Wednesday, March 04, 2020

Two ways to stop borrowing trouble: Sermon on the Mount on Worry

Continuing the Lenten meditation and self-reflection on worry, this is a brief thought on the texts from the Sermon on the Mount which I wanted to set out separately from the prior post. 

Reading the Sermon on the Mount for texts addressing worry, I was surprised to find an echo of those thoughts in neighboring verses, one of which I had related to fear and worry before, and the second which I hadn't:
"Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will worry about itself. Sufficient for each day is its own evil."
It's the very next verse that reminds us:
"Judge not, lest you be judged." 
At first glance they seem unrelated and I had always separated them in my mind. But this past week I considered whether "Judge not" was meant as something of a parallel: in the same way that each day has enough trouble of its own without borrowing more trouble from another day, likewise each of us has enough faults of our own without troubling ourselves about another person's faults. "Why look at the speck in your brother's eye when you have a plank in your own?" It sounds a lot like what he was saying about worry in just the previous breath.

So there are two easy ways to reduce my load of worrying: keeping myself to here and now, and keeping myself to my own faults.

It seems that keeping myself to my own faults would have two quick advantages. First it would lighten my load of worries by the amount from concerning myself with the faults of others. So the faults that remained would be my own. (Does anyone but Jesus need to have a worry about the weight of other peoples' faults?) Next it would lighten my load by reducing my own faults by whatever amount of fault it was to be looking over my neighbors' faults in the first place.

2 comments:

Martin LaBar said...

Keeping to our own faults? An interesting thought!

Weekend Fisher said...

Hey Martin

Thank you for reading and for commenting!

Take care & God bless
Anne / WF