Sixteen verses, near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, on money and worry. They are among the most quoted words Jesus ever spoke and among the most domesticated: printed on cards about not stressing, cited in sermons on tithing, reduced on both sides to a slogan. Read straight through in Greek they are stranger and more exact than either use of them suggests.
The unit has four movements and one hinge. Two commands about where you store things (19–21). A one-sentence parable about the eye that is nearly untranslatable (22–23). A flat impossibility about two masters (24). And then the longest movement, ten verses on anxiety (25–34), which begins with “therefore” — meaning it is not a new subject but the consequence of the first three. The hinge is verse 21: your heart follows your treasure, not the other way round.
Everything hangs on one verb, μεριμνάω, which appears six times and which English has never translated well. The KJV’s “take no thought” was already misleading in 1611 and is actively wrong now. That single lexical question — what exactly is forbidden — is what the whole commentary tradition has argued about, and it is what the five questions at the foot of this page turn on.
The Greek here is the SBL Greek New Testament; the English facing it is the World English Bible. Both are public domain. Where the manuscripts disagree the disagreement is noted rather than resolved. Following the convention of this site, the words of Jesus are set in rubric red — which, on this page, is the whole of the text.
I
Two Places to Put Things
Matthew 6:19–21
19Μὴ θησαυρίζετε ὑμῖν θησαυροὺς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, ὅπου σὴς καὶ βρῶσις ἀφανίζει, καὶ ὅπου κλέπται διορύσσουσιν καὶ κλέπτουσιν· 20θησαυρίζετε δὲ ὑμῖν θησαυροὺς ἐν οὐρανῷ, ὅπου οὔτε σὴς οὔτε βρῶσις ἀφανίζει, καὶ ὅπου κλέπται οὐ διορύσσουσιν οὐδὲ κλέπτουσιν· 21ὅπου γάρ ἐστιν ὁ θησαυρός σου, ἐκεῖ ἔσται καὶ ἡ καρδία σου.
19Don’t lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal; 20but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consume, and where thieves don’t break through and steal; 21for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Both verbs are present imperatives: not “never do this once” but “stop doing this, keep doing that.” The Greek stores treasure with a cognate object — θησαυρίζετε…θησαυρούς, treasure up treasures — a doubling English cannot keep. At verse 21 the older manuscripts read the singular σου, “thy treasure…thy heart”; the Byzantine text and the KJV read the plural. It is addressed to one person at a time.
II
The Lamp of the Body
Matthew 6:22–23
22Ὁ λύχνος τοῦ σώματός ἐστιν ὁ ὀφθαλμός. ἐὰν οὖν ᾖ ὁ ὀφθαλμός σου ἁπλοῦς, ὅλον τὸ σῶμά σου φωτεινὸν ἔσται· 23ἐὰν δὲ ὁ ὀφθαλμός σου πονηρὸς ᾖ, ὅλον τὸ σῶμά σου σκοτεινὸν ἔσται. εἰ οὖν τὸ φῶς τὸ ἐν σοὶ σκότος ἐστίν, τὸ σκότος πόσον.
22The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light. 23But if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
The last clause has no verb in the Greek — τὸ σκότος πόσον, “the darkness — how much!” The sentence breaks off, which is probably the point. Note the position: this obscure saying about the eye sits deliberately between the paragraph on wealth and the paragraph on worry, and every commentator from Augustine to Wesley has noticed that placement and read the eye as the intention that governs both.
III
Two Masters
Matthew 6:24
24Οὐδεὶς δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν· ἢ γὰρ τὸν ἕνα μισήσει καὶ τὸν ἕτερον ἀγαπήσει, ἢ ἑνὸς ἀνθέξεται καὶ τοῦ ἑτέρου καταφρονήσει· οὐ δύνασθε θεῷ δουλεύειν καὶ μαμωνᾷ.
24No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon.
This is not a proverb about divided attention. δουλεύειν is the verb for slavery, not employment: a hired man may hold two jobs; a slave has one owner. And the sentence names the second owner — μαμωνᾷ, an Aramaic word left untranslated, standing in the sentence exactly where a god’s name would stand.
