“Be not anxious”
What is Jesus saying here? Simply this. He wants us to look at the world with new eyes. Look at the sequence of strong verbs here: behold, consider and seek. “Behold, the fowls of the air”. “Consider the lilies of the field”. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”.
It makes all the difference for us in our lives. To behold what he wants us to behold, to consider what he wants us to consider, to seek what he wants us to seek counters the paralysis of our fears, the terror of our anxieties and most importantly, perhaps, our anxiety about our anxieties.
Jesus says “be not anxious” more than once in this gospel. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is “the Martha Syndrome” as diagnosed elsewhere by Jesus. “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). We all have our fears and our worries, our troubles and our concerns, our heart-aches and our despairs. And we can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them. What are we anxious about? What are our anxieties? Quite simply, they are our cares, the things which, quite literally, occupy our thoughts.
Our anxieties are the cares which choke and oppress us, the cares which give us great anguish of soul. Our problem, it seems, and the cause of our anxiety is that we are often too careful, meaning that we are too full of cares about the wrong things and/or in the wrong way. The cares of this world beset us but Jesus would have us view the world and its cares in a new way.
But what is that new way? Is it simply this threefold “be not anxious” which Jesus keeps saying as if it were some sort of magical mantra? Is Jesus saying, in effect, “Don’t worry, be happy!” In short; is the antidote to our being “full of cares” simply to be careless? Does “be not careful,” as the 16th century Prayer Books accurately put it, really mean be careless? No.
“Teach us to care and not to care,” as T.S. Eliot put it. It is really a matter of how we deal with the multitude of cares and worries that belong to our world and day. There are anxious-making things, to be sure.
There are all of our anxieties about the deeply disturbing and perplexing affairs of the larger world, a world of wars and woes, a world of folly and destruction, from the threats of burning the Qu’ran to the fears about an Iranian woman being stoned to death for alleged adultery. We confront a host of things that confuse and confound us, in part, because we are not looking at things in the right way. I think this is what Jesus is getting at in this powerful gospel story. He is recalling us to the nature of his providential care for us, a care which does not mean that there will suddenly be no more troubling things in our world and day. What it means is another way of looking at ourselves and these things. In Christ we can look at the spectacle of the world’s folly and destruction and not be stressed out and destroyed by what we see.
Stress is our contemporary word for our anxieties and already points to a shift in understanding. It is not what we are anxious about so much as how we cope with such things. But, regardless, there are “a multitude of things” about which we are anxious and, hence, “stressed out”. What is the antidote? It is here in what Jesus says. “Behold”, “consider”, “seek” are the strong words that are all woven around Jesus’ repeated exhortation,“be not anxious”.
The antidote is a new way of looking at the world. These strong words are all verbs of perception and desire. They signal a new way of looking at the world. What? Birds and flowers? Are we to go out bird watching and picking Michaelmas daisies? Well, yes, perhaps, but the point is wonderfully captured in the third strong word, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” which illumines for us what is being said in the other two. Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is discerned in these little things. We are to see in the birds and the flowers the care of the heavenly Father for every living thing and, by extension, his care for us. We are to see in the natural world the Father’s glory as providential care.
The recollection of God’s providence is the strong answer to our anxieties. Why? Because it reminds us that God’s care and purpose for us and his world override our immediate concerns and cares. In our anxieties we forget that this is God’s world. We find our place in his world and not the other way around. It means to look at the world sacramentally, the world as “charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, puts it, despite the way we have trampled over it, the world as “seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil,” a world weary of our anxieties, a bent world.
“O ye of little faith”, Jesus says. You see, that is the issue. It is all about how we see the world. God’s world or our world? Behold, consider and seek are the strong verbs which speak about ourselves as spiritual creatures who see God’s will and purpose in the world and, ultimately, see the world in God. This counters our predilections and preoccupations with manipulation and control, on the one hand, and our indifference and indolence, on the other hand. Either way we do not see the world as the cloak of God’s glory and as existing for his praise.
What is wanted then is a new way of looking at the world. It means not care-less–ness but a childlike care-free-ness born out of a trust in God’s providence. He wants something more and better for us. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” Hopkins suggests, “because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings!”
“Be not anxious”
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity XV, 2010, 8:00am