14th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year A: “Conjugated” with Christ

“Conjugated” with Christ

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened.”
Matthew 11:25–30

After the missionary discourse (Matthew 10), we now find a narrative section (Matthew 11–12), following Matthew’s preferred literary method of alternating discourses and narratives. This narrative section is marked by an atmosphere of mounting tension.

Jesus realises that his message and his work are not understood: John the Baptist harbours doubts about his messiahship; the people behave capriciously like children; the towns around the lake, where he had performed so many miracles, do not repent; the scribes and Pharisees oppose him. Jesus thus finds himself facing failure and the prospect of defeat. This is the dramatic context of today’s Gospel passage.

The text is divided into three clearly distinct paragraphs: in the first, Jesus’ prayer of praise addressed to the Father; in the second, the close relationship between the Father and the Son; in the third, the relationship between Jesus and us, with the invitation to come to him.

The Greek passage opens in an unusual way: “At that time Jesus, answering, said…”. Yet no question has been asked beforehand. It is almost as though Jesus were responding to the question that this apparent failure raises about his mission. And what is his answer? “I praise you, Father!”

1. Jesus disappointed, but not discouraged

We may ask: why does Jesus, in this context of opposition and apparent failure, respond with a prayer of praise, with a kind of personal “Magnificat”?

The Lord does not lose heart or become discouraged, as perhaps we might have done. Although disappointed by the closed-mindedness and lack of faith of so many listeners who had witnessed his miracles, Jesus brings this situation into prayer, into dialogue with the Father. And he discovers that the Father continues to fulfil his plan of love not through the wise and learned, but through the little ones.

This is a very relevant situation today. We are witnessing the departure of many Christians and the marginalisation of the Christian faith in Western culture; we therefore ask what purpose the proclamation of the Gospel can serve in such a context. Perhaps we too are disappointed because God’s promises seem slow to be fulfilled. We have grown old in the hope of a renewed Church. The temptation towards resignation, discouragement and cynical pessimism is strong.

Yet Jesus invites us to have the courage to pray, so that we may discern where the Spirit is blowing from and where he is leading.

2. A new call for everyone: come, take, learn!

Jesus emerges from his encounter with the Father renewed in his awareness of his messianic mission: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” And he turns once more to the little ones—or rather, to everyone: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.”

Who are these weary and oppressed people? They are those who live under the yoke of the Law. In rabbinic tradition, the yoke was an image of the Law: the 613 precepts drawn from Scripture and the thousands of minor prescriptions that obliged people to “toe the line”.

The yoke evoked a condition of slavery, since it was generally slaves who used it to carry heavy loads (cf. Leviticus 26:13).

Jesus invites them to break that yoke and to come to him in order to find rest, that is, the rest promised by God to his people (cf. Hebrews 3–4). Immediately afterwards, however, he invites them to take his yoke and learn from him, who is “gentle and humble in heart”.

We can certainly learn from him, a teacher with a gentle and humble heart, who does not behave like the scribes and Pharisees, who “tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders” (Matthew 23:4). Yet we would not normally expect to associate a yoke with rest.

What, then, is this yoke of Jesus?

The yoke was a wooden instrument that joined two animals together in order to plough or pull a cart. Jesus’ yoke is the cross: the one he carried for us and, therefore, our cross, our yoke. Jesus becomes our Simon of Cyrene; he stands beside us. He is our companion, our… “spouse”!

Yes, because the Italian term coniuge (“spouse”) derives from the Latin coniux, formed from cum and iugum: it refers to someone joined to another under the same yoke, someone who shares the same destiny. This is also the origin of the verb “to conjugate”. It is therefore a nuptial image.

Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Why is it easy? Because it is the yoke of love. Why is it light? Because he carries it with us.

Two temptations emerge in response to this invitation from Jesus.

The first is to want to break every yoke and every bond, including the “easy and light” yoke of love. Like the false prophet Hananiah, who broke the symbolic wooden yoke carried by Jeremiah, promising the people freedom and prosperity. The risk is that we may find ourselves with an iron yoke instead (cf. Jeremiah 28).

The second temptation is to place our trust in the yoke of laws in order to guarantee order and preserve power—in social, ecclesial, family or any other setting—thereby increasing weariness and oppression, while sacrificing solidarity and love.

Weekly reflection exercise

• How do I react in the face of failure and disappointment?
• Who is my “spouse” in carrying the cross: Christ or the new cultural messianism?
• “I want to thank you, Lord, for the gift of life. I read somewhere that human beings are angels with only one wing: they can fly only by remaining embraced. At times, in moments of intimacy, I dare to think, Lord, that you too have only one wing. You keep the other hidden: perhaps to make me understand that you do not wish to fly without me” (Don Tonino Bello).