IV
Therefore, Do Not Be Anxious
Matthew 6:25–34
25Διὰ τοῦτο λέγω ὑμῖν· μὴ μεριμνᾶτε τῇ ψυχῇ ὑμῶν τί φάγητε, μηδὲ τῷ σώματι ὑμῶν τί ἐνδύσησθε· οὐχὶ ἡ ψυχὴ πλεῖόν ἐστι τῆς τροφῆς καὶ τὸ σῶμα τοῦ ἐνδύματος; 26ἐμβλέψατε εἰς τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ ὅτι οὐ σπείρουσιν οὐδὲ θερίζουσιν οὐδὲ συνάγουσιν εἰς ἀποθήκας, καὶ ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος τρέφει αὐτά· οὐχ ὑμεῖς μᾶλλον διαφέρετε αὐτῶν; 27τίς δὲ ἐξ ὑμῶν μεριμνῶν δύναται προσθεῖναι ἐπὶ τὴν ἡλικίαν αὐτοῦ πῆχυν ἕνα; 28καὶ περὶ ἐνδύματος τί μεριμνᾶτε; καταμάθετε τὰ κρίνα τοῦ ἀγροῦ πῶς αὐξάνουσιν· οὐ κοπιῶσιν οὐδὲ νήθουσιν· 29λέγω δὲ ὑμῖν ὅτι οὐδὲ Σολομὼν ἐν πάσῃ τῇ δόξῃ αὐτοῦ περιεβάλετο ὡς ἓν τούτων. 30εἰ δὲ τὸν χόρτον τοῦ ἀγροῦ σήμερον ὄντα καὶ αὔριον εἰς κλίβανον βαλλόμενον ὁ θεὸς οὕτως ἀμφιέννυσιν, οὐ πολλῷ μᾶλλον ὑμᾶς, ὀλιγόπιστοι; 31μὴ οὖν μεριμνήσητε λέγοντες· Τί φάγωμεν; ἤ· Τί πίωμεν; ἤ· Τί περιβαλώμεθα; 32πάντα γὰρ ταῦτα τὰ ἔθνη ἐπιζητοῦσιν· οἶδεν γὰρ ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος ὅτι χρῄζετε τούτων ἁπάντων. 33ζητεῖτε δὲ πρῶτον τὴν βασιλείαν καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ, καὶ ταῦτα πάντα προστεθήσεται ὑμῖν. 34μὴ οὖν μεριμνήσητε εἰς τὴν αὔριον, ἡ γὰρ αὔριον μεριμνήσει ἑαυτῆς· ἀρκετὸν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἡ κακία αὐτῆς.
25Therefore I tell you, don’t be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26See the birds of the sky, that they don’t sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you of much more value than they? 27Which of you by being anxious, can add one moment to his lifespan? 28Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don’t toil, neither do they spin, 29yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. 30But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today exists and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, won’t he much more clothe you, you of little faith? 31Therefore don’t be anxious, saying, ‘What will we eat?’, ‘What will we drink?’ or, ‘With what will we be clothed?’ 32For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33But seek first God’s Kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore don’t be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day’s own evil is sufficient.
Three textual notes, none of them resolved here. At verse 25 many manuscripts add ἢ τί πίητε, “or what you will drink” — which is why the KJV has it and the WEB has it in verse 25 but the oldest witnesses are split. At verse 33 a large body of manuscripts reads τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ, “the kingdom of God,” which is what the KJV translates. The two great fourth-century codices both lack “of God”: Sinaiticus reads τὴν βασιλείαν καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ, “his kingdom and his righteousness” — one possessive governing both nouns, which is why the ASV and WEB say “his kingdom” — while Vaticanus goes further and reverses the pair, “his righteousness and his kingdom.” Bruce Metzger suggested the transposition was meant to imply that righteousness is prerequisite to the kingdom, comparing Matthew 5:20. The difference matters for the fourth question below.
θησαυρίζω · θησαυρός
thēsaurizō · thēsauros · 6:19, 20, 21
to store up · a store, a hoard, a treasury
Our word thesaurus comes from it, and that is the right feel: not a jewel but a storehouse — the place where a thing is kept against the future. The command is not against having; it is against warehousing. Verse 19 forbids it on earth and verse 20 commands it in heaven with the same verb, which means heaven is not the alternative to storing but the alternative place to store.
Both are present imperatives. Μὴ θησαυρίζετε with the present tense is naturally read as stopping a practice already under way, and θησαυρίζετε δέ as beginning and continuing another. Nothing here is a single dramatic renunciation; it is a change of standing habit.
σὴς καὶ βρῶσις
sēs kai brōsis · 6:19–20
moth and… eating
σής is the clothes-moth. βρῶσις is not “rust” — it is the ordinary noun for eating, the act or the food. “Rust” is a guess, made because the pairing seems to want a metal-destroyer beside a cloth-destroyer; but the Greek says only moth and eating, and the likeliest sense is a second devouring pest, or corrosion understood as a kind of consumption.
Which matters, because it names the actual enemy of stored wealth in a village economy: not inflation but appetite. Cloth and grain are eaten. What you put away is being consumed while you sleep, and the burglar is only the fastest of the mouths.
διορύσσουσιν
diorussousin · 6:19–20
they dig through
Literally: to dig through. Palestinian village houses were mud brick. The thief did not force a lock; he made a hole in the wall. The KJV’s “break through” keeps this; most modern versions flatten it to “break in.” It is a small loss but a real one, because the picture is of a wall that looks solid and is not.
καρδία
kardia · 6:21
heart — the seat of will, thought and desire together
The hinge of the whole passage, and it runs the direction people do not expect. Jesus does not say “put your treasure where your heart is.” He says the reverse: the treasure goes first and the heart follows it. ἐκεῖ ἔσται is a future indicative — a prediction, not an exhortation. Where you put your money, your attention will migrate; you will not be consulted.
This is the sentence that makes the passage practical rather than merely inspiring. It says that affection is downstream of allocation, and therefore that you can move your heart by moving your treasure. Bonhoeffer inverts it to make the diagnostic: “Where thy heart is, there shall thy treasure be also” — run it backwards and it tells you what you actually worship.
ἁπλοῦς · πονηρός
haplous · ponēros · 6:22–23
single, simple, unfolded · evil, worthless
The hardest word on the page. ἁπλοῦς is built from a- (one) and the root of folding: unfolded, of one piece, without a double. In the Septuagint and in Jewish Greek it carries the sense of singleness of heart, undivided loyalty. But it also carries, in the idiom of the period, the sense of generous — the open-handed person — and its opposite here, the ὀφθαλμὸς πονηρός, is the standard Semitic expression for the stingy, grudging “evil eye” (compare Deuteronomy 15:9 and Proverbs 28:22).
