Coming to the Lord with our Labors and Burdens, Fifteenth Thursday (I), July 18, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Thursday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Camillus de Lellis
July 18, 2019
Ex 3:13-20, Ps 105, Mt 11:28-30

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

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 sensitivity.
• 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, you will die in your sins” (Jn 8:24). He takes away our sins when we yoke ourselves to the mercy of I AM. With regard to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he said to the Jews in the Temple who were plotting to murder him, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM” (Jn 8:58). During the Last Supper, after he reveals that one of them will be his betrayer, he says, “I am telling you before it happens, so that when it happens you may believe that I AM” (Jn 13:18). Later, when Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, in the middle of his Passion, he asks the group of 200 soldiers who had come for him who they were looking for. When they said, “Jesus of Nazareth,” Jesus replied, “I AM” and we’re told that all of these armed men fell over because of the power of what was said, as if they grasped what he was indicating (Jn 18:5). We will come to know Christ personally, to know God personally, to experience his life, his immanent relations and the relationship he desires to have with us, precisely through yoking ourselves to him. But there’s another aspect of this yoke which is very important to ponder. To be yoked with Jesus is literally to be con (with) jugum (yoke), to be his spouse, his conjugal partner. When Jesus says “Come,” he’s proposing, and when he says “Take,” we’re called to respond, “I take you as my spouse, … for better or worse, in sickness or in health, all the days of my life.” To be yoked to Jesus means to live the spousal Covenant with Jesus all our days, and when we are living together with him, we find that our burdens are light and sweet because of the mutual love with Jesus that changes their weight and bitterness. That spousal covenant with Christ is consummated on the marriage bed of the Cross and that is the way, St. Edith Stein teaches us, that we become Brides of Christ on the Cross.
• The third way we grow in spiritual childhood to receive God’s revelation, Jesus says, is to “learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart and you will find rest for yourselves.” The way we learn from Jesus is not in a classroom seated on a chair. It’s by being yoked in this loving covenantal bond with Jesus. And when we are living in that union, then we not only learn “from” Jesus, but, as the Greek of St. Matthew’s Gospel says more literally, we learn Jesus. He tells us to “learn me.” We learn his humility, which is the capacity to see ourselves as we really are before God and others and how much we need God. We learn his meekness, which is the self-disciplined tameness that allows us calmly to find our strength in Him. We’ve got so much to learn from him, but we first must come, take on his yoke, spousally uniting ourselves to him permanently, and then we will learn from him all we need.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of a saint who heeded Jesus’ triple command and learned him so well that he was able to become like him in caring for so many others whose burdens and labors he would mercifully receive. When St. Camillus de Lellis was young, he picked up many of the bad habits of his Neapolitan father, a mercenary soldier, most notably his terrible temper. With his father, he joined the military as a means of handling his aggression, but it only increased his violence. When he left military service because of a failed campaign and a serious leg infection, his violent streak had only grown, and he had become a gambling addict. He was hired by the Capuchins as a laborer, and one of the Capuchins saw some goodness in him and patiently pushed him to conversion and to trust in Christ’s power to make something good of him. At 25 he converted so thoroughly that he wanted to spend the rest of his life serving God through the Capuchins, but because his leg injury was incurable, he was refused. He was cared for in Rome by the Hospitallers of St. John in such a way that he resolved to use his organizational skills, talents, and charity to revolutionize the type of care that was given to incurables in their clinic. Under the guidance of his spiritual director, St. Philip Neri, he began to organize around himself a group of men who would care for the sick. This became the Ministers of the Infirm that now are known as the Camillians. They took a fourth vow to care for the sick even at the risk of their life, something they routinely did in caring for those with the bubonic plague and other infectious diseases. St. Camillus taught his brothers in religious life how to care for Christ in the sick and so great was his focus on Christ in the sick that he would literally treat them as if he were handling Christ, even expressing sorrow to them for all his past sins and begging mercy. When St. Camillus couldn’t walk to see the sick, he would crawl on the floor. He sought to treat others as they deserved as images of Christ. He allowed them to come to him with all of their labors, burdens and sufferings and he sought to refresh them with Christ-like love, because he had learned that love from taking on Christ’s yoke and learning humility, meekness and compassion from learning Christ.
• The great place where we respond to Jesus’ invitation to receive God’s self-revelation within the mystery of his own divine filiation, the way we seize Christ’s spousal yoke of the Cross and learn him, is here at Mass. It’s at Mass that Jesus says,  “Come to me, all you who labor and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you.” He seeks to remake us here by his word, by his own body and blood, by his community, so that in this two-fold communion we might face all those labors and burdens. It’s here at Mass that he says, “Take my yoke upon you.” This is where we enter into a conjugal union, a yoke together with him, from the inside out. It’s here at Mass he says, “Learn me,” as he seeks to teach us and make us sharers in all his virtues, particularly his humility, meekness and compassion. It’s through Holy Communion that we become one with him as the great teacher continues to teach and remake us so that we may together with him bear abundant fruit that will last. Before Mass, the last prayer a priest says as he is vesting is over the chasuble he dons, and it’s all about this mystery of yoking ourselves to Christ in the Mass. The priest prays, “Domine, qui dixisti iugum meum suave est, et onus meum leve: fac, ut istud portare sic valeam, quod consequar tuam gratiam. Amen”: “Lord you have said, ‘My yoke is sweet and My burden light,’ grant that I may be worthy so carry [this yoke] as to obtain your grace.” We pray for the grace to carry the yoke of the Lord, to carry the Cross, to unite ourselves fully to the Passion, like St. Camillus. That is our prayer as the Lord, each day, seeks to make all our burdens sweet and light through our uniting them to him for the salvation of the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: