Christ Threatens Us Not With Hell, but with Being Baked into Bread

Mat 6:30 Therefore, if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is cast into the oven, [shall he] not much more [clothe] you, O ye of little faith?

Here, Christ continues his contrast of the physical and the spiritual. The relevant phrase describes the grass of the field as today (semeron--same word use for "give us this day" in the Lord's Prayer) existing (on) and tomorrow destroyed. In other words, the physical world is changing from one thing to another, which is how Christ describes both the physical and spiritual world.

This transition is more clear in the Greek, in which the term translated as "grasses" is chortos, which means "an enclosed place" with the sense of a feed lot. Christ is using this idea of a feedlot as a metaphor for the temporal physical world. However, chortos means even more. It means food as well, specifically the raw material of Christ's most important food, bread.

There is also a specific connection in Greek between this throwing of chortos in an oven and making bread. Bread is Christ's first symbol for physical life (appearing in his first temptation). Another meaning of chortos is grain or feed. The oven it is being put into is specifically a klibanos (clibanos), which is Greek for a small, clay oven used for baking bread. In a klibanos, the fire is on the outside, but the bread is on the inside. So when Christ says that the chortos is thrown inside, he is describing it being baked, not burned up in a fire. So the metaphor here is not people being thrown into hell, as this phrase is often portrayed, but the baking of bread in an oven.

The original Greek says nothing about clothing people better than plants, which you might buess from the brackets we inserted above, but which are often left out. The original phrase is ou (not) polus (much) mallon (more) humas (you) and it isn't referring just to the clothing. It refers to the entire phrase, and even more closely, to the baking as well. Christ is saying that God is clothing us while we are here today AND preparing us to be baked into something different. This is also the process he describes in the Beatitudes, which began this sermon. When he describes his listeners as oligopistos, trusting too little, he is echoing the first blessed group in the Beatitudes, the ptochos pneuma, those lacking faith.