

neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

And in Mark’s variant of the same teaching:

Mark 11.25 KWL

“Whenever you stand to pray,

forgive whatever you have against anyone

so that your Father who’s in the heavens

might forgive you your trespasses.”

Jesus elaborates on it further when Simon Peter asked him how often he has to forgive:

Matthew 18.21-22 KWL

21Then Simon Peter comes to tell Jesus,

“Master, how often will my fellow Christian sin against me,

and I’ll have to forgive them?

As many as seven times?

22Jesus tells him, “I don’t say ‘as many as seven times,’

but as many as seven by seventy times.”

Followed by Jesus’s Unforgiving Debtor Story, in which a hypothetical king forgave a man who owned 260 million grams silver; the forgiven debtor then turned round and threw a man who owed him 390 grams into debtors prison; the king found this out and unforgave his debtor. Then handed him over to torturers. Mt 18.23-35

The bit about the torturers makes various Christians nervous, and some of us have invented all sorts of iffy teachings about devils and curses and hell. As if our heavenly Father plans to hand us over to torturers. No; he’s gonna do as he’s always done, and leave us to our own devices—and without his protection it’s gonna feel like torture. But fixating on the torture misses the point. God shows us infinite mercy. What kind of ingrates are we when we won’t pay his mercy forward?

For thine is the kingdom…

Matthew 6.13, Daniel 7.14.

At the end of the Lord’s Prayer, in both the well-known Book of Common Prayer version and the King James Version, it ends with this line:

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,

for ever and ever. Amen.

You’ll find other bibles don’t include it, because it’s not in the original text. In my translation I have to put it in braces, to indicate it comes from the Textus Receptus, not Matthew.

Matthew 6.13 KWL

“Don’t bring us into tribulation

but rescue us from the time of evil,

{because the kingdom, power, and glory

belong to you in the age to come. Amen.}”

It comes from the Didache, an instruction manual for new Christians written in the first century. Yep, around the same time the New Testament was written. Its version of the Lord’s Prayer includes that line, whereas the oldest copies of Matthew do not. But because a lot of ancient Christians used the Didache to instruct new Christians, a lot of ’em were taught the Didache version of the Lord’s Prayer… and that last line gradually worked its way into ancient copies of Matthew. And from there into the Vulgate, the Textus, the Lutherbibel, the Geneva Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the King James Version.

So it’s not from the bible? No it actually is from the bible. But it’s from Daniel, not Jesus. Comes from this verse:

Daniel 7.14 KWL

The Ancient gave the Son authority,

honor, and the kingdom,

and every people, nation, and language,

who’ll bow to his authority.

His authority is permanent:

It never passes away.

His kingdom will never be destroyed.

Jesus didn’t end his prayer with “Amen,” which quickly became a Christian custom, so the authors of the Didache wanted to include it. And while they were at it, a nice worshipful closing. ’Cause the Ancient of Days is gonna grant the Son his kingdom, and authority (i.e. power), and honor (i.e. glory), forever and ever. It’s all true, so there’s nothing at all wrong with saying and praying it.

But no, Jesus didn’t tell us to say it. So it’s optional.

So if you wanna get all literalist—and a little bit legalist—fine; pray the Lord’s Prayer without the added-on line. But it’s not gonna hurt you, at all, to say it. In fact it’s a useful reminder Jesus is coming back to establish his kingdom on earth—which’ll be awesome!—and he’s gonna have authority and honor, and his kingdom is gonna last a mighty long time… and even outlast the earth itself.

And hopefully the people who prefer the Book of Common Prayer version don’t clash with the KJV fans, because the KJV only has “for ever” instead of “forever and ever.” Y’all need to make accommodations for one another, instead of demanding uniformity. We’re all saying the Lord’s Prayer here; the intent, not the translation, is what matters.

Is it “debts” or “trespasses”?

Matthew 6.12, Luke 11.4.

Years ago I was a member of a multi-church small group. Its members were Christians all over town, from various denominations and traditions. Most were Baptist; we met at a nondenominational Baptist church, and there are a lot of Baptists in town—and the United States, for that matter. Of course many weren’t Baptist; I’m not. But we all have the same Lord Jesus, so we tried to avoid our churches’ doctrinal hangups and focus on what unifies us in him.

Anyway one of the unifying things we did was, at the end of each meeting, we’d say the Lord’s Prayer together. We have that in common, right?

Except… well, translations. Most of us have it memorized in either the Book of Common Prayer version or the King James Version. A few know it best in the NIV or ESV, or whatever’s their favorite translation. (Or their pastor’s favorite.) But the majority know it in either the BCP or KJV.

Spot the differences.

Book of Common Prayer Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Matthew 6.9-13 KJV 9BOur Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. 10Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. 11Give us this day our daily bread. 12And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. 13And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

Some of these differences go largely unnoticed: “Who art in heaven” and “Which art in heaven” is a minor difference in pronunciation, same as the “on earth” and “in earth.” There’s a bit of confusion at the end when the BCP has “for ever and ever” and the KJV only has “for ever.”

But the real hiccup is where the BCP has “trespasses” and the KJV has “debtors.”

At first you might think (’cause some have): “Well the Lord’s Prayer is also in Luke, so let’s see what word Luke used,” but that’ll just frustrate you: Luke has Jesus say,

Luke 11.4 KJV

And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us.

So Luke gives us half a vote for “debts,” because the second part of the verse describes debtors. But it doesn’t matter what people are voting: Those who say the Book of Common Prayer version have a really strong traditional bias in favor of “trespasses,” since it’s what they’ve been praying all their lives, every time they recite the Lord’s Prayer. And those who quote the King James Version have a likewise strong traditional bias in favor of “debts,” because it’s what they’ve been praying all their lives… and I’m not gonna even get into the type of KJV worshiper who thinks the KJV is the one true bible and every other variant is satanic.

Okay. Is this minor difference of wording a big deal? Of course not. But not every Christian has the maturity to recognize this, and they wanna pick a fight. They wanna be the prayer leaders, largely so they can impose their favorite version of the Lord’s Prayer on everybody, and make everyone say “debts” or “trespasses” as they please.

And somehow they don’t notice everybody is pretty much saying whatever translation of the Lord’s Prayer they’re accustomed to saying anyway: For one second of cacophony, the BCP fans are saying “trespasses” and the KJV fans are saying “debts,” because nobody’s following the prayer leader: As usual, they’re reciting by memory.

And y’know what? That’s okay.

And y’know what else? If it’s not okay—if it’s making you nuts—go back and read the Lord’s Prayer again: “As we forgive those who trespass against us,” or “As we forgive our debtors,” or “As we forgive every one that is indebted to us.” We’re supposed to forgive the people who “say it wrong,” same as we’re supposed to forgive everyone. If you can’t do that, you’re doing it wrong.

Daily bread.

Matthew 6.11, Luke 11.3.

Whenever we read Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, or any of his other teachings, they make way more sense when we remember his audience at the time consisted of poor people.

