The Gospel of the Forty Days: Giving is Blessed, Not Receiving
We are continuing to identify what commands (Ac 1:2) and teachings (Ac 1:3) the resurrected Lord Jesus gave, or might have given, during the forty days before His ascension – what Jaroslav Pelikan called the “Gospel of the Forty Days.”
References:
Jaroslav Pelikan, Acts (part of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series) (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press) p. 223.
Joachim Jeremias, Unknown Sayings of Jesus, Reginald H. Fuller, tr. (London, S.P.C.K., 1957), p. 77-81.
We are continuing to identify what commands (Ac 1:2) and teachings (Ac 1:3) the resurrected Lord Jesus gave, or might have given, during the forty days before His ascension – what Jaroslav Pelikan called the “Gospel of the Forty Days.”
In St. Paul’s last farewell address to the
elders (presbyters) of Ephesus (around 58 AD), the Acts of the Apostles ends
with this sentence: “In all things I have shown you that by so toiling [as Paul
had], one must help the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how He
said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” (Ac 20:35.) Paul’s word to
“help the weak” is reminiscent of Gal. 2:9-10 where he reports of the earlier
meeting he and Barnabas had with the “pillars” of the Church in Jerusalem (Acts
15) who had sent him and Barnabas to the Gentiles, admonishing them only to
“remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.” “Remember the poor” –
“Help the weak.”
To support this admonition, Paul quotes a
saying of Jesus: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
The interesting thing is that this saying
of Jesus is not recorded in any of the Gospels – not even by Luke who, in
writing Acts clearly knew the saying but does not record it in his Gospel. So
perhaps this saying was part of Jesus’ Gospel of the Forty Days? Perhaps. There
is no way to know.
But like everything written in the New Testament about Jesus, it was part of the oral Tradition well known by believers and
later written down (Catechism 126). However, this saying also carries great
historical authority by being quoted by one of the very earliest of ancient
Christian writers, St. Clement of Rome, writing about 96/97 AD (I Clement 2:1).
Clement may be a fellow-worker of St. Paul (Phil. 4:3), was ordained a priest
by St. Peter, and later Bishop of Rome (88-99 AD), so he may well have known
the oral Tradition.
This inclusion of a saying of Jesus in
Acts but omitted in the Gospels reminds us again that everything in Scripture
was written “under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,” that God acted in and
through the authors who, “as true authors, consigned to writing everything and
only those things which He wanted.” (Dei Verbum, 11.)
What does this saying of Jesus mean?
German Lutheran theologian Joachim Jeremias (1900-1979) suggests that the usual
translation, “It is better to give than to receive,” does not quite give the
right meaning because it suggests there is only a difference in degree between
giving and receiving, that both are blessed only giving more so. But, he says,
the saying is not about receiving being blessed. Jesus, and all Jews, spoke
Aramaic, while the NT was written in Greek. The Aramaic term which the Greek
word translated as “more than” frequently denotes not a comparison but a sharp
antithesis. He illustrates this point with other oral Aramaic statements
written in Greek such as Acts 5:29, “We must obey God not man” (and not “rather
than man”), and with Acts 4:19, “to listen to you instead of to God” (and not
“rather than to God”). Both, as spoken Aramaic, are not comparison statements but
either/or statements. Another early writing, The Didache, written probably
around 100 AD, writes (1:5), “Blessed is he that gives ... woe to he that
receives/takes,” showing more clearly that it is not a matter of degree but of
kind. (Jeremias suggests Acts 20:35 and Didache 1:5, though different styles,
may be just different translations of the same Aramaic original.)
So Jeremias translates Jesus’ saying in
Aramaic as, “Giving is blessed, not receiving.”
He says it is characteristic of Jesus (1)
by speaking of “blessed,” familiar from the Beatitudes (Mt 5:3-11) and
indicating the age of salvation, to be a partaker in salvation, to be a child
of God, (2) as Jesus was fond of antithesis, e.g., “When you give a banquet, do
not invite your friends ... but the poor ... and you will be blessed” (Lk
14:12-14), and (3) it is brief and to the point: giving, not taking; i.e.,
love, not selfishness.
Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church is located in California City, CA. Visit our website at ollcalcity.org.References:
Jaroslav Pelikan, Acts (part of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series) (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press) p. 223.
Joachim Jeremias, Unknown Sayings of Jesus, Reginald H. Fuller, tr. (London, S.P.C.K., 1957), p. 77-81.