By
Sister Rebecca
Gospel
– Matthew 11:25-30
Today’s
Gospel begins: “At that time Jesus said, ‘I thank you Father for having
revealed these hidden things...to babes.’”
Jesus is transcending the limitation of ordinary time and space to
Kairos time—God’s time. In this passage we experience a sudden flash of the intimate
relationship of Jesus with his Father. He invites his listeners into this very
relationship. It is through Jesus that God reveals these
hidden things—that is, Divine Wisdom—to those who have ears to hear, to children. Jesus calls “children” those who know they
need God, and to these he unveils the path of spiritual transformation
To these little ones Jesus says, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me…you shall find rest for your souls.”
A yoke* is what a laborer places upon the shoulders of two oxen in plowing a field. In this metaphor, the disciple is yoked to Jesus, that is, not only for his teaching but his enabling us to carry the burden of putting it into daily practice. What makes this yoke light is total openness to God, knowing God is present and knowing that there is meaning and purpose in bearing life’s burdens: we are not alone. And this trust, this intimate relationship of love gives us the energy to carry our burdens not from will power, by gritting our teeth and groaning, but from a spirit of willingness and surrendering ourselves to God’s presence in this particular situation. This was Jesus’ own experience, and he lived into it to the very end.
Today we
celebrate Saint Francis as a model disciple. A famous story is told of Saint
Francis while he was traveling with his disciple Brother Leo. It was winter, and they both shivered from
the cold. Francis called to Leo:
“Brother Leo, little lamb, if the friars were to make the lame to walk,
if they chase away demons and give sight to the blind,…this would not be
perfect joy. If, when we arrive at our destination all drenched with rain and
trembling with cold, all covered with mud and exhausted from hunger; if, when
we knock at the convent gate the porter should come angrily refuse to open to
us, and leave us outside, exposed to the snow and rain…if we endure such
injustice, and contempt with patience, without murmuring, Brother Leo: This is
perfect joy.”
This point
of the story is not to recommend passivity and inertia when we are faced with
adversity. Like Jesus’ parables, this
story is about the innermost joy and peace to be found in the midst of
suffering. It is meant to completely upset our applecart and usher us onto the
road of spiritual transformation. It
illumines the falsity of our clinging to self-designed happiness, and it sheds
light on today’s Gospel. When we are faced with adversity, the greatest suffering
is within our own minds: our minds can go wild with “what ifs” as we imagine a future
with the worst possible scenario. At
such times the rest that comes from being yoked to Christ can truly bring us to
peace of mind and heart.
The rest
Jesus speaks about points especially to soul-sick weariness: work extracted
from compulsion, work motivated by fear, or work performed in the face of
futility. Such weariness comes from having nothing that truly matters.
This soul weariness is well illustrated in
an article “I used to be a human being.”
The man who wrote this article, after years of denial, finally wakes up
to the reality that he is addicted to the internet. He says: “Endless bombardment of news and
gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me.
It might break you too.” He was
hooked to gossip like others to sugar.
We have gone from looking up—living into the real now—to constantly
looking down into our phones. After 15
years of this hellish existence, and with even his health jeopardized, the man began
to meditate, to introduce silence into his mind, and as he says, “…to follow
spaces I had once known where mind and soul are replenished. The reason we live in a culture increasingly
without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the (seemingly) improbable,
but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in
which faith in God might be reborn.”
Jesus’
invitation to rest means not only stillness, but also an injunction to stop, to
put down, to cease from what drains us.
Internet addiction is only one of many sources of our mental and
emotional drainage. Maybe the call for each of us is a personal inventory. Perhaps most of our suffering comes from
exhaustion that is self-imposed, whether externally or internally. Rest means to be still, and also it can mean being
before God in meditation, as in Psalm 62: “Only in God is my soul at rest and
from him comes my hope.”
Jesus at one time says to his disciples: “Come
away to a quiet place and rest awhile.” The rest Jesus is talking about here
and in today’s Gospel is synonymous with the word Sabbath. Do we take time to honor the Sabbath? Where in my life is the reality of Sabbath (Sunday
or another day of the week): a day of rest—rest from physical exertion, but even
more important from our mind’s inner noise?
What really nourishes my soul?
What on the contrary leaves me feeling empty? What leads me to become
rooted in an identity that is unshakable, my true self in God? The more we live
from this innermost still point, the more we find rest for our souls and
experience wholesome contentedness, no matter what. There is no “one size fits
all.” We need to listen deeply to what and where our hearts find replenishment,
what St. Augustine refers to in this way: “our hearts are restless until they
rest in you, O God.”
*An added note on the “yoke” metaphor: In offering us a life-giving yoke, Jesus could
also have had in mind another kind of yoke, which is spoken of by the Prophet
Jeremiah (cf. chapter 27), who speaks of yokes as bars attached to the
shoulders of the Israelites who are dragged and deported on foot to Babylon by
their captors. Jesus is aware of this kind of “yoke” not imposed by others, but
by our own worries and preoccupations (Matthew 6:25-27). This kind of yoke may
well apply to whatever in us today captivates us, leading us into a land of
servitude of needless depletion and suffering.
