NOTES for Mat 6:24

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.