Fight as God's Soldier: Seeking the Kingdom of God

Saturday, June 20th Readings Reflection: Saturday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Today’s Gospel contains Christ’s beautiful and now-famous exhortation to seek the Kingdom of God, entrusting our wellbeing to His Providence like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Our Lord tells us to “not worry about tomorrow[,] [for] tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.”

In St. Augustine’s commentary on this Gospel passage, he explains that this passage is not condemning those who store up temporal goods—within the bounds of prudence and temperance—for their future wellbeing. St. Augustine points out that even Our Lord carried a bag with necessities for His physical needs. The Doctor of the Church cites the Acts of the Apostles, in which the Apostles sent food to the Christians in Judea who had run out of food in the famine (cf. Act 11:28-30). They sent this food from the stores that they had previously saved up, thereby showing that foresight and prudence in managing our temporal goods is not sinful but rather is good and virtuous.

In this Gospel reading, Christ is condemning those who become so occupied with preserving earthly necessities that they neglect their faith as a result. When temporal necessities become our sole focus and cause us to no longer “fight as God’s soldier,” as St. Augustine says, our attachment to them becomes sinful (Catena aurea). Temporal goods are a means to an end, namely, the preservation of our physical health, which is so intrinsically connected with our mental and spiritual health. We must never make them an end in themselves, for such would be a perversion of their intended use.

Our primary goal in all things, from the grandest to the most mundane of tasks, is to seek first the Kingdom of God and His justice. Our Lord has promised that if we seek these first in our lives, all other things, including what we need for our temporal wellbeing, will be given to us. Christ intimately understands the weaknesses of human nature and the struggle that we all experience to set aside our worries and to focus solely on Him. For this reason, He gives us beautiful reassurances in today’s Gospel as to why we need not worry about temporal things.

Just as God provides for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, knowing what they need to grow and flourish in the order He has established for them, so too He intimately knows our every need even before we ourselves do. When we seek the Kingdom of God first and foremost in our lives, we trust him to provide for all our needs; this in turn makes us detached from the things of this world so that we can more fully be soldiers of God, fighting evil at every turn and relying on prayer and the sacraments to preserve grace within our souls.

May Our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel fill our hearts with hope and renew our faith in the God Whose Providence encompasses all things so that we might seek His Kingdom above all else in our lives, trusting Him to provide for all our needs.

The Sermon on the Mount, by Carl Bloch. Public domain.