The Gospel According to Matthew – 2017.02.26
The Path to God
Jesus
said to his disciples: ‘No one can be the slave of two masters: he will either
hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second
with scorn. You cannot be the slave both of God and of money.
‘That is why I am telling you not to worry
about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to
clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing!
Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet
your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are? Can
any of you, for all his worrying, add one single cubit to his span of life? And
why worry about clothing? Think of the flowers growing in the fields; they
never have to work or spin; yet I assure you that not even Solomon in all his
regalia was robed like one of these. Now if that is how God clothes the grass
in the field which is there today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, will he
not much more look after you, you men of little faith? So do not worry; do not
say, “What are we to eat? What are we to drink? How are we to be clothed?” It
is the pagans who set their hearts on all these things. Your heavenly Father
knows you need them all. Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on his
righteousness, and all these other things will be given you as well. So do not
worry about tomorrow: tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough
trouble of its own.’
Faith is Trust
It
is a bold prescription for living. It is contrary to everything society, our
families, our instincts tell us to do.
We
all struggle with the desire to be fed, clothed comfortably, housed securely,
and to build on those things.
For
most of us, for the vast majority of us, even here in America, in the land of
plenty, it is not enough that we have food for today, we feel the need to store
up food for tomorrow, against the famine and drought that do not come. We store
up dollars against the threat of bankruptcy, of poverty, for a future, either
good or bad, for a future that may never come.
We
do this, I do it to the extent that I can. I do not have much, and so I do not
have a lot, but I have to confess that if I had more, I would hoard more. It is
a difficult instinct to resist.
We
all contend with those instincts, to some degree, they come from a time and a
place when we were gatherers, hunters, before the age of agriculture, walled
cities, and granaries.
The
money and things that we store up do little good sitting in a vault, or a
computer file.
Jesus
is telling us to free those resources so that they can do good. This is the
way, the path back to the garden, through the individual ministries of love,
and sharing, of caring for your neighbor, your brother and sister, the stranger
in your midst, each of whom like, like us, bears the image of God within.
Jesus
calls on us to be faithful. Christian faith is not belief in a certain
proposition about Jesus. Christian faith has nothing to do with what we believe
about Jesus; whether he lived at all, or died on a cross, or was raised on the
third day. Christian faith is to trust, it is to trust in God, to trust that
our needs will be met tomorrow, as they have been today, to share from our
abundance, to ask for help when we are in need.
It
is in the spirit of that faith that we return to the Garden and walk in the way
of God.
8th Sunday of Ordinary
Time