In the United States, “poor” usually means you live within limited means—you don’t have a lot of money. In ancient Israel, “poor” meant you had no money. Maybe you had stuff to barter; usually not. You lived from day to day, job to job, harvest to harvest, doing the best you could with what little you had. Any time you did have money, taxmen would take it away, priests and Pharisees would demand you give it to temple, or rich people would con you out of it.

When Jesus told his audience in the Lord’s Prayer, to pray for daily bread, he’s talking to people who had no pantries. Had no refrigerators. Had very little food in the house; had to go out and get it every day. No, he doesn’t literally just mean bread; he means food in general. But he encouraged his hearers to pray for that daily bread, because they daily sought bread.

Whereas in our culture, only the homeless seek daily bread like that. The rest of us have food in our houses. If I had to go two weeks without a trip to the supermarket, I easily could. I’m very blessed. So are most Americans. Whenever Jesus speaks on money, possessions, or economics, we really can’t relate to first-century Jewish mindset. Even our “poor” have wealth.

This is why so many Americans read, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and claim, “Oh Jesus doesn’t necessarily mean food. He means spiritual food. He means we’re to do the will of his Father, Jn 4.34 so we’re to ask God for the strength and power to do that.” And okay yes, Jesus does want us to follow his Father’s will, but no, this prayer isn’t about that.

Or if we’re more materialist or Mammonist, we’ll claim, “Oh Jesus doesn’t literally mean food; he means daily provision. Give us this day our weekly paycheck. And then we can pay our bills, put some into savings, and do righteous things with what’s left.” As if we do righteous things with the rest; more like buy whatever we covet. But nope, this prayer isn’t about that either.

Most of us recognize we should go to God first when we want anything, and submit to his will when he tells us yes or no. But when Jesus told us to pray for daily bread, it’s not a metaphor for our every necessity or desire. It’s about sustaining life. We need food so we can live. We need to recognize our dependence on God for our lives. So when he says pray for daily bread, pray for daily bread.

Yeah, you can pray for spiritual growth too. You can pray for money. You can ask God for anything, and he’s not stingy. But don’t go reading your various other desires into the Lord’s Prayer, and pray for those things instead of what Jesus told us to pray for. Pray for bread.

And specifically, pray for tomorrow’s bread. Because that’s a better translation of what Jesus commanded.

The “Your will be done” prayer.

Matthew 6.10.

The “Your will be done” prayer is part of the Lord’s Prayer. Obviously it’s the “Thy will be done” bit. Mt 6.10 I’ve already discussed where we’re praying for his will to be done. Today it’s more about how we fulfill that particular prayer of his. Yep, it’s about doing God’s will.

Matthew 6.10 KWL

“Make your kingdom come.

Make your will happen both in heaven and on earth.”

Typically when Christians pray “Your will be done,” we’re not talking about ourselves. We’re talking about everyone. “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” is how the clause goes, so we’re thinking about how God’s will presumably gets done in heaven, and how God’s will oughta be done on earth… and by all humanity instead of us as individuals. When we pray it, we’re playing society, or our country, or humanity as a whole, starts obeying God’s will. We’re not always remembering we Christians really oughta do God’s will too. We’re not what’s wrong with the world; it’s them.

So yeah, when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, or just the “Your will be done” prayer, this isn’t about ourselves; it’s for everyone else. Anyone else. But we too are a part of society, our country, and humanity. So today, why don’t we step away from the idea everyone else isn’t really pulling their weight: Next time you pray, “Your will be done,” try praying it thisaway: “Your will be done by me.”

’Cause we do wanna do God’s will, right?

Well, let’s be honest, no we don’t. Not always. Not really. We wanna do our will.

We’re ready and eager to do God’s will whenever it coincides with our will. God wants us to go to church, and if we like church, cool! And if we hate church, this is a huge problem… and suddenly we’re gonna be very receptive to any Christian who tells us we might not have to go; that “the communion of saints” is an option, that you can forsake gathering together, He 10.25 and that you won’t grow undisciplined, weird, heretic, and less loving because you’ve no one to sharpen your iron. Pr 27.17 Basically we’ll just do our own thing, cling to any excuse for why God might be okay with it, and even imagine it was all his idea, if we can mentally get away with it.

So, sometimes we wanna do God’s will. Which is why we need to keep praying this prayer. We need to learn to always wanna do his will. We need God to not let us get away with weaseling out of it.

Thy kingdom come.

Matthew 6.10, Luke 11.2.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus told us to ask our Father ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου/elthéto i vasilía su, “must come, the kingdom of yours.” The literal translation is a bit Yoda-like, which is why “Your kingdom come” is how the ESV put it, and of course we all know the Book of Common Prayer and KJV translation. I still translated it myself though.

Matthew 6.10 KWL

“Make your kingdom come.

Make your will happen both in heaven and on earth.”

Luke 11.2 KWL

Jesus tells them, “When you pray, say: ‘Father!

Sanctify your name.

Bring your kingdom.’ ”

The arrival of God’s kingdom is the gospel. It’s not John 3.16, no matter how much we love that verse. Eternal life is part of it, but the more important thing is where we spend this eternal life, and John 3.16 says nothing about that. You know the verse; you know this already. It’s why when Christians interpret the verse for other people, we tend to explain “will have everlasting life in heaven, with Jesus.” But Jesus never said that: In his second coming, he’s coming to earth to take over. God’s kingdom is gonna be here. We Christians have been laying the groundwork for it.

And doing a rotten job of it, but that stands to reason: Too many of us think the kingdom’s not here. We anticipate an otherworldly, cosmic heaven; we figure we leave this world behind to fall apart and be destroyed. The millennium isn’t part of our plans.

So why have we bothered to pray “Thy kingdom come”? Well, ’cause the words are there, so we recite them by rote, but never meditated on them any. We just presumed God’d make his kingdom come by blowing up the earth while we all watch safely from heaven, and that’s where his kingdom is. And since God’s gonna blow up the earth, why bother to care of it? This world is passing away, so it’s okay if we pollute and spoil it, ’cause God’ll make us another one.

But once we realize God’s kingdom is located here, on our planet; once we realize God’s kingdom is meant to fix everything that’s broken on our planet (’cause God’s in the business of fixing what’s broken); and once we realize the Holy Spirit’s been given to us so we can get started already on God’s plan to make all things new: It’s gonna radically transform our nihilistic attitudes towards our world. And towards the people on it, whose glimpses of the coming kingdom are gonna attract them to it far better than warnings of doom and gloom.

Our Father who art in heaven.

Matthew 6.9-10.

In Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, it begins with Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς/Páter émon o en tois úranua, “our Father who’s [located] in the heavens,” Mt 6.9 ’cause we’re addressing—duh—our heavenly Father.

Matthew 6.9 KWL

“So pray like this:

Our Father who’s in the heavens!

Sanctify your name.”

