NOTES for Mat 6:31-34

Let us remember the prophet's words. "Thus says the Lord: What wrong did your fathers find in Me, that they went far from Me and followed vanity, and became vain, and did not say: 'Where is the Lord, who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and pits, through a land of drought and the shadow of death, through a land that no one passed through and where no one lived?'" (Jer. 2:5-6).

The Lord always nourishes us, and we ungratefully forget this, apparently crediting everything to our own efforts. But the wilderness truly could be an image of our life, if not for what the Lord gives: the generous Lord, the loving Lord. Although why say "could be"? It is, because our life is an exodus from slavery to sin into the promised land, "from which flow milk and honey."

But how then, some may say, can we explain that disorderly and godless people have everything we lack, and have it in abundance? Because that very abundance harms them, depriving them of the priceless thing we have: spiritual joy, perfect joy, the joy of being poor for Christ's sake. And no one can take this joy away, for there is nothing that will separate us from the Lord. Everything earthly can be taken away. But "neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:38, 39)

Aspiration for life is embodied in man from the beginning. Fear for one’s own security and care for it - is in essence the natural manifestations of this aspiration. There now, the whole problem is to know in what life consists of and what is needed for its guarantee. But here, man’s point of view damaged by sin misfires. It seems to us that the whole life and all its meanings are concentrated here, in this world. That is why what aspires a man is limited materially, production of means of subsistence. You become like that a mammon servant.

Saying “Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you”, the Lord opens to us His intentions about us, vision that is inaccessible to us. As St Augustine said in his prayer “You created us for yourself, and our heart will be restless until it finds peace in you”. There are main and prime things, and there are significant but secondarily things. Will it be really good if someone provides himself secondarily and losses the main thing? Jesus’ words clearly put accents on what is exactly the main and what is important, but which is meaningless without the main. So, we can wash a car as much as we want, but if we don’t fill it with petrol – it will not move. It is possible to care as much as we want about wages, but life will become smaller and smaller and will ultimately end if we forget about the Kingdom of Heaven.

As we can see, readiness to grant good to the one who asks is presented as a distinctive feature of God, to which Jesus draws His listeners' attention. Of course, Hosea had already spoken of God's readiness to do more than deserved for His people, as well as for each individual person. The only thing required of the people for this is to turn to God and ask forgiveness for the sins they have committed. And the pre-exilic prophets already connected this readiness of God for undeserved benefactions with the very possibility of justification on the day of Judgment, whether for the people or for an individual person.

Jesus, as we see, connects with it the very possibility of the Kingdom as such. He says to the people listening to Him: you are able to do good deeds for those you love, for example for your own children, although in general goodness is contrary to your fallen nature; yet sometimes you are able to build concrete relationships with concrete people, even if only a few, despite your nature. But for God a good attitude toward every person is the norm; doing good does not contradict His nature. It is enough only to enter into relationship with Him in order to receive good, for there can be no other, non-good relationship with Him. And this in turn opens the road to the Kingdom for everyone: for the fullness of relationship with the Father and with Christ is precisely what brings a person into communion with it.

And Jesus bears witness that God is always ready for such relationships, so now it is up to the person. For Him, loving a person is no labor: relationships of love are the only relationships natural to Him. But in order to love, a person must always step over himself and build a relationship with another, whether God or neighbor, against his own fallen nature. Yet for a person the matter is made simpler by the fact that God is always ready to take a step toward him. And not only one step, but many steps in response to the one step taken by a person seeking relationship with God and the Kingdom.

We live as though we ourselves provide our own life, although we did not even come into it by ourselves. We spend our time in constant worries, scraping together life wherever we can. But since we are not eternal beings, we cannot secure eternal life for ourselves.

Jesus offers us a way to build life so as to receive it from the One who is eternal. For this, we must seek His presence and guidance, that is, His Kingdom. And we must also try to "fit into" this Kingdom, to correspond to it, to carry out the will of the Heavenly King; this is the truth, the righteousness of the Kingdom of God.

Again, as throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus turns our attention not to our tasks and worries, but to our relationship with God, to whom we are so precious that He is ready to take all our cares upon Himself, giving us in return a full, eternal life.

Many people cannot make sense of these words at all. How can we not be anxious when we must work in order to eat? Even the birds of the air, though they neither sow nor reap, constantly work their wings to find food for themselves and their chicks.

Yet not being anxious does not mean not working. This passage speaks of the anxiety that overwhelms a person, ceases to be reasonable, and turns human life into constant worry, preventing us from receiving the Heavenly Father’s many gifts. Our desire to minimize unexpected troubles is understandable, but when we try to anticipate every possible future, we risk becoming like Clever Elsie, who deprived herself of the present out of fear of one possible future.

