Jesus teaching about dependence on God

Our gospel reading for this Sunday is about the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ about our dependence on God. This is not your everyday Catholic teaching, but it’s good to know what the Lord thinks about our anxieties of daily life. In case you have forgotten. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is Divinity himself, became man and lived in Galilee for all his 30-years in hidden life and 3-years of his public ministry.

Therefore, from his boyhood until he became an adult, our Lord Jesus Christ was able to meet a lot of people and knew what they wanted in life, which why this particular teaching today may have been taught 2,000 years ago is still very relevant today. After all, man has changed very little in the last 2,000 years. You can read this in your Bibles on Matt.6: 24-34.

“[Jesus said to his disciples] 24” No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat (or drink), or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?

26 Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they? 27 Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span? 28 Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. 29 But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them.

30 If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith? 31 So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat? Or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’ 32 All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides. 34 Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.”

*  *  *

So what lessons are we getting directly from our Lord Jesus Christ today? Let me remind you again…what the Lord said, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat (or drink), or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Now is the right time to ask ourselves that poignant question; “How serious are we when we say that we want to follow our Lord Jesus Christ?

Let’s dig deeper and for this discussion, let’s do a self-examination albeit a self-inquisition and look at ourselves in the mirror and ask that all important question… “Do we see a follower of our Lord Jesus Christ… or do you see a vain person looking at the mirror? I must submit that almost all of us fail in this vanity test. Most of us look at the mirror to see those ugly blemishes or wrinkles in our faces or the shape of our bodies or the clothes we are to wear in work today or in a party?

Yes we are guilty as charged! After all, we all are frail human beings who just worry too much about life’s daily grind. Of course, we know that vanity is one of the deadly sins. But our Lord Jesus Christ knew the hearts of men… and women in his time and we know that our Lord Jesus Christ is still with us today and knows what’s the inside of our hearts.

But what is the message that our Lord Jesus is trying to tell us in this gospel today? Look into verse 33 when he said, “But seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.” How do we do this? Well, let me count the ways. As we learned from the Bible in the Old Testament, every devout Jew prays the Shema Prayer in Hebrew before he sleeps and when he wakes up in the morning. This is the Shema, “Sh’ma Yisraeil, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad” translated in English, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One!”

The first thing we ought to do when we wake up in the morning is to pray… and thank the Lord first of all because we lived through the night and are still alive… and when we’re done for the day, we pray and thank the Lord for the good and yes even the bad things that happened to us during the day. St. Pio of Petrelcina had a beautiful prayer, “You pray, you hope and you don’t worry.” Indeed St. Padre Pio was a man of faith and men (and women) of faith only have complete trust in God.

At the end of today’s gospel our Lord tells us, “Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.” So allow me to ask you a final question, “Would you be able to have a total trust in God? If you do have that trust God, then you have nothing to worry about because we are far more important to God than the birds he feeds.

*  *  *

Email: [email protected].