Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing.
Luke 12:23 (WEB)
The Man Inside the Clothes
A man lays a jacket on the bed the night before an interview and looks at it longer than a jacket deserves. He is forty-nine, and this is the third interview since spring. The jacket is meant to say he isn’t finished, because he is no longer sure his face will say it for him.
The men who first heard this line had been told not to worry about their lives, what they would eat, or about their bodies, what they would wear. Food and clothing sat at the center of an ordinary person’s worry in that country, and they have held on to the job since.
Food and clothing can be held up and set beside whatever walked in ahead of you. A life has no display like that, and there is nowhere to lay one out and see the whole of it at once. The closet is right there.
Jesus treats the food and the clothes as real things, and still refuses to let either one stand in for the man wearing them. Life is the greater term, and so is the body. He leaves the jacket alone.
Jesus says the same two things again, food and clothing, and then he points them at the ravens, birds that do not sow or reap and have no storeroom, and God feeds them.
Some of the men listening had reason to wonder about the next meal, and the line is easier to hear on a full stomach. He tells them they are worth far more than the birds God feeds, and he grants that the worry is about something real before he keeps going.
At ten past eight he buttons the jacket and sits down across from two strangers, and the jacket is the smallest thing he brings into that room.
A Prayer to Remember
God, I’ve done what he is doing tonight, laid out everything I can show people and looked at it too long. Keep me from mistaking the pile for the size of my life, and keep him from it tomorrow morning, whatever those two strangers decide. You have never once looked at either of us that way.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