So there are two live readings: the eye that is focused on one thing, and the eye that is open-handed. R. T. France and Harold Fowler have both argued that the ambiguity is deliberate — that Matthew has placed a word here which means both, in a paragraph that is about both. The commentary tradition mostly took the first sense; the ancient idiom points hard at the second. This edition does not choose.
μαμωνᾶς
mamōnas · 6:24
wealth, property — an Aramaic word, left untranslated
Aramaic māmōnā, meaning simply property or resources. In the Jewish literature of the period it is not usually a term of abuse; one could be urged to honour God with one’s mammon, by giving. Augustine reports the etymology as he had it: “Riches are said to be called mammon among the Hebrews. The Punic name also corresponds: for gain is called mammon in Punic” — Punic being the Carthaginian dialect he heard around him in North Africa, a cousin of Hebrew.
What makes it terrible here is not the word but the grammar. Matthew leaves it untranslated and puts it in the dative beside θεῷ — you cannot be a slave to God and to mammon — in the slot where a rival deity’s name belongs. Money is not condemned by being called mammon; it is condemned by being conjugated as a lord.
δουλεύειν
douleuein · 6:24
to be a slave to, to belong to as property
Not “to work for.” The δοῦλος is owned. Leon Morris notes that a hired labourer might well have several employers and that the impossibility Jesus asserts is therefore not a legal one but a psychological one: it is possible to have two owners on paper and not possible to be owned by two.
This is the verse’s escape hatch and its trap at once. It leaves room for a Christian to have money, use it, plan with it, even accumulate it for a purpose — and it closes the door on any arrangement in which money gives the orders. The distinction is not the size of the balance. It is who is holding whom.
μεριμνάω
merimnaō · 6:25, 27, 28, 31, 34 (×2)
to be pulled apart; to be anxious
The load-bearing word, and the one everything below turns on. It belongs to the family of μερίζω, to divide, to split into parts. To μεριμνᾶν is to have a mind in pieces, drawn in several directions by a thing you cannot control. Paul uses it for the legitimate, wearing concern of the married and of the churches (1 Corinthians 7:32–34; 2 Corinthians 11:28) — so it is not automatically a sin word. But in this passage, alongside “little faith” and “the Gentiles,” it plainly means the corrosive kind.
What it does not mean is planning, providing, saving, working, or thinking ahead. Greek has ordinary words for those and Jesus does not use them. The KJV’s “take no thought” was a reasonable seventeenth-century rendering of careful in its old sense — full of care — and is now simply a mistranslation to any modern ear. The ASV corrected it to “be not anxious” in 1901 and nearly everything since has followed.
Note the aspect, too. Verse 25 and 28 are present (μὴ μεριμνᾶτε): stop the ongoing state. Verses 31 and 34 are aorist subjunctive (μὴ μεριμνήσητε): do not even start, do not have the episode. The passage forbids both the chronic condition and the acute attack.
ψυχή
psychē · 6:25
life — the animating self, not “soul” in the later sense
“Do not be anxious for your ψυχή, what you shall eat.” Read as “soul” that is nonsense, and the Fathers noticed. Chrysostom’s solution was that Jesus “spoke according to the common custom” — the soul does not eat, but it cannot stay in a body that does not. Augustine’s was cleaner: ψυχή here stands for this present life, the life that food sustains.
Augustine is almost certainly right, and it matters for the argument: the comparison in the verse is life against food, body against clothing. Both halves are about the material creature. God gave the greater — the living body itself — so the lesser is not in doubt.
ἡλικία · πῆχυς
hēlikia · pēchys · 6:27
stature, or age · a cubit, the forearm’s length
The famous crux. ἡλικία can mean bodily stature or span of life; πῆχυς is unambiguously a measure of length, about eighteen inches. So the sentence either adds a foot and a half to your height — grotesque, and nobody wants it — or adds a length-unit to a lifespan, which is a mixed metaphor.
The KJV took “stature.” Augustine read it that way and drew the obvious inference: the providence that brought your body to its present size can also clothe it. Most modern versions take “lifespan” and treat the cubit as a metaphor for any small increment; the WEB prints “one moment to his lifespan.” Alfred Plummer objected that a cubit of height would be monstrous; Harold Fowler answered that Jesus may be thinking of a child’s growth; Leon Morris suggested it is simply a joke; Ulrich Luz raised the speculation that it alludes to the tradition of Adam’s pre-fall height; John Nolland reads “a cubit” as roughly one step, so that anxiety cannot advance you a single pace.
None of it changes the argument, and that is worth saying plainly: on every reading the verse asserts that anxiety has no purchase on the body. It is the one verse in the passage aimed squarely at the domain most modern readers actually worry about.
ὀλιγόπιστοι
oligopistoi · 6:30
little-faiths
A compound Matthew is fond of — he uses it of the disciples in the storm, of Peter on the water, of the argument about bread (8:26; 14:31; 16:8). It is not a word for unbelievers. It is a word for people who do believe and whose faith is the wrong size for the situation. Chrysostom’s note is exact: Christ lays to their charge “not want, but poverty, of faith.”
Which locates the diagnosis. In this passage anxiety is not treated as a mood, a temperament, or a medical fact. It is treated as a theological symptom — a small estimate of the Father — and it is addressed by enlarging the estimate, not by suppressing the feeling.
