Fourteenth Sunday In Ordinary Time (Year A)

Zech 9.9-10;
Rom 8.9, 11-13;  
Mt 11.25-30

THE LORD WANTS US TO COME TO HIM, LET HIM IN.

In today’s gospel passage, we have from the lips of our Lord Himself; a brief summary of one of the two principal purposes for His mission on earth namely; He came to give His life for us, to redeem us from our sin; and He came, as He has just said to us, to reveal the Father to us. The eternal Father, God almighty – how could we begin to understand Him who created us and sustains our very existence if He had not revealed Himself and He chose to reveal Himself in the way that we could best understand – by humbling himself and becoming like us, in all things but sin. He took human flesh and was born of the Virgin Mary as Son, in order to reveal His true nature to us. And all this was done entirely out of love for us, His creation.
 

And so, throughout His earthly life, the Son reveals more and more of the truth, the reality of God; and when He returns to His Father, they send the Holy Spirit to deepen that process. During His time on earth Christ revealed the reality of God in a manner that those who saw and heard Him could begin to understand; the Spirit now helps us to understand the meaning, the fullness of this revelation. And this whole process tells us something about one of the greatest mysteries of this revelation of the life of God – the Trinity; that God, without in any way compromising His unity, is three persons.

Be that as it may, today’s gospel reading however, highlights a slightly different aspect of unity: not the unity of the persons of the Trinity, but the unity of the Father and the Son and with us: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.” We are loved and called by Christ; He chooses to reveal the Father to us. We are caught up into the unity of the Father and the Son. Through the love of the Son for each one of us, we are united with God. And one great sign of that love should be the unity we share with each other, in other words, the unity of the Church. In part of the prayer of Christ immediately before his arrest and trial, as presented to us in Saint John’s gospel, He prays to the Father: “Holy Father, I am praying for all those who believe in me, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, are in me and I in thee, that they may also be one in us.”

It is very clearly Christ’s will that those He leaves behind to continue His presence, that is the Church, should be united, and should be one. And yet, if we look at the Church, every good Catholic knows that there are aspects of the visible Church that cause suffering to those who love her. It is often the lot of the saints to suffer not only for the Church, but also – painfully and mysteriously – from the Church. The Church is not a society of the perfect, but of sinful human beings: human beings who, through the grace of God, are being transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that sometimes there is pain and misunderstanding; hardly surprising that good and serious Catholics disagree; that, as Saint Paul wrote to his Corinthians: ‘I hear that there are divisions among you.’ The Church, the Mystical Body of our Lord on earth, is scarred with the wounds inflicted on our Saviour by the sin of man. The great French philosopher Pascal wrote that Christ is in agony until the end of time. Cardinal Newman expressed the same thought when he said that the Church bears in her body the marks of her dying Lord.

We have joined the Church and we remain members of it. We have accepted the responsibility that that entails. But we must always remember the promise that our Lord makes to us in today’s gospel: “Come to me” – in other words, ‘Come to my Church – unite yourself with Me through My continuing presence in today’s world; “Learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart” – ‘see the revelation which I am making for your sake; learn from that revelation about the person of God, and his great love.’ “Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light” – ‘unite yourself with Me and your heavenly Father in the sacraments of the Church, in the mission of the Church, in the teaching of the Church. That is a great privilege and a great responsibility, but I will help you to carry it. Your greatest burden in life is sin, and I will take that upon myself of the cross. So take my yoke: it is much lighter than any you would make for yourselves. And if at times you are weary and are heavily laden, “come to me and I will give you rest.”
 
Our Lord makes all these promises to us. If we think entirely inhuman, adult terms, we can get rather depressed by what we see as an impossible task, impossible standards set before us by God; but when we become like children, when we accept lovingly what our heavenly Father is lovingly teaching us, that He will help us with that burden, help we receive most especially through the two sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist, we will find our path is easier, and we will know that it is that path that will lead us to heaven.

Fr Joseph Osho