The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses

“NO ONE CAN SERVE TWO MASTERS, FOR HE MUST EITHER HATE THE ONE AND LOVE THE OTHER, OR HOLD FAST TO ONE AND DESPISE THE OTHER.”

MY LISTENER! You know that there is often talk of an either/or in the world; and this either/or gives rise to a great commotion, involving various sorts of people in the most various ways, in hope, in fear, in busy activity, in tense inactivity, etc. You also know that in this same world people have heard it said that no either/or exists, and that this wisdom has given rise to just as much commotion as has the most significant either/or. But out here in the silence with the lily and the bird, should it be doubtful here that an either/or exists? Or should it be doubtful here what this either/or is? Or should it be doubtful here whether this either/or is in the deepest sense the only either/or?

No, here, in this solemn silence, not only under God’s heaven, but in this solemn silence before God—here there can be no doubt about it. There is an either/or: either God—or, well, then the rest is a matter of indifference; whatever else a human being chooses, if he does not choose God he misses either/or, or he is in perdition through his either/or. Thus: either God—you see, there is no emphasis whatever placed on the alternative except by contrast to God, whereby the emphasis falls infinitely upon God. So it is actually God who, by being himself the object of the choice, tightens the decision of the choice into truly becoming an either/or. If a human being were capable of thinking, in frivolous or melancholic fashion, that where God is present as the One, there were actually three things to choose among—he is lost, or he has lost God, and therefore there is actually no either/or for him. For with God, when the notion of God disappears or is distorted, the either/or also disappears. But how could this happen to anyone in the silence with the lily and the bird!

Thus: either/or. Either God, and as the gospel explains it, either love God or hate him. Yes, when you are surrounded by commotion or when you are immersed in diversions, this seems to be almost an exaggeration; there seems to be altogether too great a distance between loving and hating to permit someone to place them so close to one another, in a single breath, in a single thought, in two words that—without subordinate clauses, without parenthetical phrases to produce greater agreement, without even the slightest punctuation mark—follow immediately upon one another. But indeed, as a body falls with infinite speed when placed in a vacuum, so also does the silence out there with the lily and the bird, the solemn silence before God, cause these two opposites to touch and repel one another at exactly the same instant: indeed, they come into existence in the same instant—either to love or to hate. No more than the airless vacuum constitutes a third factor that delays a falling body, does this solemn silence before God constitute a third factor that could keep loving and hating at a delaying distance from each other.—Either God, and as the gospel explains it, either hold fast to God or despise him. In human society, in everyday dealings, in associating with the multitude, there seems to be a great distance between holding fast to someone and despising him: “I do not need to associate with that person,” someone says, “but of course it by no means follows from this that I despise him, not at all.” And this is indeed how it is in relation to the many people with whom a person associates in social talkativeness and without essential inwardness, more or less indifferently. But the smaller the number becomes, the less talkative social intercourse becomes—that is, the more inward it becomes—the more does an either/or begin to become the law for the relationship. And intercourse with God is in the deepest sense unsociable, unconditionally so. Just take two lovers, a relationship that is also unsociable, precisely because it is so inward: the rule for them and their relationship is: either we hold fast to one another or we despise one another. And now, in the silence before God with the lily and the bird, where absolutely no one else is present, thus where there is absolutely no other association for you than with God—yes, then the rule is: either hold fast to him or despise him. There is no excuse, because no one else is present, and in any case there is no one else present in such a way that you can hold fast to him without despising God, for precisely in this silence it is clear how close God is to you. The two lovers are so close to one another that as long as the other is alive the one cannot hold fast to another without despising the other; therein lies the either/or of this relationship. Whether this either/or (either hold fast—or despise) exists depends on how close the two are to one another. But God, who of course never dies, is even closer to you, infinitely closer, than two lovers are to one another—he, your Creator and Sustainer; he, in whom you live, move, and have your being; he, by the grace of whom you have everything. So it is no exaggeration, this either to hold fast to God or to despise him; it is not as when a person proposes an either/or in connection with something insignificant, a person of whom one thus may properly say, “He is brusque.” That is not how things are here. For, on the one hand, God, of course, is surely God. And on the other hand, he does not set forth an either/or in relation to something insignificant; he does not say, “Either a rose or a tulip,” but he sets it forth in relation to himself and says: “Either me … either you hold fast to me unconditionally in everything, or you—despise me.” Yet God certainly could not speak otherwise of himself. If God should—or could—speak of himself as though he were not absolutely number 1, as though he were not the only one, unconditionally everything, but merely sort of a something, someone who had hopes of perhaps being included in our consideration—then God must of course have lost himself, lost the notion of himself, and would not be God.

