Today’s Mass readings converge on a single challenge: the choice between serving God and serving our anxieties. In the Gospel from Matthew 6, Christ gives us the most direct teaching on worry in Scripture, and the other readings frame it within the larger story of trust and provision. One line runs through all of them: you cannot serve two masters, and the Father knows what you need.
What today’s readings give us
The First Reading from 2 Chronicles 24 tells the downfall of King Joash, who abandons the God who raised him and turns to idols after the death of his protector Jehoiada. The Responsorial Psalm is from Psalm 89, affirming God’s covenant faithfulness across generations. The Alleluia verse gives us 2 Corinthians 8:9, the great exchange: Christ became poor so that by his poverty we might become rich.
Then Matthew 6:24-34 arrives with the Sermon on the Mount teaching on worry. Jesus names what we serve when we are anxious: not God, but mammon. He shows us the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, neither of which toil, yet both of which are sustained. The Father who feeds sparrows will feed you.
The line worth carrying with you
The command appears three times in seven verses: do not be anxious. Not as advice but as instruction. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34, Douay-Rheims). Christ does not say tomorrow holds no trouble. He says today’s trouble is enough, and the Father is present in today.
What makes this more than motivational talk is the context. Joash’s fall in 2 Chronicles shows what happens when we lose trust and grasp for security in created things. The Alleluia verse names the price Christ paid to restore that trust: he took our poverty so we could receive his riches, which are not mammon but the Father’s care. The Gospel is not asking us to pretend provision does not matter. It is asking us to recognize who provides.
For today
Before bed tonight, name one thing you have been anxious about this week. Then read Matthew 6:25-34 slowly, letting the image of the sparrows and lilies sit alongside your worry. Ask whether the thing you fear is outside the Father’s knowledge. The exercise is not to erase the concern but to see it in scale.
Today’s full readings are at USCCB.
