Do Not Worry About Tomorrow

Matthew 6: 25-34 is a classic passage on the providence of God. This text gets better and better as it goes. There is poetry and mysticism in it. Once a man was traveling in a train and there was a Buddhist monk in the same cabin. This man as he was readying the gospels read out this passage loudly, the monk heard it and said, ‘It must have been written by a Buddha.’ Only an enlightened, detached man can write this. Thomas Merton prophesied that the third-millennium spirituality would be a combination of Buddha and Christ.

Life: we have life. Compared to so many inanimate things, and living things we have a life that is so evolved. “For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes” (Luke 12:23). In the Italian neorealism film, Bicycle Thieves, the father, stuck by abject poverty tells his son, ‘that there is a solution for everything, except death.’ In other words, keep finding solutions for life, until death. Life is precious.

Something is considered precious when it does not have a substitute, a replica. The meaning of the words, ‘you are created in the likeness and image of God’ means, you are as unique as god, you will not be repeated. All of us are beautiful. If we begin to appreciate life, it will be absurd when people say, he is handsome, she is beautiful, etc. Everyone is unique and beautiful. To compare one to another we should be made of the same template. There is a Malayalam book, Sunderenmarum Sundarikalum (handsome men and beautiful women); what about the rest? What is the standard?

Worry diminishes the quality of your life: it is gentiles (meaning people who are not spiritual, calling people of other religions gentiles is not politically correct) who are anxious about life. They don’t understand God as Father.

Seek first the Kingdom of God, the wisdom of god to confront anxiety. The gospel says that ‘the rest will be added on to you’. No, the earlier text seems to say that ‘the rest will become irrelevant’, the rest becomes trivial. The critical study of the Bible demands that we correct the Bible too when needed. Some texts are wrong because people have added them there to make them appealing to the people of that time. Some texts need revision because of the modern understanding of humanity, gender, environment, and the constitutions of the states.

Every day has its own troubles: Take life by units. Handle today’s responsibility. Tomorrow there will be provisions designed by god to handle tomorrow’s problems. Just face today. We would expect an optimistic ending, but Jesus is genuine, he says, tomorrow has its own troubles.

Notes taken during my annual retreat, preached by Bobby Jose Kattikad, Capuchin.

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