Author: CCW

“Be not anxious”

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.”

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“And one turned back… giving him thanks”

God is extravagant with his mercies; we are miserly with our thanks. There is something profound and wonderful in this quintessential gospel that speaks so wonderfully to this time of transition from Summer to Fall, and especially on this Labour Day weekend. Nothing quite so transformative, in a way, than thanksgiving, the counter to all the tedium of our endless complaining, the counter, too, to all the despairing fatalisms of our world and day. Thanksgiving  is our true and freest labour. We are, I think, a long ways from the suffering of the lepers – the outcasts and rejects – of the ancient world and, yet, there are the fears and anxieties of our own times that beset us and trouble us and which separate us from God and from one another.

There were ten “that lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”. But only “one of them when he saw that he was healed, turned back and with a loud voice glorified God and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan”. In short, there are many who cry out for mercy but few who return to give thanks. To cry out for mercy, it seems to me, is itself a great matter, a matter of honest realization about ourselves and the human condition. But to return – literally, to turn back – and to give thanks, well, that is something even far more amazing.

Repentance and thanksgiving go together. Both are a return to God, a turning back to the one from whom we have turned away in one fashion or another and turning back to the one upon our whole being depends. Redire ad principium. Repentance and thanksgiving are both about returning to the very principle of our being and knowing, to God in whom we find our truth and life.

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