Look at the Birds, Look at the Flowers

Bread for today was right there in the prayer Jesus had taught them, and plenty of people on that hillside were already worrying about tomorrow's.

They were net-menders and shepherds and mothers with babies on their hips. A bad harvest meant an empty pot. One cloak might have to last a man for years. (A poor man often slept in his cloak at night, so losing it meant losing his blanket too.)

"Don't worry about your life," Jesus said, "what you will eat or drink, or what you will wear. Isn't life more than food? Isn't your body more than clothes?"

A few swallows swooped low over the crowd, snatching gnats out of the air.

"Look at the birds," Jesus said. "They don't plant seeds. They don't bring in a harvest. They don't own a single barn." (A swallow eats hundreds of bugs in a day and has never once paid for one.) "Yet your Father in heaven feeds them. Aren't you worth much more than they are?"

A farmer near the front rubbed the back of his neck. He had been up before dawn, fretting about his barley.

"Which of you can add one hour to your life by worrying?" Jesus asked. Nobody could. A person can worry all night and wake up no taller, no richer, and a good deal more tired.

Then he pointed down the slope, where wildflowers grew in bright patches between the rocks, scarlet and yellow.

"Look at the flowers of the field and how they grow. They don't work. They don't spin thread or sew. But I tell you, even King Solomon in all his splendor was not dressed like one of these."

Everyone knew about Solomon. He sat on a throne of ivory covered in gold, and every cup in his palace was gold, because in his day silver was hardly worth counting. One red flower on a hillside outshone him.

"If that is how God dresses the grass," Jesus said, "which is here today and thrown into the oven tomorrow, won't he much more dress you? Oh, how little you trust him!"

(Dry grass and weeds were burned to heat clay ovens for baking bread. Even the oven fuel got to dress better than a king first.)

"So don't worry and say, 'What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?' People who don't know God run after all those things. Your Father in heaven knows you need them."

Then he told them what to run after instead.

"Seek first his kingdom, and to do what is right in his eyes, and all these things will be given to you as well. Don't worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

The swallows that day had mud nests to fly home to. The man pointing at them had nothing like that.

Jesus owned no house, no field, and no barn. Later he told a man, "Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but I have nowhere to lay my head." Friends shared their food with him, and his Father fed him the way he fed the swallows. Even on the cross, on the day he died, he trusted his Father. His last prayer was, "Father, into your hands I put my spirit." And on the third day, his Father raised him from the dead.

He had no barn and no bed of his own, and he knew exactly who fed the swallows. It was his Father, and theirs.