ζητεῖτε πρῶτον · ἐπιζητοῦσιν
zēteite prōton · epizētousin · 6:32–33
seek first · they seek after
The same root, twice, one verse apart, and the contrast is not what people assume. Verse 32 says the Gentiles ἐπιζητοῦσιν — seek after — food, drink, clothing. Verse 33 says you seek the kingdom. But the next clause immediately concedes that you need the very same things, and that the Father knows it. The objects are not the problem. The order is.
πρῶτον is the whole argument compressed into one adverb, and Augustine gave the classic gloss: it is first in rank, not first in time. You do not finish seeking the kingdom and then start eating. You eat within a life whose end is the kingdom. Wesley’s note is the sharpest one-liner in the tradition: “whosoever seeks this first, will soon come to seek this only.”
The imperative is present — keep seeking — which rules out reading it as a completed transaction.
προστεθήσεται · ἀρκετόν · κακία
prostethēsetai · arketon · kakia · 6:33–34
shall be added · enough · trouble
προστεθήσεται is future passive: shall be added — added to something already given, by someone unnamed. Chrysostom presses the verb hard: “He said not, shall be given, but shall be added, that you might learn, that the things present are no great part of His gifts.” An addition is a supplement to a principal. It is not the deal.
And the last word of the passage is not “faith” or “peace” but κακία, which usually means wickedness and here does not. Chrysostom again: “By evil here He means, not wickedness, far from it, but affliction, and trouble, and calamities.” The sentence concedes that every day carries a load of trouble and says only that its own load is ἀρκετόν — enough, sufficient, all it can hold. It is not a promise that tomorrow will be fine. It is a ration.
Gathered in order of date. They are not all friends of one another, and two of them are here precisely because this desk does not follow them. What is striking is how far the agreement runs: a desert monk, a Byzantine bishop, a North African rhetorician, a Genevan reformer, an Oxford Methodist and a German pastor in a banned seminary all arrive at the same distinction, and it is the distinction the fifth question below needs.
Evagrius Ponticus · d. 399 · the Egyptian desert
“Just as it is possible to think of water both while thirsty and while not thirsty, so it is possible to think of gold with greed and without greed. The same applies to other things.”On Discrimination · The Philokalia, trans. Palmer, Sherrard & Ware, vol. 1, p. 40
The oldest and the most surgical statement of the whole problem. Evagrius, who renounced everything and taught others to, is nevertheless clear that the object is not the sin and the thought of the object is not the sin. Gold can be thought about with greed or without it. The passion is a separable thing, and it is the passion that is treated. He is also merciless about how the passion disguises itself: the demon of avarice, he says, when frustrated by strict renunciation, “immediately pretends to be a steward and a lover of the poor.”
John Chrysostom · c. 349–407 · Antioch & Constantinople
“In fact, the labor lies, not in taking no thought, but in taking thought for these things. And as in saying, they sow not, it was not the sowing that He did away with, but the anxious thought; so in saying, they toil not, neither do they spin, He put an end not to the work, but to the care.”Homily XXII on Matthew · NPNF, first series, vol. 10
“Tell me not of them that are rich, but of them that serve riches. Since Job also was rich, but he served not mammon, but possessed it and ruled over it, and was a master, not a slave.”Homily XXI on Matthew · NPNF, first series, vol. 10
Chrysostom is the fiercest preacher against wealth in the patristic canon — he was exiled twice, partly for it — which is what makes these two sentences load-bearing. Even he will not say that work, provision or property are what Jesus forbids. He isolates the target with a precision no modern translation has improved on: not the work, but the care. And on mammon he refuses the easy line: the question is never the size of the estate but the direction of the ownership.
Augustine of Hippo · 354–430 · On the Sermon on the Mount, Book II
“Hence we ought to take the eye here in the sense of the intent itself, wherewith we do whatever we are doing… It is not, therefore, what one does, but the intent with which he does it, that is to be considered.”Book II, ch. 13, §§45–46 · NPNF, first series, vol. 6
“For in using that word first, He has indicated that this is to be sought later, not in point of time, but in point of importance: the one as being our good, the other as being something necessary for us; but the necessary on account of that good.”Book II, ch. 16, §53
“For neither ought we, for example, to preach the gospel with this object, that we may eat; but to eat with this object, that we may preach the gospel.”Book II, ch. 16, §54
Augustine supplies the grammar the rest of the tradition uses. He distinguishes a good, which is sought for its own sake and is the end of everything else, from a necessary, which is used for the sake of the good. Food is not demoted to unimportance; it is relocated from end to means. And he is careful to insist that this is an ordering of rank, not a sequence in time — a distinction that dissolves most of the practical difficulty people have with verse 33.
John Calvin · 1509–1564 · Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists
“When he forbids them to be anxious, this is not to be taken literally, as if he intended to take away from his people all care. We know that men are born on the condition of having some care.”On Matthew 6:25 · trans. William Pringle
“Each of us ought to labor, as far as his calling requires and the Lord commands… Such anxiety holds an intermediate place between indolent carelessness and the unnecessary torments by which unbelievers kill themselves. But if we give proper attention to the words of Christ, we shall find, that he does not forbid every kind of care, but only what arises from distrust.”On Matthew 6:25
Calvin arrives at Chrysostom’s conclusion from the opposite end of Christendom and eleven centuries later, and he adds the useful middle term: there is a legitimate care that sits between laziness and torment, sized by one’s calling. His criterion is the cleanest anyone has offered — the care Jesus forbids is the care that arises from distrust — because it is a test you can actually apply to yourself.
