Thursday in the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 16, 2020

The Feast Day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel

Matthew 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.”

We have already looked at this reading on a recent Sunday, but let’s look closely at how Jesus describes himself here.  His words give us an opportunity to think deeply about his personality.

“I am meek and humble of heart.”  If we forget everything we know or think we know about the Lord and read the Gospels as objectively as we can, we should be struck by two main qualities that characterize Jesus: the way that he talks and the manner of his acting.  When he talks, he says exactly what he wants to say and no more.  He rarely speaks directly about himself, speaking principally of the Father and about those who follow him.  He does not employ many words when he performs his miracles.  When he does speak, his speech is compressed, his sentences generally short.  He even gives the impression of speaking with a certain brusqueness.  He speaks with great authority and does not back away from what he has said.  In short, he speaks in the way a servant does on behalf of his master.  This is why he can say of himself, “I am meek” even while denouncing Pharisees and the Jewish leaders or cursing towns.  As he himself says, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works” (John 14, 10).  That is, when he speaks harshly or gives commands, he seeks  no gain for himself: he is only acting on the Father’s behalf.  

St. Paul has this to say of the Lord’s humility: “Christ Jesus: who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.” Philippians 2, 5-8.  We can hear the awe and the hush in Paul’s voice as he says this.  The Son, as the Word, the “image” of the invisible God (cf. Colossians 1, 15), knew himself to be equal to the Father in power and glory, and in obedience to the Father, joined his divinity to a human nature and so took on the “likeness” of men so completely that he died on a cross.  The readiness with which he offered himself up is so hard for us to fathom that we can only begin to glimpse it in the lives of the saints.

The Blessed Virgin Mary reflects something of this humility, though here too it is nearly blinding.  We celebrate her today as Our Lady of Mount Carmel, under which title we know her to be the special protector of the Carmelite Order, the font of so many saints.