Ordinary 14

The Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Zechariah 9:9-10; Psalm 145; Romans 8:9. 11-13; Matthew 11:25-30

Jesus has described and sent his disciples into a precarious world. We are living no less an unstable world, are we not?

John is arrested and imprisoned by Herod. How soon before Herod comes after Jesus?

Jesus reflects on the Jewish towns that have rejected his message. Their rejection of him is their condemnation.

The gossip on the streets is that John is possessed; Jesus is a glutton and a drunkard.

No one listens. No one repents.

How would you feel if you were Jesus? What would be your next step?

Jesus chooses to enter into prayer. And an unusual prayer at that, “I give praise to you, Father…” In our being rejected, in our frustrations, fears and humiliations would we turn, do we turn to prayer and prayers of praise?

Preaching the Gospel for thirty-six years and wondering if any of it has made a difference in people’s lives…I can more than imagine Jesus’ feelings. What about you as you have raised your children and look back? Tried to make a difference in your community and parish? As we watch the Church becoming more irrelevant in the lives of Catholics who have been quietly drifting away for decades, it would seem that to be a committed follower of Jesus means that we better get used to failure, rejection, being misunderstood and unfairly judged.

But praise? How does praise rise up out of a sense of failure? “I give praise to you…”

Notice the double address with which Jesus speaks to God: “Father, Lord of heaven and earth…” Here may be a door of understanding. Jesus first addresses God as Abba, Dad, Daddy, Pop. It is familiar and intimate. It is a son or daughter climbing up on the lap of a parent and curling up in their arms.

Is that your experience of God? How do you conceive of the Eternal One when you pray?

Jesus then immediately addresses God as Creator of heaven and earth. Mom and Dad have become expansive beyond our understanding and control! Dad/Mom, you who started all life with a Big Bang which continues to expand, I offer you praise. This mixture of intimacy, comfort and strengthen mingled with expansiveness that unfolds around us daily is Jesus’ experience of God. Intimate OR expansive is not a complete encounter with our God. It must be intimacy AND expansiveness.

Again, what is your experience of God; how do you personally address God in prayer?

Jesus goes on, “for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned,” the powerful, the intelligent, the bully, the controllers in life…you have revealed them to children.” What are these hidden things? What do children innately know concerning our relationship with God that as we became adults we let go of, rejected, thought we knew better…better than God?

It is the awareness that we are needy…running to mom and dad when frightened, hungry, lost, hurt?

Is it the sense of helplessness that only someone greater than ourselves can afford us strength and security?

We adults don’t like feeling needy and helpless. Our culture has taught us a radical self-sufficiency and individualism. We clearly see it in the lack of concern over the common good during this pandemic. People complaining about governmental directives as attacking their personal freedoms. Young adults saying they don’t have to wear masks and distance. It’s their right and if they die, so what. So what…

So let’s be honest, how many of our lives are coloured more by our culture’s values than the teaching and the way of life of Jesus? When we make moral decisions what values inform those decisions? How many people maintain the veneer of a Christian but are not made of the substance of Christ? Isn’t that why so many Catholics have drifted away; the veneer has worn off and the self-truth revealed.

The hidden things revealed to children, which we all were at one time, have given way to other values we deem of greater value, have they not?. As Jesus reflects on John’s imprisonment and eventually most probably his own does he not feel needy and helpless? Will these feelings not culminate in the unanswered question to Dad, Creator of heaven and earth, “Why have you abandoned me?”

What the life of Jesus reveals is a God, not of strength and might, and not all-powerful but a God who is in the midst of our suffering and helplessness. A God who experiences our helplessness and suffering. A God who dies a failure on a cross. Only such a God can make the invitation, “Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Rest is not offered to the strongest and the most powerful. Rest is offered to people who have been made weary by a world that fails to comprehend injustice.

A bumper stick used to proclaim: The one who dies with the most toys wins. The Gospel proclaims: The one who dies in Christ abandoned wins.

Two very different sets of values and world views.

Which is more appealing to a consumer? Which is the life of a believer?

The hidden things revealed to children.