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Who Is Carrying It

The word behind “take no thought” is not about thinking less, and every commentator who stops to define it says so

The talk, read aloud
5 minutes 4 seconds · the mortgage, the sick parent, the shoes, in the author’s voice. The letter is below.

If you have ever been told that Matthew 6 forbids you to worry, and then gone home to a mortgage, a sick parent and a child who needs shoes, you have felt the problem. The command sounds like an order to stop having a mind. It is not, and the word underneath it says so.

What “take no thought” meant in 1611

Start with the English, because it has moved. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown stop the reader on the first phrase:

The English word “thought,” when our version was made, expressed this idea of “solicitude,” “anxious concern”… But this sense of the word has now nearly gone out, and so the mere English reader is apt to be perplexed. Thought or forethought, for temporal things — in the sense of reflection, consideration — is required alike by Scripture and common sense. It is that anxious solicitude, that oppressive care, which springs from unbelieving doubts and misgivings, which alone is here condemned. Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, on Matthew 6:25

A man in 1611 could die of thought; Shakespeare has Brutus say of a Roman that all he can do “is to himself: take thought and die for Caesar” (Julius Caesar II.i). Four hundred years later the same sentence reads as do not plan ahead, which is the opposite of a sermon that points at farmers watching a harvest and birds being fed.

They are not alone in stopping to say it. Gill: “Christ does not forbid labour to maintain, support, and preserve, this animal life; nor does he forbid all thought and care about it, but all anxious, immoderate, perplexing, and distressing thoughts and cares; such as arise from diffidence and unbelief.” Ryle: “Prudent provision for the future is right. Wearing, corroding, self-tormenting anxiety is wrong.” Jerome, most bluntly of all: “the toil is to be undergone, the anxiety put away.”

The word, and what Scripture does with it

The Greek is merimnaô, Strong’s G3309, and it appears nineteen times in the New Testament. Six of them are in this passage.

Two things about it settle the question, and neither is an etymology. (Lexicons often derive the noun from a root meaning to divide, and preachers make much of it. That may be true and it is not the argument here. How Scripture uses a word is firmer ground than where the word came from.)

First, the grammar changes partway through. Matthew 6:25 is mê merimnate, a present imperative: stop the thing already running. Verses 31 and 34 are mê merimnêsête, an aorist subjunctive: do not let it start. He opens by interrupting a worry in progress and closes by forbidding tomorrow’s.

Second, and decisively, Scripture uses the same verb approvingly. Paul says the unmarried man “careth for the things that belong to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:32), that the members of the body should “have the same care one for another” (1 Corinthians 12:25), and of Timothy, that he “will naturally care for your state” (Philippians 2:20). All three are merimnaô.

That last one is the sharpest thing in this letter. “The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself” (Matthew 6:34) and “Timothy will care for your state” are the identical Greek form, merimnêsei, future indicative. One is the thing forbidden. The other is Paul’s highest compliment to a friend.

So the sermon is not against caring. Whatever merimnaô names, it is something that can be aimed rightly, and Paul praises a man for doing it.

Martha, and the difference between many and one

The clearest use of the word outside the Sermon is a woman doing legitimate work.

Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. Luke 10:41-42

“Careful” there is merimnas, the same verb. Now notice everything He does not say. He does not tell her to stop cooking. He does not call hospitality worldly. He does not say she is thinking about too many subjects. He sets many things against one thing.

The correction is to the order, not the quantity. Martha’s meal was not the problem; the meal having become first was.

Moses, and the burden God did not tell him to put down

Because a reader with a family and a job will ask the obvious question: what about a man whose load is genuinely heavy and genuinely his?

Scripture has that man, and he is Moses. He is doing exactly the work God gave him, and it crushes him. His father in law sees it first: “Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone” (Exodus 18:18). Later Moses says it himself: “I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me” (Numbers 11:14).

God’s answer is not care less. It is seventy men:

And I will take of the spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with thee, that thou bear it not thyself alone. Numbers 11:17

The remedy for a legitimate burden that has grown too heavy is help, not detachment. That verse belongs to every exhausted parent, and it says the opposite of what Matthew 6 is usually made to say to them.

And lest anyone think the providing itself is the sin, Paul settles it in a sentence: “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8). Whatever Christ forbade, it was not that.

Then what is it?

Augustine reads verse 25 back into verse 24, where it belongs. The chapter opens “No man can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24), and verse 25 begins therefore:

The Lord had taught above, that whoso desires to love God, and to take heed not to offend, should not think that he can serve two masters; lest though perhaps he may not look for superfluities, yet his heart may become double for the sake of very necessaries, and his thoughts bent to obtain them. St. Augustine, on the Sermon on the Mount

A man can avoid loving luxury and still end up double-hearted over bread. That is the thing being forbidden. The Glossa Ordinaria gives it in one line: “Be not withdrawn by temporal cares from things eternal.” Matthew Henry calls it “disquieting, distracting, distrustful cares”, and the third word is doing the work.

So here is the definition this letter is willing to defend. Merimnaô is not thinking about many things. It is carrying many things as though they were yours, and as though nobody else were holding them.

Three questions, and busyness is not one of them

Which means the test is not how much is on your plate. A man can be idle and divided; a woman can be run off her feet and whole. Three questions sort it, and none of them counts tasks.

