simple answers. Matt 6.25

Do not worry about what you will eat or what you will wear.

Ruins of an industrial plant, taken from the train, somewhere between Cluj and Brașov, Romania.

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We will look at a couple simple passages of Scripture and give the simple explanation of what they mean. After that, we will start over and look at each one in more detail.

Matt 6.25

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

The typical explanation is that we are not to worry. God will provide what we need. He cares for the birds and flowers. If we trust him he will take care of us too. That explanation is wrong: almost exactly the opposite of what Christ is saying.

Christ is not talking about worry. That makes no sense, first because worry neither blocks nor increases God's care for us, and second because if you live like a bird or a flower you will die.

"Worry" is something we do for things we care about. We worry about our children, and we should. We worry about a loved one who is sick, and we should. We don't worry about a spider somewhere in Bolivia because it's a spider. In Bolivia.

Worry is the measure of how much we care about something. There is nothing wrong with it, unless you worry about the wrong things.

Worrying about what you will eat or wear is understandable only if those things have value. A person's first response would be: of course they have value! I care a lot whether my family starves or if we go naked! Which is the unreasonable response to a reasonable statement of Christ. He did not say don't worry whether you will eat: he said don't worry what you eat. That is a big difference. But we do that all the time to the words of Christ. We make them outlandish so we don't have to do them. In this case, we make them outlandish and are then free to disregard the point of his teaching (food and clothing) and focus instead on what he wasn't talking about (worry).

What Jesus is saying is this: If your decision to do what God wants is based upon having the food and drink you want, and having the style of clothing you want, then you're off to a bad start. Saying no to God for frivolous reasons will not turn out well. To the people sitting there, it was an especially serious matter: in forty years God would remove his protection. God cared whether they had food and clothes and homes. The Romans would not.

There is a "sow what you reap" element to this. It is not a difficult thing to give God what he wants. In the wilderness the people complained and wanted to turn back to Egypt. God said no and left them there for 40 years, but he fed them and made sure their shoes never wore out. If they had put up with some inconvenience for a couple weeks they would have been allowed into the Promised land. They wouldn't do that, so the minor inconvenience they complained about after just a few days became a major inconvenience for the rest of their lives.

Now Israel is at the tipping point again. Jesus wants to know: Will you do the simple thing and follow God into the unknown? or will you insist on staying where you are, where you know how to live from day to day?

Life is more than survival. When the people of God refuse the path of God and insist upon surviving, when they trust God so little that they prefer slavery to him, when they cannot risk the simplest things for him, then he has no more pity on them. They have planted their flag: this is where we stay.

And so God, having been told what the rules are, removes his protection and shows them what life is like without his small inconveniences.

The difference between them and us is that we now know they had only 40 years. We don't know what God has decided for us, but it has been 2000 years and people still think it over and say, "no thanks, I think I'll just stay here."

The reason it is difficult for us to explain this verse is because we have painted ourselves into a corner. We know certain things to be true, and since those must be true, the words of Christ require some adjustment. These are the things we know to be true:

1. The Jews trusted in the Law instead of God's grace, so they could not be brought into the Church and were left behind.

2. Unlike the Jews, Christians are saved by grace through faith.

3. What my priest or my pastor says is right.

4. If we find something in Scripture that doesn't fit points 1, 2 and 3, there must be some other explanation.

There are a few problems with this.

1. The Jews did not trust in the Law instead of God's grace. The Law was given by God. It was holy and good. God insisted that they obey and was displeased when they didn't.

2. Christians are not saved by grace through faith, unlike the Jews.

3. Your priest or pastor is not right.

4. Scripture is right.

The reason we find Scripture difficult to understand and explain is that we cannot let it be true: we must find a way for them to be wrong and us right. This is a new age. The old things have passed away and everything has become new, so we're safe. Because we're not like them.

It is ironic that Israel thought it was safe because it was Israel and the Church thinks it's safe because it's not Israel.

But, if they are not wrong for the reasons we say, then we're not right for the reasons we say.

Scripture is not difficult to understand unless you believe your pastor or priest when they tell you why we need to some small adjustments. Scripture is not difficult to understand if we don't make the Jew a straw man who can be turned to dust with just a breath. Scripture is not difficult to understand if we see ourselves as another people of God: not the first, not the last, not the favorite, not the only. God has treated his people exactly the same from Adam until the last person born before the end of time, and it is this: he's God, we're not. He will do what he wants, for whatever reason he wants, when he wants, with whomever he wants. We will also do what we want, for whatever reason we want, when we want, with whomever we want. It must be understood that those two cannot exist in the same time and space. Somebody has to give in. We think it's God. That is a very bad view to take of things.