Thus in the silence with the lily and the bird there is an either/or, either God … and understood as follows: either love him or—hate him, either hold fast to him or—despise him.

Then what does this either/or mean, what does God require? For either/or is a requirement, just as the lovers of course require love when the one says to the other, “Either/or.” But God does not relate to you as a lover, nor do you relate to him as a lover. The relationship is different: it is that of the creature to the Creator. What, then, does he require with this either/or? He requires obedience, unconditional obedience; if you are not obedient in everything, unconditionally, then you do not love him, and if you do not love him, then—you hate him. If you are not obedient in everything unconditionally, then you do not hold fast to him. Or, if you do not hold fast to him unconditionally and in everything, you do not hold fast to him; and if you do not hold fast to him, then—you despise him.

This unconditional obedience—that if one does not love God, one hates him, that if one does not hold fast to him unconditionally and in everything, one despises him—this unconditional obedience you can learn from the teachers to which the gospel refers, the lily and the bird. It is said that in learning to obey one learns to rule, but what is even more certain is that by being obedient oneself one can teach obedience. So it is with the lily and the bird. They have no power with which to compel the learner, they have only the compulsion of their own obedience. The lily and the bird are “the obedient teachers.” Is this not a strange way of speaking? In other cases, “obedient” is of course the word one uses of the learner; it is required of him that he be obedient; but here it is the teacher himself who is obedient! And in what does he give instruction? In obedience. And how does he give instruction? By obedience. If you were able to be obedient in the same way as the lily and the bird, you would also be able to teach obedience by obedience. But since neither you nor I are obedient in that way, let us from the lily and the bird learn:

obedience.

Out there with the lily and the bird there is silence, we said. But this silence—or what we strove to learn from it, to become silent—is the first condition for truly being able to obey. When everything around you is solemn silence, as it is out there, and when there is silence within you, then you perceive—and you perceive it with the emphasis of the infinite—the truth of this: You shall love the Lord your God and serve him alone. And you perceive that it is “you,” you who shall love God in this way, you alone in the whole world, you who are indeed alone, surrounded by the solemn silence: alone in such a way that every doubt, every objection, every excuse, every evasion, and every question—in short, every voice—is reduced to silence within you: every voice, that is, every voice other than that of God, which around you and within you speaks to you through the silence. Were there never silence around you and within you in this way, then you would never have learned and never will learn obedience. But if you have learned silence, then it will surely be possible to learn obedience.