John Wesley · 1703–1791 · Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament
“And what the eye is to the body, the intention is to the soul. We may observe with what exact propriety our Lord places purity of intention between worldly desires and worldly cares, either of which directly tend to destroy.”Note on Matthew 6:22 · 1754
“Mammon — Riches, money; any thing loved or sought, without reference to God.”Note on Matthew 6:24
“Singly aim at this, that God, reigning in your heart, may fill it with the righteousness above described. And indeed whosoever seeks this first, will soon come to seek this only.”Note on Matthew 6:33
Wesley notices the architecture: the eye sits between desires and cares because it governs both, and the two paragraphs on either side of it are one argument. His definition of mammon is the widest in the tradition and the one that makes this passage bite outside the domain of money — any thing loved or sought, without reference to God. On verse 33 he says the thing that sounds like a paradox and is not.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1906–1945 · The Cost of Discipleship, ch. 17
“Jesus does not forbid the possession of property in itself. He was man, he ate and drank like his disciples, and thereby sanctified the good things of life… Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected.”“The Simplicity of the Carefree Life” · trans. R. H. Fuller
“But Jesus knows that the heart of man hankers after a treasure, and so it is his will that he should have one.”ibid., with his footnote: Jesus “does not deprive the human heart of its instinctive needs—treasure, glory and praise. But he gives it higher objects.”
“It is not care that frees the disciples from care, but their faith in Jesus Christ.”ibid.
Bonhoeffer wrote this at Finkenwalde, in a seminary the state would shortly close, and it reads like it. Two of his moves are found nowhere else with this force. First, that the desire for treasure is not to be extinguished but redirected — Jesus wills that you have a treasure. Second, the pastoral reversal: run verse 21 backwards and it becomes a diagnostic, since whatever stands between you and obedience is, by definition, where your heart already is.
— and where Bonhoeffer breaks with all of them
“Only God can take care, for it is he who rules the world. Since we cannot take care, since we are so completely powerless, we ought not to do it either. If we do, we are dethroning God and presuming to rule the world ourselves.”The Cost of Discipleship, ch. 17
This is a genuinely harder line than Chrysostom’s “not the work, but the care” or Calvin’s “only what arises from distrust.” Bonhoeffer is not distinguishing anxious care from prudent care; he is arguing from human powerlessness that taking care of the future at all usurps God. He softens it a page later — “it is man’s bounden duty to work,” he quotes from Luther — but the sentence stands, and it is the tradition’s most serious internal disagreement about this passage. This page does not harmonise it away.
Thomas Merton · 1915–1968 · Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.”Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966
Merton is not commenting on Matthew 6 here, and it would be dishonest to pretend he is. But he supplies the translation of μεριμνάω into a life where nobody is short of bread. The divided mind Jesus forbids does not present itself to us as fear of starving; it presents itself as too many good projects, and it wears the costume of responsibility. Merton names that as a kind of violence done to oneself — and violence, unlike prudence, is not a thing one is permitted to keep on the grounds that it gets results.
Dallas Willard · 1935–2013 · The Divine Conspiracy
“God’s own ‘kingdom,’ or ‘rule,’ is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done.”The Divine Conspiracy, 1998
The most useful modern definition, because it is not abstract. A kingdom is a range — a territory over which a will is actually effective. That makes “seek first the kingdom” a spatial instruction rather than a devotional mood: find the places where God’s will is in fact being done, and get inside them; and let the range extend into the parts of your life it does not yet cover. It is also the reading that connects verse 33 back to the Lord’s Prayer twenty-three verses earlier, where “thy kingdom come” is immediately restated as “thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”
The critical commentators · twentieth & twenty-first century
Summarised, not quoted. Leon Morris presses δουλεύειν as slavery rather than employment and reads the impossibility of 6:24 as psychological rather than legal; he also floats the possibility that 6:27 is deliberate comic exaggeration. David Hill observes that the slave image was chosen because labourers commonly did have more than one employer. R. T. France and Harold Fowler both hold that the double sense of ἁπλοῦς — single-minded and open-handed — is intentional. Alfred Plummer argued against “stature” at 6:27 on the grounds that a cubit of extra height is nobody’s wish; Ulrich Luz raises an allusion to the tradition of Adam’s pre-fall size; John Nolland reads the cubit as approximately one pace, so that worry cannot advance you a single step. None of these readings changes the sense of the paragraph, and the fact that they do not is itself a datum.
A reading this page does not accept · the prosperity teaching
In the Word of Faith stream, verse 33 is read as a mechanism: seek the kingdom — understood as giving money into a ministry — and “all these things” arrives as return, often quantified from the hundredfold of Mark 10:30. Gloria and Kenneth Copeland are among the doctrine’s best-known exponents, and the Lausanne Movement’s critique identifies the hundredfold teaching as a distortion of a promise Christ made to those who had left everything.
The exegetical objections are three, and they are all inside this passage. First, the antecedent of ταῦτα πάντα in verse 33 is fixed by verse 31: food, drink and clothing — subsistence, not surplus. Second, προστεθήσεται is an addition to a principal, and Chrysostom already made the point that this is precisely the word chosen to stop anyone treating the necessities as the gift. Third, and decisively, the sentence is the conclusion of a paragraph that begins by forbidding the storing of treasure on earth. A reading that turns verse 33 into an investment instrument has to make verse 19 mean its opposite fourteen verses earlier.