But if we place more hope in God than in our own limited efforts, we can calmly begin our daily work, trusting that it will not become a meaningless waste of strength. The Lord Himself will be beside us in sorrow and in joy.

It is no accident that this passage ends with a call to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. For this is the one essential thing to which everything else will be added.

Speaking about the care of the Heavenly Father for His creation, Jesus calls His disciples to look at the world around them. Birds that do not need to worry about stores of food, plants adorned more richly than kings, a person's growth - all this testifies to divine providence. By discovering the beauty of the universe and grasping its laws, a person fulfills the Creator's command. For when the Lord created Adam, He gave him authority over every living thing, entrusted the world to him, and therefore it is so important for a person to learn how this world is arranged. The amazing beauty and harmony placed in nature can become a true source of the knowledge of God. And this knowledge directly concerns us, human beings; it is the knowledge that "your Heavenly Father knows that you need them."

How often we neglect this attentive looking at the world, which gives so many opportunities to give thanks and to understand Him. We prefer to learn all sorts of theological truths instead of simply looking around and seeing a lily, a bird, or just realizing how amazingly precisely your own body works. And is this not one of the ways of seeking the Kingdom of God?

Calling us to trust that God knows all our needs and will not leave us without care, the Lord Jesus Christ opens to us a new, almost unknown dimension of our life. We are so afraid of being left without necessities, of losing the means of existence, that this fear takes possession of the whole heart, and the poor are in no better position here than the rich. Yet the Lord speaks of a life that is not enclosed only within the material world and not limited only to the short span of earthly life. Christ's astonishing words about how the heavenly Father feeds the birds and clothes the flowers of the field reveal the meaningfulness and beauty of the world in which God has placed us.

And these words of Christ set before us a choice: what exactly constitutes the goal of our life. It is important that, by choosing God and His Kingdom, we lose nothing, because "all these things will be added to you"; but by choosing momentary well-being, we risk losing something infinitely precious and irreplaceable.

The unfamiliar word "mammon" actually means a "stronghold," something one can rely on, a source of hope. Of course, the Lord understands that all of us need to eat, drink, dress, earn a living, and so on, but He says that in a person's life there cannot be two hopes, two treasures, two goals. He uses little birds and flowers of the field as examples to show that one can be free, happy, and beautiful while hoping not in "treasure on earth," but in God. Moreover, this beauty is purer, this freedom clearer, than anything the "trouble of the day" can offer us. And this is not about fleeing life, not about irresponsibility or getting something for nothing, but about turning to the most precious and most meaningful content of life - to God, who is absolutely more wondrous than any treasure.

Christ invites us to ask the Heavenly Father for everything we need. This alone is not easy to take in. Can this really be so, and can we really trouble Him about anything at all? But even more striking is the question of whom Christ invites to ask: us, the very people whom He Himself called evil. But the Lord asks us to open up the potential for mercy that lives in us despite all our hardness precisely because He Himself loves us. And if the generosity of the Heavenly Father is set against our human limitation, then we who ask and those who ask of us turn out to be in the same position.

It would seem not hard to see oneself in another person's place, but often we do not even have enough strength for this. Meanwhile, it has long been noted that Christ formulates the well-known moral principle called the "golden rule" somewhat differently from those before Him. If many ancient sages taught that one should not do to another what one does not want for oneself, Christ proposes that we act more actively and do for our neighbor what we want for ourselves.

And this means that the Gospel proposes that we not limit ourselves to refraining from evil while sitting with folded hands. It is a call to action.

"In this are the Law and the Prophets"... That is, Jesus reduces all Old Testament teaching to a short phrase, a slightly altered ancient saying known as the "golden rule of ethics." How does He change it? He translates it from a negative form ("do not do...") into a positive one, and this is very important.

How often people suppose that religion is the opium of the people, that Christianity is a convenient psychological niche in which one can hide from the problems of the surrounding world. At times Christians themselves think this too, and that is probably why outsiderhood was so widespread among "underground" Christians in Soviet times. But Jesus sets a much higher standard for oneself. "A city set on a hill cannot be hidden"; the Christian position in the world is a position of action, of transforming this world, not of fleeing from it.

But of course not every action will be right. The Lord considers that every person still loves himself, and He invites us to act toward other people from the same motive: love.

Hoping for God’s help is as natural as it is for a child to expect care from its parents. If you cannot deceive your own child, how can the heavenly Father fail His children?... These words were not spoken for “naive believers” unfamiliar with life, but for perfectly ordinary people who knew that things are not so simple, that God does not always answer prayer, and that hunger, sickness, and death exist in the world. So what is this: yet another religious idea, opium for the people, or is it nevertheless true? And if it is true, how are we to understand it? It seems that it can be understood only in the context of the joyful News that the Ruler of the universe becomes Father to Jesus’ disciples. For it is one thing to know how to receive good and evil, suffering and joy, with gratitude from the hand of the Master; it is another to know that, in every circumstance, a loving Father will always be more faithful and closer than the people dearest to us...

