Vae Vobis Pharisaeis [Woe to you Pharisees]

14th Sunday of Ordinary Time

06 July, 2014

WOE TO YOU PHARISEES, who have taken the simple and pure love of God and made of it hoops through which you pleasure in watching God’s children jump. There is nothing tortuous about embracing the love of God, for God even gives us the love which we return to him in faith. Nothing could be simpler than the invitation Christ makes today. And yet there are those who would adjudge themselves more worthy and others less so, of the divine gift of life that is so freely given by the Lord.

“Come to me,” says the Lord. How more unambiguous can he get? The relationship we are invited to participate in is personal; a direct response to his call in the Gospels. It is the call of the Lord your God to a personal conversion of life, a re-orientation of your being towards his light. And nothing can block the light of Christ’s love but you alone. There may be those who seek to intercept this light, to withhold it, to tell you that you are not worth of it, to insist that you follow their way towards it, but they are not of God. Respond from the depth of your heart to the call of Christ, “arise, shine: for your light has come.” The Church of Christ’s faithful is lit not by the light of Christ upon an elite, select few but by the glory of the Lord magnified in the hearts of each one of those he has called by name. And what a light for a world in darkness this produces, if only we would let it shine.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” says the Lord. Struggles that burden us and make our faith laborious are not sent from God but created by us. Whenever we struggle in our faith or wrestle with following God’s plan for us, the distress comes not from God but ourselves. Our place, like that of the disciple Jesus loved, is resting on the Lord’s chest. We can pull ourselves away from him, for sure. But when we lament that God seems far away and unconcerned about our struggles, we need to see that it is we who have removed ourselves from the repose of his embrace. He remains, as does always his invitation to rest assured in him through faith. The Lord does not test us. Life just happens, the good and the bad. It is up to us whether we use all that life throws at us to get closer to the Lord and accept the peace he extends to us, or otherwise.

"Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart,” says the Lord. Accepting the invitation of Christ is to learn his ways; as I have said before, to live how he lived and to love those whom he loved. Just as He has said, let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone, therefore should we refrain always from judgment, for there is a time destined for judgment and one destined to judge and we do not know the former and dare not presume to know the heart of the latter. We all stand before him unworthy of his gift of eternal life, each of us in need of his mercy and compassion. And for each time that we condemn in word or deed, we forgo the chance of manifesting the divine mercy that has brought us into communion with God’s love and could too have softened the heart of a sinner.

There is no ‘in-crowd’ in the house of God. God has no favourites. The moment we build the barriers of judgment between people “[t]he mark of Christ, incarnate, crucified and risen, is not present; closed and elite groups are formed, and no effort is made to go forth and seek out those who are distant or the immense multitudes who thirst for Christ. Evangelical fervour is replaced by the empty pleasure of complacency and self-indulgence.” [Evangelii Gaudium, §95]

“My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” says the Lord. So it is that the hallmark of our faith must necessarily be the free expression of the joy of God’s love and the magnification of that love in the community of the Church and beyond. The hallmark of our faith needs to be the expression of Christ’s own mercy and compassion through service of our neighbour that is, like Christ, “gentle and lowly of heart”. That is how we are to make ourselves known as disciples of Christ. Our faith is spread through the Word of God but the actions of His people. Never has the old adage “practise what you preach” been more appropriate than today, in the context of the New Evangelisation.