How not to take no thought for the morrow
The concrete meaning of the warnings against preoccupation with material security has been rendered less accessible to us by some of the short-circuited ways it has often been read, sometimes in order to be applied sincerely and sometimes in order to set it aside as unrealistic. Since the birds and the flowers are fed without their thinking about it, and since the Old Testament reports that the prophet Elijah was once fed by ravens, there are those who think that Jesus was promising some kind of nature miracle, some new gift of manna, as an alternative to sober economic planning. Then obviously such “trust in God” would not be something we could reproduce in our culture. Thus by making the meaning radical we make it irrelevant.
But that was not Jesus’s point. The concrete and credible meanings of Jesus’s words were confirmed by the life of the circle of disciples who had literally left economic security behind and were already experiencing material support from the common fund. Already in this life, Jesus later taught (Mark 10:29ff.), those who forsake other communities and securities find in the Kingdom fellowship new possessions and new families. Thus the first impact of the promise that the morrow will take care of itself was not about ravens but about Jesus. It called people to join his itinerant commune. It summons us to make real among ourselves the new economic solidarity of those who consider nothing their own and who share according to need.9
The further analysis of what it means to trust God for survival is pointed up by the parallel, already accentuated by Leo Tolstoy and Reinhold Niebuhr, between the renunciation of selfish economic security in Mathew 6 and the renunciation of violence toward the enemy in Matthew 5. Both chapters exemplify renouncing the habits of thinking from the perspective of controlling the situation for good, and of beginning with one’s own rights. The most entrenched defenses of inequitable social systems in our time are not the unabashed selfishness of criminal types, but the consciously justified “legitimate self-concern” of good people, and the assignment to oneself of the responsibility to make sure that things do not come out still worse, whereby people claiming to do justice maintain things the way they are, because the alternative would be worse.
“Taking thought for the morrow” is the claim that it is my right or my duty to exercise control over others—control first of all over the social system, and therefore control over other persons—in the name of a relative justice that is better than something else that I fear, and in which, not so incidentally, my own rights will be taken care of first.
A pietist or a pre-scientific social thinker might say more simply that defending my rights means not trusting God. A more sophisticated analyst would add that it means not trusting other people, not trusting dialogue and forgiveness, not trusting conflict resolution and due process; claiming instead that one has no choice but to manipulate, to use non-dialogical power, and to accumulate and preserve one’s own economic advantage at the cost of wider sharing. “Taking thought for the morrow” is what some call “an ethic of responsibility.” We must control events because God won’t. Its basic moral mood is utilitarian. It puts security above solidarity. It privileges one’s own party in calculating the common good.
Thereby we have backed into a functional definition of what “trusting God” would mean in concrete social terms. It would mean that our calculations of the common good would not begin by privileging our own perspective, and would not be used to assign to ourselves or to our party the authority to impose our vision or our rights on others by authority or by applying greater power. To trust God is then to trust in dialogue and due process, repentance and the common search. Does this have something to say about economic justice and “national security”?
There is a deep commonality between the daring to share that is enjoined for the disciples’ economic life (Matthew 6) and the love for enemy that is commended in the realm of conflict. Both risk themselves at the hand of open process over which one is ready to relinquish control.
Proclamation and prayer derived from the coming of the Kingdom give reason to trust that such renunciation is not going to be generally suicidal, though it may situationally be costly. Heralding the Kingdom (Matt 3:2; 4:17; 10:7) and the commitment in prayer to its coming (6:10) do not replace sober planning with blind faith, nor social analysis with unthinking obedience. They change the calculation of common good. They place realism in a framework of faith and hope.10
Further suggested readings:
Bauman, Sermon on the Mount
Crosby, Spirituality of the Beatitudes
Crosby, Thy Will be Done
Davies, Setting of the Sermon on the Mount
Hunter, Design for Life
Jeremias, Sermon on the Mount
Minear, “Bible’s Authority in the Congregation.”
1. Previously published as “Jesus’ Life-Style Sermon and Prayer.” There is some overlap with the chapter, “Political Axioms of the Sermon the Mount,” in my Original Revolution, 34–54.
2. Tolstoy, What I Believe. Tolstoy expanded his argument in several fuller exegetical works on the Gospels.
3. The best surveys of the great diversity of perspectives are McArthur, Understanding the Sermon, and Bauman, Sermon on the Mount. Further sources are provided in the bibliography.
4. One very important component of interpretation—which the format of an essay like this, based on the lectionary and limited in length, must lay aside—is the critical consideration of the contexts, both literary and historical. Some such matters were dealt with more adequately in the other text named in note 1 above. [This footnote is missing from the first edition. —Ed.]
5. “The Kingdom is at hand” characterizes the first preaching of John and the first preaching of Jesus, just before our text. “Great Reversal” is one way to characterize the mood of that proclamation.
6. This notion of a shift between the testaments is especially at home in the post- and anti-Constantinian renewal movements: i.e., the Czech Brethren, the Anabaptists, and Tolstoy.
7. Classical Lutheran theology described this as the usus elenchthicus legis, the “condemning use of the law.” A rough analogy to that is found in Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought about the “relevance of an impossible ideal.”
8. Jewish reverence for the proper names of God prescribed that those names not be pronounced. Thus the noun “Name” came to be used as substitute for the unspoken proper names. Therefore to “sanctify the Name” means to ascribe holiness to God himself, and in later rabbinic thought it came to mean suffering for that witness.
9. See my Body Politics, 14ff.
10. [See bibliography for complete title and publication details. —Ed.]
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“Thou Shalt Not Kill” (Exodus 20:13)
“Interpretation” as a theological task1 is most at home with the kind of