Is the Sin Anxiety . . . or Idolatry?
If you're anxious and you know it, have more faith! Or not.
In a detour from the usual Ignatian spirituality I dive into here, I’m sharing portions of my exegetical research paper from last year (edited to make reading more enjoyable for a general audience). ICYMI, here’s the first installment where I talk a bit about the difference between spirituality and theology and give the intro to the paper.
My goal is to give you permission to explore scripture passages that have always felt a bit off. It’s not that I’ve “done the research” and am somehow all-knowing now. It’s that I chose a passage I’ve never really liked and wrestled with it. Maybe you’ll learn something from what I’ve written, or maybe you’ll be inspired to do some spiritual wrestling of your own.
Last year, the passage I wrestled with was Matthew 6:25—33, the “do not worry” passage of the Sermon on the Mount. You know, the part where Jesus tells his followers that God takes care of the birds and the flowers and so obviously everything will be just fine for you? The passage that the pastor of your local megachurch uses to make you believe you don’t have enough faith because you experience worry, fear, or anxiety?
If you can’t already tell, I have some thoughts. Let’s dive into them. (But read the first part if you haven’t yet!)
If there’s one thing my scripture professor has taught me, it’s that the Bible was not written with us in mind. It’s for us as the inspired Word of God, but we can’t read scripture assuming that the original audience didn’t matter. In this case, there are two audiences to take into consideration.
Jesus’s Audience in the Sermon on the Mount
First up, let’s set the historical scene. Jesus’s famed sermon takes place on a hilltop in Galilee. His disciples are gathered close to him, while larger crowds from the area are farther away. These people who gathered by and large already knew who Jesus was and trusted him. They knew about his miracles because they had either witnessed them firsthand or knew someone who did.
These were not wealthy folks. Galilee was a rural area, mainly full of peasant farmers living in some amount of poverty. One source estimates that 90 percent of the Galilean population lived with “continuous problems of sustenance.”1
Does this sound like a group Jesus would have patronized with a sermon that essentially says, “Have more faith and it will all be fine?” Nope. On the contrary, he specifically acknowledges the group’s need for food and water for survival in Mt 6:32b when he says, “Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.”
These would have been words of comfort to a crowd of low socioeconomic status living in a culture that required their constant toil for survival. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that, in this passage, Jesus is dismantling the relationship between work and sustenance: “According to [Jesus], bread is not to be valued as the reward for work; he speaks instead of the carefree simplicity of the man who walks with him and accepts everything as it comes from God.”2
Matthew’s Gospel Audience
This divorce of work from provision is also significant for Matthew’s audience. The Gospel of Matthew was written decades after Jesus’s death and resurrection, likely around 80 CE. Matthew wrote primarily to Jewish Christians and Torah-observant Gentiles.3
These Jewish Christians were a people newly separated from the synagogue. For them, the Sermon on the Mount was intended to answer a question of identity. How were they supposed to behave now? What ethical system should they follow?4
Speaking from the hillside as a Moses figure, Jesus delivers the answer to Matthew’s audience in the form of the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew chose his words carefully to ensure he was conveying the ethical code by which Jewish Christians were expected to live.
The message the “don’t worry” passage of the sermon sends to this audience is twofold: to reject anxious striving and instead rely on God for daily provision and to prepare for right living in God’s eternal kingdom.5
We can see that Jesus’s audience and Matthew’s audience would have been hearing this sermon with very different perspectives than we have today.
Those of us in the West, particularly the US, have been steeped in a culture of earning our keep, working for what we have, and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. So that, of course, is what we read into this scripture.
But that’s not at all what the scripture actually says.
Relying on Yourself Is Just Dressed-Up Idolatry
Matthew’s use of language is important here. When he writes, “birds of the sky” and “grass of the field,” his Jewish-Christian readers are going to follow that thread back to Genesis and start making some connections.
We know the basics of what happened in the Garden of Eden. God provided everything Adam and Eve needed for survival (and then some). By disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve sought to expand their own knowledge, essentially choosing to rely on themselves.
This turning away from God and toward themselves is a sort of idolatry: the worship of our own abilities, skills, knowledge, strength, and so on. It’s pride at the core.
Matthew, in writing the Sermon on the Mount, wants readers to remember that sin. So this portion of the Sermon, which Jesus preached to poor farmers and Matthew wrote down for a Jewish audience, is arranged as an echo of the Fall. One of the consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve was cursed ground. The earth that once yielded food easily would now require toil (Gen 3:17)—toil that the Galilean farmers would have understood in their bones.
Fun fact: the verse immediately before the “do not worry” passage is the famous one about Mammon: “You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Mt 6:24). The New Collegeville Bible Commentary states that mammon, meaning “wealth,” shares the same root word as the Hebrew amen: (mn), which means “trust.”6
In the full historic context, the “don’t worry” passage can be seen as a command to trust God instead of one’s own wealth-building.
Oof. That’s a much harder pill to swallow for the WASP-y, Western, “good Christian crowd” than just telling people to have more faith and not worry so much. Another great quote from the commentary:
“When the disciples’ whole attention is centered on seeking God’s reign and right relation with all creation, then those who have enough of life’s necessities do not become obsessed with the quest for material possessions.”7
This is good news for all us clinical anxiety sufferers (and those who have normal, everyday worries as well). God isn’t sitting on his throne looking down at us, tsk-tsking because we don’t have enough faith! Instead, he is asking us to turn away from the idolatry of reliance on ourselves and our wealth—a difficult ask in modern America.8
In part three, we’ll explore how to do this, and the larger implications for our callings as Christians in a global church. Stay tuned!
While you wait for part three of this experiment in sharing my homework, I’d love to hear from you. How have you interpreted this passage for your own life? What parts of scripture do you want to wrestle with?
Sakari Häkkinen, “Poverty in the First-Century Galilee,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 72, no. 4: (September 2016), 3. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v72i4.3398.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 179.
Stephen L. Harris, The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2020), 157.
Andrie B. du Toit, “Revisiting the Sermon on the Mount: Some Major Issues,” Neotestamentica 50, no. 3 (Special Edition 2016): 64. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=rfh&AN=ATLAiBCB170515001890&scope=site&custid=s8448101.
There’s more I could say here about the Sermon on the Mount as an eschatological passage. According to some scholars, it has somewhat of a double meaning about how to live here and now and also about the end times.
Barbara E. Reid, “The Gospel of Matthew.” In The New Collegeville Bible Commentary: New Testament, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), 44.
Ibid., 44.
For an adjacent conversation on living out Christianity in a capitalist society, see this post from last Lent.