Some Christians wanna make it particularly clear which god we’re praying to. Partly because some of ’em actually think they might accidentally invoke the wrong god (and y’know, if they’re Mammonists or some other type of idolater, they might). Sometimes because they’re showing off to pagans that they worship the Father of Jesus, or some other form of playacting. But Jesus would have us keep it simple: Just address our heavenly Father. There’s no special formula for addressing him; no secret password we’ve gotta say; even “in Jesus’s name” isn’t a magic spell—and you notice “in Jesus’s name” isn’t in the Lord’s Prayer either. You know who he is; he knows who he is; he knows what our relationship consists of; that’s fine.

As I said in the Lord’s Prayer article, Jesus isn’t the first to teach people God is our Father. Many a Pharisee prayer, and many Jewish prayers nowadays, address God as אָבִינוּ/avínu, “our Father”—like Avínu Malkéinu (“our Father, our king”), recited during fasts and the high holidays. If we have a relationship with him, and we should through Jesus, we should have no hesitation to approach him boldly. He 4.16 He loves us; he wants to be gracious to us; let’s feel free to talk with him about anything and everything.

Don’t let God’s foreknowledge weird you out about prayer!

Matthew 6.8.

Jesus instructs his followers to not pad our prayers, to not stretch ’em out like pagans who think God won’t take ’em seriously unless they pray for a really long time. And then, in his Sermon on the Mount, he drops this comment about why it’s unnecessary: God’s foreknowledge.

Matthew 6.8 KWL

“So you ought not be like them!

For your Father knew what need you have

before your asking of him.”

In the New Testament, foreknow is our usual translation of the verb προγινώσκω/pro-yinósko, “pre-know.” Ro 8.29, 11.2 Paul used it to describe how God knows something before it happens. It doesn’t say how he knows it’ll happen, which is why Christians have largely come up with two theories about it:

• Determinists claim it’s because God decreed this stuff will happen. The universe is all irresistibly going according to his plan, and that’s the future he planned.
• The rest of us figure God is omnipresent—he exists at every point in space and time; there’s no place nor time where he’s not—so he knows the future because he’s at the future, observing it right now.

I figure the scriptures are the most consistent with omnipresence, so that’s how I describe God.

Various Christians incorrectly describe God as outside time, looking down upon it all at once. They got the idea from St. Augustine of Hippo, who most likely borrowed it from how Plato of Athens described his pagan gods. But that’d make God not omnipresent: He wouldn’t be everywhere within space and time, but somewhere else. So that’d be wrong. Space and time are the same thing anyway: God’s inside time and fills time, same as he does space. He’s here, aware of what’s going on. And 20 years ago, still here, still aware. And 20 years from now, still here, still aware. Simultaneously.

That’s a mind-bending idea to us Christians. Even us Christians who love to watch science fiction TV and movies where they monkey with time travel for fun and adventure. We’re time-based creatures, so we only experience now, the moving present instant. And even when we’re consciously aware, paying attention to now… we actually aren’t. ’Cause in the split second of time our senses require to take in the world around us, and our brains require to process it, and attach emotions and ideas and values to it… that instant is over. It’s past. We’re reacting to a memory. We move through time just that quick.

Whereas God doesn’t move. He’s still in that moment. And in every moment we also consider “now,” whenever we perceive it: The moment I write this, or the moment you read it. And all the moments before, and all the moments to come. Forever, in both directions.

That’s how God foreknows the future. From our human viewpoint the future doesn’t yet exist; from God’s, he’s looking right at it, and it’s a certainty to him. Because of this, we Christians can be confident everything God says about the future is guaranteed. He’s not making the universe’s greatest-educated guess; he’s not describing stuff that doesn’t exist to him either, but he has the almighty power to unstoppably make it happen, like the determinists and Open Theists insist. God’s speaking from experience—or to coin a word, foresperience. He foresees it, so he foreknows it. It’s real. Well, fore-real.

So we can confidently put our hope in God. Jesus is returning. We are getting raised from the dead. All things are gonna be made new. We are gonna inherit his kingdom. None of this is hypothetical. God’s already there.

And this is why Jesus can say his Father knows our needs before we ask. It’s not just because he’s always been able to read our hearts, so he knows our needs and desires before we request ’em. It’s also because he foresaw us praying for them. And in many cases, he’s answered them before we requested ’em.

Do not pad your prayers.

Matthew 6.7-8.

Right after Jesus taught his followers, in his Sermon on the Mount, to keep our prayers private, he added,

Matthew 6.7-8 KWL

7“You who pray, ought not babble like the pagans,

for they think they will be listened to

because of their many words.

8So you ought not be like them!

For your Father knew what need you have

before your asking of him.”

“Babble” comes from the verb βαττολογέω/vattoloyéo, “to stammer [one’s] words.” It’s about padding one’s prayers by repeating ourselves too much.

I didn’t grow up Pentecostal; I became one as an adult. The first time I ever heard a Pentecostal pray, I was a teenager, and was not at all used to the way most of us pray. I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” ’Cause a whole lot of us have the embarrassingly bad habit of babbling.

Father God, LORD God, we thank you Lord Jesus, we thank you. Oh Abba Father, we just wanna thank you LORD God, and praise your name LORD God, because LORD God, Lord Jesus, your name is great LORD God Abba Father praise Jesus. Oh Lord God…

And so on. Most people when they’re at a loss for words, stammer a filler word like “uh” or “um.” We Pentecostals swapped that out for a “LORD God” or three. So let’s see… that’s eight LORD/Lords, seven Gods, three Fathers, three Jesuses, and two Abbas; and we haven’t even got to the request yet.

Yes this is what Jesus is talking about. I’ve heard plenty of Pentecostals try to claim it really isn’t; that Jesus is actually talking about hypocrisy. There’s a myth Ovid recorded in his Metamorphoses about the god Hermes and an old man named Váttos; Hermes swore him to secrecy, then approached him later in disguise and offered him a bribe to spill the secret. When Váttos ratted Hermes out, Hermes turned him into a rock. That’s a clear example of hypocrisy, isn’t it?

But we don’t derive the meaning of the Greek word βάττος/váttos from this myth; we get it from Hesychius of Alexandria and others, who say it means stammerer. Jesus is talking about stammering. If he meant hypocrisy he’d have said hypocrisy; Jesus is never shy about condemning hypocrisy!

The lesson therefore is do not pad your prayers. Get to the point. Jesus demonstrates in the very next passage with the Lord’s Prayer, which is not a long prayer, not a padded prayer, and gets to the point! Whereas we think, like the ancient pagans mistakenly did, that short prayers are not serious prayers; we gotta make ’em longer. And we do not. Jesus showed us we do not. Follow Jesus.

Get in the closet.

Matthew 6.6.

The reason Jesus addresses public prayer in his Sermon on the Mount is to discourage hypocrisy. That’s what you saw in public places in Israel: People conspicuously praying so that others would see them, and think them devout.

Whereas Jesus told his followers that if you legitimately want to pray, make it a private conversation.

Matthew 6.6 KWL

“You, whenever you pray,

go into your private room, closing your door;

and pray to your Father in private.

