The two models just named have in common with the evident meaning of the teaching of Jesus that they seek to describe something that is possible. A third classical approach is to see in this text an impossible demand: Jesus calls us precisely to do what he knows we cannot do. He demands of us that we be flawless, sinless. He demands it not because he expects it but because he knows it to be unattainable. He wants to leave us no excuse or escape before the humiliating recognition of our sinfulness. The purpose of moral teaching generally, and therefore also—especially—of the Sermon on the Mount, is not first to instruct us but to condemn us, bringing us to our knees, driving us to recognize that we can be acceptable before God only by grace.7
Each of these interpretations of “perfection” is solidly rooted somewhere else in the thought and piety of the people who then bring it from there into this passage. In the text itself, however, when taken straightforwardly, the context makes evident that to be “perfect” is something far more simple and, although not easy, not by definition impossible. We are called to be nondiscriminatory in our love just as God does not discriminate. Discriminating in favor of those to whom we are closer is something that the Gentiles, the tax-collectors, the “sinners” do; the contrast is with God, whose benevolence aids the evil and the good alike (Matt 5:46), whose generosity is extended to the “ungrateful and the selfish” (Luke 6:35).
Most of our discussions of social justice center upon the debates about what is a desirable goal and who should lead us toward it. Jesus asks a prior question: For whom do we want what we want? Whose welfare do we seek to serve? Do we recognize a moral priority to the needs and claims of our adversaries in the social system? If not, we do not initiate the search for social justice were Jesus does, namely at the point of the fundamental flaw in our community. That flaw is not that food is scarce, nor that every individual is self-seeking. It is that we have acquiesced in a truncated understanding of community, according to which certain adversaries are excluded from the range of our mercy.
One of the reasons that the misunderstanding identified above could persist was the tendency in our culture to see “love” as an emotion whose grasp upon us is pre-rational, a given kind of empathy or a bond with a claim on our sentiments, powerful to move our decisions toward the needs of those whom we “love.” Romantic or erotic understandings of love as drive are only the extreme forms of this. Familial and cultural, ethnic and national forms make the same kinds of claim. They affirm a loyalty that is not reasoned, not a decision but a given, a loyalty that by its nature is part of a wider social selfishness, rather than ennobling adversaries. What Jesus says is not that we have or should cultivate that kind of “love,” in the sense of an emotional attachment, toward people with whom we have nothing human in common. It is that we should (and can) seek their welfare and serve their needs, whoever they be.
The Power of Praise and Forgiveness (Matt 6:9–15; Luke 11:2–4)
What it means not to heap up empty phrases
When we lift the “Our Father” or “Lord’s Prayer” out of the text of the Sermon and take it simply as a standard outline for prayer in common worship, we get the impression of a series of seven petitions, each of them meaningful in its own right, but with no special internal connections among them, except that (logically enough) they begin and end with the honor of God, with our own needs in the middle. Closer attention, however, yields a less scattered impression, and focuses more upon a commitment to concrete righteousness on the part of the one who prays.
Jewish thought holds that since the revelation of God’s holiness has been received most adequately in the form of gracious commands (Torah), therefore to recognize and proclaim the holiness of God is not an action of mere cultic adoration or mystical contemplation. To “sanctify the Name,” to proclaim the holiness of God, is most fittingly to obey God. Especially it means obeying God in a context where obedience must be a matter of costly choice. “To sanctify the Name” in fact became, in later Jewish thought, the standard designation for martyrdom.
When we take account of the place of parallelism in Hebrew prayer and poetry, we see that the first three petitions are three facets of the same thing. That God’s Name is sanctified, that God’s Kingdom comes, that God’s will is done on earth as in heaven are three formulations of the same reality for which we pray. The three together constitute one massive petition, one superscription over the entire prayer, asking for the doing of God’s will among us, which is the way for “the Name”8 to be glorified. The prayer, together with the other words of Jesus in the same context about prayer (Matt 6:2–6), turns its back on ceremony and on inner contemplation, in favor of concretely lived-out holiness.
Like his ancestors, like his listeners and like Matthew, Jesus assumed—as we do not since the cultural triumph of philosophical monotheism—that God’s control of history is contested. When addressed to the victorious Sovereign of the universe and of Christendom, the petition “May your name be sanctified, may your will be done,” seems to be asking for something to happen that can hardly help happening: thus prayer becomes submitting to and lining oneself up with the way things are. But in Jesus’s world, God’s sovereignty is not yet confirmed and God’s name is not yet widely hallowed. The other “gods” are still around, and are apparently winning. To pray, “Your name be hallowed; your will be done” is not an acceptance of evident reality, not the liturgical celebration of a settled cosmology, but a battle cry. It is a word of hope in defiance of the powers.
The first petition directed toward ourselves acknowledges our dependence upon God to meet our need for bread: a theme to which Jesus returns later in Matthew 6. The second petition is unique in the prayer in that it is conditional. The forgiveness we request corresponds to the forgiveness we have extended to others. This is the only portion of the prayer to be commented upon afterward by Jesus (vv. 14ff.). The same point is made as well in Luke 6:37 and in Matthew 18. The duty constantly to forgive is linked directly with our own constant need to be forgiven. Translators and commentators have not finished discussing whether the forgiveness in question is most fittingly understood as beginning with concrete financial obligations (“debts”) and then extending by analogy to other offenses and kinds of guilt or “trespass,” or whether it should be the other way around. In either case it is central that everyone who prays is committing herself or himself to live from and toward a quality of relationships in which one can be free from the bondage of past obligations and offenses. Not all debts have to be paid by me or to me; not all offenses need to be avenged or punished. We accept from God the grace of remission, and we commit ourselves to live out that grace as we relate to those who have incurred obligations toward us. It is not enough then to see in this prayer a petition for social justice; it is even more a petition for and commitment to social grace, to liberation from obligations actually incurred through our need, weakness, and guilt. Already in the Psalms the pious Hebrews had praised God for not remembering our trespasses. Jesus’s disciples commit themselves by thus praying to become instruments of that same quality of gracious forgetfulness. Does this have something to say about society’s treatment of offenders?
The other theme is protection from temptation. The petition is not that we may be made strong to face temptation successfully, but that we be saved from testing. There is no interest in braving the Tempter’s power, no sense that moral character would be formed or demonstrated by flirting with the edges of evil.
In the Greek one cannot distinguish between “evil thing” and “evil One.” Although most translations have favored the former, it might well be the latter that is meant. This would again make two sentences more nearly parallel: “Do not lead us into a time of trial; save us from the Tempter.” This petition acknowledges vulnerability and dependence in a world predisposed to foster our disobedience.
Our last observation is as profound as it is formal. The prayer is consistently in the plural. We pray together for our bread, our forgiveness, and our protection from temptation. The agent of Christian petition is the community, not the lonely soul or the moral hero. Likewise, then, the sanctifying of the Name and the doing of his will on earth as in heaven are collective activities, as we pray for and do them.