Romans 8: 18-25 Matthew 6: 25-end
Jesus teaches us that the quest for the kingdom of God and the quest for justice are not two separate voyages of discovery but are two halves of the same coin. There is no authentic search for the kingdom that is not also a search for justice.
To search merely for the next meal or warm coat is to blind oneself to the need for justice in this world and the next. And just as we toil and spin in order to fulfil our needs, so we should toil and spin to produce justice on earth so that God’s will is seen to be done on earth as it is in the kingdom in heaven.
Like all good preachers, Jesus knows his audience in this morning’s gospel reading. He knows that the crowd in front of him is relatively prosperous. The Galilean community was not destitute. By and large, its people knew where the next meal was coming from and they had shelter and warmth from whatever the elements threw at them – be it the chill cold air of the night or the beating hot sunlight of the day.
But they might have asked their preacher the very question that you might be asking right now: how we can ask the poor and the destitute to concentrate on the search for justice more than their next meal if they don’t know where their next meal is coming from?
To which question the answer is relatively simple. Those of us who know where our next meal is coming from should not be satisfied by such providence until there is no one on earth who doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from because of such justice is the kingdom made and without such justice we will not have found the kingdom or be worthy to enter it.
It’s the hallmark of so much of Jesus’s teaching and this morning’s gospel reading teaches us something of the urgency of his call to almsgiving. Because his teaching is no mere call to philanthropy but a test of the authenticity of our desire for the kingdom.
There is no authentic search for the kingdom that is not also a search for justice.
So this morning’s gospel reading is not saying that it is better to be hungry than to fail in your search for the kingdom of God. It’s saying that the search for the kingdom of God is futile if anyone is left to go hungry.
One might change the word ‘philanthropy’ to ‘philobasileity’ – a word I’ve just made up – so that our care for our fellow men and women is actually synonymous with our care for the kingdom.
The poetic language of this morning’s gospel lesson might disguise the dark side of nature. After all, it is not all romantic. There are floods and storms and rain. Nature can be destructive so it’s not wise to equate Father God with Mother Nature but rather to see God’s providence as a catalyst to our search for the kingdom of God.
Mother Nature is an end in itself. Father God is a journey to something greater than ordinarily occupies our daily routine. Otherwise our basic human needs can become fetishes or idols – the sorts of things that stand between us and God.
And scripture is punctuated by the call to the kingdom through the call to philanthropy: from teaching in the Old Testament about tithing and leaving the gleanings at the edges of your fields for the poor to the New Testament parables of Dives and Lazarus and the Good Samaritan. This is not kindness to strangers but the search for the kingdom.
Asking and receiving, seeking and finding, knocking and having the door opened to you are just a few verses away in St Matthew’s Gospel after this morning’s gospel reading and they continue the challenge not to do these things for their own sake or for your own sake but to act in a way that paints a picture of justice that is envisaged not as a justice through God alone but one that we are called to produce on earth ourselves.
There is no authentic search for the kingdom that is not also a search for justice.
Near the end of St Matthew’s Gospel we are taught that it is the sheep who helped the vulnerable who will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven. There are greater things to worry about than what we will eat.