ZECHARIAH 9: 9-10
PSALM 144: 1-2, 8-11, 13-14
ROMANS 8: 9, 11-13
MATTHEW 11: 25-30
Is our Christian faith a burden or a joyful and freeing experience for us?
For instance, for some, the Mass can be a spiritually rewarding and strengthening experience.
For others, it can be reduced to a sense of fulfilling one’s duty or even a rejection of it, which then becomes a burden.
The extent that our Christian faith is a joyful, life giving experience depends on our faith in God.
There are those who are so attracted by the life of the world that they give minimal attention to God. God’s command becomes a challenge to their life styles.
There are those who reduce faith to a doing of one’s duty to God. There is little joy in their faith life. God’s command becomes a burden but they follow it.
It is here that Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel speaks to us. He was addressing the lack of faith in the people. Jesus praises the Father who reveals Himself not to the clever and learned but to children.
It is not about being learned in religious things. It is about knowing and being open to being loved…..by God
Whilst Jesus acknowledged that following him would not always be easy, he insisted that it would always be life giving. The way of God may be difficult. But there must be Christian discipline, but in reality it frees us from the many things we burden ourselves with.
For instance, we may feel that to forgive is unrealistic and too difficult. Yet when we are unwilling to forgive, we burden ourselves with hate and bitterness. But God’s love heals and fills our lives with love in turn.
Pride is a burden that many carry on their shoulders. It will never be satisfied for it seeks always to be better than the next person we meet. God’s love helps to know that we are special no matter who we are.
Whenever we sin, we carry the burden because it becomes a contradiction of our humanness, of who we are meant to be, an image of Christ. We will never be happy.
At the heart of the message of Jesus was the call to enter into a personal relationship with him, ‘Come to me’. The shift from ‘keep the Law’ to ‘Come to Me’ is a significant one. There is always the danger of taking Christ out of Christianity and reducing the Christian faith to rules and regulations. It is the person of Jesus who breathes life into the codes and creeds of our faith.
The starting point is God’s love for us. We may say we believe in God, in Jesus. But do we know God; do we know Jesus; do we know God’s love?
For the Christian, following God’s law begins with God’s love for us that we may respond to that love. Just think of what it means to say I love someone. And then how do we respond to someone that we love? As Jesus said in John’s Gospel, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Let us ask ourselves do we love Christ?
The whole Gospel is about inviting us to a loving relationship with God that our faith may be may be joyful: that our faith may be life giving and bear the fruits of God’s love.