Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, July 8, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
July 8, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when the Lord Jesus is going to give us one of the most incredible invitations we’ve ever received and, if we say yes to it, one of the most unbelievable guarantees.
• The God-man, our Savior, will say to us, “Come to me, all you who labor and find life burdensome.” That’s the invitation: “Come to me all you who are working hard but can’t see to fully get your head above water to feel secure; come to me all you who are burdened with anxieties of family life, work, schooling, age or health; come to me all you who are weighed down by sorrows, who are going through life with heavy hearts because you’ve lost a loved one or are worried about someone close to you; come to me all you who are pressed down by your sins and the harm sins always bring; all of you, come.”
• After this invitation, he gives us the extraordinary promise: “And I will refresh you.” Think about what Jesus is saying: “All of you who have problems in human life, come to me, and I will renew you, bring you back to life, and make you see the blessing in what you see as a burden.”
• That’s what he said to his listeners two thousand years ago — who must have been shocked by so categorical a promise — and that’s what he says to each one of us this Sunday. Any there any takers? Don’t all of us need Jesus’ help to bear heavy burdens?
• Many of us during these days have some vacation. Starting from the time we’re students, we look to the summer as a kind of respite from the burdens of study or work. Today Jesus is telling us not to look toward the beach or the mountains as the source of our refreshment, but to him.
• To understand better Jesus’ amazing offer, we have to look at whom Jesus is summoning to this reinvigoration. There’s a prerequisite, a condition, to this call. Jesus addresses the invitation to those who are “labor” and are carrying heavy burdens. He is not summoning to himself as they are those who are lazy, who pass the buck, who don’t roll up their sleeves and work up a sweat. He’s not inviting those who are seeking a comfortable, easy life. To those in these circumstances, he calls them first to conversion, because they’re not yet ready to receive his rest. And there’s a good reason for that. Because when Jesus says “follow me!,” he’s not intending to lead us to a resort or a superyacht; he’s going to lead us along the same path he trod, which was a hard-working path all the way to Calvary. That’s why Jesus is speaking to those who are working hard, who are striving to take responsibility for their own life, for the life of their loved ones, for society, for their country, for the Church, who are pushing themselves in love to the limit, because it’s only they who would recognize that rest with Jesus comes not through inactivity but through a special joint activity with him, as we’ll talk about a little later. Remember what Jesus a few weeks ago told us to pray for: he urged us ask the Harvest Master, his Father, to send not bodies but “laborers into his vineyard” (Mt 9:38). The way to our salvation and the salvation of others in his vineyard is through responding to all his gifts with faith, love, fatigue and perspiration. It’s those who labor, and they alone, whom he promises to refresh because it’s only they who are capable of receiving this gift.
• For the same reasons, Jesus is similarly not calling the proud, the arrogant, those who already think they know it all. He says in the Gospel, “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, you have revealed them to little ones.” Those who are “wise and learned” in their own eyes don’t capture what Jesus is revealing or value his invitation because they don’t think they need it. It’s only the “little ones,” those who are humble, those who know how much they need the Lord, who alone know the worth of what Jesus wants to give them. Jesus himself is “meek and humble of heart,” and in order to understand what he wants to reveal, in order to receive what he is giving, we need to become meek and humble as well. And there are great consequences hanging on whether we do. Jesus said that to enter into his Kingdom, to get to heaven, we need to become like “little children.” This is a call not to be childish, but child-like: simple, trusting, obedient. If we think we already “know it all,” we really know very little, either about ourselves or the power and the wisdom of God. And we can’t receive the refreshment of his kingdom without having a childlike, humble openness to it.
• The second thing we have to tackle is how Jesus promises to refresh us. He does not pledge to do so by taking awayour burdens and labors. That’s what most of us think we want. If we’re dealing with the stress and the fatigue of life, most of us think we want the Lord to remove our hardships, so that we can live without stress, without financial concerns, without anxiety over the situation of those we love, without the need to put in hard-working days. We think we want the Lord to exchange whatever difficulties we have for an easier, more comfortable, relaxed life. That’s not what Jesus knows is best for us nor wants to do. Immediately after inviting us to himself and promising that he will refresh us, he gives us the surprising means: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves.”
• Jesus says that our refreshment involves two things:
  • First Jesus wants us to come to Him to learn. He is the Master. He wants us to come to him directly and to learn from him and, more precisely, to learn him. That’s why he has us come to Mass each Sunday, so that we can encounter him the Master in Sacred Scripture and learn from him on the inside through Holy Communion. It’s also the reason why he wants us to pray each day, because in prayer he continues to whisper to us the path to humility and meekness. Our restoration involves learning his wisdom, his meekness, his humility, his gratitude, his whole approach to life, and that he is with us always, risen from the dead and until the end of time.
  • Second, we need to take Jesus’ yoke upon our shoulders. What is that yoke? It’s ultimately what he put on his shoulders: his Cross. At first glance, it seems ridiculous that Jesus would call that yoke “easy” and “light.” After all, he fell three times under its weight and it was the difficult instrument of his own painful crucifixion. What made him capable of calling it sweet and light is the love with which he bore it. The Cross — and this is one of the most important things we learn when we learn him — is not so much a sign of pain and suffering, but a sign of the love for the Father and for us that makes even that literally excruciating pain bearable. When the Lord says he wants us to learn from him in taking his yoke upon ourselves, he is telling us that we need to take his love upon us and bear our own crosses like he bore his. There is the great, true story from Boys Town when a crippled boy with leg braces had difficulty walking. Other boys would take turns giving him a ride on their backs. A photographer in 1921 saw the scene and snapped a photo that soon became famous. When the boy carrying his lame friend was asked whether he was heavy, he replied, “He ain’t heavy; he’s my brother.” The love he had for his fellow orphan was so great that he was willing to bear the pain. That’s what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel. He’s asking us to yoke ourselves to him in love, to embrace him as we face whatever labors and burdens we have. Like the kids in Boys Town with their crippled pal, Jesus, the Good Shepherd, bears each of us, his lost sheep, on his shoulders, and doesn’t complain about the weight, for, to him, we’re not heavy, we’re his beloved brothers and sisters. The more we love like him, the lighter and the easier all our burdens will be, too.
• What Jesus is teaching us is very challenging: that the way to the refreshment and rest we seek is not by liberation from our burdens and labors but by uniting ourselves to him and allowing him to change us on the inside as we bear them. He doesn’t remove our burdens but changes them from something heavy and bitter, to light and sweet. He doesn’t eliminate the cross from our life but changes how we bear it. This Sunday is an opportunity for us to look at the burdens we bear and the tough work we do and to see how we can better unite them to him as gifts, so that he can through him help us to become more like him.
• The best place for us to learn meekness and humility, the best means for us to be carried by him and strengthened to carry others is at Mass, as Jesus says “Come to me,” and we carry each other as brothers and sisters to Christ at the altar. The Eucharist is the place where Jesus gives us Himself within so that he might help us from the inside better bear our burdens. The Eucharist is the summit of Jesus’ meekness and humility, who loved us so much that he became our food under the humblest appearances of bread and wine. The Eucharist is the place where, simply, Jesus refreshes us.
• As we prepare for Sunday, Jesus makes his invitation anew to us, “Come to me, all you who labor and find life burdensome and I will refresh you.” He’s waiting for us to RSVP, to come with childlike humility, and to receive the amazing fulfillment of the promise he guarantees.

The Gospel on which this homily was based was: 

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