Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§14.2 The Character of Discipleship
anxiety 48 about necessities; God is trustworthy. Uncertainty in face of the fragility
of human existence (Isa. 40.6-7) need not cause anxiety. The child can
be confident in the face even of crisis; the father will sustain through the crisis.
The King is also Father, and his kingly rule can already be experienced in
the trustworthiness with which he provides for their needs. 49
Such teaching should not be discounted as unrealistic in the face of the experience
of famine and political crises which many of Jesus' audiences would
well remember and could expect to confront again. Jesus himself would hardly
have been unaware of such harsh realities, and many of those who cherished his
teaching will no doubt have had all too much experience of hard times and personal
distress. The teaching was valued, then, presumably, not because it inculcated
a careless disregard for harsh reality, but because it encouraged trust in the
providence of a caring Creator, 50 the clarification of personal priorities (life itself
[nepes, psyche] as more important than food and clothing), and the calm acceptance
of what cannot be changed. 51 Initially the imminence of the coming kingdom
would have been the (or a) major factor in such a reordering of priorities.
But the communities which cherished the teaching probably saw in it enduring
encouragement to an unfretful faith for daily living (as Matt. 6.34 presumably
implies), a tranquillity of trust even in the midst of stress and crisis. In neither
case need (or should) an 'eschatological' (or apocalyptic) overtone be set in antithesis
to a 'sapiential', as though the one excluded the other.
The Jesus Seminar were equally confident that this passage went back to Jesus (Funk, Five
Gospels 172-73), whereas Lüdemann ignores the close parallel with Matt. 6.26/Luke 12.24 in
dismissing the whole of Matt. 10.27-33 as 'inauthentic as they derive from a later situation of
the community stamped by persecution' (Jesus 169), in striking contrast to his judgment on the
earlier Matthean passage (above, n. 45).
48. The key word is merimnaö, 'be anxious, (unduly) concerned' (used five times: Matt.
6.25, 27, 28, 31, 34). In this case Bultmann's existentialist reading captures the thrust of the
passage well: a warning against the illusion that life can be somehow secured by worrying
about the means of life (merimnaö, TDNT 4.591-93).
49. Becker, Jesus 268.
50. The thought is hardly new in Jewish tradition; e.g., Job 12.10; 38.41; Pss. 104;
147.9; Pss. Sol. 5.9-10 (Davies and Allison, Matthew 1.650). Jeremias notes the disapproval
voiced in m. Ber. 5.3 of prayer which refers to God's mercies extending 'to a bird's nest' (Proclamation
182). But Davies and Allison note also m. Qidd. 4.14 (649). A similar confidence was
encouraged among Cynics (Downing, Christ and the Cynics 68-71).
51. 'You must see yourselves as human beings who stand in God's presence and are
therefore more than the wretched needs that attack you' (Schottroff and Stegemann, Hope of
the Poor 44).
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