When Montag reads the Bible on the subway, the text includes the phrase "the lilies of the field." This is from the Sermon on the Mount. It's a phrase that doesn't seem particularly relevant to the novel, but later it (in its original context) acquires a sort of retrograde importance.
A few pages after Montag rides the subway, he arrives at Faber's house, and they talk about how religion has changed to conform to the "families" in the parlor wall-screens. Faber says
Christ is one of the "family" now. I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.What Faber says can stand on its own, but - in their original context - "the lilies of the field" that Montag read about while in the subway emphasize it:
Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ... And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Matthew 6:25, 28-29)In that section of the Sermon of the Mount, Christ says to not worry about clothing (and by extension seems to say to not worry about having particular possessions at all), but now - via the perversion of the television parlors - He's made to say the opposite: that there are "products that every worshiper absolutely needs."
