Year A 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

[SPEAKER_01]: reading from the Prophet Zachariah.

[SPEAKER_01]: The Lord says this, rejoice heart and soul, daughter of Zion, shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem.

[SPEAKER_01]: See you now, your king comes to you.

[SPEAKER_01]: He is victorious.

[SPEAKER_01]: He is triumphant.

[SPEAKER_01]: humble and riding on a donkey, on the cold, the fall of the donkey.

[SPEAKER_01]: He will banish chariots from Ephraim and horses from Jerusalem.

[SPEAKER_01]: The bow of wool will be banished.

[SPEAKER_01]: He will proclaim peace for the nations, his empire shall stretch from sea to sea, from riveter the end of the earth.

[SPEAKER_01]: The word of the Lord,

[SPEAKER_01]: responses.

[SPEAKER_01]: I will praise your name forever.

[SPEAKER_01]: My king and my god.

[SPEAKER_01]: I will give you glory, oh God, my King.

[SPEAKER_01]: I will bless your name forever.

[SPEAKER_01]: I will bless you day after day and praise your name forever.

[SPEAKER_01]: I will praise your name forever, my King and my God.

[SPEAKER_01]: The Lord is kind and full of compassion.

[SPEAKER_01]: So to anger, abounding in love, how good is the Lord's all compassionate to his all as creatures?

[SPEAKER_01]: I will praise your name forever, my King and my God.

[SPEAKER_01]: or your creature shall thank you, our Lord, and all, and your friend shall repeat their blessing.

[SPEAKER_01]: They shall speak of the glory of your reign and declare your might oh God.

[SPEAKER_01]: I will praise your name forever, my King and my God.

[SPEAKER_01]: The Lord is faithful in all his words and loving and all his deeds.

[SPEAKER_01]: The Lord supports all who fall and raises all who are bowed down.

[SPEAKER_01]: I will praise you a name for every, forever, my king and my god, are reading from the letter of St. Paul to the Romans.

[SPEAKER_01]: Your spirits are not in the unsperitual, but in the spiritual.

[SPEAKER_01]: Since the spirit of God has made His home in you, in fact, unless you possess the spirit of Christ, you would not belong to Him.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if the spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you,

[SPEAKER_01]: Then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give you life to your own mortal bodies through his spirit living in you.

[SPEAKER_01]: So then my brothers, there is no necessity for us to obey our on spiritual selves or to live on spiritual lives.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you do live in that way, you are doomed to die.

[SPEAKER_01]: But if by the spirit you put an end to the misdeeds of your body, you will live.

[SPEAKER_01]: The word of the Lord.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus exclaimed, I bless you Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, just as no one knows the Father except the Son, and those

[SPEAKER_00]: Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.

[SPEAKER_00]: Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.

[SPEAKER_00]: The gospel of the Lord

[SPEAKER_00]: Today in our readings, there is the sense of peace and joy that permeates the lives of those who live in the will of God and in whom God dwells.

[SPEAKER_00]: In our first reading from Zachariah, we see the author encouraging joy and celebration with this image of a humble king riding victorious on a donkey.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's no question that Jesus would have remembered this when he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey at the beginning of his passion.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, this author is writing in the context of the period of Jewish history, after the exile and the restoration of Israel.

[SPEAKER_00]: But this lowly king on a donkey is not powerless though.

[SPEAKER_00]: He will banish chariots from Ephraim and horses from Jerusalem.

[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, the attacking army is going to protect Israel.

[SPEAKER_00]: And these images, these chariots and these horses, these were powerful symbols of freedom because the Israelites had learned the hard way.

[SPEAKER_00]: to have a healthy respect or fierce, we say, for the cherries and the armies of nations that had been successful against them, and they had learned through the better experiences to give up their dreams of being in sort of imperial power, and the only hope lay in God's intervention and His protection.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then this reading is followed by an even more exuberant celebration in the song.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a happy sort of outpouring of praise to God.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then in our second reading, we have this movement from this kind of loud celebration to a more subdued, a more profound sense of joy and inner peace.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a poor right

[SPEAKER_00]: You're interested not in the unsperitual, but in the spiritual, since the Spirit of God has made his home in you.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the ones we have, there's a beautiful text that we have when we baptize babies and we say, you know, we pray that God may bathe this child in light and make him the temple where you dwell.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this that's in Paul writes, it's not just getting sedental, it's cause and effect.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at what Paul goes on to say he writes, if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his spirit living in you.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not trying to repeat the whole reading, but I just want to emphasize that Paul is not talking here.

[SPEAKER_00]: of our risen bodies, but after we die, he is talking about now, so where we have been released from the prison of sin to the freedom of the Spirit.

[SPEAKER_00]: There is a sort of, I don't know if it's attention, but it's maybe a parallel, you know, when you have this relationship that proceeds and in a sense, if not guarantees, it makes more likely that we will act rightly.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like this Christian, if it's chicken and egg, if I change my life, will it draw me closer to Christ leading me deeper into a relationship with him?

[SPEAKER_00]: Or if I deepen my relationship with him, will it inevitably call me to a deeper holiness?

[SPEAKER_00]: and I think that generally speaking the relationship should come first.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's like, I'm not loyal and I don't cheat on my wife because it's the right thing to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love my wife and therefore I do the actions that are loving and trying to avoid the ones that aren't loving.

[SPEAKER_00]: The gospel, then today, continues with this sort of, it's a seeming paradox.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus says, come to me all you who labor and are overburdened and I will give you rest.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sounds good so far, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: But then he goes on.

