January 1, 2014: Thoughts in Response to Reading the New TestamentJanuary 1, 2014
Matthew 6: 19-24
Concerning Treasures
19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[a] consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust[b] consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.The Sound Eye
22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; 23 but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!Serving Two Masters
24 “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.[c]Commentary
Similar to a comment I’ve made before, I find the “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven” to be tricky psychology for me, because on a surface level it seems to invite self-centered thinking. One might think to themselves, “I’m going to go do such and such because I will be rewarded in heaven”. I have a certain resistance to that kind of thinking, because at a deeper level I sense that God wants us to be motivated to action out of a sense of love that is purely interested in the other person, or purely interested in loving God, and not loving in a way that is anticipating a reward. The other way I look at this, however, is that Jesus is simply saying something factual: Our behaviours and attitudes here and now have eternal implications, and as we make decisions and try to be the best managers we can of our time and money, we need to take that into account. Any manager needs to know something about reality if they’re going to be a good manager. (!)
I find verses 22-23 on the eye a bit mysterious. Is this the teaching that the song “oh be careful little eyes what you see?” is based on? Is the point that the light that enters our souls comes in through our eyes, and so we want to be letting in good light, not darkness? I’m not quite following the thought here.
And of course, verse 24 about not being able to serve both God and money is very familiar. (sometimes referred to as mammon, I think, the God of money?) One thought I’ve had about this passage over the last couple of years is that I wonder what the pitfalls are of trying to serve God through money. ie. If you are a person who devotes many hours to their professional activities, earns a high wage, and then goes about serving God by trying to invest that money wisely, are there pitfalls there? Can we get sucked into a mentality where we’re trying to earn more and more money, because we equate more money with being able to serve God better? ie. By having more to invest? Can we ironically then end up “serving money” when we had intended to serve God? Maybe my point there isn’t especially clear, or maybe you are catching my drift.
December 20: Thoughts in Response to Reading the New TestamentDecember 20, 2013
Matthew 6:5-15: Prayer
5 “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.[a]
7 “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
9 “Pray then in this way:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
10 Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.[b]
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And do not bring us to the time of trial,[c]
but rescue us from the evil one.[d]
14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 15 but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.Matthew 6:16-18: Fasting
16 “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18 so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.Commentary
In the last few months, someone commented that it seems that during Bible times, people prayed out loud. It was how they did it, perhaps… that for them, when you talked to God, you actually talked to God. I’m not sure whether that’s correct or not, but it’s an interesting thing to consider, and it seems to fit somewhat with passages like this.
While it would be a good exercise to think through the Lord’s prayer, and I do have some thoughts on that, I have to be honest about what sticks out most about these two passages, and likewise about the previous passage on “Giving to the Needy”. It is the common thread:
  | Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. |
| And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. |
| And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. |
I think the reason this causes me so much pause is that, at least at some level, I feel like Jesus might be talking about me here. Let’s look at the surface level evidence:
| Many of the things I post on Facebook or on my blog are religious in nature, or things that could be connected back to things that I have done or thought that are virtuous. Here I am now, blogging about my reading of the New Testament. |
| The things I have felt compelled to talk about with people in the last couple of years not infrequently fall into that pattern. |
| The talk I gave at Grebel fits into this pattern (even if I named that tension explicitly in my talk), and the article written in Grebel Now about that talk/challenge (although not by me) definitely feel a bit uncomfortable on these scales. |
| I am not good at finding chunks of time to pray on my own, but I enjoy going to the church every Thursday morning to pray in a group. |
As with most things Jesus says, I think he’s mostly concerned with heart -- what displeases him most is when a person’s motivation, or a good chunk of their motivation, is to get a pat on the back and raise their status among people. From this perspective, I don’t feel overly insecure reading these passages, because I don’t feel like I have impure motivations. What does still give me pause there as I’ve mentioned before is that it can be hard to truly ferret out one’s motivations at times. The subconscious parts of our being can be an enigma. Parts of our being we can introspect, but other parts we cannot. And so that leaves a question: Deep down, in my subconscious being, am I unknowingly highly motivated to be seen and appreciated by others? Perhaps one nugget of wisdom here is to say “yes, we all are, to a degree”, even if we can’t introspect it, and to keep that in the balance as we try and understand our behavior.
Then there’s the ironic part of all of this: It’s as if Jesus is saying “stop be so concerned by your image”, and yet part of what’s giving me such pause here is being concerned about my image, but in the inverse sense being talked about by this passage: Realizing that quite possibly people react to the virtuous things I say and do, and when they contrast it with these scriptures, are left with a bad taste in their mouth. That remains an open question for me: How careful should we be about our image? On one hand, being concerned about our image seems to fall into the trap these passages are warning against, but on the other hand, appearing as a self-righteous attention-seeker doesn’t seem very honoring to God either. In any event, I feel it would be a mistake to ever get too bent out of shape about what others think about us, in relative importance to standing before God and trying to discern how our hearts need to be changed. (even if those two aren’t mutually exclusive)
Something that I struggle with in these passages is that, on the flip side, I feel that human encouragement and affirmation is incredibly important. For example, when I started doing software development at Navtech, I felt like I was in one of those situations where one gets a fair bit of negative feedback for anything one doesn’t do well, but rarely encouragement for all of the things one is doing well, or even great. That’s a toxic environment. It de-motivates, it’s harmful to one’s sense of health and wellbeing, etc. To contrast that, when one is in an environment where good work is recognized and appreciated, it can be incredibly motivating and life giving. And so at one level it is a bit unintuitive to suggest that positive human feedback for doing good is destructive and unpleasing to God. I’m guessing that’s not the point Jesus is trying to make, in a specific sense, but rather that it matters how that feedback is sought and the heart behind that.