Fr Manuel João Pereira Correia, MCCJ

GOSPEL REFLECTION 
Matthew 11:25-30

The small ones, more than any other, feel the need of God’s tenderness. They hunger and thirst for righteousness, cry, live in grief and wait for the Lord to intervene, to raise their heads, and fill them with joy. They are blessed because for them the Kingdom of God has come. Then he adds: this fact falls within the plan of the Father: “Yes Father, this was your gracious will” (v. 26).

The deeply rooted conviction is that God is a friend only of the good and righteous, prefers those who behave well and bears the fatigue of those who sin. This is the God created by the “wise” and the “intelligent.” It is the product of human logic and criteria. The Father of Jesus instead goes to recover those that we throw in the trash. He prefers those who are despised and those who are not paid attention to by anyone, the public sinners (Mt 11:19) and prostitutes (Mt 21:31) because they are the most in need of his love. The rich, the satiated, those who are proud of their knowledge, do not need this Father. They hold tight to their God. They will also reach salvation, of course, but only when they make themselves “small ones.” The trouble for them is that of arriving late, of losing precious time.

In the second part of the passage (v. 27), an important statement of Jesus is introduced: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

The verb to know in the Bible does not mean having met or contacted a person a few times. It means “to have had a profound experience of the person.” It is used, for example, to indicate the intimate relationship that exists between husband and wife (cf. Lk 1:34).

A full knowledge of the Father is possible only to the Son. However, he may communicate this experience to anyone he wants. Who will have the right disposition to accept his revelation? The small ones, of course!

The scribes, rabbis, those who are educated in every detail of the law, are convinced that they have the full knowledge of God. They maintain they know how to discern what is good. They present themselves as guides for the blind, as light to those who are in darkness, as educators of the ignorant, as masters of the simple ones (Rom 2:18-20). As long as they do not give up their attitude of being “wise” and “intelligent” people, they preclude the true and rewarding experience of God’s love.

The last part of the passage (vv. 28-30) refers to the oppression that the “small ones,” the simple people of the land, the poor, suffer from the “wise and intelligent.” They (the scribes and Pharisees) have structured a very complicated religion, made up of minute rules and prescriptions impossible to observe. They loaded the shoulders of ignorant people “unbearable burdens that they do not even move a finger to help them” (Lk 11:46).

The law of God, yes, is a yoke and the wise Sirach recommended to his son to– “Put her constraints on your feet and her yoke on your neck, do not rebel against the chains. you will find in her your rest” (Sir 6:24-28). But the religion preached by the masters of Israel has transformed it in an oppressive yoke. For this, the poor not only feel wretched in this world but also rejected by God and excluded from the world to come. They know of not being able to observe the provisions dictated by the rabbis and they are convinced that they are impure: “Only this cursed people who have no knowledge of the law” declared the high priest Caiaphas (Jn 7:49).

To these poor, lost and disoriented, Jesus addressed the invitation to be free from fear and distressing religion instilled in them. He recommends: Accept my law, the new one that is summed up in a single commandment: love of the brothers/sisters. He does not propose an easier and permissive moral, but an ethic that points directly to the essential. It does not waste energies in the observance of prescriptions “that has the appearance of wisdom” but in reality, they have no value (Col 2:23).

His yoke is sweet. First of all, because it is his: not in the sense that he imposed it, but because he carried it first. Jesus always bent down to the Father’s will. He freely embraced it while he never imposed human precepts (Mk 7). His yoke is sweet because only those who accept the wisdom of the Beatitudes can experience the joy and peace.

Finally, the invitation: “Learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart” (v. 29). Perhaps this statement leaves us a bit confused because it seems a deserved celebration, certainly, but not appropriate.

These words are nothing more than a boast.

“Learn from me” simply means, do not follow the teachers who act as masters on your consciences. They preach a God who is not on the side of the poor, the sinners and the last. They teach a religion that takes away the joy with its fussiness and absurdity.

Jesus is presented as meek and humble of heart. These are the terms that we find in the Beatitudes. They do not indicate the timid, the meek, the quiet, but those who are poor and oppressed, those who, while suffering injustice, do not resort to violence.

To all these poor people of the land, Jesus says: I’m on your side, I am one of you, I am poor and rejected.

The passage of today’s Gospel is a reason for both personal and community reflection. Which God do we believe in? Is he that one of the “wise” or that one revealed to us by Jesus? For whom is our community a sign of hope, for whom is one convinced of meriting the first place? For whom does one feel unworthy to cross the threshold of the Church?

READ:  There is every reason to rejoice because God is a king who dictates peace, and not war, to the nations.  Christ invites the weary and the burdened to seek refuge and rest in him.  In and through the working of the Spirit, God claims us as His own.

REFLECT:  Those who have the Spirit of God do the works of God.  If we bear the Spirit of God, how well do we share in God’s work?

PRAY:  Your prayer is always to God, the Father of Jesus and also your father, through Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Christian prayer is Trinitarian.

ACT:  A kind person emphasizes what is positive in another.  A mean person picks out what is wrong.  Practice kindness until it becomes a habit.

Fernando Armellini
Italian missionary and biblical scholar