Our Lord Jesus Christ speaks today to us as a pastor would speak to his flock. Christ is our Good Shepherd. He says “Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on.” Our food, our drink, and our clothing are not things outside of God’s care, He is saying. Instead, Jesus says, these are part of the Father’s ongoing care for us. He is saying, creation is God’s gift to us. To be anxious about food, drink, and clothing is to take a non-eucharistic stance. Our Lord counsels us to seek first the kingdom of God. Seek first His righteousness, He says. Seek the Holy Spirit, in other words: do this, and all the things of life will be added unto us.
To make his point evident, Jesus instructs us to look at the birds of the air, and the flowers of the field. He tells us to notice that the needs we might be anxious about are already given in abundance to them. They are fed by God. They intuitively understand what human beings have to be taught to learn: the things of creation are given to us by God as His ordinary means of communion with us. In beholding the ordinary things of creation, which are everywhere around us at all times, Christ wants us to see these as of the Father’s care, of the Father’s love. These ordinary things are not the Holy Eucharist, but by the Eucharist we can learn to regard them as gifts from God, and be satisfied rather than anxious; be thankful rather than always seeking more.
The two masters that Christ speaks about are really two ways of thinking. One is eucharistic and ordered by serving God, and thus leads to holiness; the other is noneucharistic and worldly and ordered by serving personal gratification, and thus leads to sin. The one looks at creation as gift from God and therefore sacramental in orientation. To see creation as sacramental means that we regard the things of creation, even creation as such, as outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. When created things exhibit beauty, or truth, or goodness, these created things are sacramental in the ordinary sense. When this perspective really takes hold in a person, that person understands what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins means when he wrote “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
The other way of thinking, what Christ calls Money (more commonly translated as Mammon), empties the world of God, empties the world of our great Giver, and then fears the world and lives by anxiety. This noneucharistic life can never be satisfied and can never find rest because from this point of view, the Father is not part of the world, so the things of the world do not point to God and thus do not bring inward and spiritual grace. In his book Confessions, S. Augustine captures his former, noneucharistic mentality with these words, speaking to God he wrote: “You were within, and I was outside and there did I seek You. … I rushed heedlessly among the things of beauty that You made. You were with me, but I was not with You. Those things kept me far from You, which, unless they were in You, were not.” In other words, the very things of creation that exist only because of God were what held him away from God.
The invitation to a eucharistic way of thinking is emphasized by Paul in our Epistle passage. For Paul, the world is a new creation. That God has newly created the world is the rule by which Christians must walk. By this way of life, Paul teaches, come peace and mercy upon us and upon the Israel of God. (And that is a reminder of what the word “Israel” means: Israel names those who seek God.) Paul writes that he never seeks to boast about anything but the Cross of Jesus Christ. For Paul, this event remakes our understanding of the world. By the Cross the world has been crucified to us; and by the Cross, we have been crucified to the world. Because of the Cross, we are able to seek first the kingdom of God, that is, to hold life in the kingdom of God as our first priority, to make life in the Holy Spirit, not life according to the flesh, our goal in this world, our goal in this life.
My dear brothers and sisters, let us listen to our Saviour Jesus Christ, and let us listen to His apostle, Saint Paul our patron. Let us not seek anxiety but rather seek the Kingdom of God and to proclaim the power of the Cross. Let us allow ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit to all things which are profitable for our salvation, profitable for our spiritual health. Let us receive with ongoing gratitude the gifts of the Father in creation and the mercy of Christ Who is the head of this Body, the Church. Let us lift up our souls to Christ, and as His servants be comforted in our soul: through our Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord, Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