And your Father, who sees what’s done in private,

will pay you back {in the open}.”

Ἐν τῷ φανερῷ/en to faneró, “in the open,” was added to Matthew by the Textus Receptus, both here and in verse 4. It’s not in the oldest copies of Matthew; it was added in the fourth century. Again, since Jesus is bringing us our compensation at his return, Rv 22.12 this isn’t a problematic addition. Still, Jesus didn’t say it.

The KJV translates ταμεῖόν/tameión as “closet,” and the NET as “inner room.” Your average middle eastern house would have two rooms—the main room, which you could access through the front door, and the smaller back room, which you could only access from the inside. Guests could enter the main room, but only family went into the back room: It was private. That’s the tameión. Wealthier middle easterners would have a number of ’em in their homes, and use them for storage—hence the KJV’s translation “closet.” But it doesn’t have to be a closet. Just someplace private.

Now, why would you have to go someplace private to pray, when it’s much easier to speak with God in your mind, and not aloud? Simple: Ancient middle easterners didn’t pray like that. They prayed aloud.

You’re talking to God, right? Which means you’re talking to God. Not thinking at God. I know; a lot of Christians pray silently, and for many of us it’s the only way we pray. Most of the time it’s not appropriate to pray aloud. If you prayed aloud at work, people’d think you’re weird. If you prayed aloud in public school, some idiot would complain about it. If everybody in church simultaneously prayed aloud, it’d get loud (and in ancient times, when people prayed aloud, it absolutely did get loud).

In general, we’re encouraged to pray silently, and that’s understandable in a lot of places. But Christians get the wrong idea and think we’re always to pray silently. No we’re not.

Lookit how Jesus demonstrates prayer in the scriptures. When he went off to pray, even by himself, privately between him and the Father, other people could overhear him. Like in Gethsemane. Mt 26.39, Lk 22.41-42 The reason we even have records in the bible of people’s prayers, is ’cause these folks weren’t silent. They spoke.

I should add: Praying in your mind is much harder than praying aloud. Because the mind wanders. (By design! It’s how the creative process works.) In the middle of our mental conversations with God, stray thoughts pop into our heads. In a verbal conversation, we can choose whether we’ll say such things aloud, but in a mental conversation, we can’t do that: There they are. We just thought ’em. They interrupted our prayers, like a rude friend who thinks he’s being funny, but isn’t. Ordinarily we ignore those thoughts. In mental prayers, we find it really hard to. Even the best-trained minds struggle with that. And a lot of Christians get frustrated with it, so they give up and pray seldom, if at all. Don’t do that. If you lose your train of thought all the time during prayer, stop praying silently. Pray aloud. It helps a lot.

“But what,” Christians object, “about privacy?” Discussions between us and God are often sensitive. We don’t want people listening in on our conversations, like they do when we answer our mobile phones at the coffeehouse. We want privacy. That’s why prayed in our minds in the first place. And this is precisely why Jesus talks about praying in private.

The street-corner show-off.

Matthew 6.5.

Since I’m going through Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and these next passages have to do with prayer, I’m gonna discuss them in lieu of my usual posts on prayer. Beginning with the first of Jesus’s teachings on the topic, in chapter 6:

Matthew 6.5 KWL

“And whenever you pray,

you’ll not be like the hypocrites,

because they love standing up to pray

in synagogues and street corners

so they might be seen by people.

Amen! I promise you this

is the compensation they receive.”

Throughout history, people have prayed publicly for various reasons. Some noble, some not. Today, Jesus gets into the not. They’re not legitimately trying to speak with God, nor publicly calling upon him for help and inviting everyone else to join their prayers. (And even these prayers can be done hypocritically.) This is purely so they can be seen praying. They wanna look religious. Usually more religious than they actually are.

Nothing annoys Jesus like hypocrisy, which is why he tries to discourage his followers from doing anything which smacks of hypocrisy. But you know some of us do this anyway.

Now the way the ancient prayed, typically, was standing up, heads and eyes and arms and hands raised to the sky, and praying aloud. They didn’t kneel, bow their heads, fold their hands, and pray mentally but not audibly. That practice arose in the middle ages. That was the posture European kings demanded of those who approached them—and since Jesus is King, people figured it’s appropriate. But the ancients faced the sky where they imagined God is, lifted their hands to get his attention, and spoke with him. This posture made it really obvious they were praying. Don’t need to get loud; just assume the position.

Jesus singles out the people who prayed in really public places. Like synagogue. Which is not a Jewish church like it is nowadays; it’s a Pharisee school. You went there to hear rabbis teach, and ask ’em questions. Prayer times took place throughout—before, after, and during the lesson—and they’d be short. But often people would stand right outside the building and make a public display of prayer, “getting right with God” before they went in. Or similarly praying this way after the lesson, ostensibly to thank God for the wisdom they just received… or maybe to ask him to straighten out some wayward rabbi. Whatever; the point was they were making it nice ’n obvious they talked with God. Presumably a lot.

Jesus also brings up ταῖς γωνίαις τῶν πλατειῶν/tes yoníës ton plateión, “the corners of the [wide] streets,” the most important busy intersections in town. Plenty of people walking past; plenty of people to witness you praying, nice and loud so God could hear you over all the other noise. (As if he’s in any way hard of hearing.)

In both cases, people might not have had the time, nor interest, to listen to the petitioner with his hands in the air. That wasn’t the point anyway. It’s not about being heard—not even by God!—but seen.

The way Christians pray nowadays, typically doesn’t assume the ancient posture. Usually our heads are bowed, eyes closed. Sometimes hands get raised, if the folks in the group have any Pentecostal influences in their background. But generally we’re not as noticeable when we pray. Unless we get loud… or unless there are a lot of us, like when a bunch of people pray in front of public buildings, around a flagpole, or in Congress.

But in these places, same as with the people Jesus critiqued, the point was to be seen and noticed by other people. Not so much God. And that’s what Jesus objects to.

For whom are you doing charity?

Matthew 6.1-4.

The second chapter of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount begins with this teaching, only found in Matthew:

Matthew 6.1-4 KWL

1“Be careful to not do your righteous deeds

in front of people for them to see.

Otherwise you certainly get no compensation

from your heavenly Father.

2“So whenever you do for the needy,

you ought not trumpet it out before you,

same as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and the streets

so they might be praised by people.

Amen! I promise you this

is the compensation they receive.

3Now when you do for the needy,

don’t let your left hand know

what your right does,

4so your works for the needy

might be private.

And your Father, who sees what’s done in private,

will pay you back {in the open}.”

“In the open” in verse 4 was added to the text in the fourth century, and found in the Codex Washingtonianus and the Textus Receptus. It’s not in the oldest copies. Yet since Jesus is described as bringing us our compensation at his return, Rv 22.12 he may very well repay us in the open.

