We just heard in today’s Gospel text a beautiful example of Our Lord’s intimate and compassionate knowledge of our human nature. We heard Him speak about WORRYING –that thing that we can spend so much time and effort doing.
Over these past weeks we’ve heard Our Lord’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount:
Sometimes we hear Our Lord’s words uttered as words of authority, of command;
sometimes we hear Him speak hard words that we know are not easy to follow.
But today, as I said, we hear this same Lord, who was and is both fully God and fully human, we heard Him speak very human words to us:
words about worrying, words that show He knows exactly what we are like.
Most of us have at least some occasions when we worry,
Some of us regularly lie awake at night worrying.
And worrying is an odd thing:
it’s not like planning or decision making when we actually ACHIEVE something,
when we actually become better able to deal with what we must do.
No, worrying does not help us in any way. As Jesus beautifully put it, “Can any of you, for all his worrying, add one single hour to his span of life?”(Mt 6:27)
And yet, we DO worry, and we often spend great energy worrying.
Let me make three points.
First, the Lord points out that we often worry because we’re focussed on the wrong things in life.
He says, very directly, that we focus too much on material things. And so He warns us that “you cannot be the slave of two masters... of both God and of money [mammon]” (Mt 6:24).
And the simple remedy He gives us is that we need to repeatedly remember that, “life means more than food and the body more than clothing”(Mt 6:25).
Second, there is the issue of whether we worry about things with a SELFISH focus, or with a focus that is on OTHER people.
Most of us have probably had moments when we realise that so often when we worry about something we worry about it because of how it will affect ME, not about how it will affect others -that even when we worry about family our worries can be filled with anxiety not for THEIR sake but because of some way in which we fear matters will affect us:
affect our time, our reputation, or something else.
This is one aspect of worry that the Lord calls on us to identify within ourselves and to seek to “let go”, to detach ourselves from our SELFISH attachment, and to attach ourselves instead to GOD:
“see ye first the kingdom of God” (Mt 6:33).
The remedy to this is to be bold enough to seek to (1) love others first, and (2) love God first and foremost, because when we do this our worries often take on a much REDUCED significance.
Third, and finally, there is the issue that our worrying is caused our lack of trust in God. And here the Lord Jesus berated His disciples for being “men of little faith” (Mt 6:30). He pointed out that God cares for the flowers of the field and the birds of the sky, and yet God loves US much more than either of these.
This type of worry can often be rooted in a sort of mistaken attempt to do everything ourselves and by our own power.
The remedy to this is to (1) call on God’s grace, (2) trust in His strength, (3) trust in His plan for our welfare.
“So do not worry about tomorrow”, and as more literal translations put it in a beautiful parody of our own worrying: “tomorrow will worry about itself” (NIV) “tomorrow will be anxious for itself” (RSV),
“Each day has troubles enough of its own”.
Priests are not immune from worry, as I’m sure you’re aware.
Not even popes are immune from worry. As Pope John XXIII supposedly used to pray each night as he pondered the problems in the Church, “It's your Church, not mine, Lord. I'm going to sleep now”.
If we seek to (1) put God’s things first, (2) focus on the eternal values and not the merely material ones, then we should be able to take the good pope’s attitude for ourselves:
it’s His world, His problems, and we can entrust them to Him.
