Third Sunday of Matthew
Matthew 6:22–33
Oops!
There’s a moment most of us know—you wake up at two in the morning, and before you’re even fully conscious, it’s already there. The list. The appointment you might have handled badly. The bill that needs paying. The relationship that hasn’t resolved. The future that won’t hold still.
We call it anxiety. And if you’re like most people, your first instinct is to be a little ashamed of it—as though it were a character defect, a sign that your faith isn’t quite what it should be. After all, Jesus himself says, “Do not be anxious.” Right here in Matthew 6. Clearly, the problem is that you just need to trust more.
Except—that hasn’t worked, has it? Telling an anxious person to simply stop being anxious is like telling someone with a broken leg to just walk it off. The command is technically correct but entirely unhelpful.
So, something else must be going on.
Ugh!
Jesus is not naïve. He doesn’t give commands without a diagnosis. And if we back up just a few verses—before the birds and the lilies—we find that he has been building toward this moment for the entire chapter.
“Where your treasure is,” he says, “there your heart will be also.”
And then comes the strange image of the eye.
“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is single—clear, whole, undivided—your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is diseased, your whole body will be full of darkness.”
In the ancient world, the eye was understood not merely as something that receives light, but as something that seeks—it reaches out toward what it is drawn to. A healthy eye is a focused eye. It knows what it is looking at. But a diseased eye—the word is ponēros, evil or corrupted—is a restless eye. It moves from object to object, never quite settling, always scanning.
Which is a visual way of saying: “You cannot serve two masters.” God and Mammon. Not because God is jealous in some petty sense, but because this is simply how the human heart works. It can only have one center of gravity. And when that center is occupied by something other than God—financial security, social approval, control over the future—the heart becomes restless. Divided. Anxious.
The desert fathers had a word for this: polymerimna—many-cares. Abba Moses of Scetis taught that the scattered heart—the heart distributed among many concerns, many fears, many desired outcomes—is a heart that has lost its stillness. Not because stillness is a spiritual luxury, but because a heart oriented toward God is held by something that does not move.
When the center shifts to things that can be lost—and they always can be lost—the heart has nothing stable to rest in. And so it circles. And circles. Even at two in the morning.
This is what Jesus means when he says that the Gentiles run after these things. He is describing a way of living—as though God were not Father, as though the world were something you must carry alone, as though no one were holding any of it.
And that posture inevitably produces anxiety.
Now, Jesus is not speaking here about every form of anxiety we would describe today. He is not giving a medical diagnosis. He is diagnosing a spiritual condition: the restlessness that arises when the heart seeks security in something other than God. Anxiety, in this sense, is what a misplaced heart feels like from the inside.
Aha!
But notice what Jesus does not say.
He does not say, “Try harder.”
He says, “Look.”
Look at the birds of the air.
Look at the lilies of the field.
Look at what is already happening in the world around you—the world your Father has not abandoned, the world he is already tending, moment by moment, without your management.
The cure for a restless eye is not willpower.
It is a new object of vision.
Abba Moses again: “Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” The fathers understood that the disordered heart is not reformed by striving, but by reorientation—by returning, again and again, to the one thing that holds still. To the presence of God, which does not fluctuate with the market or the news cycle or the state of your relationships.
Jesus is not asking you to pretend that material things do not matter. You need food. You need clothing. The body is real. He knows this. Your Father knows that you need all these things.
The point is not that needs are illusory.
The point is that there is a Father who sees them and who is not indifferent to them.
Whee!
This is the gospel of this passage: you are already known and already seen. Already held.
The same God who numbers the hairs of your head and marks the fall of a sparrow has not looked away from whatever it is that wakes you at two in the morning.
And this is why Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God.”
The kingdom is not merely heaven someday. It is the reign of God breaking into the world even now. To seek the kingdom first is to let God’s rule become the organizing principle of your life rather than fear, money, reputation, or control.
The kingdom is not something you manufacture. It is God’s reality into which you are continually invited.
“Seek first the kingdom” is not a command to spiritual heroism. It is an invitation to stop being lord of a world you were never meant to manage and to rest in the lordship of the One who already is.
Yeah!
So what does this look like on a Tuesday?
Or at two in the morning?
The fathers called it epistrophē—returning. Not a single dramatic conversion, but the ten thousand small acts of reorientation that make up a life.
When the anxious loop begins, you do not suppress it. You notice it. And you let it become a question:
What am I treating as my treasure right now?
Where is my eye?
And then you turn. Not to a technique. To a Person.
“Our Father, who art in heaven…”
The prayer Jesus taught us is not just a ritual. It is the practice of reorienting the heart. Every time we pray it, we rehearse the right order: God’s name, God’s kingdom, God’s will—and then, and only then, our needs.
We are training the eye to look at the right thing.
So perhaps the next time you wake at two in the morning and the list begins to arrive, you need not win an argument with your fears. You need not solve every problem before dawn.
You need only remember where your treasure is.
Turn your eyes again toward the Father who already knows what you need.
Seek first His kingdom.
The birds are still fed.
The lilies are still clothed.
And your Father is still your Father.
A single eye. A whole body full of light.
That is what Jesus is offering us today.
Amen.