Sunday’s Readings: 2nd Sunday before Lent

Genesis 1.1-2.3; Psalm 136 (136 1-9, 23-end); Romans 8.18-25; Matthew 6.25-end

ONE scholar encourages us to savour the “combination of sapiential insight and apocalyptic vision within the anxieties passage”. But his shorthand — “the anxieties passage” — made me uncomfortable. I had not considered it in that way before.

When I reflected on my response to that ugly label for a gorgeous Gospel, I could see that the explanation that I disliked it was more reflex than reflection: “Jesus” and “anxiety” don’t sit comfortably side by side. Then my discomfort drove me back to the text itself. This time, I saw clearly the remarkable depth of understanding that Jesus shows about how fundamentally we human beings are governed and dominated, even bullied, by our anxieties. He highlights lessons that we are able to learn from nature, too, but here I’ll focus most on his words about anxieties.

Listing the anxieties within the order through which they seem on this Gospel: we’re told first not to fret about our life (explained as covering what we are going to eat or drink). Next, we must not worry about our body (covering what we are going to wear). Then he points out how anxiety is futile since it is sterile: it cannot produce real fruit (comparable to increasing our span of life). After taking a look at examples from nature, he turns back to those same drivers of human anxiety: what we are going to eat, what we are going to drink, and what we are going to wear.

It is tempting to make this insight a conclusion: human anxieties don’t change. In Bible days, people fearful about food and clothing, and we still do today. That is true — but the total message goes deeper. We know that Jesus’s listeners didn’t have the institutions of state welfare and charity support which give our social safety net. For lots of them, the selection should have been between eating and ravenous, drink and thirst, clothing and nakedness. Worrying, in those circumstances, would surely be sensible, unavoidable.

Most of us are unlikely to be troubled by not having enough food or drink for survival, or enough clothing to remain comfortable and warm, while maintaining our dignity. Yet our anxieties about bodily necessities are someway just as pervasive as they were in Jesus’s lifetime. In place of the fear of starvation, we have now eating disorders, obesity, fat-shaming. And we have now turned bodily need into an aesthetic, through the gluttony expressed in food as luxury, exclusivity, status.

In place of lack of clothing comes fixation on brands and fashions, and being seen in the proper trainers or sporting the most costly logos. Even if we are usually not touched by such anxieties ourselves, we could have to administer the anxieties of others: children can face the self-consciousness of their teenage years tormented by peer pressures and secret shames about clothing (amongst other things) — anxieties of which their parents are unaware.

Once this Gospel is tested against modern life-experience, it becomes clear that humankind’s problem isn’t necessarily actual food or actual clothing in any respect. The real problem is one in all desiring. Augustine calls this “appetite”, and it opens up a wealth of opportunities for sin. The Roman poet Ovid isn’t a natural companion for Augustine, but he agrees with him on this, putting it perfectly when he writes of humankind’s “wicked passion for having” (amor sceleratus habendi).

We wouldn’t tell an individual susceptible to hunger that food was unimportant. But then Jesus isn’t telling them that, either. Worrying is natural, reasonable. It is a component of how we apply our intelligence to solving problems: “I would like to eat” results in “I’ll eat this apple.” Then, worrying that “I would like to eat tomorrow as well” results in “I would like to search out more apples.” Worrying could make us strategic: “I’ll plant this seed and nurture it, water and have a tendency it, in order that I at all times have loads of apples.”

Somewhere in each of us is a dividing line between positive anxiety, which helps us to avoid mistakes and prepare for the longer term, and negative anxiety, which distorts the pattern of life in order that we behave as if we were in that not-yet-existent future fairly than the current moment. The dividing line is about in another way in each of us. Once we discover it, we must learn to administer it; for the query that Jesus poses within the “anxieties passage” is whether or not we possess the necessities for human life and dignity, or whether or not they possess us.