Pay attention, then, to nature, which surrounds you. In nature everything is obedience, unconditional obedience. Here “God’s will is done, as in heaven, so also on earth.” Or if one were to cite the holy words in another way, they would still be fitting: here in nature “God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.” In nature everything is unconditional obedience; here it is not merely the case that (as is also true in the world of human beings) inasmuch as God is the Almighty, nothing, not the least thing, happens without it being his will—no, here it is also because everything is unconditional obedience. But this, after all, is certainly an infinite difference: for it is one thing that the most cowardly and most defiant human disobedience cannot—that the disobedience of an individual human being or of the entire human race cannot—do the least thing against his will, he the Almighty; it is something else that his will is done because everything obeys him unconditionally, because there is no other will than his in heaven and on earth; and this is the case in nature. In nature it is the case that, as scripture says, “not one sparrow falls to the ground without his will.” And this is so not only because he is the Almighty, but because everything is unconditional obedience; his will is the only thing: there is not the least objection; not a word, not a sigh is heard; the unconditionally obedient sparrow falls to the ground in unconditional obedience if it is God’s will. In nature, everything is unconditional obedience. The sighing of the wind, the echo of the forest, the murmuring of the brook, the hum of summer, the whispering of the leaves, the hiss of the grass, every sound, every sound you hear, it is all compliance, unconditional obedience, so that in it you can hear God as you can hear him in the music of the obedient movement of the heavenly bodies. And the impetuous turbulence of wind, the light pliability of the clouds, the dripping fluidity and cohesiveness of the sea, the speed of a ray of light, and the even greater speed of sound: all this is obedience. And the rise of the sun at a given hour, and its setting at a given hour, and the shift of the wind at God’s command, and the rise and fall of the tides at set times, and the agreement of the seasons of the year in their precise alternation: everything, everything, everything is obedience. Yes, were there a star in the heavens that wanted to have its own will, or a speck of dust on earth: they are instantly annihilated, and with equal ease. For in nature everything is nothing, understood in the sense that there is nothing other than God’s unconditional will; at the same instant that it is not unconditionally God’s will, it has ceased to exist.

Let us, then, observe the lily and bird more closely, and from a human perspective, in order to learn obedience. The lily and the bird are unconditionally obedient to God. They are masters at this. As befits teachers, they have a masterful understanding of how to encounter the unconditioned—something that, alas, most people surely miss and at which they fail. For there is one thing that the lily and bird unconditionally do not understand, that, alas, most people understand best: half-measures. That a minor bit of disobedience would not be unconditional disobedience is something the lily and the bird cannot and do not want to understand. That the least little bit of disobedience would truly have any name other than contempt for God is something the lily and the bird cannot and do not want to understand. That there should be anything else or anyone else that a person, being divided, could also serve in addition to serving God, and that this would not also be despising God: this is something that the bird and the lily cannot and do not want to understand. Marvelous security in encountering the unconditioned and having one’s life in it! And yet, o you profound teachers, could it really be possible to find security anywhere else than in the unconditioned, since in itself the conditioned is of course insecurity! Then I would certainly rather speak differently; I would not admire the security with which they encounter the unconditioned, but would rather say that it is precisely the unconditioned that gives them the admirable security that makes them teachers of obedience. For the lily and the bird are unconditionally obedient to God; in their obedience they are so simple or so lofty that they believe that everything that happens is unconditionally God’s will, and that they have absolutely nothing to do in the world other than either to carry out God’s will in unconditional obedience or to submit to God’s will in unconditional obedience.