It's a matter of courage. And truth. And faith. We must find a reason God would judge Israel and bless the Church, so we invent a reason. But it is not the real reason. The real reason judges the Church along with Israel.

We don't necessarily have a strict definition of faith, but one thing we know is: it's not the law. And usually we define faith as avoiding anything that could be interpreted as "works".

Asking ahead of time whether you will have food and clothes if you do what he wants means you don't want to do it. Being resentful and poisoning the work because you thing the food and clothes should be better is will hurt you, your people, and embarrass Christ. Stopping because the food and clothes are not what you expected is abandoning the work.

God told the Israelites that all the time in the wilderness their shoes did not wear out. He fed them and found them water. He will not do less for us than he did for them, if we do as he wants.

The food and the clothes will not be to your liking. Your life will not be what you wanted. But the life you want is not the life God wants. Thinking that life is the satisfaction of everything you expected and want is not the life God expects and wants.

It is important that we look at every part of what Christ says. He doesn't just say "do not worry"; he first says "I tell you". It's not really a suggestion. If he tells us, it's a demand. If you gather your kids together and say, "I'm telling you, Saturday everyone stays home and we work on the yard," it's a serious thing. You should expect complaints: "But I already made plans! All day?! I can't do anything else all day?"

There is a "therefore", which means we have to back up to see what he was building up to:

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Ahh, there it is. The two things we never want to talk about: serving and money. We can talk about stewardship and money, but not serving and money, because we must insist that we are the master. Of course that's a lie: we're not the master. And it's a deception: Scripture never allows us to be stewards of our money, or our things, or our lives. We can only be stewards of God's things. We solder in a wire that allows us to jump stewardship-God-money so it appears money is something God gives us to manage for him, but it's not. Money is what you make by going to work. You have a right to be concerned what you wear when you go to work, because if you show up in the wrong outfit you might lose your job, which will mean you will not longer have money to be a steward of, which should prove to any reasonable mind that it is your boss who you are working for, not God, because your boss is the one who sets your schedule and makes you afraid to risk your salary by not doing what you're told.

We will not get distracted by looking at this further except to note that the reasons we react against Christ's "do not worry about your life, what you will eat and drink" is because we want to spend our days doing what we want and spending our money as we want. If we didn't have problems with the first part, the second part would be much easier.

It is possible to get to the point where you don't care about these things. You get there by doing it, even though you care very much about your life and what you will eat and wear. After you've done that, God can use you for a second thing, and if you do that you will find you care less about your life and your clothes and food. If you keep going, after a while you will find you expressly do not care about these things and wish other people didn't, because you finally see how simple it was and how silly the complaints were.

But if you never start, no: this will forever be something you can't answer, which should bother you. There aren't any big words. Not once does Jesus throw in something you cannot understand. You don't have to look up in the dictionary what propitiation means, you don't need to know anything about first century culture or traditions, you don't need to know the Mosaic law. They're all simple words. The longest one is "therefore", but we still know what it means.

If you know Koine Greek you can read it in the Greek, but it says essentially the same thing and there are no words that are long or complicated:

dia houtos legō hymeis mē merimnaō ho hymeis psychē tis esthiō ē tis pinō, mēde ho hymeis sōma tis endyō eimi ouchi ho psychē polys ho trophē kai ho sōma ho endyma

If you know French you can read it in French. We have friends in France and they say there are no words here difficult for them to understand:

C'est pourquoi je vous dis: Ne vous inquiétez pas de ce que vous mangerez [et boirez] pour vivre, ni de ce dont vous habillerez votre corps. La vie n'est-elle pas plus que la nourriture et le corps plus que le vêtement?

If you know German you can read it in German. We have family in Germany and they say there are no words here difficult for them to understand:

Darum sage ich euch: Sorgt euch nicht um euer Leben, was ihr essen und was ihr trinken sollt, noch um euren Leib, was ihr anziehen sollt! Ist nicht das Leben mehr als die Speise und der Leib mehr als die Kleidung?

No, looking at the words won't give us any help. They are simply words, doing their job of communicating ideas from one person to another.

There is another translation. Possibly it can shine some light on the problem. Donald Hagner, Word Biblical Commentary, p. 167:

The disciples have a "heavenly Father" who knows of their ongoing needs and who will supply them. The passage does not mean, however, that food, drink, clothing, and other such necessities will come to the disciple automatically without work or foresight. It addresses only the problem of anxiety about these thing. The answer to this anxiety and all such debilitating anxiety is to be found in an absolute allegiance to the kingdom and the righteousness that is the natural expression of that kingdom. The teaching of Jesus on this subject probably had in mind the itinerant ministry of the disciples who first widely proclaimed the kingdom of God. To them, it would have had special relevance. And with some modification it has an ongoing relevance to the established Church. For Christians of every age, anxiety is incompatible with a lifestyle focused on God's kingdom. Indeed, anxiety and worry need not govern the disciple who has known the grace of the kingdom.