These are the questions this study was built to answer. They are answered here rather than left open, because they are answerable — the text is more specific than its reputation. Where the text genuinely underdetermines a question, that is said instead of covered over, and what remains unsettled is gathered at the end.
I
Does Jesus mean don’t worry about our material well-being only — where our resources come from?
Answer · That is the stated subject; it is not the whole principle
The passage names its own subject, and it names it four times without variation: food, drink, clothing (25, 26, 28, 31), preceded by the storable wealth of 19–24. That is a subsistence list. It is not a list about comfort or lifestyle; it is the list a first-century Galilean day-labourer would recite if you asked what could go wrong. The question Jesus is answering is literally where the next meal comes from.
So yes — the explicit target is material provision, and specifically the fear that the supply will fail. And notice that the argument he mounts against it is not economic. He does not say the risk is low, or that you have savings, or that it usually works out. He says something about who is upstream of the supply: οἶδεν…ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος ὅτι χρῄζετε τούτων ἁπάντων — your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. The cure for anxiety about resources is a fact about the Father, not a fact about the resources.
But the principle is wider than its stated subject, and the passage says so itself. Verse 24 does not name money as the rival; it names a rival lordship, and merely uses money as the instance. Whatever functions as κύριος is inside the sentence. This is why the tradition has always read it more broadly than economics.
The tradition reads the principle wide
“Mammon — Riches, money; any thing loved or sought, without reference to God.”Wesley · Note on Matthew 6:24
“Everything which hinders us from loving God above all things and acts as a barrier between ourselves and our obedience to Jesus is our treasure, and the place where our heart is.”Bonhoeffer · The Cost of Discipleship, ch. 17
The honest summary is two-part. Where the passage speaks directly, it speaks about material provision. Anything else — reputation, health, the future of a career, a body — comes under it by extension, not by explicit statement. The extension is legitimate, because verse 24 is framed in terms of lordship and verse 21 in terms of the heart; but it should be made knowingly, and not smuggled in as though Jesus had said it.
II
Does he mean don’t worry about dieting or exercise?
Answer · Not directly — but the principle reaches them exactly
Directly, no. The anxieties Jesus names are the anxieties of scarcity: will there be food at all, will there be a garment at all. Dieting and exercise are anxieties of surplus. They are not on the horizon of the text, and to claim they are is to make the passage say what it does not.
But the principle does reach them, and it reaches them by a shorter route than most extensions do — because they are the same domain. Jesus’ subject is food and the body. Verse 25 states the two terms explicitly: ἡ ψυχὴ πλεῖόν ἐστι τῆς τροφῆς καὶ τὸ σῶμα τοῦ ἐνδύματος — the life is more than the food, the body more than the clothing. A modern anxiety about macros and training is an anxiety about food and the body. The commodity is the same; only the direction of the fear has reversed, from too little to not the right kind.
And one verse is aimed precisely here. Verse 27 is the only verse in the passage that names the body as such: which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his ἡλικία? Whether that means height or lifespan — the commentators have never settled it — the assertion is the same on either reading, and it is an assertion about the exact thing a fitness anxiety is about: worry cannot add to your body. Not an inch, not a day, not a step. Effort might. Worry cannot.
The test the passage gives is behavioural, not topical. Verse 31 does not describe a subject; it describes a voice: “don’t be anxious, saying, What will we eat? What will we drink? With what will we be clothed?” The mark of what Jesus forbids is that interrogative loop. If the missed workout or the bad week produces that sentence in the same key — the tightening, the running of scenarios, the day coloured by it — then whatever the subject matter, you are inside verse 31. If it produces a plan and then quiet, you are not.
III
Is dieting and exercise bad, or only worrying about it?
Answer · Only the worry — and on this the tradition is nearly unanimous
Only the worry. This is the one place where the whole commentary tradition, across parties that agree on almost nothing else, converges on a single sentence: the forbidden thing is the anxiety, not the activity. It is worth seeing how many independent witnesses say it.
Four traditions, one distinction
“In saying, they toil not, neither do they spin, He put an end not to the work, but to the care.”Chrysostom · Homily XXII on Matthew · Greek East, 4th c.
“He does not forbid every kind of care, but only what arises from distrust.”Calvin · on Matthew 6:25 · Reformed, 16th c.
“It is possible to think of gold with greed and without greed.”Evagrius · On Discrimination · Egyptian desert, 4th c.
“Jesus does not forbid the possession of property in itself… Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected.”Bonhoeffer · The Cost of Discipleship · Lutheran, 20th c.
The lexical evidence agrees with them. μεριμνάω is not the Greek for plan, provide, save, train or work; those words exist and Jesus does not use any of them. He uses the word for a mind pulled into pieces. Paul can use the same verb approvingly of the pressure of caring for churches (2 Corinthians 11:28) and of a wife’s care for her husband (1 Corinthians 7:34), which settles that the word is not intrinsically sinful. What makes it sinful here is what it is joined to: little faith (30) and the Gentiles (32).