  1. Whose is it? Am I carrying what was given me, what I took up on my own, or what God has already offered to carry?
  2. What is first? Not how many, but which one wins when they collide. Martha had many and so did Moses.
  3. Who do I think is holding it? Every commentator above locates the sin here. Gill: such cares “arise from diffidence and unbelief.”

Moses passes all three while being crushed. A man with nothing to do can fail all three without breaking a sweat.

What to do with it, in five steps, from four writers

And Scripture does not leave it at a diagnosis.

Christ: install a different first thing. “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). Not fewer things. A different first thing.

Peter: hand it over, and notice it is not deleted. “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” (1 Peter 5:7). The noun is merimnan, the same word, and it is thrown onto Him. And the word for His caring is different, melei. He does not take the care away and leave you indifferent. He takes it over. The care still exists; it changed hands.

Paul: the whole sequence, in four verses. Philippians 4:6-9 forbids the same thing Christ forbade, in the same grammar, and then says what to do instead.

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you. Philippians 4:6-9

“Be careful for nothing” is mê merimnate, present imperative, second person plural — the identical construction to Matthew 6:25. Not an allusion. The same words. Then:

Paul says elsewhere what kind of thing this is. It is not a passing thought but a phronêma, a mind-set, the direction a mind habitually leans: “to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Romans 8:6). And Isaiah names the stayed mind and the trusting as one thing: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee” (Isaiah 26:3).

What the research can say, and what it cannot

A word of caution before the studies, because this is exactly where pages like this go wrong. Nothing below proves the Sermon on the Mount, and the Sermon does not need it. What follows is narrower: where attention rests appears to change how severe a thing is, and that is a claim somebody has actually measured.

In 1993 Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and Jannay Morrow took mildly to moderately depressed people and non-depressed people and gave them eight minutes. Half spent it attending to their own feelings and characteristics. Half spent it attending to descriptions of places and objects. The depressed subjects who ruminated became significantly more depressed; the depressed subjects who were given something else to attend to became significantly less. Neither condition moved the people who were not depressed.1

That it holds beyond one laboratory: a multimodal meta-analysis of 179 correlational studies and 37 clinical comparisons found moderate associations between rumination and symptoms, strongest for brooding, and stronger again where conditions overlapped.2 And that changing what a person does works, not only what they think: a Cochrane review of 53 trials and 5,495 participants found moderate-certainty evidence that behavioural activation outperforms usual care in the short term.3

Now the limits, stated as plainly as the findings. Distraction shortened depressed mood; it did not end depression. Behavioural activation beats usual care; it is not a cure. Nothing here says a man’s panic will lift if he reads Matthew 6 properly, and a page that implied it would be doing him harm. He would have two problems instead of one: the fear, and the conviction that Scripture failed him.

Which is the pastoral point this letter most wants to make. The commentators locate the sin in a disposition, not in a symptom. Unbelieving doubts, says Jamieson. Diffidence, says Gill. A double heart, says Augustine. None of them is describing a racing pulse at three in the morning. A man can have an anxiety disorder and an undivided heart. A man can be perfectly calm and be serving mammon. If Matthew 6 has ever been used on you as a club, it was aimed at something it was never pointed at.

Where this lands

He is not telling you to think about fewer things. He is telling you who is carrying them.

The cure He gives is not feel differently. It is seek first, a change of first thing, which is a redirection of attention and action rather than an instruction about emotion. Christ never once says calm down. He points at birds and tells you whose Father feeds them.

And that is what keeps this from being a technique. Distraction is a method; anyone can use it and it works about as well as the research says. But Paul does not say think about something else. He says think on what is true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely — and then, having handed the care over, that the God of peace shall be with you. The object is a Person, and the promise attached is His presence rather than the removal of the trouble.

Which is why the hope in it does not depend on the outcome. “Hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans 5:5). Hope that does not put you to shame, and the reason it does not is not that it promised little. It is that it rests on Someone rather than on a result.

A man whose fear does not lift still has the Father who feeds birds. That is the hope that survives the method not working, and it is the reason the studies can be printed here without being hedged into uselessness.

Cast it over. Take inventory on purpose. Then go and do the next thing in front of you, and let the sentry stand where you were standing.

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links open our Study Bible, with the King James beside the Berean, the Douay-Rheims and the Reina-Valera.

Sources for the research paragraphs. 1 S. Nolen-Hoeksema and J. Morrow, “Effects of rumination and distraction on naturally occurring depressed mood,” Cognition and Emotion 7(6), 1993, 561-570. 2 B.O. Olatunji, D.F. Naragon-Gainey and K.B. Wolitzky-Taylor, “Specificity of Rumination in Anxiety and Depression: A Multimodal Meta-Analysis,” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 2013. 3 E. Uphoff et al., “Behavioural activation therapy for depression in adults,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2020, CD013305. These are cited for one narrow claim, that where attention rests changes severity. They are not cited for anything about the soul, and the disciplines they come from disagree with themselves about a good deal else.

Related: The Vine, on abiding as the shape of the relationship; Is Any Sick Among You?; The Spirit Isn’t Always Tidy; What the Word Says. Greek and Hebrew checked word by word against the Berean translation tables held in our own database, with Strong’s numbers given so any reader can check them. Commentary quoted verbatim from the public-domain editions in our library. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to our Study Bible. The three studies are cited from their published abstracts and the Cochrane summary; we have not read the full texts and say so.