If the place assigned to the lily is really as unfortunate as possible, so that it can be easily foreseen that it will be totally superfluous all its life, not be noticed by a single person who might find joy in it; if the place and the surroundings are—yes, I had forgotten it was the lily of which we are speaking—are so “desperately” unfortunate, that not only is it not visited, but is avoided: the obedient lily obediently submits to its circumstances and bursts forth in all its loveliness. We human beings—or rather, a human being in the lily’s situation—would say: “It is hard, it is unendurable, when one is a lily and is as lovely as a lily, then to be assigned a place in such a location, to have to bloom there, in surroundings that are as unfavorable as possible, that are as if calculated to annihilate the impression of one’s loveliness. No, it is unendurable. It is of course a self-contradiction on the part of the Creator!” That is how a human being, or we human beings, would certainly think and speak if we were in the lily’s place, and then we would wither from grief. But the lily thinks differently, it thinks as follows: “Of course, I myself cannot determine the location and the circumstances; this is thus not my affair in the least way; that I stand where I stand is God’s will.” That is how the lily thinks. And that things actually are as it thinks—that this is God’s will—can be seen from its appearance, for it is lovely: Solomon in all his splendor was not arrayed like this. Ah, if one lily differed from another in its loveliness, this lily would have to be awarded the prize: it possesses one additional loveliness, for there is really no art to being lovely when one is a lily, but to be lovely in these circumstances and in such surroundings, which do everything they can to hinder it—fully to be oneself in such surroundings, and to preserve oneself, to mock all the power of the surroundings—no, not to mock, lilies do not do that, but to be entirely carefree in all one’s loveliness! For despite its surroundings the lily is itself because it is unconditionally obedient to God; and because it is unconditionally obedient to God, it is unconditionally free of cares, which only those who are unconditionally obedient—especially under such circumstances—can be. And because it is wholly and fully itself and is unconditionally free of cares—two things that correspond to one another directly and inversely—it is lovely. Only through unconditional obedience can one unconditionally encounter “the place” where one is to stand; and when one encounters it unconditionally, then one understands that it is unconditionally a matter of indifference even if “the place” is a dunghill.—Even if the situation that the lily encounters at precisely the moment it is to spring forth is as unfortunate as possible, is so unfavorable that as far as it can judge in advance with something close to certainty, the lily can predict that it will be snapped off at that very instant, so that its coming into existence becomes its downfall—indeed, so that it seems as if it only came into existence and became lovely in order to perish: the obedient lily submits to this obediently; it knows that such is God’s will, and it springs forth. If you saw it at that moment there would not be the least indication that this unfolding was also its downfall; it sprang forth in such rich, beautiful fashion, so richly and beautifully did it go forth—for the whole thing was just a moment—it went to its downfall in unconditional obedience. In the lily’s place, a human being, or we human beings, would certainly despair at the thought that coming into existence and downfall were one, and then in despair we would hinder ourselves in becoming what we could have become, even if only for a moment. It is otherwise with the lily; it was unconditionally obedient; therefore it became itself in loveliness; it actually became its entire possibility, undisturbed, unconditionally undisturbed, by the thought that that very moment was its death. Ah, if one lily differed from another in its loveliness, this lily would have to be awarded the prize: it possesses one additional loveliness, to be lovely like this despite the certainty of downfall at the same moment. And truly, confronted with one’s downfall, to have the courage and the faith to come into existence in all one’s loveliness: only unconditional obedience is capable of this. As noted, the certainty of downfall would disturb a human being, so that although only the briefest of existences had been allotted him, he did not fulfill the possibility he had in fact been granted. “To what purpose?” he would say, or “Why?” he would say, or “What good will it do?” he would say: and then he would not develop the whole of his potential, but would be culpable—crippled and unbeautiful as he was—of having succumbed in advance of the moment. Only unconditional obedience can encounter “the moment” unconditionally exactly; only unconditional obedience can make use of “the moment,” unconditionally undisturbed by the next moment.

When the moment comes for it to depart, even though, according to its understanding of the matter, the bird is quite certain that things are quite good the way they are, and that to travel is thus to let go of what is certain in order to grasp what is uncertain, the obedient bird nonetheless immediately sets forth on the journey; in simple fashion and with the help of unconditional obedience, it understands only one thing but understands it unconditionally: that now is the moment, unconditionally.—When the bird comes into contact with the harshness of this life, when it is tried with difficulties and opposition, when, every morning, day after day, it finds that its nest has been disturbed: every day, the obedient bird begins its work all over again with the same joy and meticulousness it displayed the first time. In simple fashion and with the help of unconditional obedience, it understands one thing, but understands it unconditionally: that this is its work and that it is solely concerned with doing it.—When the bird must experience the world’s evil, when the little songbird that sings to the glory of God must put up with a naughty child’s finding amusement in jeering at it in order, if possible, to disturb the solemnity; or when the solitary bird has found surroundings it loves, a beloved branch on which it especially loves to sit, perhaps also dear to it for the most cherished memories—and then there is a human being who takes delight in chasing it away by throwing stones or in some other way—alas, a human being who is just as untiring in evil as the bird, despite having been driven off and scared away, is untiring in returning to its love and its old place: the obedient bird submits unconditionally to everything. In simple fashion and with the help of unconditional obedience, it understands only one thing, but understands it unconditionally, that everything of this sort that happens to it does not really concern it; that is, these things only concern it in an unreal fashion, or more correctly, that what actually concerns it—but also unconditionally—is to submit to it in unconditional obedience to God.

