Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY

Thursday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor

July 15, 2021

Ex 3:13-20, Ps 105, Mt 11:28-30

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.15.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday we focused on how God reveals himself and seeks to enter into a personal relationship with us but in order for that to occur we must have a childlike receptivity through entering into Jesus’ own filiation. Today in the readings, Jesus deepens the understanding we need to have of those realities and shows us ever more the means. He gives us three powerful verbs to characterize the means by which he seeks to incorporate us into his own childlike sonship.

* The first is “come”: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened.” The way we are going to be able to learn how to grow more deeply in spiritual childhood is precisely through our labors and burdens, through our hardships and sacrifices. These experiences make us run to God the Father like a young child hearing powerful thunder for the first time runs to earthly parents. Jesus gives us this invitation to enter as children more and more deeply into God’s revelation precisely through all that we’re going through, through all the various obstacles and challenges. He says if we do, he will give us “rest,” he will “refresh” us. The word translated “refresh” (or poorly translated as “give us rest,” which we are tempted to misinterpret as inactivity) actually means “remake.” Jesus wants to give us a fresh start, a new beginning, to bring us back to our spiritual infancy. In Psalm 23, we pray in anticipation of this remaking, “The Lord is my Shepherd. There is nothing I lack. In green pastures you lead me to grace and besides restful waters you refresh [remake] me.” He thoroughly remakes us in his image in baptism and that life is meant to continue. And he does that not by removing us from work and difficulties but precisely through our labors and hardships. We see this in what he does with the Israelites in the first reading. They are laboring under the burdens of Pharaoh and God comes to their aid. He seeks to remake them as a people, to remind them of their childhood though Abraham, Isaac and Jacob so that they might recognize their divine filiation, and he leads them to the waters of the Red Sea that prefigure baptism.

* The second action Jesus commands is to “take” or “assume.” Jesus tells us “Take my yoke upon you.”  Jesus doesn’t tell us to bend down and let him put the yoke on us. He wants us to seize it. He wants us to want it. What’s that yoke? We know that a yoke is a harness — Jesus doubtless used the make them as a carpenter in Joseph’s shop in Nazareth —  to unite two animals so that they might work in tandem. Jesus wants us to take up “his” yoke and his yoke is the patibulum of the Cross. Later he’ll say that his yoke is “easy,” which means that it is “easy-fitting,” it’s tailor-made, for us, to unite us to him, like the Cross on Calvary was the shoe that fit perfectly Simon of Cyrene’s feet. In the first reading, God revealed himself to Moses as “I Am Who Am,” and Jesus is the incarnation of the great “I Am.” But he revealed him most precisely in his passion and he wants us to pick up our Cross every day so we might be yoked to him with the yoke of the Cross from the inside out.  In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus mentions that he is I AM on several occasions linked to his Passion. He says, “When you lift up the Son of Man [obviously on the Cross!], then you will realize that I AM” (Jn 8:28), saying that “if you do not believe that I AM,