We hear 3 very different readings today, each of them rather short, but each of them telling us a little bit about what Jesus is going to be like as a leader. To start off with, let’s look at our 1st reading from the Prophet Zechariah, who lived more than 5 centuries before the birth of Christ. This prophet lived in a very dark period in Israel’s history: the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed & many Jews were exiled to Babylon. Zechariah prophesied in a time when the Jews were returning to Jerusalem after their exile when they were freed by King Cyrus of Persia. He told of the Messiah whom God would send to his people. Of course, the people wanted a strong, aggressive, powerful leader who’d be able to stand up to foreign powers, a leader who’d lead them back to glory. Zechariah defies these expectations, telling them about a leader who will be meek, who will enter the land riding on a donkey, who will bring peace & will banish the warrior’s sword. I bet the people of Israel wondered: How would meekness be a strength for our new leader? By being humble & kind, how would our leader, our king, win wars & bring peace to our kingdom?
Zechariah prophesied the coming of the Messiah to the people of ancient Israel: that prophecy was fulfilled in Jesus. Our world today is much like the ancient world in Jesus’ day in the way we idolize power & strength. Yet, Jesus contradicts this view of the world, telling us that although certain truths have been withheld from the wise & the learned, they have been revealed to the children & the little ones. Indeed, we as adults still have a lot to learn about our faith. Yes, we are encouraged in our Catholic faith to study philosophy and theology. We can have insights & epiphanies from the prayers we make to the Lord. We can meditate on God’s Word, breaking open his Word for greater comprehension & understanding. And all of that is good & important, all of these are ways we can progress along our journey of faith as disciples of Christ. In fact, we always need to be growing in our faith, gaining in our understanding of the Lord. Yet, that’s not the entire story. There is another dimension to our lives of faith: We can look at how our children see God through their joy & enthusiasm, how they see God’s love as the central message of our faith. If we live out a faith in which we try to follow all of God’s laws & try to do the right things, but if we leave out the love of God & do not have joy in our hearts, then we really don’t understand what Jesus is all about. We do indeed have a lot to teach our children about our faith, to pass down our faith to them, but, as Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel, our children have a lot to teach us about our faith as well.
Opening up ourselves to God with the heart of a child is important. Jesus knows that we all can be burdened down in life by so many different things, & he addresses this in today’s Gospel, too. If you look at all the people we are praying for in our parish, there are so many who are suffering in their health, who are enduring long-term illnesses, or who are dealing with the aches & pains of old age. We have members of our parish family who are still recovering from the tornados that happened last year, & those who are still not back in their homes after the recent flooding. Farmers all around us are dealing with the affects of flooding and the lack of rain at the same time. On top of all of these things, all of us are haunted by our own personal demons, by struggles we have in our daily lives – both big & small - those things that weigh heavily on our hearts.
Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel: “Take my yoke upon you & learn from me,
for I am meek & humble of heart;
& you will find rest for yourselves.” Well, the simple, humble people of Jesus’ day knew what a yoke was. They saw the teams of oxen wearing yokes around their necks with a big crossbar as they pulled a plow in the fields. And the peasants of Jesus’ day felt the yoke of their backbreaking work imposed on them, as they worked the land & had little time to rest. On top of that, the Pharisees tried to impose the yoke of their interpretation of religion upon the people, a yoke of rigid laws & commandments that often had no sense of God’s love & compassion.
But Jesus understood the burdens of the poor of his day, just as he understands all that we in the modern world endure. When Jesus made the statements we hear in today’s Gospel, he knew of the rocky road he would have on his way to death on the cross. The yoke Jesus wants us to assume is not one that will increase our burdens; Jesus’ yoke will not increase what is weighing us down. Jesus offers us a yoke that will bring peace & rest to our hearts, a yoke that will allow us to find meaning in our sufferings, a yoke that will bring us eternal life & salvation.
But this is not saying that the yoke Jesus asks us to assume is always the easiest path to follow in life. His yoke asks us to live a life of discipleship without reservation. Jesus is not telling us that our Catholic faith is always the politically correct thing to do. It is important to remember: When we assume Jesus’ yoke in our lives, we must never forget that we are always to practice our faith out of compassion & love. We are not to harbor bitterness & hatred in our hearts, even for those who lash out against us or who persecute us. We certainly need to practice in our daily lives what we hear Jesus preach. Yes, we will still have burdens that we carry with us in life. We will still be confronted with challenges. We will still have sufferings we will have to endure. But we also have Jesus at our side every step of the way.
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