NOTES for Luk 12:25

In the Sermon on the Mount, the Savior speaks in some detail about what Russian translations usually call "care." The corresponding Greek word means not simply care as something one has to think about in life, but something that hangs over a person, poisoning his whole existence.

This is no longer simply something that needs to be thought about and dealt with in due time, but a heavy, all-obscuring problem that cannot be solved so easily, and perhaps cannot be solved at all, but that, while remaining unsolved, does not let a person live and constantly turns his attention back to itself. As a result, all of a person's thoughts revolve around this unsolved, perhaps unsolvable problem, while life passes him by. This often happens because a person does not distinguish what is within his power from what is not within his power. Obviously, a person cannot add to his height, no matter how much he wants to and no matter how much time he devotes to this "problem."

But the most interesting thing is precisely that the "problem" turns out to be a "problem" in quotation marks. At least in the overwhelming majority of cases. Of course, people can have a manic desire to become taller, but here one should speak rather of some kind of deviation and of a problem that is, if not mental, then psychological. Such problems usually arise where a person wants to control everything and everyone.

Strictly speaking, that is how the fall once began: a person decided to become god in his own, even if small, world, and in order to become god in it, he had to control it completely, letting nothing take its own course. And our desire to be god of our own, even small, little world and of our own life still brings us many problems. There are things that by definition God, not we ourselves, should determine in our life, but in the fallen state it is very hard for us to accept this.

It seems to us that even our height is not God's business, though He created us with the height we have, but ours. Perhaps the example Jesus gives exaggerates the situation a little, but it looks like only a little. And this desire to become god of our own life kills us: spiritually, psychologically, and sometimes physically. The only way out of such a situation is to let God into our life. And to rely on Christ, for it is not by chance that He calls to Himself all who "labor and are heavy laden."