God is the center of all gravities. I mean this word in its pure sense — of "grave things," of gravitas. The most grave thing, the fundamental thing, the ground of all being, is, of course, God Himself. In the beginning He is all there is. And in the end there is only God — God and His with us, which is Heaven, and His not with us, which is Hell.
He has taught us: there is only towards God or away from God. There is no standing still, no other way. The earth is not His. He created it for us and then turned it over to our awesome powers for good or not-for-good. Since, the departure from Eden, it has been a place of preparation in which and through which we become fully who we are. In that sense, we might say that all Scripture belongs under the genre "travel literature," like Mandeville's Travels or The Canterbury Tales. For the Holy Scriptures are, fundamentally, about journey: in one extreme, we see the journey of the determined Jonah to the opposite end of the world in Tarshish (technically beyond the known world, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. In the other, we behold the journey of Jesus of Nazareth, whose journey mysteriously is the Kingdom of Heaven. In between we find nothing but journeys: the journey of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees into a constant intimacy with God, the journey of God's people in bondage from Egypt through the wilderness, the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, the visitation of Mary, and the constant perambulations of Jesus and His followers including later the journeys of His Apostles to the ends of the earth (Acts 13:47).
It all begins with the first steps east from Eden and must continue until all steps cease. Yes, the theme is struck with the wandering Tribes of Jacob seeking a Promised Land (Exodus) or with the "sheep of the house of Israel" (Mt 10:6), scattered and lost. By the Middle Ages it has become part of our cultural DNA, seen in the Wandering Jew whom we meet in Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale. This is the point of the Canterbury Tales. we wander physically and spiritually until we are lost: "at a thropes ende," (The Parson's Tale), neither here nor there. Suddenly day turns to night one bright morning, and the constellation of Libra (the Scales of Justice) appear on the horizon (Ibid, ).
Human history is one great mess of wanderings — from the discovery of New Worlds with its train of reckless genocides; to scaling highest mountain summits whose trails chronicle deadly expeditions; to the bottom of the seas littered with the wreckage of vessels and lost lives; and thence beyond our world, into outer space leaving in our wake 100 trillion pieces of man-made debris according to the European Space Agency.
There is no standing still in God's plan. And our word wandering through history has come to be a synonym for error.
Each of our lives is de facto a holy pilgrimage. For each begins with God and then continues in the company of His angels. Each life ends in God, inevitably. And even the lifetime spent wandering-by-the-way, rejecting God, unavoidably makes for a definite and consequential journey surrounded by the force (and solicitude) of Divinity.
The life lived with God, revealed by Jesus of Nazareth, was originally conceived to be a journey. The phrase "the way" is attested throughout the Scriptures but specifically used, even by the enemies of Christianity, to designate the followers of Christ:
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Then Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest
and asked letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. (Acts 9:2) |
The Greek word for Way here is Òδός / Hodós meaning "journey" or "path." And the Church's first teaching — the opening line from its oldest book of Apostolic instruction — is this: "Two ways there are: life and death, but a great difference between the two ways."
In our Gospel lesson this morning, the master verb is to seek: "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God." This is to be our life, Jesus reveals: above all other things, we must seek. It follows that our lives consist in coming to one crossroads after another. Our lesson this morning focuses on the greatest of earthly crossroads: the path to God and the path away from God:
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No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other,
or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (Mt 6:24) |
Jesus uses the Aramaic word mâmôn meaning "wealth" or "riches" in the sense of "corrupting influence." The American slang for this, especially during the 1960s, was "materialism" suggesting an idolatry of money and luxurious things. It is telling that the phrase "almighty dollar" was also commonly heard, obviously a "God phrase." Biblical commentators during the Middle Ages were specific, proposing Mammon to be a god, or idol, which people actually worshiped.
How do we advance down the path towards Mammon? What actions do we take? Jesus proposes the verb to worry:
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"Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat
or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. .... "Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? .... "So why do you worry? .... "Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For after all these things the Gentiles seek." (Mt 6:25, 27, 28, 31) |
He concludes this litany with the all-important verb to seek, but this time pairing it not to "the Kingdom of God" but rather to "the kingdom of Gentile desires." The word Gentile here (the Greek word is έθνος / ethnos ) means "the vast majority who do not know God." These are the people who have made "lifestyles of the rich and famous" into an idol. This is the true picture of the society surrounding us. Indeed, news agencies, from CNN to Fox, devote their headlines to the vagaries so-called celebrities and their luxurious style of living.