Superficially, Jesus’s teaching appears to contradict what he said about us being the world’s light—“that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” Mt 5.16 KJV But the obvious difference between that and this, is motive. As Jesus says in verse 1, watch out lest your good deeds are “in front of people for them to see,” i.e. done for public acclaim, not out of goodness, and definitely not for God. Done out of hypocrisy, not actual devotion. If you’re doing ’em for public praise, bad Christian!—human praise is all the compensation you get. That’s the context.

Jesus’s word “compensation” (Greek μισθὸν/misthón) means something we earned; “the worker is worthy of his misthú/wages.” 1Ti 5.18 Yet lots of bibles, following the KJV, translate it “reward,” which’ll give people the false idea this is something we didn’t actually merit, like when we get a reward for finding a lost item or missing person. When the King James was published in 1611, “reward” still meant compensation for your troubles. Workers don’t win their wages; they earn ’em.

Various stingy Christians claim God owes us nothing when we do good deeds. ’Cause we should be doing ’em anyway, right? And yeah, we should. True. But they’ve got a really lousy attitude about how God’s grace, and therefore our grace, should work. We’re not just God’s kids, who work for him for free. We inherit his kingdom. We have a stake in it; it’s also our kingdom. We should want to see it succeed, and the only way for that to happen is for us to follow the Boss’s vision. And God doesn’t skimp on our wages.

Unless of course we’re not working for God, but for our own gain. Unless we’re not making him any profit, but swiping all that profit for ourselves. This is what Jesus addresses in this lesson: Hypocrites who only do good deeds to make themselves look good. Ostensibly they work for God, but really they’re growing their own little fiefdoms instead of his kingdom.

There are three hypocritical practices Jesus objects to in the Sermon: Self-serving public charity, self-serving public prayer, and self-serving public fasting. Today I deal with the charity.

Praying the scriptures.

It’s a popular Christian practice to drop little bits of bible into our prayers. Kinda like so.

Father, we come to you because you tell us “if my people, who are called by my name, seek my face, I will hear from heaven,” and we recognize “your word won’t return void,” so we call upon you today, Lord. Hear our prayers, meet our needs, heed our cries. “Give us today our daily bread.” Amen.

We pray the Lord’s Prayer of course. Sometimes we pray the psalms. Sometimes full psalms—yes, we can pray entire passages from the scriptures. Many of the more famous rote prayers consist of lines lifted straight from the bible and arranged to sound like a prayer.

We do this for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes not-so-legitimate ones, like we want our prayers to sound more bible-y. That’s why we’ll trot out the King James Version English with its “thee” and “thou” and old-timey verbs. If it’s old-fashioned we figure it’s more solemn and serious and holy. It’s not really—but people think so, which is why they do it.

Or we covet the bible’s power. We quote bible because the bible is God’s word… and since God’s word is mighty and powerful, maybe quoting it in prayer is also mighty and powerful. Maybe those words can make our prayer requests mighty and powerful, and we can get what we want because we’re tapping that power.

Or we’re padding our prayers. Short prayers are fine, but way too many Christians think long prayers are, again, more solemn and serious and holy. So if our prayers are too short, maybe we can stretch ’em out by throwing in a dozen bible verses. Plus they’ll sound bible-y, plus they’ll tap the bible’s power; we can do this for all three inappropriate reasons.

But don’t get me wrong; there are appropriate reasons to include bible verses in our prayers. Really good reasons.

The world’s light.

Mark 4.21, Matthew 5.14-16, Luke 8.16, 11.33, John 8.12.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his students they’re the light of the world. And multiple times in John, Jesus himself is declared the light of the world. Here, I’ve got one of those passages lined up for you.

Matthew 5.14 KWL

“You’re the world’s light.

A city can’t be hidden when it lies on a hill.”

John 8.12 KWL

So Jesus spoke again, saying, “I’m the world’s light.

My followers should never walk in the dark,

but will have light and life.”

So which is it? Both, obviously.

It’s not a contradiction. Jesus is the true light who entered the world; Jn 1.9 as long as he’s in the world he enlightens it; Jn 9.5 whoever believes in him needn’t live in the dark; Jn 12.46 he reflects the fact that God is light. 1Jn 1.5 And we’re the light of the world when we follow his example, and reveal to the world God’s kingdom is near, same as Jesus did. Once we were darkness, but now light, Ep 5.8 for since God’s now our Father, we are light’s children, 1Th 5.5 shining as lights in this dark world. Pp 2.15

Yep, this light metaphor is all over the bible. Wouldn’t hurt us to read up on it, and see all the different ways God wants us to carry his light. 2Co 4.6

Starting with the city-on-a-hill idea. Nowadays we don’t create cities on hills. When developers create a town, they place them somewhere convenient: Outside bigger cities, near main roads, a place easy to access. Hills aren’t so easy, plus there’s all the hassle of building on a hill. Put a city on a hill, and it’ll nearly always be an expensive city. But back in ancient times, rulers worried about invasion, and figured a hill was easier to defend than a plain. Plus they could see their enemies coming. The downside was their cities were very visible-especially at night, with all their torches burning.

That’s the trait Jesus wants his followers to have: We oughta be nice and obvious. (True, it makes us more visible to enemies, but let’s not hang up on the negative.) If Christianity is a city on a hill, we Christians need to be visible. No hiding our faith. No concealing who it is we follow.

Don’t you worry ’bout a thing.

Matthew 6.25-34, Luke 12.22-32.

Right after Jesus taught we can’t make masters of both God and Mammon, he got to the core reason why we humans tend to slide away from trusting God, and instead put our trust in money: When it comes to basic daily needs, we don’t look to God first. We look to our wallets. Can we afford it? If not, then we might call out to God… but too often we don’t.

This is a much harder lesson to learn for rich Christians than poor ones. In rich countries, we have crazy standards for what denotes “basic daily needs.” It’s not just food, drink, and clothing, as Jesus addresses in the following teaching. It’s having a roof over your head. A bed. Electricity and gas, for the central heat and air conditioning. Oh, and since you have electricity: A refrigerator to keep the food in. Internet and wifi. A phone. An email address. A television—’cause you can’t expect us to watch all our TV on our phones. And probably a car, ’cause you can’t expect us to walk everywhere.

Food and drink is no longer just grains, vegetables, and water: We’ve gotta have meat and dairy. If we’ve learned about some special diet we really oughta be on—whether our doctors tell us so or not—we want that accommodated too: Gluten-free grains, keto-friendly vegetables, vegan dairy products. Oh, and we gotta have coffee and beer and candy and salty snacks. We expect a variety of good foods. And sometimes enough money to go out to eat sometimes.

Clothing is no longer a single loincloth, tunic, robe, and sandals, with maybe an extra just in case: We gotta have at least two weeks’ worth of outfits. And they gotta be fashionable, so we don’t just fit in, but stand out as especially good-looking. Plus an extra-nice outfit for important occasions, like church or parties.

If you only have the basics and no more, in a rich country you’d be considered poor. Not comfortable; not okay; poor. But in a poor country, like ancient Judea… wealthy.

