Luke 21:34, ‘But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap.’
Jesus equates the ‘cares of this life’ to ‘drunkenness’ and ‘dissipation.’ Both drunkenness and dissipation translate words that relate to literal, physical drunkenness and its disorienting, sense-blearing effects on the body—a ‘hangover,’ we might say.
In contrast to this, Jesus’ point in this verse is tonic in its clarity: What an exorbitant amount of alcohol does to the body and the brain, so world-anchored cares and anxieties do to the spiritual faculties, to the ‘heart.’
It is as though anxiety stirred up by the cares of this world (anxieties which Jesus likens to thorns in Mark 4:18-19) is the debaucherous wine of this age. The more we set the lips of our soul to this stupefying cup, the more drunken our hearts become, the more bleary-eyed, the more dulled, numbed, and distorted becomes our ability to rightly perceive the things of the spirit.
An anxious heart is a drunken heart…a worrying heart is a dulled and stumbling heart…A care-ridden heart is a heart unready for and unaware of the coming of the Lord…
How easy it is to be drunk on the cares of this world! How easy it is to return again and again to this heart-numbing, soul-dimming, sight-blurring cup! May the Lord have mercy on us—we who live in a world that bombards us at every turn with some new ‘care,’ some new anxiety, some newly proffered cup of transient, world-bound fear to drown our spiritual senses in the strong drink of this age.
May we, instead—with eyes alert through prayer in the Spirit—drink deeply and continually from the Wine of our Lord, the Good Wine of His life poured out, the True Vintage that flows from His love-pierced heart. May we, as it were, be soberly, vividly ‘drunk’ on this Wine….May we forsake the moldy casks of anxiety and turn instead to the Living Spring of our Lord’s open side, to the River of God’s own Delight, to the very Wine of Blessedness, to that Cross-declared Love which is the Truth and—as the Truth—banishes every fear of this age.
