Who can not worry?



Today’s Gospel – Matthew 6:25-34 – seems like a call to mobilize our willpower and strive not to worry. That would be a formula for worry! Add Jesus’ authority and the worry will be intensified by false guilt. This text needs careful interpretation.

A key to the interpretation is found near the end: “Strive first for the kingdom of God”. Focus on God, not yourself. God is everywhere. In all people, events and things. The kingdom is the state of being where God’s presence is acknowledged, welcomed and allowed to completely shape our lives. That is “the Good news of the kingdom” proclaimed by Jesus – see Matthew 4:23. It is not an imperative to set about a moral program but rather an invitation to allow God to love us into freedom. The moral life flows from – and can only flow from – that freedom that is the gift of God’s love. One particular manifestation of this is the disposition that increasingly trusts God and therefore does not “worry”. This is grace!

There are some people who have shown extraordinary commitment in allowing God to love them into freedom. Over time they develop more and more a God-shaped life. They are many in number. Some, like Mary MacKillop, have been formally acknowledged by the Church. We celebrate and remember these people. The celebrating and the remembering can inspire us to the necessary work that, slowly but surely, enables the letting go that allows the Good News of the kingdom to take hold in our hearts. 

The commitment, endurance and generous sacrifice Mary MacKillop and so many of her sisters have exhibited over the past 150 years, reminds us of both the work that must be done and the manner of that work. It is a gradual, shifting centre of gravity, from self towards God, from control towards letting go, from me-and-my-efforts towards God-and God’s-unmerited gift, from wilful effort towards graced emergence. 

The God-shaped life – which is also paradoxically but pre-eminently a this-world-life – will be manifest in our capacity to live in the present moment. Thus, Mary MacKillop writes: “Do all you can with the means at your disposal and calmly leave the rest to God”. St Teresa of Avila shows the same God-shaped disposition. The following reflection was found in Teresa’s prayer book after her death: “Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. All things pass away. God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Those who have God find they lack nothing. God alone suffices”. 

If you want to be someone like Mary and Teresa, seek to know God in all things, everywhere, at all times. God comes to us as the truth of our experience, as the kindness of a neighbour, the challenge in our moments of pain and frustration and disappointment, as the tedium of repetitive tasks, as the joy in a child’s presence, as the delight of the embrace of your beloved. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well”.



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Date
08 August 2021

Tag 1
Gospel

Tag 2
Story

Tag 3
Teaching

Source Name
Michael Whelan sm

Source URL
https://stpatschurchhill.org/...

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