Anxiety and Worry

Reading these passages

The line about casting your burden comes from a psalm about being betrayed by a friend.

Psalm 55 is not a general meditation on worry. It is a man describing a specific injury, and he is precise about why this one is worse than the alternatives: For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him.

Then he names it. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company. Someone he prayed with.

Halfway through he says the thing anyone in that position has thought: Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest. He wants to leave. It is only after all of that — the injury, the naming, the wish to escape — that the psalm arrives at Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee.

The instruction is not offered as a first response. It is what a man reaches at the end of a bad passage, having already wanted to run.

Casting

Peter uses the same image and a more physical verb: Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.

The Greek is epirhipto, and it appears in only one other place in the New Testament: the disciples throwing their cloaks over the colt before Jesus rides into Jerusalem. It is a word for flinging a covering over an animal's back — transferring a load onto something built to carry it.

Two things follow from that. It is not a word for suppressing a feeling; what is described goes somewhere rather than being contained. And it is not gentle — you do not carefully place a cloak on a donkey, and the verb has none of the delicacy that "casting your cares" has acquired in English.

Note also the reason attached: for he careth for you. The argument is not that the worry is irrational, which is what most reassurance amounts to. Peter does not assess whether the thing is worth worrying about. He addresses only the question of who is holding it.

Divided

The Greek word for anxiety in this page's New Testament verses is merimna, and its likely root is a verb meaning to divide or separate. To be anxious, in that etymology, is to be pulled into parts.

That is what the King James is translating when it renders Matthew's instruction as Take therefore no thought for the morrow. The phrase sounds like a prohibition on planning, which it plainly is not; the same Gospel is full of people told to count the cost. What is forbidden is the dividing — attention split between today and a day that has not arrived.

And the Hebrew does something remarkably similar. Psalm 94 says In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul, and the word behind thoughts is sar'appim, a rare noun built on the root for branching — the same root that gives the word for the boughs of a tree. The psalmist is not describing many thoughts. He is describing one thought that keeps forking.

Two languages, two unrelated word-families, and both of them locate the problem in division rather than in volume. Which matches the experience more closely than "worrying too much" does.

Enough for today

Matthew's conclusion is usually heard as reassurance and is closer to arithmetic: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

He does not say tomorrow will be fine. He says today already contains a full allocation of trouble, and that importing more from tomorrow adds to a total that is complete. The sentence before it makes the same point by personification — the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself — which hands tomorrow its own worrying to do and declines to do it on tomorrow's behalf.

It is a strange kind of comfort and worth being honest about. Nothing here promises the trouble is small or that it will pass. The claim is only about how much of it belongs to the present hour.

What Philippians actually asks

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.

Be careful is four hundred years old and means full of care — the same merimna again. And notice the instruction that replaces it. Paul does not say feel differently, or think about it correctly, or trust harder. He says ask. The remedy offered for a divided mind is a specific and rather mundane action.

What follows is not the granting of the request: And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

The verb is phroureo, a military term. It means to garrison a city, to post a guard on the walls — Paul uses it elsewhere of a city under watch. Philippi was a Roman colony with a veteran population; the readers would have known exactly what a garrison looked like and what it was for.

The image is precise about what is being offered and what is not. A garrison does not remove the threat outside the walls. It stands between the threat and what is inside, and the two things it is posted over here are named: hearts and minds. Not circumstances.

A command he had obeyed badly himself

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

The verb is tarasso, and it is a word for water being stirred up — the churning of a pool, sediment lifted off the bottom. John uses it of a crowd in commotion and of the pool at Bethesda when the water moves. It describes disturbance rather than fear as such: the state of something that had settled and no longer is.

Two chapters earlier John uses the same verb of Jesus. At the last supper, before naming his betrayer, he was troubled in spirit — etarachthe, the identical word. And in the garden shortly after this conversation he is described in stronger terms still.

So the instruction here is not issued from a position of never having been in the state. Whatever let not your heart be troubled asks, it is not asking for something its speaker had maintained perfectly. That does not soften the command, but it does change who is giving it.

Who did the loading

The invitation in Matthew is addressed to a particular group, and the grammar of the description is easy to miss: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

The two participles are not doing the same thing. Labour is active — these are people working. Heavy laden is pephortismenoi, a perfect passive: having been loaded, and still loaded. Passive, which means somebody else put it there.

Matthew does not say who. In the immediate context of his gospel the likeliest referent is the religious teaching of the day, which Jesus elsewhere describes as binding heavy burdens on people's shoulders. But the grammar leaves it open, and the invitation does not require the listener to identify the source before accepting.

What it does establish is that the load is not being treated as the listener's own fault. That is a small thing and not a small thing. Most advice about anxiety arrives with an implication about the person receiving it; this sentence, in its grammar, declines to make one.

Very present

The psalm compresses it into one line: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

The Hebrew behind very present is a phrase meaning found or readily located — abundantly available, easy to find. It is a claim about accessibility rather than about power, and it is the second half of the sentence that does the work, not the first. Refuge and strength are common enough claims. Being findable is the one that matters at the moment it is needed.

And in trouble is not incidental. Every promise on this page is sited inside the difficulty rather than after it — the burden is cast while it is still heavy, the garrison is posted while the threat is still outside, the psalmist's forking thoughts do not stop. None of these verses describes an anxiety that has ended. They describe what is available while it continues.