Last night I was at the Lourdes center in Boston to celebrate World Day of the Sick with members of the Order of Malta. This is the homily I preached.
As members of Malta we talk a lot about the sick, and most of us, at one time or another, get sick and find out what it is really like.
Sometimes it’s a serious illness like cancer or heart disease or stroke. At other times it is a temporary, although miserable, indisposition from something like the flu or an allergy or a broken bone.
And sometimes, it is just being afraid of getting sick (anyone here look like they have the Carona virus) or being afraid of getting old or of dying. I think about that more and more whenever I celebrate the funeral of people younger than me (which as I get older, is happening more and more).
And getting sick, or even being afraid of getting sick, is no fun. Indeed, it induces a kind of panicked realisation that we have little control over the anxiety, pain or misery which we call suffering and we just have to “offer it up.”
That’s what my grnadmother used to say when she had no solution to life’s problems. Just offer it up. Give it over to Jesus and join it to the sufferings he suffers on the Cross.
Jesus expresses that precise same thought in a slightly different way tonight when he looks at us in our suffering and says, “Come to me…all you who are labor and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest.”
So, all we have to do is go to him and he will take away the suffering? Not quite.
We go to him and then take his yoke upon us. Did you ever see a yoke…the kind they use on oxen at old Sturbridge Village? It’s a great big heavy contraption that links two oxen together and is then connected by ropes or chains to the heavy thing they are carrying. It’s a means of two big dumb oxen sharing the aame burden and pulling together.
So Jesus does not tell us that he will take the burden away. He tells us to yoke ourselves to him, join ourselves to his suffering on the Cross, and he will help us to bear our burdens. And then we will find rest for ourselves, for with his pulling beside us the yoke is easy and the burden is light.
And this not only pertains to the times when we are deadly sick, but also to the times when we are deadly sick of life, or of the people around us. The one solution to all life’s problems is the Lord Jesus Christ, hanging upon the cross, clinging to nothing of this world, and letting go of everything for love of us. For it is only by giving our hearts and our lives over to Christ, by inviting him to live within us, that we can find rest from our burdens.
The Little Flower understood it best when she called us to a life of gratitude rather than greed.
“I feel, [she once wrote] that when I am charitable it is Jesus acting in me; the more I am united to Him the more do I love all my Sisters….True Charity consists in bearing with all the defects of our neighbor, in not being surprised at his failings, and in being edified by his least virtues.”
So we who seek to follow Jesus are called, she continues, not only to give to whoever asks, but to let what we think belongs to us to be taken. “I know it seems hard; [she writes] but the yoke of the Lord is sweet and light: and when we accept it we feel its sweetness immediately…For only love can enlarge my heart..."
That’s why each time I am caught up in my own suffering, the Lord smiles patiently and shows me the wounds he suffered for my salvation, still bleeding from his hands, his feet and his side…and smiling he says, “Come to me and take my yoke upon your shoulders and you will find rest.”
