Psalm 27 contrasts our trust in God over against our fears of ourselves and each other. It s a common predicament. The words of Jesus in today s Gospel are offered in the context that King Herod want to kill him, surely an occasion for fear.
Fear comes in several guises.
It can be the apparently harmless thing we call worry. But when worry is allowed to remain for periods in our life unanswered, it can grow like an aggressive weed into full-grown fear. And fear can also show up as anxiety when it focuses its apprehension upon no particular object. When Julian of Norwich lived in her cell alongside the Cathedral of Norwich in the 14 th century, looking in at the altar and out at the world, she wrote about fear. She said there were different sorts of fear determined by our relationship in time to the thing feared.