Do Not Worry - What If We All Lived As Jesus Teaches?

In Matthew 6, Jesus lays out a powerful prescription for freedom:

“Do not worry about what you will eat, or drink, or what you will wear... But seek first the Kingdom of God and it’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you.”

Taken literally, this passage would have profound implications on our individual lives. Imagine if  someone:

• Goes grocery shopping, but only buys food they will eat that day.
• Does not own a refrigerator to preserve any food for another day,
• Does not plant a garden or grow their own food of any sort.
• Does not own more than one set of clothes.
• Does not maintain a plumbing system in their home to guarantee fresh water is always available.

Extended to all aspects of society, this literal command becomes even more ridiculous:

• No preventative medicine.
• No banking or financial investments.
• No construction that takes more than a day to build and won’t be used that very day.
• No education systems or formal schooling of any kind.

In short, to live like the “birds of the air” and the “lilies of the field,”as Jesus suggests, would be irresponsible for individuals and disastrous for society. It would drag us back thousands of years to a time when life was short and quite difficult for the majority of people - when each day was indeed a struggle to meet basic needs.

So what does Jesus mean when he implores us to worry about today and not tomorrow? Is it simply a caution not to become too anxious about the future, even as we work to provide for ourselves what we need? That is likely how most relatively affluent modern Christians have interpreted this passage. 

But that’s not what it says. 

Perhaps, Jesus is not telling us to buy small portions of meat so we don’t have leftovers to preserve - but he is calling us to live radically different lifestyles than the dominant culture around us. He is leading us toward an orientation toward the material side of life that recognizes our dependence on God. 

He is freeing us from the anxiety that it up to us (and us alone) to secure what we need not only for tomorrow - but also for next week, next years, and even decades into the future. This is a belief which causes us to ignore the needs of others and the presence of the Kingdom today.

In other words, the command not to worry about what we will eat, drink, or wear is not literal, but neither is it trivial and to be too quickly dismissed. In fact, it lies at the heart of the spiritual freedom about which Jesus is teaching.

(In the next post, I will explore some practical example of how people are fulfilling this command in their daily lives and faith.)