A homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ “I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on…seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”
 
Perhaps one of the most difficult things about Christian discipleship is getting first things first. For the world entangles us in its details—many, many more details than simply those concerning food, drink and clothing—and we can often become so immured in them and oppressed by their demands that each day, if not each hour, is so tainted by an all-pervading mundane anxiety that Almighty God has no space to work within us. The cacophony created by the unending questions about the future, the ceaseless “But…?”s and the interminable “What if…?”s render us incapable of hearing, let alone responding to, He who speaks to us in “a still, small voice.” (1 Kings 19:12)
 
The same cancerous anxiety can pervade monasteries. At the very beginning of his Rule (Ch. 2) St Benedict found it necessary to warn his abbots that “if [they] be tempted to complain of lack of means, let [them] remember the words: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ And again: ‘They that fear him lack nothing’”. (ps 33: 10) An abbot more concerned about his bank account than the faithful observance of his monks has his priorities fundamentally wrong. A monk who seeks material comfort or a career, or who worries about tomorrow, needs instead to attend the bells that call him further in God’s service today—for only with this disposition shall he be able worthily and fruitfully to respond to the morrow’s demands.
 
Be it in the cloister or in the home, in a presbytery or in a place of work or of education, this anxiety is spiritually deadly. Its ego-centricity spirals us further and further down into the darkness of fear and despair, in which “I” am the only concern, “my” wants and desires are absolute—and when they are frustrated or lost (or when I fear that they shall be) I have nothing. I grasp for whatever comfort and pleasure that I can to anesthetise the terrorising reality that I am insufficient, that I simply cannot achieve that which I desire, that it is beyond my reach.
 
It is precisely here, in the distress and anguish in which we so often find ourselves, that Our Lord Jesus Christ, in and through the Sacred Liturgy of His Church, addresses these words to us this morning: “seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.” First things first. We must first seek God, then all the rest will follow.
 
Indeed, Saint Benedict instructs the monk in charge of forming those who enter the monastery to “examine whether the novice truly seeks God, and whether he is zealous for the Work of God, for obedience and for humiliations.” (Rule, ch. 58) The novice must be prepared to seek God first and above all. Only then do other things follow—good things, indeed, very good things will follow, things that perhaps the novice could never have imagined on the day he received the habit, but which Almighty God in His Providence has willed from all eternity, and which shall come to pass, just as they have throughout centuries of monastic history because men and women were each prepared to offer their “fiat” (cf. Lk 1:38), only if we are prepared simply, humbly and resolutely to “seek first His kingdom and His righteousness”.
 
This humble faith and trust in God’s Providence—in the fact that He, our Creator and Redeemer, that He our loving Father, will ultimately provide all that we need—is the fertile soil in which His grace can take root and grow. Without this humility, without this faith, without this trust I remain imprisoned in my anxiety and lock out He who stands at the door of my heart and knocks, asking only that I open it and allow Him in. (cf. Rev. 3:20)
 
Of course, faith in the Providence of Almighty God is not an excuse for a quietist imprudent worldly sloth on our part! No—we must make good use of the gifts Almighty God has given us as faithful and wise stewards, as the parable of the talents teaches us (cf. Mt 25:14-30). But we must do so with that evangelical wisdom and prudence that knows that the very first duty of our stewardship is to “seek first His kingdom and His righteousness”. Then, and only then, shall we know how best to invest the talents entrusted to us.
 
The anxieties of this world are real; indeed, they are only too real, particularly when the scarcity of material resources and physical or mental suffering in its various forms oppress us. So too, even in our seeking God, egocentric anxieties can distract and deform us. As we go to His altar this morning, let us lay all of these anxieties at the foot of the Cross, offering ourselves in all our inadequacy with He Who offered Himself for us, confident that our wholehearted participation in His self-sacrifice is all that is necessary if we are to enjoy that pax inter spinas, that peace amidst that thorns of this world, that the Providence of Almighty God will not fail to give us. +