Fear and being afraid are featured prominently in today’s gospel. God and Jesus are well acquainted with the human capacity for fear.  So much so, that fear is mentioned about 350 times in the bible.  Our God understands how humans can sometimes get so overwhelmed by fear that we can become paralyzed or silenced or willing to go along with something we know is so very wrong.  Perhaps that is what is behind Jesus’ question: 

“Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?
Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.
Even all the hairs on your head are counted.
So do not be afraid: you are worth more than many sparrows.”

Jesus and God do not want us to live our lives in fear. Today’s gospel is trying to encourage people to move beyond their fears. 

So often I have wondered why it is so easy to incite fear and hate, yet so difficult to foster compassion and love. Is it our propensity towards fear that drives the willingness to be suspicious of and/or fear the ‘other’? 

In the 1990s, I partnered with a business ethics professor to have her MBA students work with entrepreneurs from a microbusiness development program in north Omaha.  Only once during the four years of working together, did we each have a married couple in our classes. So naturally we paired them with each other.

After that class session, the MBA students approached us as they had found out they both had 14 year old daughters. They were quite surprised to learn their daughters were experiencing very similar problems.  They had anticipated that a 14 year old white girl would have different problems than a 14 black girl.  They had forgotten that 14 is a difficult age regardless of what race you are. It struck me then, as it does now, that as long as we are so separated, we cannot know about each other lives.  And that not knowing, not being connected makes it easier to judge others or to fall prey to our fears.

When you start to become fearful or feel afraid of someone based on how society has labeled them, that’s when Jesus is calling on us to remember the sparrows in Matthew’s gospel. Jesus wants to remind us that, as each one of us is a child of God, we are all worth more than hundreds of sparrows.