That’s something to keep in mind whenever Jesus talks about not having enough. Judea, where he lived, would be what we’d nowadays call a third-world country. Or a “less developed country,” or what Donald Trump would call a s---hole country. It was poor. The largest part of the population survived on less than $2 a day. The families who ran the Judean senate had money, but that was old-family wealth, or they got it by collaborating with the Romans like the taxmen. The rest of them were subsistence farmers, or day laborers like Jesus’s dad and later Jesus himself: Scratching to get by. Legitimately concerned about daily needs.

The folks Jesus preached to? They had way less than we who live in rich countries. They’d be what we consider destitute. Near-homeless. They didn’t imagine themselves so, but hey: Different countries, different millennia, different standards.

And yet in his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told ’em to stop worrying. Because worry wasn’t getting them anywhere.

Matthew 6.25 KWL

“This is why I tell you: Stop worrying!

Stop worrying about what your soul would eat or drink, or what your body would wear.

Isn’t your soul more than food? your body more than clothes?”

Luke 12.22-23 KWL

22Jesus told his students, “This is why I tell you: Stop worrying!

Stop worrying about what your soul would eat, or what your body would wear.

23The soul is more than food. The body more than clothes.”

Try to wrap your brain around this idea: One set of clothing. Maybe three days’ worth of food in the pantry. Water comes from the creek. No electricity nor gasoline. No money; you gotta barter for everything. This isn’t because there’s a dire recession: This is life. This has always been life, as far as you or your parents or grandparents knew. Every day’s a struggle. And here Jesus is, telling you to stop worrying about food or clothing, because God has your back.

The typical American response to this? “Are you nuts, Jesus? I’m poor!”

Yeah, you are. Poor in faith. That’s why it’s easier to shove camels through needles than get rich Christians into God’s kingdom. Mk 10.25 We just aren’t always aware Jesus was making that statement about us.

The text of the Sermon on the Mount.

My translation of the Sermon on the Mount.

No, not so I can have my own spin on it, or an “authoritative text” to work from; that’s not how translation works. I translate so I can study the original text in greater depth. If you translate so you can frame it to suit yourself, stop it.

Feel free to read it in other translations. Compare them to one another so you can see the translators’ consensus—and that gives you a better idea of what Jesus means, than simply reading one “best” translation. Then follow him; not us translators.

And the best way to follow him is to follow his sermon, as he himself taught in verses 7.24-27.

Worshiping Mammon instead of Jesus.

Matthew 6.24, Luke 16.13.

Lately I’ve been seeing a meme on social media, warning people about what might happen if society goes cashless. Some of the memes claim Dave Ramsey wrote it; he did not. Like most memes which go viral pretty quickly, it’s meant to scare people. And since it plays right into many a Christian’s fears about the End Times, of course Christians have been spreading it too.

My comment after yet another friend posted it on Facebook: “Isn’t it funny? The first thing Christians worry about when the Beast comes… is Mammon.”

Mammonism is the worship of wealth, money, material possessions, and the joy of pursuing all that stuff. Our word Mammon comes from something Jesus taught in his Sermon on the Mount, repeated in Luke. I’ll quote both variants.

Matthew 6.24 KWL

“Nobody’s able to be a slave to two masters: Either they’ll hate one and love the other,

or look up to one and down on the other: Can’t be a slave to God and Mammon.”

 

Luke 16.13 KWL

“No slave is able to be a slave to two masters: Either they’ll hate one and love the other,

or look up to one and down on the other: Can’t be a slave to God and Mammon.”

A few current translations drop the reference to Mammon and translate this verse, “You cannot serve both God and money” (GNB, NIV, NLT), or “You cannot serve God and wealth” (NASB, NRSV). Thing is, μαμωνᾷ/mammoná isn’t the Greek word for money; that’d be ἀργύριον/argýrion, literally “silver.” Nor the word for wealth; that’d be χρῆμα/hríma, “thing of value.” Mammoná is actually an Aramaic word with a Greek ending tacked on—as if it’s an Aramaic name. Hence people extrapolated the idea Mammon is a person, and since Jesus says you can’t serve this person as well as God, it must therefore be another god.

A false god of course. But some god which competes with the LORD for our devotion. And since the Aramaic מַמוֹן/mamón is a cognate of the Hebrew מַטְמוֹן/matmón, “secret riches,” people imagine Mammon is therefore be a god of riches, wealth, or money.

In Luke when Jesus made this statement, he’d just told the Shrewd Butler Story. Maybe you remember it; maybe not, ’cause pastors hesitate to teach on it, ’cause Jesus straight-up praises a guy who’s widely seen as an embezzler. In it, a butler made friends by undercharging his boss’s debtors. Lk 16.1-9 Jesus’s moral: “Make yourselves friends with your improper mammon.” Lk 16.9 In response, the Pharisees who heard the story rejected it, ’cause they were φιλάργυροι/filiárgyri, “silver-lovers.” Lk 16.14

So is Mammon a money god? Or simply Jesus’s personification of money? Or a mistranslation?

Mammon’s a person?

First of all, there’s nothing in ancient literature about the god Mammon. Seriously, nothing.

The Mishna is a collection of what second-century Pharisees taught—and this’d include some things first-century Pharisees taught, so it’s a useful insight into what Jesus dealt with. When the Aramaic word mamón came up in the Mishna, Pharisees meant money. When we’re taught to love the LORD with all our might, Dt 6.5 the Pharisees said it also means with all our mamón. Berakot 9.5 They sorta equated might with wealth—same as we might do. But they didn’t think of it as a person or god. Merely a power.

Archaeologists have dug up nothing about Mammon in Israel and ancient Aramaic-speaking territories. That’s not to say one of ’em won’t discover something someday. But till something gets found, all our talk about the god Mammon, all of it, is guesswork. The ancients may have never worshiped any such god as Mammon. We’re just extrapolating all of it from Jesus’s lesson.

But this sure hasn’t stopped us Christians from extrapolating away. The mind can’t handle gaps in our knowledge, and has to fill it with something. Anything. Myths if necessary.

Christians invented all sorts of theories about who Mammon is. Fallen angel or demon. Elder god or spiritual force. What its motives and goals are. What it plots when we’re not looking. Popular Christian mythology (namely The Faerie Queene, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost) include Mammon as one of the demons under Satan. Our saints invented complicated theologies about where it fits into the devils’ hierarchy. Whole books were written. Whole industries were created.

All of it guesswork. ’Cause our only source of Mammon’s existence is the Mishna and Jesus, and neither of ’em define it as anything but money.

Is there any legitimacy to any Christian teachings about Mammon? Depends on who’s teaching. Any preacher who claims, “We know from the bible that Mammon is a demon,” knows no such thing. “We know Mammon is headquartered in the financial capitals in the world”—no we don’t. “We know Mammon gains power every time the market goes up”—we do not.

