Today’s readings: Isaiah 49, 14-15; 1 Corinthians 4, 1-5; Matthew 6, 24-34.
In today’s post-modern condition, anxiety has become a trademark of our daily living. Many people though, little bother whether God has forgotten them or not. The sense of aloneness comes from lack of belonging, from isolation, from the feeling of not being loved or not loving. It comes more from what the body lacks rather than from what the heart longs for.
For many, God may not even figure in the formula. He may be considered part of the problem, but surely not part of the solution. This is sad indeed. Yet the problem Jesus is posing in today’s gospel is not necessarily being posed from a faith perspective.
Anxiety for material needs not satisfied, and forms of slavery to possessions are issues that need to be dealt with first and foremost on the human level. Because ultimately they impinge on the quality of our living.
In the first reading, Isaiah reports the complaint from the abyss of a people in exile: “The Lord has forgotten us”. That was a strong sensation in Israel while in a foreign land, and at times it is a strong sensation in us whenever we come to terms with how we live. The prophet’s remedy is of hope and assurance.
The imagery of a remembering God portrayed as a nursing mother is one of the strongest we find in the Scriptures.
The words of Jesus in the gospel that “life means more than food, and the body more than clothing”, are words to be heeded if we want to discover and enjoy an added meaning to daily existence.
Trust in God can be reassuring in the face of anxiety. God enters to top our life with meaning and our hearts with joy.
Evagrius of Pontus, one of the greatest spiritual directors of fourth-century monasticism, wrote extensively about a disordered relationship we can have with things we possess and with money. It is such a disordered relationship that can be profoundly wrong with the way we live today. We have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material greed and self-interest.
Tony Judt, author and director-founder of the Remarque Institute, writes in his book Ill Fares the Land: “we know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth”. As Christians we can be very ambivalent and double-minded in what we deeply confess as believers, and then in the way we leave the public sphere to the ideology of the market.
The financial crash of 2008 made us stop and think. But it seems we learnt no lessons. We are simply picking up the pieces, determined to carry on as before. There are choices to be made and, as Jesus today warns, “no one can serve two masters”. Yet, the pathology of life as it is today seems to be precisely that we are unable to conceive of alternatives.
In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus considers the poor as blessed, he is not upholding that poverty we would all like to see eradicated from the globe. His insistence not to worry is not to be taken unrealistically as a promise of a worry-free existence. Jesus is rather arguing, even on a merely human level, that anxiety for things we long for can consume us.
This is the difficulty of coping with whatever life brings across. We end up being taken wholeheartedly by daily things, losing perspective and missing on what ultimately gives real meaning to life. When the heart is drained, that would be the end of living.
We need to remain in perspective, setting priorities and protecting ourselves from all unnecessary anxiety.
We need to put soul back into daily living, measuring wisely to what extent, at times without knowing, we subject life to material needs, the provisional to the eternal, seeking in a very disordered manner to satisfy the spiritual thirst of the heart merely with what the body can desire.