The Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)
Dear brothers and sisters,
Four weeks ago, we heard of Jesus’ great concern for the crowds, how “his heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned” (Matthew 9:36). Today we hear of Jesus’s compassionate care for us – who are surely part of the crowd - in his famous and moving invitation, “Come to me, all who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
With these words, Jesus “seems to want to tell us that this experience of debilitation and fatigue is part of daily life, of every man’s experience.”[1] Much of our society works diligently in the attempt to persuade us otherwise, to convince us that all of life is meant to be exhilarating and ecstatic. Many people get caught in these webs of lies and experience a greater sense of being troubled and abandoned, of being burdened, of being debilitated and fatigued. Jesus comes to relieve us of this, to give us true and eternal rest. Those who do not accept their burdens cannot accept Jesus’ invitation and cannot enter into his rest.
The rest Jesus wishes to give us comes his from heart, from the depths of his love for us.
The light burden, which Jesus offers us, is that of a free and humble integrity, which knows how to stand before the Father as a child who knows his mercy. Standing before the Father without fear, with trust, without hiding anything from him, simply letting him love us, this is the way to know the Father, to find rest.[2]
The rest of God comes from his love and our loving response to his love. If we wish to rest, we must love.
Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, f. 328r
Indeed, we can rightly say “the true remedy
for humanity's wounds, both material — such as hunger and injustice in all its
forms — and psychological and moral, caused by a false well-being, is a rule of
life based on fraternal love, whose source is in the love of God.”[3]
Saint Paul reminds us today, “Who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Romans 8:9). You and I have received the Spirit of Christ – the Holy Spirit – in the waters of Baptism and in the anointing of Confirmation. Consequently, we must live in the Spirit of Christ, we must live in the Spirit of love. As “the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness,” so must we be (Psalm 145:8). What does this look like?
One day last week I stopped at a Casey’s General Store to refill my car. As I stood at my car, a woman approached me. She told me she was pregnant, homeless, and needed something to eat. She asked if I had any money I could spare so she could get a slice of pizza.
Ordinarily, when someone asks me for money for food I take them inside the store or restaurant, allow them to choose what they want, and I pay for it at the counter. This particular day, however, I simply gave the woman some cash out of my wallet. I then watched her walk toward the store, go past it, get into a car as the passenger, and drive away. Suffice it to say I did not feel gracious or merciful.
A few days later I received a call from a woman who said she was fleeing a situation of domestic abuse and needed help with the cost of a motel room. After asking her a few questions, I prepared a check for the motel and took it to the manager. I admit it was something of a challenge to keep the experience with that first woman at bay.
In such situations when others lay a claim on our love, what is our response? Do we allow our hearts to be hardened and jaded, or do we seek to imitate the love of Christ Jesus who never lets his heart become hardened or jaded toward us, despite our numerous failures to return his love?
If we wish to be relieved from the sense of being troubled and abandoned, of being burdened, of being debilitated and fatigued, we must seek to rest in the love of Jesus Christ. But we cannot rest in his love if we do not open ourselves to this love and seek to share it with others. We must remember this:
If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God… Only my readiness to encounter my neighbor and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbor can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me. The saints — consider the example of [Saint] Teresa of Calcutta [or the Venerable Augustus Tolton] — constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbor from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its realism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbor are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first.[4]
It is certainly not easy to live and to love in this way, but it is to this that we are called. We, too, must become “meek and humble of heart” (Matthew 11:29).
Saint Augustine once asked, “What does love look like? It has hands to help others,” he said. “It has feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of all people. This is what love looks like.” Loving in this way can be exhausting, but only those who are exhausted can truly know the joy of rest.
Let us, then, approach the Lord with full trust, abandoning ourselves to him so that he might place his yoke of love upon us. Then, having taken up the light burden of authentic love, may we be brought into the joy of his rest. Amen.
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