God’s Concern for Every Creature
Matthew 10:29–31:
Are not two sparrows sold for a
penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father.
And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are
of more value than many sparrows.
Luke 12:6–7:
Are not five sparrows sold for two
pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. But even the hairs of
your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many
sparrows.
Evidently sparrows were sold in the
market, either in pairs or in fives (which for Jewish counting in tens would be
equivalent to our halfdozen), as food for the poor, who would probably rarely
be able to afford any other form of meat. That sparrows were the cheapest birds
for sale in the market – and for this reason selected by Jesus to make his
point – is confirmed by a decree of Emperor Diocletian (late third century CE)
that fixes maximum prices for all kinds of items and lists sparrows as the
cheapest of all the birds used for food.[1] The cheapness of birds, in
general, is interestingly confirmed by a passage in the Mishnah relating to the
law of Deuteronomy 22:6–7, which, as we have already noticed, forbids taking
the mother bird together with her young from a nest. The rabbis were struck by
the fact that, very unusually, this law specifies a reward for keeping it:
‘that it may go well with you and you may live long’ (Deut. 22:7). They
concluded that if such a reward attaches to ‘so light a precept concerning what
is worth but an issar’, then how much more will a similar reward be given
for observing ‘the weightier precepts of the law’ (m. Hull. 12:5). The
commandment is here considered trivial, compared with others,[2] because it concerns only a
bird, which is worth only an issar. The issar is the same small
copper coin as Matthew’s and Luke’s ‘penny’ (assarion). [3]
Thus Jesus has selected a creature that is valued very cheaply by humans, of course on the basis of its limited usefulness to them. Even a creature that humans think so unimportant is important enough to God for it never to escape his caring attention. Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the saying make the point in slightly different ways. Matthew’s is the more specific and relates to the capture of sparrows for food. The sparrow’s fall to the earth is not, as modern readers often suppose, its death,[4] but what happens when the hunter’s throw-net snares it and brings it to the ground (cf. Amos 3:5).[5] It will then be sold in the market. The sparrow’s capture cannot happen ‘without (aneu) your Father’ (Matt. 10:29), i.e. without his knowledge and consent. There is a remarkably close parallel, not only to this point but also to the moral which Jesus draws from it with regard to God’s care for the disciples, in a later rabbinic story, which must show that Jesus is drawing on traditional Jewish teaching. The story concerns Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai (mid-second century CE), who at the end of the second Jewish war spent thirteen years hiding in a cave with his son.
At the end of this period he emerged and sat at the
entrance of the cave and saw a hunter engaged in catching birds. Now whenever
R. Simeon heard a heavenly voice exclaim from heaven, ‘Mercy!’ [i.e. a legal
sentence of release] it escaped; if it exclaimed, ‘Death!’ it was caught. ‘Even
a bird is not caught without the assent of Providence,’ he remarked; ‘how much
more then the life of a human being!’ Thereupon he went forth and found that
the trouble had subsided. (Gen. Rab. 79:6)[6]
Rabbi Simeon realizes that his fate is in the hands of
God, to whom he can therefore entrust himself, when he realises that this is
even true of each bird. If Jesus drew on traditional Jewish teaching, this
teaching was itself rooted in the Old Testament, which says that:
In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of every human being (Job 12:10) and:
You save humans and animals alike, O LORD (Ps. 36:6).
It is God who preserves the life of each of his
creatures, animal and human, and who likewise allows that life to perish when
it does. Luke’s version makes the more general point that not a single sparrow ever
escapes God’s attention (‘forgotten in the sight of God’ is a Jewish
reverential periphrasis for ‘forgotten by God’; cf. Matt. 18:14). But in both
versions the point is God’s caring providence for each individual creature. God
does not concern himself only with the species, but with each individual of the
species. Nor does he simply superintend what happens to each without concern
for the welfare of each: this would provide no basis for Jesus’ assurance that
the disciples need have no fear. The point is that since God actually cares
about and takes care of each sparrow, how much more must he care about and take
care of Jesus’ disciples. Of course, Jesus does not raise the problems of such
a doctrine of providence:[7] Why does God let one sparrow
escape and another be captured and killed? Why does he allow righteous people
to suffer? Here Jesus is content to affirm that the disciples, like all God’s
creatures, are in the hands of God who cares for all he has made.
[1] Adolf Deissmann, Light
from the Ancient East (4th edition; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927),
pp. 273–4; Otto Bauernfeind in TDNT 7.730 n. 10, 732 n. 19. I. Howard
Marshall, Luke, p. 514, appears to be mistaken when he says that
sparrows were not in fact eaten for food and that strouthion here must
mean any small bird eaten for food.
[2]
Cf. Deut. Rab. 6:2, which calls it the least weighty of the
commandments, whereas Exod. 20:12, for which the same reward is specified, is
the weightiest.
[3] The Romans reckoned an assarion
(Latin as) as one sixteenth of a denarius, the rabbis as one
twenty-fourth of a denarius: see Hermann Leberecht Strack and Paul Billerbeck, Kommentar
zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, vol. 1 (Munich: Beck, 1922),
p. 291.
[4] E.g. William David Davies
and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel
according to Saint Matthew, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), p.
208.
[5] See the comments on Amos
3:5 in William Rainey Harper, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos
and Hosea (ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1905), pp. 70–1; James Luther
Mays, Amos (OTL; London: SCM Press, 1969), p. 61.
[6]
Translation from Harry Freedman, Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, vol. 2
(London: Soncino Press, 1939), p. 730. The story also appears in y. Sheb. 9,22,38d;
Eccles. Rab. 10:8; Midr. Ps. 17:13.
[7] For a modern discussion of
this issue in relation to animal suffering, which takes Jesus’ saying as its
starting-point, see Jay B. McDaniel, Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of
Reverence for Life (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989),
ch. 1.
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