We know money is a force. Educated economists understand how we create it. Yes, we humans create it. Money’s a human invention. We used to barter. Barter’s inefficient; how is a week’s labor precisely worth one goat? But if you can trade goods and labor for grams of copper, silver, gold, or platinum, now you can meter out how much you think something’s worth—and haggle over that price. Problem is, the value of precious metals is way too easy to manipulate, so governments switched it to pounds, dollars, yuan, yen, and our other currencies… and now people worry about how much governments manipulate its value. Not that the “cashless society” meme considers that… but I’m gonna stay off that tangent today.

People who don’t understand money, and how humans influence it, tend to imagine money has a life of its own. They attribute all sorts of special powers to it. Those are myths too. Stands to reason these same folks would imagine Mammon has a life of its own too. And that it controls money, not humans. And that we’re powerless against it—when in fact we humans have a great deal of power over everything we’ve created. Yeah, even when it gets away from us sometimes.

I’m gonna stop capitalizing the word now: I treat mammon as the same as money. It’s a spiritual force. Not a person. Yes it’s always possible there’s some no-foolin’ spiritual being which attached itself to money, and claims power over it. After all, there are humans who do the very same thing; why not a devil? But it has no more power over money than we do. It’s tricking us into thinking it’s mightier than it is. We can dismiss it, because through Christ we can easily defeat it. Any fear or awe we have of it is misplaced, and will simply get in the way of our understanding.

So… why’d Jesus personify it? Because Jesus is a poet, and this is what poets do. When the Greeks described ἔρος/éros, “passion,” as if it’s a being—one which could strike you with its arrows of love or hatred—it’s a clever way to describe just what passion kinda does. Problem is, the Greeks also began to mix up personification with personhood. They worshiped Éros as a god, same as they did Phóbos (φόβος/fóvos, “fear”) or Plútos (πλοῦτος/plútos, “wealth”—not the Latin god Pluto; notice the -S at the end). But that isn’t Jesus’s intent. Mammon’s not a competitor god. But it will, wrongly, get our worship—which only rightly belongs to the LORD.

Mammon doesn’t need to be a person before humans’ll worship it. A money manager doesn’t go to any Church of Mammon to pay homage to her god; she just goes to the office. A banker doesn’t need to pray to Mammon; accessing his online bank account serves the very same function. The ancients worshiped lifeless stone gods, and Mammonists just happen to worship lifeless wealth. Worshiping a dead god is just as wrong as worshiping a spirit; the pursuit of a fake deity will lead us just as far afield.

Yeah, every once in a while some Christian claims they had a prophetic dream in which Mammon is one of the archdemons, battling the holy angels with its silver arrows. Speaking for myself, very very few of the prophetic dreams I’ve heard are profound sources of revelation: It’s just their subconscious, telling ’em stuff we Christians already believe and sometimes take for granted… and shouldn’t. All the popular Christian myths get mixed up in their visions. The human subconscious is an unreliable messenger, so remember this whenever people insist on the validity of their prophetic dreams. Dreams regularly represent mammon as a being, but it’s still not. It’s a force. It’s money.

Money. It’s a gas.

Money isn’t material.

I know; pocket change is a physical thing. As are dollar bills. But these items only represent the actual value of money. That’s why people will pick up a quarter when they find one in the street, but they won’t pick up a washer. (Or even pennies anymore.) They’ll pick up a $10 bill, but not a napkin. Currency makes money appear tangible. In fact money is a cloud of mathematics, behavioral psychology, economic theory, and political theory. When we convert it into bills, coins, and bonds, we make it look tangible, solid, countable, and controllable. It may be countable and controllable, but it’s really not solid.

For the longest time, instead of bills and coins, humanity used metal, and we attached a specific value per gram to the metal. (Or in the States, value per ounce.) For this reason certain people wanna put us back on a gold and silver standard: They insist gold has a built-in value, and dollars don’t. But they’re wrong: Gold has no built-in value. ’Cause human psychology easily manipulates that value.

It’s actually way easier to manipulate the value with gold than dollars. One of the first events people called “Black Friday” was when Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to manipulate the New York gold market. They slowly bought up a lot of gold… then on 24 September 1869 they sold all of it, dumping it on the market. Thanks to the rules of supply and demand, too much gold caused people to value it less, and gold’s price plummeted. Gould and Fisk took advantage of the new cheap price of gold, and bought back more than they sold. And if we didn’t pass laws against this practice, people would do it again and again, just to enrich themselves. Other countries don’t pass such laws, which is why gold isn’t a safe investment: They could dump gold on the international market, and mess with the world’s prices for fun and profit.

Goldbugs insist such acts artificially alter gold’s price. ’Cause they refuse to believe gold doesn’t have a fixed value. Which only proves they’ve no idea how money works. All value is entirely based on belief: What do people imagine something’s worth? Same with trading cards, collectible toys, art, memorabilia, silver, gold, and the dollar.

The U.S. dollar is worth a dollar because the American people believe it buys a dollar’s worth of something. If we figure a dollar can buy a cup of coffee, that’s how far its power extends: Any coffee sold for more than a dollar is “too much,” or less than a dollar is “a bargain.” Everything gets tied to that dollar=coffee metric. We don’t even think about why they should be equal. Says who? Um… the government? The Federal Reserve? The economy? (Clearly not Starbucks.) The collective belief of every American?

Actually… yeah it is collective belief.

Gold works precisely the same way. Gold is worth $40 per gram because gold buyers believe it’s worth $40 per gram. When they don’t anymore, that’ll change. Might go up, or down. Claiming, “But its real value never changes” is the illusion: Everything’s real value changes. And you don’t want two speculators who don’t mind bankrupting the world, wielding the power to make those changes so they can enrich themselves. That’s why we abandoned the gold standard.

Stocks are a more obvious example. A corporation might make no money, and hasn’t for years, but it’s an internet company, and people are convinced they should put their hopes (“put stock”) in internet companies, so its stock is outrageously overvalued. Some ninny on CNBC with a sound effects box said it’s worth a lot, so it is. Conversely another company might be really profitable, doing great, very stable, yet its stock value is low because stockholders think it should be inexpensive.

The collective belief of shareholders just happens to be far more volatile than that of every American. But even American faith and credit has its limits. When other things take greater priority than money, like food during a famine, humans will trade a decent pile of money for donkey heads and dove crap. 2Ki 6.25

So money isn’t material. And any force which isn’t material is spiritual.

I know, some folks are gonna object to my reducing things that way. In part because many pagans imagine material things are real, and spiritual things are not. And money’s real!—therefore it must somehow be material. But it’s not material. Yet it’s real. Therefore spiritual.

No, others will argue; it’s intellectual. It’s psychological. It’s conceptual. Pick any synonym with means “immaterial but real,” and they’d far rather use that word than “spiritual.” ’Cause that word “spiritual” bugs ’em, and they wanna strictly limit it to religious stuff. Stuff they don’t believe in. They believe in money; God’s another deal. If money is spiritual just like God is spiritual, perhaps they’ve gotta take another look at God… and they really don’t wanna.

