Wednesday in the Second Week of Advent, December 13, 2023

11, 28-30

Jesus said: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

These few verses making up today’s Gospel Reading should be read in the context of the Lord’s rebuke of the Galilean towns which had not repented after nearly three years of his miracles and preaching.  To Capernaum, he had said, “It will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.”  Following the rebuke, the Lord had praised the Father for revealing the mysteries of the Gospel to “the unlearned” or “children”, who were eager to know them.  Here, the Lord speaks of these unlearned, these children, and now calls them “laborers” and “the burdened”: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened.”  They labor under the yoke of the Pharisees and are burned with their onerous interpretations of the Law which do not bring them any closer to God and holiness.  The Lord calls them to him so that he might give them rest.  He will deliver them from the Law that signified but did not provide grace, and will himself give them the grace that will allow them to live in peace with God.  

There is still labor to do for their salvation, for grace is not magic.  But it will be work very different from that put on them by the Pharisees: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.”  The “yoke” offered by the Lord Jesus is his own.  The Pharisees “bind heavy and insupportable burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders: but with a finger of their own they will not move them” (Matthew 23, 4).  The yoke the Pharisees force others to wear is not their own but one which they have contrived for others.  The yoke of Jesus Christ is the one he wears while he leads those yoked with him to the fields of heaven.  This yoke is the life of good works and penance.  This “yoke” is easy and this “burden” light because it is done through our love of the Lord and through the graces he gives us to persevere in it.

“Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.”  The Lord May not seem meek when he casts the merchants out of the Temple precincts or declares that the unrepentant people of Capernaum will go down to hell, but on those cases he speaks to the hardened of heart for their own good: where promises of rewards fail, threats of punishments may succeed.  We see his meekness and humility especially in the Passion, during which he speaks hardly at all and does not resist in his sufferings: “He shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53, 7).  He, the Son of the Most High God, born before the ages, became the lowest of men and offered himself on the Cross for the salvation of sinners.

We are also laboring and ate burdened by the demands of this world which continuously presses us to conform ourselves to it.  By the grace of our Lord and through imitating his life, “learning” from him, we may be set free from this world to live in his.

The Holy Church today celebrates the Feast of St. Lucy, a young woman of Syracuse, Sicily who lived around the year 300.  It is handed down to us that she was accused of being a Christian by a man who sought her in marriage but whom she rejected because she wanted to give herself entirely to Jesus.  It is said that before her beheading her eyes were gouged out and so she has been known as a patron saint of those with eye ailments.  She imitated her Lord in his humility of heart as well as in her fortitude.  We ask her prayers upon the unbelievers in the world that they might come and see the truth of the Gospel.