8 Sunday Ordinary Time, Year A, Matthew 6:24-34

Have you ever been on a train, or on a bus, and quietly observed the people around you? I call it “people watching”. There is a real skill to it, to look at all that is going on around you, without letting them know that you’re interested in the slightest! Watching people, how they dress, what phone they have, clean-shaven or three day old stubble. Fashion conscious, or not fashion conscious. Confident or not confident. There is something of a tradition of people watching here in Ireland at Sunday Mass. We observe each other, where we sit, what we wear, pious and prayerful or talkative and letting on to be disinterested.

Yet, in our gospel this Sunday we are exhorted to focus first on the coming Kingdom of God. Our worries are very often bound up with what will happen next in our world. We are worried about what will happen for the children of this generation, will they be able to live in the Ireland of the future? Will there be a return to mass poverty? Worries like this can inhabit our mind. They can take over and leave us fretful and worried about the future.

Focusing first on the coming Kingdom of God is a life-long task that each one of us must try to do. Having discovered our faith for ourselves, we then have to make a choice to place God in the first place in our lives. This means entering into a relationship with the Other; the Other that God is and the other that my neighbour is. This is what the commandments are all about – relationship with God, relationship with our neighbour, relationship with my own self.

And we have to love all three. We have to strike a balance between loving God, loving my neighbour and loving myself. We come here to Church as individuals, gathered with our nearest neighbours, to worship God together. That three-fold relationship of love between myself, my God and my neighbour is fed in this gathering.

That is why we say that the Kingdom of God is here and yet still coming to be. When we gather as a community of faith, the principles of the Kingdom of God gain an entrance into our world. We get a small insight of the beauty that awaits us in the coming Kingdom of God.

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”