by CCW | 8 September 2013 15:00
I have to admit, nothing makes me more anxious than this text! And not just because it falls this year at that time when we are getting back to our regular patterns and routines, to the beginning again of our various programmes with all of the anxieties and worries, the busyness and the annoyances, too, that attend such things. Why, then, the anxiety about not being anxious? Because it is so easily said and yet so greatly misunderstood. To be sure, we are rightly exhorted not to be anxious not just once but actually three times. To be sure, we are given powerful illustrations and reasons not to be anxious. “Behold”, “consider”, “seek” – these are the strong verbs which counter explicitly and wonderfully all our anxieties. They recall us to the great doctrine of the Providence of God. And yet, what makes me anxious, year after year, is how we fail to get this central teaching, the deep doctrine, the critical understanding, that is, in fact, the only true and real counter to the anxieties and the cares, the fears and the worries of each and every age.
That central teaching is further illustrated, I think, both in the Epistle reading and in the Gospel by way of other texts. “God forbid that I should glory,” St Paul tells us, “save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He goes on to say, that “neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.” That is the key phrase, a new creation. Something has changed; the old has become new. There is a new creation. Such is the radical meaning of human redemption. It is entirely about a new creation. We are a new creation in Christ. We forget this at our peril. And in the Gospel? Well, just ponder the weight and meaning of the final coda: “Be ye not anxious about the morrow; for the morrow shall take care for itself: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Wow! Just consider. The evils of the day are undeniable but ultimately not worth worrying about! This is amazing. Radical and astounding. And profoundly true. We are more than our actions and more than just the things that happen to us, the evil of the day notwithstanding. Our fears and worries need not define us.
The whole point of the Christian Faith is often concentrated for us in the wonderful readings of the Trinity season. This is one of those occasion where that is especially so. The Christian Faith offers us precisely the reality of a new creation. It is found in Christ, in the cross of Christ to be more exact, in the sacrifice of Christ, to be even more precise, and in the way in which Christ’s life is given to us to be lived out through us. Be not anxious is about nothing more than our wanting Christ’s life to live in us. It is about nothing less than the triumph of God’s Providence written out for us to read in Jesus Christ. It is about the radical meaning of the cross of Christ in our lives, our lives as a “living sacrifice,” to put in the paradoxical terms of the liturgy.
I have to be direct and to the point. Simple exhortations not to be anxious, like the mantra and song, “don’t worry, be happy,” are all just so much stuff and nonsense without our thinking about the radical nature of the goodness of God, the counter to all our pathetic fatalisms and dire doomsday predictions, the counter to the evil of each and every day. The Providence of God is the testament to the absolute goodness of God, a goodness which cannot be collapsed into the petty concerns of our world and day. The great paradox is that it is the wonder of the transcendent God that alone counters the preoccupations of our anxieties which is about how we are divided in our affections and so become anxious about a great myriad of things because we have lost our center in God. To contemplate the wonder of God is the only counter to our preoccupations and anxieties. For all such things are, after all, all about ourselves and not about God, and therein lies our problem.
Perhaps, then, we need this text in its simple imperative. “Be not anxious!” It leads us to contemplate the greater goodness of God which is, by definition, far greater than the evil which is sufficient unto the day, but of no lasting consequence or meaning. The new creation is about the marks of Christ’s sacrifice in us, the sign and symbol of the ultimate triumph of good over evil, of the good that is greater than all and every evil. In him we have no reason to be anxious and every reason to be of good cheer.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XV, 2013
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