Epiphany 8A Gospel
Matthew 6:24-34
Craig Keen
There is hardly a more beloved passage of Scripture than Matthew 5–7, the Sermon on the Mount. It is grippingly powerful, an eloquent and quotable series of verses, commonly found on lists of the most admired pieces of literature in the history of the Western world.
Still, in spite of popular opinion, it is mistake, I think, to imagine the Sermon on the Mount as admirable. In fact I am not at all sure how a text that demands so much of the reader could be read seriously and affirmatively without a foreboding sense of doom, without significant anxiety, especially when the Sermon commands us not to worry. It is the same kind of foreboding one might feel when reciting John Wesley’s Covenant Renewal Service, say, when we are asked to pronounce the words, “Christ will be all in all, or he will be nothing.” At least the self-critical among us know ourselves too well to trust any of our “decisions” to make Christ (or anything, for that matter) “all in all.” How could we easily admire a text that commands us to do so?
What Matthew 6:24–34 demands of us is an economic dependence on God that in our context strikes us either as impossible or so abstract that it becomes utterly irrelevant to lived life. We don’t know economic relations except as mediated by money. When we ask, “‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’” we ask about money, about countable, uniform units with purchase power. When we think of resources for tomorrow, we think of the money it takes to buy them.
Other places and times have worked their way through life otherwise. We might think of a little isolated village of about 50 first century Galilean peasants—people who (if they were lucky) were born alive, lived two and a half decades, and died among neighbors and family. These are people who would perhaps have never seen a stranger up close. Their eating and ducking into a shelter during a storm and caring for each other during hard times and for a little field of crops and some goats and sheep came not by way of money or barter or surplus, but by flesh and blood work in humane mutual dependence, together (if often on the very edge of starvation). What this passage is asking them and also us to do is to live and work together, recognizing the rhythms of the days and months and years we are given, but never to presume that we are the ones who have the resources—and certainly not the money—for building tomorrow. Tomorrow, this passage tells us, comes as a gift or it does not come at all.
This is what it is saying when it says to “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (or “the kingdom of God and God’s justice”). This kingdom is a place where people eat and drink and are clothed, but they do and are all these things not according to ordinary justice (and certainly not according to the justice of balanced scales), but according to the justice of the God who embraces and gives life to—who forgives—those whom ordinary justice would condemn and run out of town.
Of course, forgiveness of the outlaws of this present evil age is a justice this present evil age has no patience with. In fact the justice, the righteousness, of the kingdom of God will always seem like injustice, unrighteousness, to this world. The friends of the kingdom of God will always look like enemies to this world. That perhaps is why in a similar passage to this one, a passage in the first gospel ever performed and then written, we read, “Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’” (Mark 10:29–31, italics added).
Matthew 6 is an admonition that commands us to step boldly out into the future, not to build it, but to greet it, to open to its coming, with joy and gratitude. In the end joy and gratitude are only the flip side of grace. It is why we are here. It is why we are created. It is why we are not done yet, even when we breathe our last. To God be our joy and gratitude, to God be the glory!