And Scripture elsewhere positively commands the very activities in question. The sluggard is sent to the ant, which “provideth her meat in the summer” (Proverbs 6:6–8) — forethought about food, commended. “If any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). “If any provide not for his own…he hath denied the faith” (1 Timothy 5:8) — the strongest statement in the New Testament, and it is a command to provide. On the body specifically: “glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:20); and Paul, describing his own practice, takes his metaphor from the gymnasium and means it — “every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things…I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection” (1 Corinthians 9:25–27). Deliberate training of the body is the image the apostle chose for his own discipleship.
A caution about the verse people reach for
1 Timothy 4:8 is usually produced at this point, in the King James wording: “bodily exercise profiteth little.” Two things are wrong with using it that way.
The Greek is ἡ…σωματικὴ γυμνασία πρὸς ὀλίγον ἐστὶν ὠφέλιμος, and πρὸς ὀλίγον can mean either for a little while or for a little benefit. It is a statement of limited value, not of worthlessness — which is why the ASV reads “profitable for a little” and the WEB “has some value.” The KJV’s “profiteth little” is the outlier and is the only rendering that sounds dismissive.
And the context is not fitness. The letter has just been warning against teachers “commanding to abstain from meats” (4:3). γυμνασία here is the bodily austerity of ascetics — fasting, self-denial, physical mortification — and Paul’s point is that it ranks below godliness, not that the body should be neglected. The verse subordinates bodily discipline. It does not disparage it.
So where is the line? Every witness above draws it in the same place, and it is not a line about quantity. It is a line about rule. Chrysostom’s test is possession versus servitude: Job was rich, “but he served not mammon, but possessed it and ruled over it, and was a master, not a slave.” Calvin’s is the source of the care: does it arise from calling, or from distrust? Augustine’s is the direction of the intention — the single eye. Applied here the question is not do you diet, do you train, how much. It is: when the regimen and the kingdom conflict, which one gives way? A discipline you can suspend for a neighbour, a sabbath, or a table with friends is a servant. One you cannot is a κύριος, and verse 24 has already told you that you now have two.
One dissent should stay visible. Bonhoeffer will not settle for this, and argues from human powerlessness that taking thought for the future at all is a usurpation of God’s office. The desert tradition materially renounced rather than merely reordered. If the consensus above is used to make the passage comfortable, those witnesses are the evidence that it was never meant to be.
IV
What are the things of Heaven and the Kingdom?
Answer · Not a location — a kind of security, and a rule actually in force
Take the two phrases separately, because the passage does.
“Treasure in heaven” is defined in the text by what cannot reach it. Verse 20 is a list of absences: no moth, no devouring, no digging through. The contrast Jesus draws is not spiritual against material — it is perishable against imperishable. He does not say earthly treasure is unreal or wicked; he says it is eaten. Heaven is named as the one storehouse with no pests and no walls to dig through. Augustine, characteristically, presses further and warns against imagining a physical vault: “we would not understand heaven in this passage as anything corporeal.”
How anything gets there, the parallel says out loud. Luke’s version of the saying supplies the mechanism Matthew leaves implicit: “Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not” (Luke 12:33). The transfer is almsgiving. And Matthew has already said the same thing eighteen verses earlier, in the paragraph on giving in secret to a Father who “seeth in secret” (6:1–4). Treasure in heaven is not a metaphor for having good intentions; in both Gospels it is what happens to money that is given away.
“The kingdom” Matthew defines inside the same sermon, and does it in the prayer twenty-three verses before this one. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (6:10) — the second line is not a new petition but the first line restated in the manner of Hebrew parallelism. The kingdom coming is the will being done. The same equation closes the sermon: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father” (7:21).
The kingdom as a range, not a realm
“God’s own ‘kingdom,’ or ‘rule,’ is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done.”Dallas Willard · The Divine Conspiracy
“And his righteousness” is the phrase most often skipped, and it is the one that makes the command concrete. δικαιοσύνη in Matthew is not a status conferred; it is conduct. It is the word for what the whole sermon has been describing since 5:20 — the anger, the lust, the oath-keeping, the enemy-love, the giving and praying and fasting done unseen. And here the manuscript question earns its keep. On the reading of Sinaiticus at 6:33 — τὴν βασιλείαν καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ — a single “his” governs both nouns: his kingdom and his righteousness, God’s rule and God’s rightness, one object named twice. Vaticanus puts the righteousness first, and Metzger’s guess about why is worth carrying: that a scribe wanted to say the rightness is how one enters the rule. Whether or not he was right about the motive, that is a fair reading of the sentence as it stands.
Bonhoeffer, refusing to let the phrase float
“The kingdom of God and his righteousness are sharply distinguished from the gifts of the world which come our way. That kingdom is none other than the righteousness of Matt. 5 and 6, the righteousness of the cross and of following Christ beneath that cross.”The Cost of Discipleship, ch. 17
So: the things of heaven are not a separate inventory of religious objects. They are God’s rule actually taking effect, and the life described in Matthew 5–7 actually being lived — with the money given away as the one form of earthly treasure the text says survives the journey.
V
If the kingdom is doing God’s will, and the work of God per John is believing in Jesus, what else is there to focus on?
Answer · Nothing else competes — and therefore everything else returns, reordered
The two verses are doing different jobs, and the argument only bites if they are collapsed. In John 6, the crowd asks a plural question — “What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?” — expecting an inventory. Jesus answers with a singular: “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent” (6:28–29). He is not abolishing the list; he is naming the root from which any item on it could grow. The same Gospel then issues a great many further imperatives to people who already believe — a new commandment, that ye love one another (13:34); feed my sheep (21:15–17). If believing had exhausted the subject, those chapters would be unnecessary.