So it is with the lily and the bird from whom we should learn. Therefore, you must not say, “The lily and the bird, of course they can be obedient; after all, they cannot do anything else or they cannot do otherwise; to become an example of obedience in that way is of course to make a virtue of necessity.” You are not to say anything of this sort; you are to say nothing whatever. You are to keep silent and obey, so that if it is indeed true that the lily and the bird make a virtue of necessity, you might also succeed in making a virtue of necessity. You, too, are of course subject to necessity. God’s will is indeed done in any case, so strive to make a virtue of necessity by doing God’s will in unconditional obedience. God’s will is indeed done in any case, so see to it that you make a virtue of necessity by submitting to God’s will unconditionally obediently, so unconditionally obediently that in connection with carrying out and submitting to God’s will, you might truthfully be able to say of yourself : “I cannot do anything else, I cannot do otherwise.”

This is what you should strive for, and you should consider that whatever the situation is with the lily and the bird, if it actually is more difficult for a human being to be unconditionally obedient, there is also a danger for the human being, a danger that might, if I dare say so, make it easier for him: the danger of forfeiting God’s patience. For have you ever truly earnestly examined your own life, or examined human life, or the human world—which is so different from that of nature, where everything is unconditionally obedient—have you ever considered this, and have you then perceived, without shuddering, how much truth there indeed is in God’s calling himself “the God of patience”; have you perceived that he, the God who says “either/or”—understood as meaning, “either love me or hate me, either hold fast to me or despise me”—that he has the patience to bear with you and me and with all of us! If God were a human being, what then? Long, long ago he would have to have become sick and tired of me (to take myself as an example) and of having anything to do with me, and he would have to have said what human parents say (though for very different reasons): “The child is naughty and sickly and stupid and slow-witted, and if there were only something good about it, but there is so much bad about it—no human being can endure it.” No, no human being can endure it, only the God of patience can do it.

And now think of the countless number of human beings who are living! We human beings speak of it as a task of patience to be a schoolmaster for little children. And now God, who has to be the schoolmaster for this countless number—what patience! And what makes the requirement of patience infinitely greater is that where God is the schoolmaster, more or less all the children suffer from the delusion that they are big, grown-up people, a delusion of which the lily and the bird are so entirely free that it is surely for this very reason that unconditional obedience comes so easily to them. “The only thing lacking,” a human schoolmaster would say, “the only thing lacking would be for the children to imagine that they were grown-up people; then one would have to lose patience and despair; no human being could endure that.” No, no human being could endure that; only the God of patience can do it. You see, that is why God calls himself the God of patience. And he certainly knows what he is saying. It is not when he is in a mood that it occurs to him to call himself this; no, he does not vary in mood; that would of course be impatience. He knew from eternity—and he knows from thousands upon thousands of years of daily experience—he knew from eternity that as long as temporality lasts, and human beings with it, he must be the God of patience, for otherwise human disobedience would be unendurable. In relating to the lily and the bird, God is the fatherly Creator and Sustainer; only in relation to human beings is he the God of patience. True enough, this is a consolation, an extremely necessary and indescribable consolation, which is in fact why scripture says that God is the God of patience—and “the God of consolation.” But it is of course also a terribly serious matter that human disobedience is to blame for the fact that God is the God of patience, a terribly serious matter that human beings not take this patience in vain. Human beings discovered an attribute of God that the lily and the bird, who are always unconditionally obedient, do not know; or God had such love for human beings that he let it be revealed to them that he has this attribute, that he is patience. But thus in a certain sense—oh, frightful responsibility!—God’s patience corresponds to human disobedience. This is a consolation, but subject to a terrible responsibility. A human being needs to know that even if all human beings gave up on him, indeed, even if he were on the verge of giving up on himself, God is still the God of patience. This is incalculable wealth. Ah, but make proper use of it; remember that it is your savings. For the sake of God in Heaven, use it properly; otherwise it plunges you into even greater wretchedness; it transforms itself into its opposite—it is no longer consolation, but becomes the most terrible of all accusations against you. For, if this seems to you to be too hard a saying (even though it is no harder than the truth is): that to fail to hold fast to God unconditionally and in everything—that this is “immediately” to despise him—then it certainly cannot be too hard a saying that to take God’s patience in vain is to despise him!