We want to be clear on what Hagner is saying. Every word is important, so we want to understand without any ambiguity, and every word not there that should be there is important, so we need to understand why he does not mention certain things.

The first word he doesn't mention is "therefore". To be fair, he does mention it in his explanation on page 163, but only to say that it refers to the entire previous section, vv 19-24. He does not say what it is there for. The "therefore" at the beginning of v 25 is meant to be a magnifying glass for v 24, but he spoils that by saying that the important thing is where one's heart lies and that we must be sensitive to that point at which wealth and possessions are not compatible with authentic discipleship (p.160). The pretty much leaves the tipping point of what is too much wealth up to each person's discretion. When we're talking about money, asking what is "too much" is a pointless question. Out of the 8 billion people in the world, you might find 3 or 4 who agree they have too much, but even they wouldn't say they have a problem.

Having dismissed v 24 as something left to everyone to decide for themselves, and passing by the "therefore" with no explanation of what might make it important, he also skips past the "I tell you".

He lands upon the phrase he considers most important and spends his time there: "do not worry". It is "worry" that he sees as being incompatible with the kingdom. Not wealth, nor your life or food or clothes, but worry. You strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.

If you have a friend who owes a loan-shark $10,000, what is the advice: that he shouldn't be worried that they are coming to break his face? If you have a friend who is addicted to cocaine and in a moment of clarity declares to you his panic about what he will do to get his next fix, what is your advice: they he shouldn't worry so much?

Worry is a nerve ending. It is a signal to our mind that something is wrong. Shutting down the signal is never the right thing to do.

Convincing ourselves we have nothing to worry about when Jesus says our heart is bad (v 21), or eyes are bad (v 23), we are enslaved to money (v 24), we worry about things that are not important(v 25), and we are people of little faith (v 30) is insane. Many of the people sitting there would be alive to see the destruction of the Temple, the Holy City, and their nation--with tens of thousands of them killed and thousands more taken into slavery. They have every reason in the world to be worried!

Jesus touches the worry-nerve now to save them from the horror to come. If they would open their eyes, crawl from underneath the foot of their slave master, and do what he says, they could get back with God and save themselves. There was still time.

Hagner says no: With "some modification" we can make it relevant to Christians of every age. Some modification! This was their last chance! They needed no modification to the words of Christ. The problem is that they had been viewing the word of God with "some modification" for centuries. Jesus came to tell them: NO MORE MODIFICATION! You have heard... but I tell you... How many times do we hear that refrain? But Hagner says we still need "some modification"?!

Hagner tells us that anxiety is incompatible with a lifestyle focused on God's kingdom. Who in Jesus' audience is focused on God's kingdom? Wasn't Jesus telling them why they weren't going to get into God's kingdom? Is it imaginable to any reasonable person that Jesus stands at the entrance to the kingdom turning away people who are worried? "Sorry. I cannot allow you in. We can't have people who are worried spoiling things for everyone else."

Not one jot or tittle will pass away.

(but not the people of God of the Old testament?)

So, Jesus' teaching had no direct relevance to the people listening to him, nor to us.

We cannot disregard it because we don't understand the words.

You can go to the commentaries. There you will find a lot of big words that you probably won't understand without a degree or two in theology. The thing you need to understand about that is that Jesus used simple words so we would understand; the experts use big words so we won't understand. Jesus used simple words so we would have no excuse for not doing it. The experts use big words and long explanations to give us an excuse for not doing it.

The simple explanation is this: If you care so much about your own plans and comforts that you change the simple words of Christ, then God can't use you. It's a test. If you say there's no explanation except the one that allows you to stay home, then God can't use you.

That's okay. It truly is. Jesus said it to everyone, but most of the people sitting with him on that mountain didn't do it, and most of the people who first read Matthew's gospel didn't do it, and all the publishing of millions of copies read by billions of people for 2000 years has not changed the fact that almost no one does it.

It's a test. If simple words stop you, then stay home. Live your life, buy what you want, eat and drink your favorite things.

But be honest with yourself. Admit the words are not confusing. Do not let yourself off the hook by saying you don't understand it, and your pastor can't explain it, and therefore you'll just go on with life, because it's unexplainable.

It is unexplainable, if we refuse to connect the simple words with their simple definitions. If we disconnect the words with anything they can mean, then they will forever be confusing. But that's because we did that, to grant ourselves a guilt-free life.