Matthew, meanwhile, is emphatic in the opposite direction. He ends this very sermon by refusing to let profession stand in for the kingdom: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord…but he that doeth the will of my Father” (7:21). So the syllogism — kingdom = God’s will, God’s work = believing, therefore nothing else — is one Matthew has pre-emptively closed off. Believing that does not become doing is exactly what 7:21 declines to count.
What the passage actually gives is not subtraction but reordering, and Augustine states the mechanics better than anyone since.
First in rank, not first in time
“For in using that word first, He has indicated that this is to be sought later, not in point of time, but in point of importance: the one as being our good, the other as being something necessary for us; but the necessary on account of that good.”Augustine · On the Sermon on the Mount II.16.53
“For neither ought we, for example, to preach the gospel with this object, that we may eat; but to eat with this object, that we may preach the gospel.”ibid., II.16.54
Read that carefully, because it answers the question as asked. Nothing is removed from the day. The eating stays. What changes is which one is for the other. There is no interval in which you have finished seeking the kingdom and may now attend to lunch; and equally, lunch does not become a rival, because it has been demoted from end to means. Augustine’s phrase for it is exact: the necessary on account of the good.
And this is why the answer to “what else is there to focus on” is, in the passage’s own terms, everything — held differently. Verse 32 is decisive here and is almost always misread. It says the Gentiles seek after food, drink and clothing, and then, in the same breath, that your Father knows you need all these things. The needs are not denied and the objects are not forbidden. What separates the disciple from the Gentile is not a different shopping list. It is rank and trust.
Concretely, the will of God that the kingdom consists in already contains most of what one would otherwise call “other things.” It contains providing for a household (1 Timothy 5:8), working rather than idling (2 Thessalonians 3:10), the hungry fed and the sick visited (Matthew 25:35–36), the neighbour loved as oneself (Matthew 22:39). None of those is a distraction from seeking the kingdom; they are what seeking it looks like on a Tuesday. Wesley’s line reads as a paradox until this is seen, and then it is simply a description: “whosoever seeks this first, will soon come to seek this only.”
The one thing the passage will not license is the use of “only the kingdom matters” as a permission slip. Matthew 6 does not release anyone from providing. It releases them from μεριμνάω while providing — which is a harder and more specific freedom, and the only one on offer.
✧
What the Text Does Not Settle
Four things, named so that the answers above are not read as more than they are.
Where prudence ends and anxiety begins. Every witness on this page draws the line, and none of them locates it. Calvin comes nearest with “what arises from distrust,” and even that is a test you can only run on yourself, from the inside, honestly. The passage gives a criterion and withholds a threshold. That is probably deliberate; a threshold would immediately become a new law to keep.
Whether property is to be reordered or renounced. Chrysostom, Calvin, Wesley and Bonhoeffer all say Jesus does not forbid possession. Luke’s parallel says “sell that ye have” (12:33), the desert fathers did, and Bonhoeffer — who wrote that Jesus does not forbid property — also wrote that we ought not to take care at all. The consensus is real and it is not the whole record.
Whether ἁπλοῦς means single-minded or generous, and whether ἡλικία means stature or lifespan. Both are genuinely open; on the second, the sense of the paragraph is unaffected, which is why nothing above rests on it.
What this asks of someone with nothing. Bonhoeffer put the difficulty most sharply and did not resolve it: “Be not anxious for the morrow” is either cruel mockery addressed to people who will actually starve, or it is the gospel — and it cannot be a mild middle thing. This page is written from a desk with food in the house, and that fact should be visible in how confidently it reads a text first spoken to people without one.
❧
The Passage Read · The Questions Answered
Where the tradition divides, the division is shown rather than resolved.
Texts, translations and method
Greek. The SBL Greek New Testament (Michael W. Holmes, ed.), freely available and used here in preference to NA28, which is in copyright. It was checked against a second printed witness of Matthew 6 and the two agree word for word across these sixteen verses. Where the manuscripts differ — at 6:21 (σου / ὑμῶν), 6:25 (the presence of ἢ τί πίητε) and 6:33 (the presence of τοῦ θεοῦ, and the transposition in Vaticanus) — the difference is reported on the page and not decided.
English. The World English Bible, public domain, set facing the Greek. Other renderings quoted in the analysis — KJV 1611, ASV 1901, Geneva 1560 — are quoted only where the difference between them is the point. Every English verse on this page was taken from a machine-readable text of that version, not from memory.
Quotation and summary. Everything inside quotation marks is verbatim from the source named. Chrysostom and Augustine are quoted from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translations; Calvin from William Pringle’s; Wesley from his own 1754 Explanatory Notes; Bonhoeffer from R. H. Fuller’s translation of Nachfolge; Evagrius from the Palmer–Sherrard–Ware Philokalia; Merton from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (page numbers vary between editions and none is given); Willard from The Divine Conspiracy. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical commentators are summarised, not quoted, and are marked as such where they appear.
Rubric red. Following the convention of this site, the words of Jesus are set in vermillion. On this page that is the entire Greek text, which is why the Greek appears in red and the English does not.
No verdict is claimed beyond the five questions. Those are answered, with the reasoning shown, because they were asked. The wider disputes this passage sits inside — wealth and the Christian, the relation of faith to works, what Matthew means by righteousness — are not settled here, and the places where the witnesses genuinely disagree are printed as disagreements.