One example of how I resonate with this passage is that at times in the past I have sensed that people pay me a favor and unless I react with joy and surprise and thankfulness, they are certain to become mad. That gets tricky when the favor isn’t something that’s appreciated! I find this kind of thing quite unvirtuous -- to almost “demand” a big psychological payment for a gift that one is giving. In that context, it feels like the gift is actually plunging one into some kind of social debt, so that one then has to try and claw back out of the pit by heaping praise on the gift giver. From that perspective, the gift can actually feel like an anti-gift, making the situation all the more brutal. This situation is obviously a bit different than the things Jesus is talking about here, but I think there’s a connection.
I think I’ll close this rambling with tying this back with our desire to glorify God. That’s the window through which I’ve been often looking at the universe and looking at behavior: How can we best glorify God? That brings this passage to life for me a bit more: Do our good works glorify God, or are we getting in the way and trying to absorb some or all of that glory? This exposes a certain irony about good works: They can be done in the name of glorifying God, but our flawed human expression can easily and ironically turn that into an exercise of glorifying self if we’re not careful. No easy answers here for me, but something to keep chewing on.
December 17: Thoughts in Response to Reading the New TestamentDecember 17, 2013
Matthew 5:38-42: An Eye for an Eye
38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 40 and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; 41 and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. 42 Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.When I read this, what came to mind was WWII. If the world’s response to Hitler was modeled after this teaching of Jesus, what would that have looked like? Would it have been horrific, or beautiful? Weak, or powerful?
A somewhat related question that, for whatever reason, has bopped around my head, is what to do if a violent person either kidnaps your child or grabs your child and threatens to harm them unless a large sum of money is handed over. How would this teaching of Jesus apply there? Something that’s interesting to me is that the passage seems to apply in two different ways: Turning the other cheek might (?) crudely imply saying something like “Why stop with my child? Why don’t I go round up the rest of my family so that you can do us all in?”. On the other hand, the “give to anyone who begs” part of the passage would seem to imply that one should not resist such violence and simply give the person what they are asking for.
It also makes me think that one of the advantages of not having a million dollars sitting in a bank account is instead relying on the love of a community is that it can't be hijacked in quite the same way. But, you could always be made to sell your home, etc.
In any event, this “turning the other cheek” teaching I think has fascinated many people. Jesus seems to be saying that if we are clever about the way we respond to evil, it can be made to look foolish and in a large part be disarmed. But that raises more questions for me: What are various ways to creatively and cleverly respond to evil?
Matthew 5:43-48: Love for Enemies
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,[a] what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.Have you ever stopped and thought “who are my enemies”? If you’re a fairly loving and forgiving person, maybe you don’t think of yourself as having a lot of “enemies”. What came to mind for me were people whose behavior frustrates me. We’ll go with owners of luxury vehicles. That frustrates me because I see a deep injustice in people dying for lack of clean water or mosquito nets (etc) while other people buy themselves such expensive toys. My response in being so annoyed with people’s behavior can be to lose love for them. Am I likely to pray for that guy who drives by me in a BMW? Not really. But that guy is just as loved by God as the lady in Africa dying of AIDS who doesn’t have enough money to buy anti-viral medications. So I think what this “love your enemies” teaching is helping me see today is that while we’re all imperfect, and some people are naturally going to frustrate us, we need to love those people just as we love ourselves, and just as we love the sick, neglected, and dying. Praying for people who frustrate you, and legitimately asking God to bless them and care for them seems like a powerful strategy to that end.
Matthew 6:1-4: Giving to the Needy
“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
2 “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.[a]This is a passage that has come to mind many times in the past couple of years. I resonate with it, but I’m also uneasy about how exactly to apply it in my life. If I do something or say something that exposes something noble I’ve done, my guideline for whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is typically to self analyze and ask myself whether I’m doing or saying something to get recognition. If I feel relatively pure in heart (which of course we probably never are, fully) then I will typically feel free in what I do and say. If I sense my attitude is feeling fleshy and craving recognition, then I try and shy away from saying more. But I’m sure we can all be fooled into thinking we’re pure in heart when deep down subconsciously what’s motivating us is tainted with self centeredness. What this also highlights is that I’m very poor at being “political”, or thinking clearly about how others are likely to perceive me, or how my words are going to affect them. Because I tend to be more heart/motivation focused (I think?), perhaps that draws my attention away from how others are going to perceive me. My “image”. I don’t think that’s all good -- perhaps I am sometimes making a fool of myself and not even realizing it. Does that please God? Probably not, eh?
The other part of this passage that I find tricky is that it sounds like Jesus is saying that we’ll be rewarded even more if we’re quiet about the good things we do, and that should be good motivation to be quiet. But because my acts of love aren’t motivated (I hope) by wanting a reward, this “do it for an even bigger reward” isn’t helpful psychologically for me, and it strikes me as a kind of strange thing for Jesus to say. I guess I’ll have to keep pondering that one.
Finally, this passage is an interesting contrast to Matthew 5:14-16:
14 “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. 15 No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.I think it’s one of the “balance” things, perhaps, something that takes judgement and discernment. Something to keep thinking about...
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