Grass

“But if God so arrays the grass of the field”  Matthew 6:30

Grass – Here is your assignment.  Write a sentence that puts strong emphasis on one of the words.  But you can’t use any punctuation, italics, underlining or any other extra devices.  Could you do it?

This is the problem faced by authors who wrote in Greek.  Their solution was to put the word they wanted to emphasize first in the sentence, even if logically it came last in our thoughts.  This verse is an example.  What word do you suppose is emphasized?  It isn’t “God”.  It’s “grass”.  In Greek the text literally says, “If but the grass of the field today being and tomorrow into a furnace being thrown, God thus arrays”.  The important part of this thought is the grass, that useless, worthless stuff that just gets cut up and thrown in the fire.

Chortos is a word that covers all the field vegetation.  The hay, the wild flowers, the weeds, whatever happens to be growing.  Why would Jesus make this the important word?  Because Jesus wants us to look deeply into the incredible complexity of life and see how splendidly God dresses each and every tiny part of the canopy of the earth.  Jesus wants us to look so deeply into the common, ordinary, useless stuff of our existence that we see something startling, uncommon, valuable and carefully designed.  If God is so intimately involved in a blade of grass, do you think He will forget about you?  Jesus says, “Open your eyes.  Everything in nature displays the care of the Father.  Don’t you see it?”

Today the wind is blowing all the newly green leaves on the Sycamore trees on my driveway.  The hedges are dotted with yellow edges where life demands room.  The grass I see though the window pushes toward the sky, defying my efforts to restrain its journey.  Everywhere God is at work.  And yet I worry about tomorrow.  I worry about the bills and the pressures and the expectations.  I have not learned the secret of grass.  I need to sit next to Jesus on the side of a hill and watch him point to the tiny flowers covering the land.  “Let me show you a secret,” he would say to me.  “God did this.  Just imagine what He wants to do for you.  The secret of grass is to let God do the growing.”