Today’s readings: Isaiah 49, 14-15; 1 Corinthians 4, 1-5; Matthew 6, 24-34.

Very often we cherish nostalgic feelings about times past when life was more serene, less hectic, and perhaps more rewarding. Let us leave aside whether life was actually that idyllic in the past. What we are sure about is that life as it is now has become too complicated. It is an age of anxiety. An anxiety which we all face at all levels of life and with which we struggle to cope from day to day. I refer mainly to social, religious, as well as personal anxiety.

Today’s Scriptural readings speak about anxiety but rather than providing us with an analysis of its causes, the focus is on the right balance within us that can serve as an antidote to it.  The prophet Isaiah is addressing the anxiety of aloneness and abandonment that Israel was suffering from in the Babylonian exile. The prophet gives reassurance that God would never forget his people.

In the gospel Jesus is telling us not to worry because life is worth more than the food and clothing we need daily and which cause so much anxiety. Of course Jesus is advocating neither a care-free life nor some sort of fundamentalism in the name of a blind faith which, to say the least, would in any case be unreasonable.

In the context of life as we live it today, maybe today’s gospel which is demanding total and radical trust in God’s providence is the most challenging text. The consumerist culture has become the force that makes the world go round. In spite of repeated warnings and setbacks in the wake of recent and very dull crises in our economies, it seems that the consumerist mentality is here to stay. We find it so difficult to imagine life otherwise.

We are more inclined today to obey to the commands of consumption and profit making rather than to the wisdom that ultimately can save our own lives and give back worth and value to our existence. In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle, author and clinical psychologist, writes about how we lean more on technology today rather than on each other. She argues that with the illusion of companionship, new instabilities are generated in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.

In today’s gospel, which proceeds with the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is speaking about a soul-full life. We need to recover the soul of living. The world is still sadly divided both where the very basic necessities of living are concerned as well as the level of technological dependence. A part of the world has almost every-thing while another part lacks almost everything.

What Jesus is saying when he advises us not worry about life, about what we are to eat and how we are to clothe, he is not advocating poverty for its own sake. He is only reminding us of something crucial and vital to daily living and which ultimately restitutes meaning and sense to life: namely, to put everything in perspective.

It means to recover the harmony between life and what nourishes it, the body and the clothing, the being and the having. Given that all along in this Sermon Jesus is setting standards and contrasting the old with the new, again he points higher up and says: “It is the pagans who set their hearts on all these things”. Jesus is inviting us to set our hearts elsewhere, on his kingdom which we are called to make happen in this world.

So it is a challenging gospel yes, but a very important one to listen to. The question it poses is about the resources we bank on in daily life and the right relationship with things, even with the very basic necessities of daily living. The worst that can happen to us is that in the face of certain circumstances and experiences, we end up empty-handed, resourceless persons where the soul of living is concerned.

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