“Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. . . . So do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” (Matthew 10.29-30)
Years ago, the gifted gospel singer and civil rights activist, Mahalia Jackson, sometimes called “The Queen of Gospel” because of her popularity as a gospel singer, made famous the song, “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” The words to the song still touch souls, even as contemporary singers give their voices to the old gospel tune.
“Why should I feel discouraged,” the song asks, “Why should the shadows come? Why should my heart feel lonely and long for heaven and home when Jesus is my portion? A constant friend is he. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches over me. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.”
The song expresses in melody the same sentiment that the Teacher from Nazareth expresses in words to his followers, urging them to put aside their fears, instead putting their trust in God, who watches over each and every sparrow. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?” he asks them. “Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.”
Those words are found within a larger unit in the Gospel of Matthew that has become known as the missionary discourse, so named because the Galilean Teacher speaks to his followers of the difficulties that they likely will find as they carry his words and his ways into the world. Honest as always, he does not sugarcoat the setbacks and struggles, but also insists that his disciples should not be afraid.
And why is there no reason for fear? Because his Father’s eye is on the sparrow. And if his Father cares for the lowliest of birds, sold for a penny apiece, then they can be certain he will care for them, even as they face foes who would want to take their lives from them, these forces hostile to the good news of the Galilean Teacher.
As he so often does, the Son of the Carpenter urges his followers to put their trust in his Father in heaven, whose care and concern and compassion for them is greater even than his solicitude for the sparrows that fly in the air and who fall to the ground. Nothing and nobody slips past out of his Father’s eyesight, regardless of how small or how poor or how common they might be in the sight of the world. His eye stays on them.
There is an old movie that seeks to portray the nature of God and his home in heaven, as many more recent movies also do. There is one scene in the movie when God needs to leave heaven for a while to take care of a matter on earth, so he tells the archangel Gabriel that there are a couple of things he wants him to attend to while he is on his trip. And what are these things? As God says to Gabriel, “That matter of them two stars and that sparrow that fell a little while ago.”
Again, we find here the same scriptural reference spoken by the Galilean Teacher so many years earlier, emphasizing the same care that the Heavenly Father carries for all his creatures, even the least and the lowliest. The Creator does not step away from his duties without entrusting the care of a sparrow to his first lieutenant, Gabriel.
“Do not be afraid.” These words spoken by the Nazorean are repeated regularly by him during his days as an itinerant preacher, so many times that they form a constant theme in his teachings, spoken usually when his disciples are faced with a frightening experience, such as in this instance, as they learn of the perils that await them in the world as they tell others of the Son of God sent to earth to redeem and to reclaim and redirect it to the kingdom of God.
Maybe the Teacher understands that they, like us, are programmed for fear, the fight or flight reaction part of our very constitution. And so he offers calm and confidence, even when we are confronted with the many dreads of the day and the darkness of the night. Almost always a moment away from hitting the panic button, in a world teetering on the edge of chaos, confusion and discord a daily part of our lives, we are told not to be afraid, although nearly everything around us makes us afraid, laying low as we wait for the next blow to knock us further down.
There is a story told of a robin speaking to a sparrow. The robin says, “I should really like to know why these anxious human beings rush about and worry so much.” The sparrow says to the robin, “Friend, I think it must be that they have no heavenly Father such as cares for you and me.” The story would ask us to ask ourselves if we believe we do have a heavenly Father that cares for us.
In the end, I suppose, it is a question of trust. Do we believe God is trustworthy, meaning is he worthy of our trust? Can we muster the trust to live free from fears, surrounded as we are by struggles and setbacks that scare us to death and shake us to our shoe soles, finding a way to see beyond the terrors to tomorrow? That is the question each of us must answer.
Frederick Buechner, the American writer and preacher, tells a story in one of his books on how he came to trust. Buechner’s story deserves retelling in his own words. He writes, “I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST.”
Buechner continues, “What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe,” he says, “that maybe it was something of both, but for me, it was an epiphany.”
Next he writes, “The owner of the car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.”
As we can see, that one word spotted on a car speeding by was enough for Buechner to make it through the day, giving him a reprieve from the darkness that threatened his sanity and his soul, reminding him that he needed to trust in the God who watches over the sparrows in the sky as surely as he watches over his creatures without feathers.
It is the same message that the Teacher from Galilee puts before us today, as we stand where his disciples stood, facing every day more frightening news, wondering if tomorrow will bring any relief, or just more pain. The teacher points to the birds of the air and he tells us to trust our Heavenly Father, for not a single sparrow falls to the ground without our Father’s knowledge. And, as the Teacher says, “So do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.”
—Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 