This coming weekend is the 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time.  In previous posts we have been exploring Jesus’ admonitions to not be afraid during the course of the evangelizing mission. In this post, Jesus begins to offer reasons and assurances to support the admonitions: 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. 

The Greek text literally translates as “without your Father.” Most translations include “knowledge,” “consent,” “will,” or “care” as the English seems to demand a clarification from the expression. But depending on the view of the reader it simply offers up more questions of divine sovereignty and providence: “does God simply know about the death of the birds (and therefore also of his people), or does he allow it, or does it happen because he has decided on it, or is the point that even in their death they are not outside his loving concern?” (France, 404).

This section does not try to sketch a misleading picture of a God. Sparrows fall to earth and disciples of Jesus are slain, and Jesus never says that it hardly matters. “What these sayings assert is that God is indeed God, that he is above success and failure, help and isolation, weal and woe, holding them in hands that Jesus says are the hands of the Father.” (Schweizter, as found in France, 404)

Where these verses begin with the repeated message not to fear, this verse reminds the reader that fear in general and fear of God (v.28) is balanced by trust in God as one’s heavenly Father. The God who can destroy in Gehenna is also the One who cares for the smallest of creatures. The sparrows, which can be purchased for a pittance, are cared for by God (v.31) while alive, but even their death is within the Creator’s care. How much more true is it of the children of a loving Father.

30 Even all the hairs of your head are counted. 31So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. 

Some things are impossible to count: the stars in the heavens, the grains of sand on the shore, and the hairs on your head (baldness aside!) The impossibility of counting the hairs of the head is proverbial (Ps 40:12; 69:4), but even the impossible is not impossible to God who made them. The Creator’s intimate knowledge of those he has made is expressed movingly in other imagery in Ps 139:1–18. Equally proverbial is the saying “not a hair of his head will fall to the ground” to express a person’s total security (1 Sam 14:45; 2 Sam 14:11; 1 Kgs 1:52; cf Dan 3:27, Luke 21:18; Acts 27:34.22) The Father who knows the number of each disciple’s hairs will make sure none of them are lost.

As we learned in v.29, the small sparrow matters to the Creator, and so (for the third time) the disciples are told not to be afraid. All of God’s creatures are important to Him, none more so than humanity.

Image credit: Image credit: The Sacrament of Ordination (Christ Presenting the Keys to Saint Peter), c. 1636-40, by Nicholas Poussin, Public Domain