“Be not anxious”
The strong words of this gospel are large letters written to us by Jesus, as it were. What are the strong words? Behold, consider, seek. Through them we see the world with new eyes even as we bear in our own bodies, as Paul suggests, “the marks of the Lord Jesus”. Large letters to be written in our lives.
Jesus tells us not to be anxious more than once. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is “the Martha Syndrome”: “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. 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.
The first Books of Common Prayer, 1549 and 1552, use the phrase “be not carefull” following Tyndale. The King James Version of the Bible, some sixty years later, uses the phrase “take no thought” to capture the Greek word about how our thoughts are taken captive or occupied, possessed, we might even say, with various concerns. The phrase, “take no thought”, became the version in the Books of Common Prayer from 1662 onwards until 1959, when in Canada the word “anxious” was introduced, a word which has 17th century provenance in English but which has been given a greater weight of interpretation in the 20th and 21st centuries; in part, through the influence of the psychology of Sigmund Freud and, in part, through existential philosophy. Angst r us.
Our anxieties are the cares which choke and oppress us. Our problem, it seems, and the cause of our anxiety is that we are often too careful, quite literally, 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 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 to be careless? No.
And yet, we have our cares and our worries, in short, our anxieties. We have only to look at ourselves.
I don’t think that I need to list the many, many things that we are anxious about in our world today. We live in unsettled and unsettling times. And we have become, I think, a remarkably anxious people, fearful and fretful about “a multitude of things”.
Our anxieties overwhelm us and even destroy us. Stress is our contemporary word which 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”. The threefold “be not anxious” of the gospel, however, is not the antidote to “the Martha Syndrome”, though it offers a necessary check, a moment of pause, a counter-assertion, from which we might then be able to receive the real antidote. What is the real antidote? It is here in the strong words of Jesus, “behold”, “consider”, “seek” all woven around the repeated exhortation “be not anxious”.
These strong words are all verbs of perception and desire. They signal a new way of looking at the world. What? Birds and flowers? Bird watching and picking Michaelmas daisies? Well, 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 all these little things. We are to see in the birds and the flowers the care of the heavenly Father for every living thing and, how much more, then, his care for us. We are to see in the natural world the Father’s glory as providential care. Perhaps, too, in the clear and luminescent air of September, and on the eve of St. Michael and All Angels, we need to see with angels’ sight.
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.
How is this new? In two ways. First, it means that the world is not merely the stage for frightening and terrifying acts of raw, brute nature or for the appearance of divine power as something which frightens and oppresses us. There is a power and a beauty even in a storm but that power and beauty ultimately belong to God, to the manifestation of divine glory. The God-in-the-thunder-storm simply reminds us of the wonder of creation. But if we are not alive to that wonder and respect it, then we are oppressed by it. The world stands over and against us as an alien and frightening force. We are not free in it.
Secondly, it means that the world is not simply there for us and our purposes. The world is not simply full of useful things for human ends and designs. The usefulness of nature is not the primary thing. In fact, this oppresses us, too. We become slaves in a technocratic world when the world becomes for us only what is useful to us. Once again, we are not free in it.
Jesus considers the inner faithfulness of each one of us. It is about a taking delight rather than a making use of the things of God’s world. It means our free enjoyment of creation, honouring the will and purpose of the creator in his creation. It means contemplating the Father’s glory in the simple being of the little things of creation. Does not that, after all, also include us?
“O ye of little faith”, Jesus says in the gospel about our anxieties. It is all about how we see the world. Open your eyes! “Behold”, “consider” and, above all, “seek”. These strong verbs speak to us as spiritual creatures who see God’s will and purpose in the world and, ultimately, see the world in God. We find ourselves within a larger spiritual community “with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven” praising God. This is the counter to our preoccupations, to our carefulness, to our endless calculations about the use of things as if the things of this world only exist if we find and give a purpose to them. This attitude and tendency we have to crucify in ourselves, as the epistle suggests. We have to crucify our desire to control and manipulate the world, otherwise we end up being consumed by the use we make of things, consumed by our carefulness, serving everything except God.
What is wanted is a new way of looking at the world: not care-less–ness but an angelic and childlike care-free-ness born out of trust in God’s providence. He wants something more and better for us. That something more and better is signaled for us here in this place and in this service. Here we are reminded of God’s providential care for us. Here we are fed and nourished with “the bread of eternal life and the cup of everlasting salvation”. Here we participate in what we proclaim. Here we are fed with nothing less than “the body and blood of Christ”, but only if “the world has been crucified unto [us], and [ourselves] unto the world”. Only so can we live in the One who reveals the providence of God, come what may in the circumstances of our lives. Then, and only then, shall we “be not anxious”.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Trinity XV, 2014 (re ’04)