PaddlingPadre

Without Christ, life can often be quite heavy. The ways of the world can weigh one down, can wear one down. Because we all know from experience how the world works, we all have heard what the world has to say: make as much money as you can, accumulate as many nice things as you can, seek out all the pleasures that you can. Money, fame, pleasure, honor: these are the things that the world presents to us as being the greatest goods, as being the things that we ought to pursue, as being the things that will make us happy. And left on our own, the natural thing is that we listen to this egoistic message that the culture tells us, and we chase after these things, often without really reflecting on what it is we are doing. And the result is that this message weighs us down, that our pursuit of goods that are so fleeting crushes us, as we collapse in the face of disappointment, misfortune, suffering, and illness, as we exhaust ourselves in restlessly chasing after things that ultimately aren’t able to bring us satisfaction and lasting meaning. Death is the ultimate end of this worldly way of living, and, as St. Paul says in our second reading, If you live according to the flesh, you will die. Such is the weight of destruction that we bear so long as we live according to the ways of the world.

But it is to those who are so burdened, namely to you and to me, that Jesus cries out “Come to me! All you who are burdened with the restlessness of the world, come to me and I will give you rest! Come to me, and you will find something that will truly satisfy you, come to me and receive that joy which lasts not for a season merely but rather forever! Set aside the worldly yoke that weighs you down and take up my yoke, which is light and easy!

With this call, Jesus is inviting us to live according to the Spirit of God, and to set aside the worldly spirit of human egoism under which we have labored. This Spirit gives us rest because it gives us life, because it leads us to the Father, because it helps us to live in accord with reality, because it leads us to structure our lives around those things that actually matter.

Money, after is not something you can take with you. Fame is fleeting. Pleasure lasts but a moment, and honors are quickly forgotten. When we center our lives on these passing things, we ensure that we will in the end be disappointed, that in the end we will lose everything, because we will have chosen to base our lives upon the pursuit of things that cannot endure. This, again, is the path of death.

But Jesus sets before us another path. For if we go to him, if we heed his call, then we will become sons and daughters of God, and we will have God as our ultimate good, as the one on whom we base our lives, as the one on whom we place all of our hopes. And God does not disappoint, God does not pass away, God gives us a joy that is not passing but is instead eternal. And the key to this great joy, as Jesus tells us, is to go to him, is to live according to the Spirit that he gives us, a Spirit that, as St. Paul says, raised Christ from the dead and that will give life to your mortal bodies also.

And so the question for us is: do we live according to this spirit? Are we Christians truly, and not merely in name? Because if we are honest with ourselves, I think we will discover very often that we are still quite worldly, that the old deceiving motivations of wealth, pleasure, and honor are still the things that motivate us, and that love of God is not always the thing that stands at the center of our lives. And if that’s the case, then is it any wonder that we often feel burdened, that we often feel weighed down by life?

If you could have one wish magically granted, for instance, how many of us would instinctively wish for something like winning the lottery, or otherwise getting a bunch of money? Maybe that seems trivial, it is certainly fun to imagine winning the lottery, but the pleasure we find in fantasizing about such things doubtless tells us something about how such worldly goods still, even for us Christians, have a hold on our hearts.

 But the good news for us worldly people, the good news for those of us who are weighed down by the heavy burden of sin, the good news for all of us who still have a ways to go along the path of Christian perfection, is that Jesus is still there and he is still calling out to us: Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. As long as we draw breath that invitation stands, as long as our hearts are still beating Jesus is always there calling us to life and to happiness and to joy.

And so we see that before us are these two paths: the path of the world, and the path of Christian discipleship. The one leads to toil, the other to rest, the one leads to disappointment, the other to lasting joy, the one leads to death, the other to eternal life. All that is left for us is to choose. So for all of you who are heavy burdened, come to Jesus, and he will give you rest.