O'Donoghue MTh_Thesis-FinalCopy.pdf - South African Theological ...

Moses. Even more significant is that Jesus is the “personification of the ultimategiver of the Law, YHWH himself.”When Jesus makes reference to the disciples’ lives He is making reference to“psyche (Brown 1975b:683).” Life can also be translated as soul (Hill 1977:144). Inthe Jewish context soul would refer to, “the essential element in a man’s vitality oraliveness (Hill 1977:144).” i.e. life is referring to one’s very existence. Brown(1975b:683) elaborates when he says, “Psyche embraced the whole natural beingand life for which he concerns himself and of which he takes constant care.”Body comes from the Greek soma (Motyer 1975:234). Soma carries severalmeanings in the New Testament. For example it can refer to the body of Jesus, acorpse, or the physical make up of a body. In this passage of Matthew soma refersto more than the body as a “…mere physical organism to the soma as signifying theself.”In light of the meanings connected to psyche and soma in these verses, it is theposition of this author that Jesus in this prohibition is forbidding His disciples to worryabout necessities pertinent to human survival. Further as Hagner (1993:163) says,there are three “parallel verbs” in verse 26. The verbs being to sow, reap and gather.These verbs, “point to human preoccupation with financial security.”It follows that desire for financial security is connected to the desire for humansurvival. The question that needs to come next is what kind of worry Jesus isspeaking about. It is now clear that in this prohibition worry is related to the means ofsurvival; however scholars are not unanimous on the kind of worry Jesus is referringto.Worry is translated from the noun merimna, and relates especially to “anxious care(Unger and White 1985:89).” Blomberg (1992:125) says that worry is translated as“Take not thought” in the KJV. This translation will not suffice as Jesus is notcommanding thoughtlessness but the absence of unnecessary care (Carson1994:94). Thus the “do not worry” translation is better suited.54