[SPEAKER_00]: Shoulder my yoke for I am gentle.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.

[SPEAKER_00]: The rabbi spoke of the Torah, meaning the law and the yoke of the kingdom.

[SPEAKER_00]: And in their tradition, the disciple is to be a lifelong learner, need follow rabbi and he'd learn from him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is both the sort of model rabbi or the teacher, as well as the ideal sort of

[SPEAKER_00]: On the one hand, in comparison with the Alaka of the Pharisees, in other words, the Jewish law and some of the traditional teachings of the Jewish leaders, Jesus's law in terms of quantity is easier because it is shorter and it's focused on the essentials as opposed to the lack of all the Jewish law which is very, very broad.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's got multiple demands.

[SPEAKER_00]: But in view of what Jesus' demands, in terms of what we could call quality, it is far more difficult.

[SPEAKER_00]: So even though the Pharisees have got a lot more laws and Jesus' more concise, because of what it demands, it is far more difficult.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because the love of God and the love of neighbor are inexhaustible, that is basically no end to that demand.

[SPEAKER_00]: So in other words, the Jewish law had all these rules down to this and down to that

[SPEAKER_00]: and you could technically observe the law but never love.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, think of the parable of the good Samaritan.

[SPEAKER_00]: The priest who walks by on the other side because he doesn't want to make himself and clean.

[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't, so he doesn't help the guy.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he got a lot of laws, but they are finite and therefore they are easier to follow.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas if the call is to love, my obligations, again, are never ending.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've never gotten something that the ethicist Dennis Hollinger won to wrote.

[SPEAKER_00]: That described a distinction between two moral codes as it were.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, the first would be that we not treat others unfelry.

[SPEAKER_00]: If we had maybe put it in today's language, we might say something like,

[SPEAKER_00]: tolerance.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then in the second sort of moral code, he speaks of not to turn away from someone in need.

[SPEAKER_00]: Again, it's the good Samaritan all over again.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not enough for us as Christians to do no harm, to tolerate or respect.

[SPEAKER_00]: we cannot, we must not ignore the cry of the most vulnerable.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the poor, the unborn, the elderly, the lonely and the abandoned.

[SPEAKER_00]: A moral obligation is not just not to do bad things, it is at least that, but it is to actively do good, otherwise what you saw me?

[SPEAKER_00]: We're not here just to admire the kingdom and share in its spoils like the Eucharist and his word.

[SPEAKER_00]: If we only do that but we keep it ourselves that is spiritual, gluttony, we need to get our hands dirty, building the kingdom.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what am I doing?

[SPEAKER_00]: What are you doing?

[SPEAKER_00]: This is not an abstract or rhetorical question.

[SPEAKER_00]: some of our brothers and sisters within our church community feed abandoned because they're ask for help in their ministries from those who are perhaps the younger or stronger or better, maybe better suited or more well placed to help but that health never comes.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is a question that every person, every couple, every family in the Catholic community,

[SPEAKER_00]: there is maybe much that you cannot do, but what I can do to be of service to my brothers and sisters in Christ, I must do.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is the yoke of Jesus.

[SPEAKER_00]: And on the surface, that doesn't sound like it's an easier or a lighter burden.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's fair comment, but only on the surface.

[SPEAKER_00]: And perhaps an analogy to trying to explain it to people who cannot understand why we choose a relationship with God when is when as a parent you speak to people who have deliberately never had or deliberately never intend to have children.

[SPEAKER_00]: Is the burden of having children a lighter one than before?

[SPEAKER_00]: But trying to explain for those who have never had children is like talking to somebody who speaks a completely different language.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we can see too to them that the burden is heavier, they will think that if you're speaking of the financial and the time demands of raising kids, where is when we speak of the burden.

[SPEAKER_00]: We mean the way to responsibility as we worry about whether we have been worthy of the gift that they are or to us, or we to strict, or we being to lenient, am I acting fairly to each of my children who are so temperamentally different from each other?

[SPEAKER_00]: How do I balance the need to make money so that my kids are not disadvantaged without losing it out on so much time of their life because I have to work long hours?

[SPEAKER_00]: Am I leading them to Christ?

[SPEAKER_00]: this is our burden and it is born out of love.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now how can you possibly compare that to people who argue that they can eat out and drive a nicer car or live in a nicer house because they don't have those burdens.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's an almost impossible language gap to bridge until and unless they have children of their own.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so it is with embracing our faith and all the bad implies.

[SPEAKER_00]: When those who are not of the faith ask, how can we turn away from a life directed at pleasure and indulgence and enjoy it to embrace the cross?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then we try and explain that at the end of the day, it wasn't really a choice.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm happy to discuss and debate and argue with agnostic, so atheists, whatever it is, but at the end of the day, all I can really say is that it is simply a relationship.

[SPEAKER_00]: I fell in love with the one who loved me first.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, just like I don't cheat on my wife, not because I'm disciplined because I love her and I could not be to hurt her in such a devastating way, not that I'm a perfect husband, I still hurt her in lots of ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: But so, sometimes in spite of my relationship with God, I still sin in lots of ways, but I remain in love with him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, I am most at peace and joyful when I am in good relationship with him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, it is a burden.

[SPEAKER_00]: But not in the way they think.

[SPEAKER_00]: The burden is not what I can or cannot do.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is knowing what is good and beautiful and the struggle to live that truth for others, because I want them to be able to see what is good and beautiful too, so that they might have peace and be joyful too.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's his yoke.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.