If that’s your hangup, get over it. Spiritual is real. God is real. Stop treating religion as if you’re only pretending. This is substantial stuff.

And too often money has taken religion’s place. It’s why Jesus warned us about making a master of it. People look to money to save them! It solves their problems, achieves their dreams, Ec 10.19 secures their futures, buys their health, conquers their adversaries, gives them peace. Heck, if they can afford to be cryogenically frozen, it’ll even offer them an afterlife.

But like every false god, it destroys more than it gives, and all its promises are deceptions. The Beatles figured out money can’t buy you love. I joke sometimes, “No; but you can rent it.” Sadly, for a lot of people, renting will do.

In Jesus’s day: The opposite problem.

Back when Jesus first taught about mammon, it was to remind his students money is substantial. Y’see, they had the opposite problem from us: God was real, but money not so much.

First-century Palestine didn’t practice free-market capitalism. Back then the Roman Empire was on the gold standard, but gold wasn’t common enough for common people to use. (Hence the big parties they’d throw when you found a lost coin. Lk 15.8-10) Only the wealthy had actual coins. For everyone else, wealth was tied up in property: Land, slaves, animals, and personal possessions. They practiced barter-based theocratic feudalism: Everything ultimately belonged to their lord, i.e. the LORD. And every seven years the LORD decreed they’d cancel debts and free their slaves. Not all wealth would last.

God was more tangible to them than money. As he’s supposed to be.

Jesus taught about mammon because he wanted people to take money more seriously. Well, nowadays we do. Often too seriously. In fact our economic system is rigged in such a way, it’s no longer possible to follow the rules set out in the Law. Selling yourself into slavery to pay debts? On the up side, slavery’s illegal; on the down side, debt repayment might take the rest of your life. Debts aren’t cancelled every seven years. And when government takes part of our income to help the needy, same as the Hebrew priests did with tithes, conservatives scream bloody murder about socialism.

Every once in a while I hear of some Christian money-manager who holds a seminar, who claims he’ll teach you some biblical principles for dealing with wealth. I’ve been to a few. What they actually teach is free-market capitalism. (Not that there’s anything wrong with learning about capitalism; it is the system Americans live under.) The rest is about debt avoidance, based on various scriptures they quote out of context to support their ideas. Again, not that debt avoidance is a bad idea; it’s a really good idea. But what they teach about money, and mammon, come from free-market economics, not bible.

Economics in the bible were greatly different than economics today, so of course what these money-managers teach doesn’t wholly jibe with the bible. Problem is, it doesn’t always jibe with the parts of the bible which can apply to our culture. Generosity, fr’instance. Giving to the needy so we can have treasure in heaven. Mt 6.19-21 Giving to everyone who asks, and not turning people away. Mt 5.42 Money-managers don’t teach that. Instead they teach “stewardship”—a concept which they claim is biblical (and it does exist in the bible, Lk 16.1-13) but it’s not about giving; it’s about gathering. It’s about investing our money, and spending none of it, so that our pile of money will grow, so the power and security mammon could bring us will increase. It’s about storing up treasure on earth, disguised as “kingdom principles.” It’s part of the “prosperity gospel.”

True Christianity is forsaking everything, everything, to follow Jesus. When we spend too much time on wealth “stewardship,” rather than making God’s kingdom grow, we forget to be generous. We forget to take leaps of faith with our money: It’s not prudent to be foolish and wasteful, even if it’s for the kingdom’s sake. We trust our pile, instead of trusting the ultimate Owner of every pile, who can easily tap those other piles for our sake. We serve the wrong lord. And as Jesus said, we just can’t serve both.

But dammit, we Americans are convinced we can serve both if we try hard enough.

The Mammonist gospel.

A particularly American teaching—one popular among the poor, and one we’ve even exported to poor countries—is God doesn’t want his kids living lives of defeat. (Which is true.) He wants us to find success in everything we do. (Which is also true.) He wants us to be rich. (Wait a minute…)

Supposedly God wants us to have so much wealth it makes pagans jealous, and want to get in on this Christianity stuff so they too can become fat and comfortable. (Wait, God tells us not to covet, Dt 5.21 but it’s okay to use covetousness to spread his kingdom?) So to these folks, mammon isn’t God’s opponent or competitor. The love of money isn’t the root of many kinds of evil. 1Ti 6.10 On the contrary: Money is God’s tool, and money-love is God’s bait. It’s our reward for trusting him, following him, for giving money away to Christian charities or churches. God’s gonna open heaven’s windows and make it rain, baby. Make it rain!

This prosperity-gospel bushwa isn’t a new idea. The Pharisees believed in it too. It’s how the rich justified their many possessions… and their stinginess towards others. They were wealthy because God blessed them… and the poor had nothing because God didn’t bless them. Why? Well, they must’ve sinned or something. Some defect of character.

Properly this philosophy is called social Darwinism. Like Darwinism, everybody fights to survive, and the “fittest” do. The wealthy are the “fittest”—they struggled, came out on top, and deserve their wealth. Even if they inherited it, or if they stumbled into wealth through dumb luck: Those are just other forms of God’s blessing, claim the wealthy.

In bible times this was how Pharisees believed the world worked. It’s why Jesus’s students were floored when their Master informed them the rich are gonna have the darnedest time getting into the kingdom. Mk 10.23-27 To their minds, the rich were already in the kingdom—it’s why they were rich! But in this age, God gives people wealth for one and only one reason: To spread his kingdom. Not to grow our own. If we aren’t growing his kingdom, we may not even be in it. We’re worshiping mammon… but we call it “Jesus,” and pretend its power came from God.

Nope, prosperity gospel folks aren’t worshiping God. Really he’s a means to an end, and that end is wealth. They’re Mammonists. Whether they think God’s got a mansion and a crown waiting for them up in heaven, or they think God’s gonna get them a Bentley and an Apple Watch here on earth, they’re following him for the bling. They’re proclaiming their ideas to an impoverished world because hopeful Christians who believe their tripe will send them donations, and these contributions fund their lifestyle. They’re exploiting the poor, same as plutocrats who make 10,000 times what their underpaid employees do. They irritate God just as much.

Look, I have no problem with billionaires, or with preachers who make really good salaries. But like I said, God gives his people wealth so we can spread his kingdom. Hoarding it spreads nothing. And one of the surest signs we’re dealing with a Mammonist instead of a Christ-follower, is when people justify this sort of behavior. I’ve heard many a Mammonist misquote Jesus’s story of the Vineyard Employer, “Isn’t this my money, to do with as I please?” Mt 20.15 They ignore the reason the employer said this: To justify his generosity, not his miserliness. In Jesus’s culture, the only one who really owns everything is God. And it just so happens, the employer in Jesus’s story represents God. It is his money, to do with as he pleases—and it pleases him to be generous, and it pleases him when his children are likewise cheerful givers. 2Co 9.7

’Cause when we’re not, when we’re fruitless and tight-fisted, we’re likely not his children either. We’re mammon’s.