Jesus on providence

Jesus’s own teaching on providence in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 6:25-34) is not a statement about the order of things as they are, but a bold declaration about coming of the kingdom of God.

He urges his hearers against anxiety about material provisions, but to be comforted. He asks them not worry about their ‘lives’. The birds are well-fed; the lilies are finely dressed. In both cases this happens without the labour of those who benefit. Yet: ‘[A]re you not much more valuable than they?’ (6:26) Jesus here highlights what has traditionally been called God’s ‘general’ providence in upholding even the smallest parts of the natural world. The fact of this provision for the natural world should prompt a reassurance of the ‘special’ providence of God for his people, and an end to running like the pagans after material securities.

And yet, the Sermon itself begins with recognition of the fraught conditions of lived experience for the people of God: mourning, persecution, being slandered and insulted, and so on (5:11-12). Whatever the providence of God means here it is not merely that his people will be well fed and beautifully clothed. There is no promise that consists in an earthly prosperity or security, which would be temporary in any case (Mt 6:19-21). The promise in which this faith in providence rests is a promise that the kingdom of God will bring vindication – that is the implication of the blesseds (Mt 5:1-12).

There is an inescapable future-sense in this view of providence. He recognizes that the experience of life as it is – and especially for the people of God – is not of itself reassuring without reference to the future fulfillment of the divine promises. The disciple of Jesus has to refrain from worry, and pursue as a priority the kingdom of God. In other words, as Bonhoeffer puts it:
The Christian lives from the times of God, and not from his own idea of life