It seems to me that since some of our parishioners will have had an experience of Mass at Saint Mary's or at St. Max' this weekend, or will have in the weeks to come, we might hopefully find a team of volunteers soon, and we can plan to open Saint Joseph's, after acquiring all the cleaning materials and obtaining the necessary permissions. It may be that we begin with weekend openings, for it will be easier to find volunteers for those. All information about opening will be communicated via the website, social media and the newsletter.
I arranged two Masses this morning, on account of an unexpected and emergency prayer intention that appeared over the weekend. On this fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary time, our readings have led us to reflect on Christ as a refuge for those who suffer, because of our gospel reading today:
"My Father has entrusted everything into My hands; none knows the Son truly except the Father, and none knows the Father truly except the Son, and those to whom it is the Son’s good pleasure to reveal Him. Come to Me, all you that labour and are burdened; I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon yourselves, and learn from Me; I am gentle and humble of heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and my burden is light." - Gospel of S. Matthew, 11: 27-30
That chapter of Matthew's Gospel is full of detail, for it moves in sequence through Christ's confirmation of the faith of Saint John the Baptist, now in prison, via his emissaries and his public identification of John as the Elijah everybody was waiting for, the Elijah who would prepare the way for the Messiah they were waiting for even more. Immediately after this, Christ scolds his listeners, and especially the Jewish communities of particular, named towns, for receiving neither John/Elijah or Himself, because the two of them did not fit their idea of what the Messiah should be: John was too ascetic for them, Christ too pastoral. Then comes today's gospel reading: having excoriated the Wise of the world (as above), Christ blesses His Father in heaven for delivering the message of salvation in a way that it could be received with simple faith, and without long philosophical justifications (although there is room for that as well, as we know from the history of our Catholic universities). The Faith is simply received because it is attached to Christ's Person, and not simply to a body of abstract thought. We believe because He told it to us, and nobody knows the Truth of the matter better than the Son of the Father Himself.
And that is the reason Christ becomes a refuge for those who labour and are burdened in various ways: our religion is not based on a code of laws that have to be observed or we don't get to heaven, as so many think. Our religion is based on a Person who has promised us much, if only we would trust in Him and His boundless Mercy. I remember somebody once pointing out to me that a typical yoke used on oxen is built for two of them. Christ will pull with us. This is part of His promise: He journeys with us, He carries with us. And when we fall into Him, strangely, even terrible suffering begins to make sense, because it is a participation in His own life; this is what I understand from the witness of great Saints. Although many of them were quite scrupulous at first, as they advanced in the spiritual life, it was the love of God that conquered their hearts. After that, they began to lead the life of the Gospel quite automatically, taking up His yoke, as He said, their hearts growing to be more like His.
"...if the Spirit of Him who raised up Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised up Jesus Christ from the dead will give life to your perishable bodies too, for the sake of His Spirit who dwells in you. Thus, brethren, nature has no longer any claim upon us, that we should live a life of nature. If you live a life of nature, you are marked out for death; if you mortify the ways of nature through the power of the Spirit, you will have life." - Romans, 8: 11-13
There's a message we don't hear very often. It's from the second reading today. Saint Paul is convinced that Christians are capable - by the grace that is ours, on account of their belonging to the Church - that we are capable of throwing away the temptations of this world, which he calls 'living a life of nature,' and by 'mortifying' our nature and its desires. It sounds a little bit like that Take-my-yoke-upon-you from the Gospel, and there are degrees of this kind of life. Not all of us can live like monks or nuns. Most of us can only live such a life to a certain extent, for we have families, and jobs, and worldly concerns. But holiness is something that is available to us all, even those of us who are not free to leave the world entirely to enter the cloisters. As Paul says, if the Spirit of God lives within us, we should find it easier than most others to live by that Spirit, that is, to follow the Law of God - not as a legal code, but by entering within it and seeing its heart: the Love of God and, what follows it naturally, the love of neighbour.
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