A Word for the Third Sunday After Pentecost

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? (Mt 6:25).

In today’s Gospel our Lord Jesus Christ offers all of us most useful and necessary instruction and fatherly comfort, impressing upon us that Heavenly Providence unceasingly and especially cares for all of us. That we might fully and clearly understand today’s Sunday Gospel, let me set it before you in the Russian tongue from beginning to end. Here it is: «The Lord declared: the lamp of the body is the eye. So then, if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So then, if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness? No one can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. 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? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; and your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they? And which of you, by worrying, can add one cubit to his stature? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I say to you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So then, do not worry, and do not say: what shall we eat? or what shall we drink? or what shall we wear? for after all these things the pagans seek; and your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you» (Mt 6:22-33). Here ends the Gospel. And here is its interpretation: the Lord speaks, at the outset, of the simplicity proper to the nature of our soul, created in the image and likeness of God: if your eye is sound, says the Lord, your whole body will be full of light (Mt 6:22); and of the impossibility of working at once for God and for mammon, for good and for evil. For as God is a simple, undivided being, in three Persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—so too the human soul is likewise a simple being, though in three powers: mind, word, and spirit, or: reason, heart, and will—for these three powers are one soul; and these three powers ought to be undivided in men—that is, for example: we ought to love God with all our mind, or thought, with all our heart, with all the strength of our will, with all our might, and not with the mind or thought alone. Our mind, or heart, is the same to us as the eye is to the body, the Lord goes on to say: if the eye is clear, bright, then the whole body has light; we walk without stumbling; if a man’s heart is simple, pure, then all his thoughts, desires, words, and actions are likewise simple, pure, well-intentioned, holy, marked with the spirit of love, meekness, righteousness, and truth. If the eye is bad, unclean, dark, then the whole body too is dark. If a man’s heart is unclean, cunning, evil, then all his thoughts too, his desires, words, and his whole life, all his actions, are cunning, unclean, often malicious. For if your mind, your heart, your conscience—these lamps of yours, which the Lord gave you, that they might be a light for you, by the light of the Gospel—if these have already become darkness in you, then how great will that darkness be—what will your thoughts, your desires, your undertakings, all your deeds be like? This will be a fearsome darkness, a forerunner of the darkness of hell, the outer darkness. And indeed, people with a corrupted mind and heart, with a seared conscience, with a depraved will, are ready for anything evil. So then, Christian, guard your lamp—your soul and heart—that your lamp may always burn brightly; watch continually, that it not be darkened by cunning or envy, self-love and indulgence of the flesh, anger and fury, pride and vainglory, sloth and negligence, or despondency and faintheartedness, gluttony and drunkenness, and the other works of darkness. Darkness, the darkness of hell, is constantly striving to darken the lamps of our souls; unceasing attention to ourselves is needed, watchfulness over ourselves; love is needed for the righteousness of God, for the commandments of God, in the keeping of which consists our eternal life—our peace, our honor and our glory, even here on earth—and the keeping of which shows forth our love for God. No one, the Lord goes on to say, can serve two masters (Mt 6:24)—that is, God and the devil, one’s own sinful, passion-ridden flesh, the adulterous and sinful world. If you love your own sinful flesh and fulfill its whims and passions, you will come to hate God, who demands of us righteousness and holiness, a life according to the spirit, the putting to death of the flesh with its passions and lusts. Our flesh is a bad master; for in it, says the Apostle, dwells no good thing, but evil is ever present with it (Rom 7:18-21); we must hate it and its lusts, for the sake of pleasing God, who seeks our holiness and grants us resurrection and eternal life: do not make provision for your flesh, to fulfill its lusts, O Christian, that you may please the Lord, for those who are in the flesh cannot please God (Rom 8:8), says the Apostle.

Therefore I say to you, says the Lord: 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? (Mt 6:25). The Lord forbids us an excessive care for food, drink, and clothing, an attachment to them, but does not forbid an ordinary, reasonable provision for food and clothing; He does not forbid a reasonable care for decency in dress and in the furnishing of one’s home. But we, through our sins, through our attachment to earthly life and to our own body, have perverted, and go on perverting, the order of life established by God: God commands us to care, first of all, for the soul—to keep the commandments of God, to do the righteousness of God, to acquire meekness, freedom from malice, mutual love, holiness, to keep a constant repentance, and in general to strive toward the life to come; but we, on the contrary, care first of all for the body, for food and drink, for various elaborate and fashionable garments, neglecting the soul—and even when we come into the house of God, even there, during the divine services, we do not lay aside our vain cares for food and clothing; and there too the vanity of this life bursts into our hearts, cools them, does not allow us to pray to God sincerely and earnestly, to repent of our sins, which are without number, or to thank the Lord with a fervent soul for His countless mercies. So harmfully do excessive cares for the flesh act upon our soul: they do not let us, even in church, sincerely pray for our own soul, for its salvation; do not allow us to lift ourselves up to Him with our whole heart, to love Him with our whole soul. Attachment to our sinful flesh has turned the whole life of the Christian, so to speak, upside down. From attachment to the flesh come all our sins: self-love, envy, ill-will, miserliness, love of gain, hardness of heart, man-pleasing, servility, intemperance, favoritism, hypocrisy, greed, drunkenness, extravagance, gambling, spectacles, sloth and negligence about the soul’s salvation, laziness in prayer and repentance, impurity, dissoluteness—this whole army of sins, from attachment to the flesh—our own much-sinning flesh has perverted everything, the whole circle of life. So then, Christians, whoever among you wishes to be Christ’s, let him crucify his flesh with its passions and lusts (Gal 5:24). Let us not care excessively for the flesh, and think only of what to eat and drink and what to wear; this is what the pagans seek, who have no notion of the Kingdom of God, and do not seek it; but we, in our baptism, were reborn for the Kingdom of God; we are children of God and heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ (Rom 8:16-17); there is prepared for us in the heavens an inheritance imperishable, unfading; let us seek this, and everything else will be added to us by the Lord: food, and drink, and clothing, and, if it be needful, even glory and honor here on earth, for glory, honor, and peace to everyone who works what is good (Rom 2:10). Amen.