Genesis 1.1-2.3; Psalm 136 (136 1-9, 23-end); Romans 8.18-25; Matthew 6.25-end

ONE scholar encourages us to savour the “combination of sapiential insight and apocalyptic vision in the anxieties passage”. But his shorthand — “the anxieties passage” — made me uncomfortable. I had not thought of it in that way before.

When I reflected on my reaction to that ugly label for a beautiful Gospel, I could see that the reason that I disliked it was more reflex than reflection: “Jesus” and “anxiety” do not sit comfortably side by side. Then my discomfort drove me back to the text itself. This time, I saw clearly the remarkable depth of understanding that Jesus shows about how fundamentally we human beings are governed and dominated, even bullied, by our anxieties. He highlights lessons that we can learn from nature, too, but here I will focus most on his words about anxieties.

Listing the anxieties in the order in which they appear in this Gospel: we are told first not to worry about our life (explained as covering what we will eat or drink). Next, we must not worry about our body (covering what we will wear). Then he points out how anxiety is futile because it is sterile: it cannot produce real fruit (such as increasing our span of life). After looking at examples from nature, he turns back to these same drivers of human anxiety: what we will eat, what we will drink, and what we will wear.

It is tempting to make this insight a conclusion: human anxieties do not change. In Bible days, people worried about food and clothing, and we still do today. That is true — but the full message goes deeper. We know that Jesus’s listeners did not have the institutions of state welfare and charity support which provide our social safety net. For many of them, the choice must have been between eating and starving, drink and thirst, clothing and nakedness. Worrying, in those circumstances, would surely be sensible, unavoidable.

Most of us are unlikely to be troubled by not having enough food or drink for survival, or enough clothing to stay comfortable and warm, while maintaining our dignity. Yet our anxieties about bodily necessities are somehow just as pervasive as they were in Jesus’s lifetime. In place of the fear of starvation, we have eating disorders, obesity, fat-shaming. And we have turned bodily need into an aesthetic, through the gluttony expressed in food as luxury, exclusivity, status.

In place of lack of clothing comes fixation on brands and fashions, and being seen in the right trainers or sporting the most expensive logos. Even if we are not touched by such anxieties ourselves, we may have to manage the anxieties of others: children can face the self-consciousness of their teenage years tormented by peer pressures and secret shames about clothing (among other things) — anxieties of which their parents are unaware.

Once this Gospel is tested against modern life-experience, it becomes clear that humankind’s problem is not necessarily actual food or actual clothing at all. The real problem is one of desiring. Augustine calls this “appetite”, and it opens up a wealth of opportunities for sin. The Roman poet Ovid is not a natural companion for Augustine, but he agrees with him in this, putting it perfectly when he writes of humankind’s “wicked passion for having” (amor sceleratus habendi).

We would not tell a person at risk of hunger that food was unimportant. But then Jesus is not telling them that, either. Worrying is natural, reasonable. It is part of how we apply our intelligence to solving problems: “I need to eat” leads to “I will eat this apple.” Then, worrying that “I need to eat tomorrow as well” leads to “I need to find more apples.” Worrying can make us strategic: “I will plant this seed and nurture it, water and tend it, so that I always have plenty of apples.”

Somewhere in each of us is a dividing line between positive anxiety, which helps us to avoid mistakes and prepare for the future, and negative anxiety, which distorts the pattern of life so that we behave as if we were in that not-yet-existent future rather than the present moment. The dividing line is set differently in each of us. Once we identify it, we must learn to manage it; for the question that Jesus poses in the “anxieties passage” is whether we possess the necessities for human life and dignity, or whether they possess us.