“Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
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What are we to make of Jesus’s teaching?
“tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
This doesn’t sound very encouraging.
And maybe not very responsible?
Can it be good news?
In the year of Matthew, we have momentarily dipped into the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is half-way through.
He has already pronounced God’s blessing, in the Beatitudes –
and it is an unlikely crew who are blessed, including the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and the meek.
He has intensified how searching the Law is in its application,
widening the meaning of murder and adultery,
putting further onus on us when we are victims of oppression and enmity
so that we take responsibility for how we react – think about what you do what your face is slapped –
and interrogating our motivations when pray, fast and give alms.
And in today’s gospel Jesus asks us to question ourselves when we worry.
It’s challenging stuff.
And we are hearing it today at a particular time – a particular liturgical time.
We celebrated Candlemas on Monday, looking back to the day of Christ’s birth and forward to the days of his passion – “the coming days of his passion”, the text says.
There is just a short period between the season of Epiphany and Ash Wednesday – two Sundays; what do we most need to hear?
What will help us make this transition between celebrating with joy the incarnation, the birth of the promised Messiah, and our Lenten work of purification in the light of his sacrificial suffering?
What our texts speak of today is God as creator – as maker.
If we had heard only Genesis chapter 1, as we did at Mattins, we could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that God is on sabbatical – a Deist watchmaker who has left us to tick on by ourselves, and to run down.
But that is not the God revealed to the Hebrew mind.
The more truthful meaning of all the order, goodness and light in Genesis 1
is that God continues to be intimately involved in all He has made –
His fingerprints are all over us, and that is astonishingly good news,
– for us, but also for whales and millipedes and ash trees,
and for all those carefully crafted environments which Genesis enumerates,
teeming with life that is made to be fruitful.
And we, who in the image and likeness of God – we are to take thought for all that is made and to name it and to see that it is good –
but God remains the Maker.
We shall not see beyond our day, or beyond our century,
but God’s creating power lasts
and so we can find encouragement to take up responsibility – a responsibility that is properly human, and not divine –
just as Pope Francis encouraged us to do in Laudato Si’.
But we didn’t hear only Genesis 1. We heard St Paul in Romans 8 explain that the creation we participate in and belong to is a creation subjected to futility – enslaved, he says, to decay.
It is not destined to be this way.
It – we – groan, yes. But know that these are labour pangs. They hurt, but they foretell life coming.
Creation is not only extant. It actively waits – eagerly, Paul says, “for the revealing of the children of God” – for the culmination of all the good that God has caused to be.
We are in Winter, but we can imagine Spring, and wait with eagerness.
Ages past can look for the Resurrection life.
This is creation, not as serene artefact, but animated by hope.
And so to St Matthew’s Gospel, and today’s selection from the Sermon on the Mount.
If Romans, in contemplating the creation, sees active hope, then in the gospel Jesus asks us to strengthen our faith – in God and God’s Kingdom, and to do so by considering the creation, the sparrows and the lilies.
The birds and the flowers do not mistrust their maker, and nor should we.
Are we so worried about our own well-being – Jesus says, our food and drink and clothes – that our faith in our Maker falters?
Which master do we want?
The inspiration offered by the lilies and the sparrows inspired Stanley Spencer in his well-known painting series, Christ in the Wilderness.
Here we see Jesus himself contemplating, yes lilies, or perhaps daisies,
and birds that are hens.
There are little foxes playing around him.
And in one of the series Jesus regards, with profound attentiveness, a scorpion on his hand.
Imagine the Son responding to the Father’s desire that he be born of this creation.
And the Father and the Spirit say, “We shall be with you always.”
“But how, my Father, will I know you when I am flesh and blood, troubled and in sorrow?”
“As you have always known me: as my Son. And now you will know me as a human being, in the way human beings are made so that they can know their heavenly Father.”
And the Son incarnate holds a scorpion in contemplation and sees that it is made good.
Thomas Traherne puts it this way:
“You never enjoy the world aright; till you see how a sand exhibiteth the wisdom and power of God”,
and, two paragraphs later:
“You never enjoy the world aright till the Sea itself floweth in your veins”.”
In a world today not fitting together rightly
and where we don’t fit together rightly
but where we wound ourselves and others,
what, as the people of God, can we say?
That we do better than others?
That we are more godly than others?
We can’t be sure of this.
There will be times when we are at odds, or feel ourselves to be at odds,
not fitting rightly.
Hold on.
Value the Kingdom.
Place faith in Him who makes all things good.
Believe that, in Christ Jesus, the revealing of the children of God is already here,
and continue in hope and eager longing.
And where else might we look for hope in our life together, that is both incarnation and passion?
Next week, in the gospel, we shall hear one further encouragement.
But we need not worry about tomorrow – we can look here today, to these gifts of consecrated bread and wine, the body and blood of our Saviour. Amen.