Therefore, take great care to learn obedience from the lily and the bird in accordance with the gospel’s instruction. Do not let yourself be frightened away; do not despair when you compare your life with the life of these teachers. There is nothing to despair over, for indeed you shall learn from them; and the gospel consoles you, first, by telling you that God is the God of patience, but then it adds: “You shall learn from the lily and the bird, learn to be unconditionally obedient like the lily and the bird, learn not to serve two masters, for no one can serve two masters, he must either … or.”

No one can serve two masters; he must either love the one and hate the other, or hold fast to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon, not God and the world, not good and evil. Thus, there are two powers: God and the world, good and evil, and the reason a human being can only serve one master is certainly that these two powers—even though one power is infinitely stronger than the other—are in mortal combat with one another. This enormous danger—a danger in which a human being is indeed situated by virtue of being a human being, a danger that the lily and the bird are spared in their unconditional obedience, which is happy innocence, for neither God and the world nor good and evil are fighting over them—this enormous danger, that “the human being” is situated between these two enormous powers and the choice is left to him: this enormous danger is that one must either love or hate, that not to love is to hate, for these two powers are so hostile that the least inclination to one side is regarded by the other side as unconditional opposition. If a human being forgets this absolute danger in which he is situated (and, note well, the attempt to forget a danger of this sort is certainly no useful protection against it)—if a human being forgets that he is situated in this enormous danger, if he believes he is not in danger, if he even says, “Peace and no danger,” then the words of the gospel must seem to him a foolish exaggeration. Alas, precisely because he is so sunken in danger and is lost, he has neither any notion of the love with which God loves him and that it is precisely out of love that God requires unconditional obedience, nor has he any notion of the power and cunning of evil and of his own weakness. And from the very first, a human being is too childish to be able to understand the gospel and to want to do so; its talk of either/or seems to him an untrue exaggeration: that the danger should be so great, that unconditional obedience should be required, that the requirement of unconditional obedience should be grounded in love—a human being cannot get this into his head.

What, then, does the gospel do? The gospel, which is the wisdom of upbringing, does not get involved in an intellectual or verbal quarrel with a person in order to prove to him that it is so; the gospel knows very well that this is not the way things are done, that a human being does not first understand that what it says is so and then decide to obey unconditionally, but the reverse, that only by unconditionally obeying does a human being come to understand that what the gospel says is so. Therefore the gospel makes use of authority and says: “You shall.” But at the same moment it becomes gentler, so that it might be capable of moving even the hardest heart; it takes you by the hand, as it were—and does just as the loving father does with his child—and says: “Come, let us go out to the lily and the bird.” Out there, it continues by saying: “Consider the lilies of the field; abandon yourself to them, lose yourself in them—does not this sight move you?” Then, when the solemn silence out there with the lily and the bird moves you deeply, the gospel explains further, saying: “But why is this silence so solemn? Because it expresses the unconditional obedience with which everything serves only one master, turns in service only toward one, joined in complete unity, in one great divine service—so let yourself be gripped by this great thought, for it is all only one thought, and learn from the lily and the bird.” But do not forget, you shall learn from the lily and the bird; you shall become unconditionally obedient like the lily and the bird. Consider that it was the sin of a human being that—by being unwilling to serve one master, or by wanting to serve another master, or by wanting to serve two, indeed, many masters—disturbed the beauty of the whole world where previously everything had been so very good; it was his sin that introduced discord into a world of unity; and consider that every sin is disobedience and every disobedience is sin.