Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Matthew · About this commentary
Consider the Lilies
Matthew 6:25-34
25 Therefore I tell you, don’t be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing? · WEB
Anxiety answered not with reassurance but with arguments — from birds, from lifespan, from flowers, and from what your Father already knows.
"Therefore I tell you, don't be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear" Matthew 6:25.
The therefore ties this to the previous paragraph: having said that no one can serve two masters, the sermon turns to the reason most people serve the wrong one, which is fear rather than greed. The items listed are not luxuries — food, drink, clothing — so the anxiety being addressed is the reasonable kind, in an audience for whom a bad harvest was a real threat.
And the command is not do not plan. The word is about a divided, fretting preoccupation, the state the same root describes in Martha Luke 10:41.
"See the birds of the sky, that they don't sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you of much more value than they?" Matthew 6:26.
The first argument is from lesser to greater and it is carefully limited. Birds do not farm — they are not being held up as models of idleness, and the point is not that provision arrives without work but that it arrives without anxiety. What the birds lack is the storehouse and the worry, not the searching.
"Which of you by being anxious, can add one moment to his lifespan?" Matthew 6:27.
The second argument is simply that it does not work. Whatever anxiety is for, it does not extend a life, and the honest observation is that it tends to do the opposite.
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don't toil, neither do they spin, yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these" Matthew 6:28–29.
The third is aimed at clothing and it is the loveliest thing in the sermon. Wild flowers on a Galilean hillside outdress the wealthiest king in the nation's memory, and they are burned as fuel within days — the grass of the field, which today exists and tomorrow is thrown into the oven Matthew 6:30. If God spends that much on something with a week to live, the arithmetic on a person is not close.
"For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things" Matthew 6:32.
The fourth argument names what anxiety actually is: living as though there were no Father — the way people do who have no such relationship to draw on. And the answer is not that the needs are unimportant but that they are known.
"But seek first God's Kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well" Matthew 6:33.
The positive command is a reordering rather than a renunciation, and the promise attached is deliberately unspecific about timing and amount. Then the closing line refuses to extend even the promise into a guarantee about tomorrow: each day's own evil is sufficient Matthew 6:34. Trouble is granted, and the instruction is to meet it one day at a time — which is the same arrangement as the daily bread two paragraphs earlier.
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