14th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle A 22-23

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Zechariah 9:9-10 | Romans 8:9, 11-13 | Matthew 11:25-30

Oh God, who in the abasement of your Son have raised up a fallen world, fill your faithful with holy joy, for on those you have rescued from slavery to sin, you bestow eternal gladness.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The beauty of this particular set of readings is found in its promise.  Life is not supposed to be a burden.  It is not supposed to be something that robs us of a sense of wellbeing.  It’s not supposed to be something filled with shame and fear, yet we often find ourselves in that kind of world.  And this is such a clear statement in all three readings, that God has done something unique and wonderful, and he didn’t do it in the beginning.  The Old Testament is a very important book to examine carefully, and first and foremost, you see so many references in the Old Testament to the coming of Jesus and this new life and this new earth, this new world that’s going to be created, but it wasn’t created in the Old Testament.  The Old Testament is filled with fear and shame and anger, and we see God angry at his people, willing to destroy them.  We see people constantly destroying each other, and we look at this way that people were living, and their performance was terrible.  So God came along and gave them the Ten Commandments, which is a way of telling you how to perform, how to do things, and you’re supposed to not do negative things to each other.  And you’re supposed to trust in God, but the Old Testament didn’t give people what they needed in order to not only live according to the Ten Commandments but to go beyond them.  And that’s what the New Testament is all about.  That’s what the revelation of Jesus is all about, a new heaven, a new earth, a new way.  And yet we go back and listen to the Old Testament, and we think that this is God speaking to you and to me.  And we can get caught up in a kind of darkness and an importance of how we’re performing and worrying about whether we’re earning salvation, and all of that gets caught up in our imaginations and in our minds mostly.  And this set of readings just blows that all apart and is saying that the flesh, living in the flesh is living in a world where you are told what to do, and you struggle to do it, and if you do it, you earn something wonderful, and if you do not do it, you are going to be deeply and powerfully punished.  It’s justice.  It’s performance.  It’s called the flesh.   

I remember as a young Catholic growing up, when you first receive first communion and all those wonderful things and you learn, you’re not supposed to disobey.  That was the big sin.  Don’t disobey your parents.  Don’t disobey your teachers or what the priest said to you.  It was also the whole image of not only that but you were supposed to, as you get older, then your body’s awakening, and you’re told that anything you do sexually of any kind is going to be a sin, and you lose God’s favor the minute you commit a sexual act.  And you live with that, and you feel, “Well, I know what the flesh is.  The flesh is my body, this body that longs for intimacy or longs for release or whatever.”  And nothing could be further from the truth.  The flesh is not our human nature in itself.  It is human nature without something, without spirit, without divinity.  If we could just make ourselves conscious and clear about this one single thing: the Old Testament is about performance, deeds, reward, punishment, and it’s necessary at the beginning of someone’s life.  Even now today it works, but then it evolves into something so much more amazing and mystical and wonderful, and it’s called God’s Spirit, God’s presence inside of you, living there, resonating life out to those around you and creating in you an amazing understanding of the way life works.  

Life is not supposed to be necessarily easy in the sense of not difficult and no problems, no pain, no suffering.  No, when Jesus is talking about a life without struggle and without ⎯ it’s easy, it’s almost effortless, well, there is a way to live in the world accepting its imperfection and the imperfection of individuals where it doesn’t create inside of you rage and anger and resentment.  There’s a way to deal with your own faults, your own fear, your own shame and that of others in a way that is easy, and it’s not that it goes away but that you understand this is part of what life is.  And resentment against someone else, shame for whatever you’ve done, anger that it’s too hard or whatever, all those things are the things that can be dealt with in a different way, and they become not a burden but a kind of tool that teaches and opens your eyes to a way of life that you do not want to participate in.  So what Jesus is trying to say to us so clearly in his ministry is that, “When you’re living in the flesh, trying to earn my Father’s affection, facing always your own shame and your own fear, you will never enter the kingdom of God.  You will be in a place of stress and worry and anxiety.”  

Look at the Old Testament and look at what happened at the end of almost 2,000 years of trying to live under this notion of justice.  And when Jesus came along and revealed who he really is and that his whole notion of you is nothing other than something he sees as beautiful ⎯  he loves what he created.  He is the Father.  He is the Son.  He is all things, and he sees everything as beautiful and everything as having meaning and purpose and working together.  And he wants to reveal that to the world, and what did the world that was living then, the religion at the time ⎯ it destroyed him.  And that’s always going to be the shadow of religion.  Religion thrives in power over people, telling them how to act, reminding them that they need to be better.  That’s not the message of Jesus.  The message of Jesus is, “You are human.  You have faults.  You have frailties.  You have fears, and you have shame, and I’ve come to release you from that.  I’ve forgiven everything you have ever done and will ever do, not because you deserve it but because I choose to.  And I know, if you know you’re loved, and if you know you’re held in that kind of esteem in God the Father, God the Son, that’s the same, that when you see God looking at you and loving what you are, you will change.  And then the scripture says this Spirit will be given to anyone that allows it to happen, anyone to whom Jesus wishes to give it.  Do you think Jesus doesn’t wish to give someone love?  Does he not wish to forgive someone who’s such a horrible sinner?  No, he is forgiveness.  He is love.  He is everything that we long for, and yet he stays at a distance as we focus on our performance and forget about what presence really means.  It means allowing God to enter into you, see all that you are, all that you’ve done, look into your eyes and tell you how wonderful you are created to be, all your potential.  And he said, “Would you let me be with you?  Would you let me be in you?  And if you allow me in you, I will minister to others.  That’s what I want you to do.  I’m not focused so much on your performance.  I’m focused on what you are potentially to me, my instrument, my hands, my eyes, my feet in the world.  I want you to allow me to work through you, even in ways you’ll never know and in ways you’ll see and be in awe of how God has used you to accomplish something for someone else.”  

St. Catherine of Siena has a wonderful line.  She said to God once, when she was ⎯ or ⎯ God and Jesus, they’re the same, but I think she had a mystical experience of Jesus saying, “What can I do?  How can I show you how much I love you?”  And Jesus said, “I don’t need your love, but you want to please me?  If that is something you want to do, love everybody around you.  That’s what I want.  That’s what I came into the world to engage in, in a life in you, my Spirit dwelling in you so that you can be what I was, and when you see the miracles I performed, they’re all about ⎯ they’re all almost medicinal, eyes that can see, ears that can hear, tongue that can speak, hands that can work, feet that can get you to where you need to be.  All of that you are able to do for your brothers and sisters if you will simply open your heart to the Spirit of God dwelling in you.”  It first has to remove within you any fear and any shame and any anger about the world that God has created.  It’s exactly as it’s supposed to be.  It’s exactly the place that God has longed to create at this point in our history, and our consciousness grows and grows and grows and has since Adam and Eve, and we’re getting closer and closer to awareness of who we really are as a species filled with divinity.  We are fully human.  At the same time, we are filled with divinity, and when we focus on that and we know that that’s there, and it’s not only there for others but also for us, we’ll know the joy and the peace and the love that is our inheritance.  It's such a basic message but so easy to miss, so easy to ignore.  Amen.

Father, your love is beyond our imagining, your presence so intimate, so close to us.  Bless us with all abandonment to ways in which we’ve imagined the world to be and openness to the way it truly is, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.