When Jesus announced the Mat 6:33 Imperative, he was in every sense calling the processes of history to look beyond themselves for answers to the questions that emerge in the tensions and contradictions of its activities. He was calling for a moment of silence and reflection. Something was missing, and he called it the kingdom of God.
Blaise Pascal said, “The sole cause of our unhappiness is that we don’t know how to sit quietly in a room.” But why would one sit quietly in a room when the rat race is so hot among individuals and nations? We live in a culture of “Se mphete ke go fete,”[1] and often racing past each other to where nobody wants to go.
The Christ had the answer, Lk 12:30 “For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them.” Existential questions revolve around “things.” To be sure, they revolve around life’s meaninglessness, and we try to create meaning around “things.” There are things which are indispensable to the survival of the human species; and Maslow called them “needs.” But in the rat race of human existence there are those who chase, and those who are being chased. Therefore, the problem is relational; it is not the “thing,” but how I choose to relate to the “thing.”
Martin Buber sheds more light on this predicament, the problem is not “It,” but how “I” relates to “It.” If “It” replaces “Thou,” then “I” become “It.” Paul Tillich was right, in manipulating things, we are transformed into the things we manipulate.
But do we know any different? Is life not about power in some sense or another? The Mat 6:33 Imperative seems to ignore all of these environmental demands. The Pharisees must have felt like they are being surrendered to the very forces they sought to be liberated from. They had become the very structures they erected.
Nietzsche (1967, pp. 122-123) was upset with Christ for all the wrong reasons; he did not question his existence in history, but was nauseated by his seemingly dis-empowering message. Why would anyone reject the answer to the questions that one wrestles with every day? The question is rhetoric, and yet it sheds some light into the deep and dark corridors of our own existence. We penetrate the skies, and yet we fail to explore the depth of our own being. And with deep insight, Tillich observed, “No one can experience depth without stopping and becoming aware of himself.”
This is true, not only for religion, but depth about anything is impossible unless we recognise the need for self-awareness. This is important because none of us is a bastion of all knowledge. Where something is known, there is always something else to be known on a higher level. This seems to have been the problem with the Pharisees and their legal counterparts. They were tenured in traditional religion, and could not conceive of anything else coming outside of the established perimeters. This is typical horizontal or linear thinking, if it doesn’t come the way it is known, it can’t be accepted.
How do you search for what you thought you had all along? But that’s what the Mat 6:33 Imperative implies. The proposition is simple yet deeply complex. We have a problem. We are missing something, and unless we stop and think deeply about it, it will elude us for ever. That calls for a thoroughgoing re-visitation of the models, symbols, and myths we hold about God. Symbols may be helpful in facilitating our expressions of God in time, but with time, they are rendered obsolete. Like people, symbols are born, and they die. Jewish religion was high on symbolism, and the Christ called for a re-visioning of the situation.
TAKE SOME TIME OFF! SCRUTINISE WHAT YOU BELIEVE! HOW RELEVANT IS IT?
[1] A phrase in Setswana (African language mostly spoken in western parts of South Africa) depicting how in the human rat race one person seems to call out to another, “Don’t pass me, let me pass you!” Martin Luther King called it, “The Drum Major Instinct” (Clayborne Cassel, 1998) .
