NOTES for Mat 6:24-34

Christ's words about the impossibility of serving two masters and His call not to be anxious about tomorrow are often understood to mean that Christians need nothing from what our untransformed world can offer a person, and that they need neither food nor clothing. Yet Jesus says nothing of the kind. He calls only for setting spiritual and practical priorities in the right order. Where should one begin: with the Kingdom, or with questions about food and clothing? For Jesus the answer is clear: first the Kingdom, and then everything else.

For a Christian, there should be no questions here. To the question whether we live in order to eat or eat in order to live, any Christian can give only one answer. But what does the call not to be anxious about tomorrow mean in this context? Not to make provisions? But what if, without making them, you will not survive the winter? In the end, sometimes it makes sense to think about tomorrow the day before precisely because otherwise, when tomorrow comes, you will have to think more about food than about the Kingdom.

The matter, however, is different. In the sense of the corresponding Greek word, this is not about thinking ahead about what in fact should be thought through ahead of time. It is about anxiety that weighs over a person and takes such possession of him that he is no longer able to think about anything else. At the limit, such anxiety can bring a person to despondency and despair; thoughts about the future can become a real nightmare for him, and possible future problems, often impossible ones as well, begin to poison his whole life, not the future life but the present one. Yet the most terrible thing is not even that normal spiritual life is out of the question in such a condition, but that it cuts a person off from the Kingdom completely. Care for this world fully hides the Kingdom from a person tormented by imaginary nightmares of tomorrow, and without formally renouncing anything, he proves completely unable not only to take even one step toward the Kingdom, but even to remember it; and so, in anxieties over illusory problems, he loses salvation and life.

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.

Perhaps one of the most "frequently asked questions" that arises for many people when they think about God is the complaint that we are so unhappy. "Why does this happen?" Different people, with very different motives, ask God and one another this question. Why are we so unhappy? This question implies not only the incomprehensibility and meaninglessness of the existence of evil and suffering, but also the deep thirst for life built into the human being itself. Why do I have so little of it?

And today's words of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew answer exactly this question, but, as often happens, they answer it in a way that is very unexpected for us. Stereotyped thinking locates the meaning of life in possessing something: goods, time, health, or finally simply happiness. The Lord, by contrast, speaks about belonging. Life is not a matter of possessing the blessings of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of belonging to it. Everything else "will be added" and will be the consequence of this belonging.

These words of Christ can become an amazing source of joy for us if we let them penetrate deeply into our hearts. Incidentally, belonging to the Kingdom of Heaven also satisfies the thirst to belong to something great, a thirst that is also built into us and that we try to drown out with all kinds of murky substitutes, such as personal, social, and national pride.

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.

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.

The recommendations for keeping the fast sound surprisingly current, as if two thousand years had not passed. Still, when rereading the Gospel, one often remembers the words that "Christianity is only beginning." Imitating piety by keeping a fasting diet with a "fasting face" has turned out to be much easier than growing spiritually by passing through the fast. But it is meaningless to act before the One Who sees the true motives of our actions.

There seems to be nothing to add to what has been said about storing up treasures. Every day we receive many opportunities to observe how what people tried to place their hopes in crumbles into dust. Nevertheless, every day we again and again try to increase those same unreliable earthly treasures. They are not necessarily treasures in the literal sense; their role can be played by everyday trifles and necessary household objects. But even what is necessary can be turned into an idol that blocks out God. And when a hard choice stands before us: God or mammon? - it becomes very easy to choose God in words while rejecting Him by our deeds.

If we are truly with Him, then His light dwells in us and lights our path, keeping us from losing our way on difficult roads. But when we leave Him, we turn away from His light too, though we do not admit it at once. Then with distorted spiritual vision we begin to take the darkness dwelling in us for light.

But if evil that pretends within us to be light, and is therefore "softened," is monstrous even in such a weakened form, then what must be the darkness of undisguised evil, toward which we risk heading when we turn away from the Source of Light?

Have you ever, say, gone swimming while vacationing at the seaside and left a bag with money on the beach? You splash around in the water, but something spoils your pleasure: you keep looking back at your things... "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Of course, this is a very primitive illustration of Jesus' words, but are you and I really such complicated beings? The same mechanism for distributing our attention operates in more "spiritual" situations too. Of course, earthly matters are important, and they must be given attention. Will we be able each time to keep within ourselves the right vertical order of what matters most, where God, the Spirit, and love are above all?

The following words of Christ about God and mammon, or wealth, speak about the same thing. Jesus is not against wealth or well-being. He says that they must not be placed at the center of our service and attention; that place must be reserved for God.