“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. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?” (Matthew 6:25)
Hard words for a soft society. The Lord Jesus puts us to the test. He challenges us to question our values. What are we living for, and what would we die for? We go to Him with our worries and we may wonder why we don’t feel that we are getting the answers we expected, needed or wanted. Silence is the response, and we lose faith. Prayer “doesn’t work,” and we eternal optimists who always anticipate success even in our prayers go away frustrated, disappointed, maybe even angry. We prayed for money, security or success, and it didn’t happen.
The Lord Jesus may be telling you or me that we don’t really need whatever it is we were asking for. He’s not a God who indulges our fantasies. He is One who humbles us in order that we consider what is best for us, and nothing better imaginable is to be loved by God and to love Him in return. And it’s long past the time when we act like spoiled children who turn on the love when we get spiritual presents and turn off our love when we do not.
Some of our church fathers grasped the deeper meaning of the Lord’s words above. St. Maximos Confessor wrote: “The one who has his mind fixed on the love of God distains all visible things and even his own body as alien” (First Century on Love, 6).
To fix your mind on the love of God means that you meditate on the love that God has for you as He revealed by His sacrifice on the Cross. To fix your mind is to make it a constant contemplation. You realize that it is not an abstraction—God’s love is very personal, and the person He loves is you. You are or ought to be grateful for this insight: The Father through the Holy Spirit sent His Son into the world to save sinners, among them being you. I think of those who feel dejected, rejected, unwanted and unloved; but they are searching for love in all the wrong places. Every crucifix is a reminder of God’s love for us.
And you are made to be more than a vacuum of affection, drawing in love from God and others without responding with your own love. Our culture makes a mistake in defending the abusers, the killers, those who inflict pain and suffering on others, justifying their brutality by claiming they weren’t taught to love nor given examples by loving parents. We are all made in the image of God. We all have the capacity to become like God in loving Him and all that He created.
The blessed Augustine, responding to the question about salvation and what a person should do to be saved, stated: “Love God, and do what you wish.” At first blush it seems so easy; but he meant not just to say we love God, but also to explore all of the implications of that command. To love God means to meditate on God’s love for us, to come to the foot of the Christ’s Cross, then to go out and do likewise. This means to learn the meaning of Christ’s paradoxical statement: “He who seeks to save his life will lose it; but he who seeks to lose his life for My sake and the gospels, will save it” (Mark 8:35).