Of Birds, Angels, and People

Mat 6:26 Behold the birds of the air: they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they?

When I first looked at this verse, I thought that I would learn little from looking at the Greek. It seems so straight-forward. However, as always, Christ surprised me. Hardly a single word here as used in Greek is what it seems in English. When I encounter phases like this, I am in awe of what the English leaves out and frightened by how much I have to learn.

First, the Greek word used for "birds" is not the word for "birds." It is peteinon, which means "the ability to fly." It also means "fully fledged" referring to young birds that are ready to take wing. It is combined here with ouranos, heaven, to make up the literal phrase, "the ability of heavenly flight." A good translation of the first phrase would be "Look at the ability of heavenly flight." Is Christ refering to birds? Yes, but as always, he is saying much more than that. He takes a spiritual ability, the ability to move through heaven, and changes it into a physical metaphor, the ability to move through the air.

We then have a list of activities that birds and heavenly angels do not or cannot do. The term used for "sow" is speiro, which means "to sow," and "to beget offspring." The term for "reap" is therizo, which means "to do summer work." It infers mowing and reaping, but it is also used as a metaphor for "to cut off." The term for "gather" is sunago, which means "to unite" or "bring together," and it is used primarily for assembling people or groups of animals. It also means leading others. And finally, the term used for "barns" is apotheke, which is any place things are preserved including a burial ground or refuge. My head spins at all the ways these terms could be put together in meaningful ways referring to the those with the ability of heavenly flight. Taking the phrase a very different direction, we could translate it as "Look at the ability of flying through heaven: it doesn't beget offspring, perform summer work, or gather into graveyards." In this version, it offers a clear contrast between the spiritual and physical.

The contrast between the physical meaning (birds dont sow, reap, or gather) and the spiritual sense (angels don't beget, work, or socialize) is consistent with the theme here. This section of Christ's sermon is contrasts the physical and the spiritual. Here we have a very straightforward statement about the physical world which parses into an very interesting statement about the spiritual world. While Christ spoke in Aramaic, it is amazing that those who translated his words into Greek chose words so full of meaning. It seems miraculous at times I least expect it. I could be imagining these shades of meaning but I don't think so. They arise when I least expect them.

The word used to describe the way God feeds the birds also has several levels of meaning. The word is trepho, which doesn't mean "to feed" at all. It means "to cause to grow or increase," "to rear," "to bring up." It is used both as a term of caring for children, animals, and slaves. In includes the idea of nurturing, maintaining, and supporting dependents.

Again, why is this term chosen instead of a simple term for feeding animals? Because feeding the birds is just one small aspect of keeping and caring for them. Angels with the ability to fly through heaven do not eat, but they grow, increase, and are nourished.

We come at last to the final phrase, "Are not you much better than they?" In my NIV Bible this is translated as "Are you not more valuable than they?" When I was reading this phrase last night, I thought the word "valuable" might be the only interesting term in this whole verse. Needless to say, it doesn't mean either of these things at all.

The word is diaphero, which means "to carry across" or "to carry in different ways," or (most interesting) "to differ." Like almost all the terms in this verse, it is a very common word. It only means "better," the way it is translated in the Gospel, through a real stretch. We might say in English, "That man knows how to carry himself." The word diaphero can mean "excel" in the a sense, but the common meaning for "carry" or diaphero isn't being better or more valuable.

However, diaphero's "to carry across" sense does mean "to go through life" and to "bear through to the end." So when combined with the term for "much" (mallon, "to a greater degree), we get the sense that Christ is saying that we go through life and bear to the end to a greater degree than birds do. However, the meaning doesn't infer on some internal superiority, but rather to our greater physical journey through life, especially in the sense of the burdens that we carry. In a physical sense, Christ is saying that we bear across, in our journey of life, much more than birds do.

However, diaphero also means "to differ," both in the sense of being different from something and in the sense of arguing with someone. So because of the word chosen, the translation "are you not much better than they?" is not as good as "are you not much different from them?" The second version contrasts the purely physical (birds), the purely spiritual (angels), and humans who combine the two and invented human society.