Here we come to the burning point of the Lord's teaching this morning. It is simple as our lesson is brief: the world consists of a small minority who seek the Kingdom of God, on one side of the crossroads, and a vast majority who have fastened all their hopes and dreams upon the kingdom of materialism, on the other side.
Certainly, the majority of Americans are more absorbed in buying lottery tickets than in cultivating a rich prayer life with God. Indeed, the public square in the U.S. has banished God and scoffs at the notion of "a spiritual path," predicating all knowledge on what is observable (or inferred) in terms of atoms and subatoms.
This is materialism taken to a level that the first-century Levant could not have imagined. On the other hand, they certainly could have imagined banishing talk of a "Kingdom of God," a policy enforced by synagogue rulers throughout the Levant and beyond. This is no side-issue but the historical background for our Gospel lesson.
As worry is the gate that leads one to serve mammon, we understand this journey Jesus to be an interior one. It has mainly to do with the state of our hearts and souls. Worry is the primary symptom of our distrust in God. For while God does not run our world in the sense of "taking over" our affairs, Jesus assures us that God is, after all, Providence, the One Who Provides. He arrays the lilies of the field splendidly, and the birds of the air do not lack for sustenance. And we, who are God's children, the sheep of His pasture, shall lack for nothing (Ps 23).
As the attributes of God Himself include simplicity and self-sacrificing love, God does not allot us with cabin cruisers and mansions. Such things subvert God's desire that all should have their portion. At the Hermitage, the proverb "Live simply that others might simply live" has a godly ring. Two paths are set before us. Which one shimmers and excites us? It depends on how we see things:
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"If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness." (Mt 6:22-23) |
During the years I spent at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, I lived in the West Village of New York near the Holland Tunnel. Thinking back to my college years, when I saw New York in terms of preeminent museums, concert halls, and fine dining, and then later when I saw it terms of the dispossessed, the suffering, and those to whom they were invisible, I realized that everything depends on you see things.
One snowy evening I saw a man freezing to death on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village. I could see the footprints in the snow giving him a wide berth to the left and to the right. But not a single foot print was seen to approach him. I asked my friend to help me at least get the man into a doorway, but his older brother admonished us: "Call the police? They don't want him. Drive him to a hospital? They won't take him." So we looked at each other, helpless in the cruelty of mammon's world.
Truly, if we have made our light a darkness, we are not even aware that it is dark. And we distract ourselves near a fire at an exclusive watering hole ordering another round of cocktails discussing the Broadway play we have just seen.
My own darkness was shattered by a lightning bolt when I began serving in Haiti. How could I have been so blind? How could I have been so self-absorbed that I could ignore the suffering of so many people so close to home? I understood the phrase "First World problems" with new clarity (and humiliation). You know "First World problems": our thousand-dollar smart phone is not new, our boat is puny as it motors into the marina, our professional title is unimpressive. Harvard Professor, Paul Farmer, M.D., who did so much for Haiti, said,
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"If I could only capture the money Americans spend grooming their pets,
I could solve every [material] problem in Haiti."
(Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains, 2003) |
And who could forget the closing scene is Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List in which Oskar Schindler says,
| "I could have done more. I could have done so much more. I threw away so much money. You have no idea." |
If we have made our interior world a darkness by fastening our attention upon the wrong things, Jesus says, "How great is that darkness!" (Mt 6:31)
The choice is simple: either we choose the light that is light, or we choose the charming lights that lure us into vast darkness and evil:
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The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. (Mt 6:22-33) |
Each of us is born with a good eye in God's good world. We must develop the bad eye ourselves. It begins with a fascination in worldly things and turns into a devotion to them — a heart and mind that has been formed in them.
The good eye is the eye of innocence and goodness. This is how we begin. We look back now and say, "a garden" in which we saw a creation shimmering with beauty, a world filled with people we hoped might become our friends, and a belief that all things work for good. At least, that is the way it was, not so long ago.
Can we return to that garden? Yes! We can always return .... though the world call us "simple," though we sacrifice ourselves in our love, and though we keep our eyes always on the Kingdom of God ignoring the nattering world around us.
Let us throw out our televisions!
Let us put our smart phones down!
And
let us give thanks to God for the beautiful earth we live in,
seeking out the goodness we shall find in the godly hearts around us.
For such as these are the Kingdom of Heaven.
Seek!
the Lord implores each of us,
and
"all these things," whatever God deems to be good,
shall be added unto you!
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.