The Sermon on the Mount is an example of how Matthew has compiled the material that Jesus preached on various occasions into a compact, memorizable unit. One can easily verify this by using a Bible with cross-references and noting how the parallels to consecutive paragraphs in Matthew are placed by Luke in a wide variety of other contexts. This enables us to see that while it was Luke’s purpose to organize his material in chronological order (Luke 1:3-4), it was Matthew’s purpose to organize his material in thematic order, within a basic chronological framework. It sometimes bothers people to realize that while Matthew used the basic order of events to write his gospel, he gathered various sayings from different occasions and stacked them into blocks of teaching material. Yet Matthew wrote the way he wrote, following his thematic intention, even though that does not meet our expectation that all stories have to be told in chronological order.

Here is something that Jesus taught: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). It’s a pretty clear implication: will you set your heart’s loyalty on God, or will you set your heart’s loyalty toward your money? You have to choose. You can’t do both. You might think we would have understood this by now. But we are slow to learn.

Jesus also taught about worry. “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear” (6:25). Yet worry seems to be what we do best. There are many things in this world that you can not change, Jesus said, no matter how much you worry at them (6:27). And so he gave us this command, which once again is really quite simple and straightforward: “Do not worry” (6:31). Yet we are reluctant to take that command seriously.

Deciding that we will serve God with full loyalty means that we will no longer worry our lives with the quest for wealth. It means that we will believe that Jesus was right when he said, “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” confident that the Lord who knows what we need will take care of those needs, and all these other things will be taken care of, too (6:32-33).

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Ah Lord God: we confess that we are worriers. It is hard for us to let go of those worries. Yet our heart’s desire is to trust in you. You are the one who knows our needs. We set ourselves to follow you, setting aside the worry, setting aside the quest for wealth: confident that you will care for us, each step of the way.

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