There are several meaningful sections in today's reading. The first of them, perhaps, (vv. 1-5) is the clearest in meaning, although the hardest of all to put into practice! Verse 6 gives an example of a fairly typical stylistic device in oral speech called "chiasm," when a phrase is built on the pattern "ABba." In our case, "trampled underfoot" refers to the pigs, and "turned and tore" refers to the dogs.

But what is all this about? Are we really supposed to consider someone dogs and pigs? Let me recall that both were considered unclean animals. Hardly! The preceding verses do not allow that. It is probably about the fact that even the most objectively good things, whether objects or ideas, do not necessarily turn out to be subjectively good in concrete situations, and therefore wisdom is needed in using them. The next section (vv. 7-11) not only urges us to persistent prayer, but also assures us that the Heavenly Father always answers it, and specifically with what "gives good things." In another Gospel this passage says that He "will give the Holy Spirit," who, of course, is the ultimate "good thing." That is, the answer from God may be "not exactly" what we expect.

Today's reading is devoted to two themes that, at first glance, are not directly connected. On the one hand, it speaks about judgment and about the fact that Christ's followers would be better off not acting as judges (vv. 1-5). On the other hand, Jesus directly advises His disciples to ask the Father for everything they may need (vv. 7-11). And this advice is introduced by words about a careful attitude toward what is holy (v. 6). At first glance, these are completely different things; but if we think carefully, we can notice that here too Jesus is again speaking about the Kingdom. Indeed, if a person can "not judge," it is only and precisely in the Kingdom.

In our fallen world, any evaluation almost automatically becomes not only a judgment, which is permitted to us, but also condemnation, which is forbidden. Evaluation without condemnation is possible only in the Kingdom, where the very environment in which communication takes place is different. In such an environment one can compare oneself with others without at the same time determining whose step on the hierarchical ladder is higher. And not because everyone in the Kingdom suddenly becomes the same, but because the ladder itself loses its significance there. In the fullness of the Kingdom each person receives his own fullness given by God, and then the comparison so familiar to us in our world becomes meaningless.

But how can such vision be attained in our fallen world? Obviously, only by preserving the Kingdom that is already given to every follower of Christ now, in this world. It is no accident that the Savior reminds us of the need to keep what is holy pure, without defiling it with anything unclean (v. 6). "Dogs" and "swine" are mentioned here for a reason: they are unclean animals that in the Bible often become symbols of uncleanness as such.

And the call to treat people as we would want them to treat us (v. 12) also reminds us of the Kingdom. It would seem that before us is only the well-known "Golden Rule" of ethics, but that is still not exactly so. The point is not to treat people the same way they treat us, but to treat them as we would want them to treat us. In that case it becomes clear that we can treat people only with love and certainly without condemnation: it is hard to find anyone who would not want to be loved, or would want to be condemned, even if that person understands that there is not much to love him for and that there is plenty to condemn him for. Here it becomes clear that in our fallen world this is impossible. But what is impossible here becomes possible in the Kingdom.

If we relate to our neighbors exactly as Jesus commanded us, then the Kingdom has already become reality for us, and then we can ask as people ask in the Kingdom, where God gives without measure. The point is not that while we are here He cannot give us everything He could give there. It is simply that in the Kingdom, having learned to give without remainder and in fullness, we will also learn to receive in fullness - as people give and receive in the Kingdom.

Here we are again invited to come out of the captivity of our own egocentrism. How easy it is to revel in our own limitations, to regard our judgments about people, and about the world around us in general, as infallible. But Jesus lets us see the limits of our horizon. And although understanding another person can be very difficult, it is precisely by seeing the boundaries of our own understanding that we begin to overcome them, and therefore draw closer to understanding other people. Then we find ourselves in the place of the person we recently judged, and we begin to understand another person even better... The words about the speck and the log have been familiar to us since childhood; fortunately for us, this gospel wisdom turned out to be one of those things acknowledged even by many hardened atheists. True, there is a great temptation to poke at one's neighbor: "but you have a log sticking out," yet in substance there is nothing to object to here.

It is harder to notice that immediately after these words comes the warning about the inadmissibility of giving holy things to dogs and pearls to pigs. Let us recall, by the way, that in another place in the Gospel the Kingdom of God is compared to a priceless pearl. What unites these sayings? It appears that here Jesus is warning us about the danger of a hasty desire to become teachers. After all, even the preaching of truth can be turned into a way of self-assertion, when admiration for one's own eloquence hides from the speaker those to whom he is speaking.

But we should not amuse ourselves with illusions, even ones that look outwardly pious. Reality will inevitably break through the illusions, and it will be good if that happens without tragedy.