Year A /
Ordinary Time / Week 8 / Sunday
Readings:
Isaiah 49.14-15 / Psalm 61.2-3, 6-7, 8-9ab (R/v 6a) / 1 Corinthians 4.1-5 /
Matthew 6.24-34
“What is keeping you awake at night?” It is a question a good friend or a caring
family member would definitely ask if you shared with her how much you have
tossed and turned as you tried to fall asleep but cannot. “What is keeping you awake at night?” is the question
that confronts us when we really want to fall asleep after a long and tiring
day but cannot.
Often times it is
our burdens, our struggles and our anxieties that keep us worrying and prevent
us from sleeping peacefully. After a while when these overwhelm us and we have
sleepless nights, it is natural to feel stressed and confused, lost and empty,
even despairing.
Today’s readings assure us that we can indeed
fall sleep and rest each night, but, even more, that we can indeed live life
confident that we need not worry excessively. Isn’t this how we all want to live?
This is why many of
us will find the words of our psalm consoling and comforting. They express our
hope to rest undisturbed in God, as they attest that we can because God is our
strength and hope, our refuge and salvation. Yes, in him alone can we find our
rest.
What kind a God
offers this assurance? A God whose heart is tender and who chases after us in
love, especially when we have sinned.
I believe this is really what is going on when we
go to Confession. Often times, we go because we feel the need to confess our sins
so that we purify ourselves to receive Holy Communion. But there is a more profound action at work within us: God moves our hearts to draw us to himself in this sacrament, where he forgives us with mercy that is boundless and
with compassion that celebrates who we are to God—"you are mine” he says.
Throughout the
gospels, we read and see how Jesus incarnates God’s tenderness and loving pursuit for all
peoples, particularly, the sick, the outcast and the sinful. His actions that
forgive and heal, teach and make each one whole again in God’s image reveal who God is to us: God is
Love. More significantly,
his actions must open our eyes to the truth of who we are: we are God’s beloved. This is why we are always
worthy for God to seek us out.
The Christian story
is about God noticing us, lost in our sinfulness, and rushing toward us in
Jesus to take us to himself. He loses himself in love over us, in selfless love
that leads to the Cross. In Jesus, we see a God who cannot help himself: this
is how God loves to the end. This is how God promises us the fullness of
life. God’s love looks beyond betrayal to come
through locked doors on Easter day to the frightened apostles. Indeed, this is how
God’s love has always
been the very beginning. I like to imagine the following is how God looked for Adam
and Eve in the garden after they has eaten the forbidden apple:
“Adam, Eve, where are you? Why are you hiding?”
“We took what you said we shouldn’t; we took what was not ours. Now, we know we are naked. We are exposed. We have disobeyed you. So, we are hiding ourselves from you. Please go away.”
“No, no, I cannot. Please come out. Come out, show yourselves. I am sad but I have come to look for you. You have nothing to fear. Come out I am waiting for you.”*
I am waiting for you. What kind of a God would look for us—seek us out especially when we have
dismayed him, and wait for us? No other than a God who always remembers us, and
never forgets who we are to him. This is the God Jesus revealed to us as our
Father.
Isaiah invites us in
our first reading to appreciate how our God cannot forget us, even if a mother
could forget her child. God cannot because this is not how God loves and cares
for us. The image of
tenderness Isaiah uses should remind us that God always responds with more than
a mother’s loving embrace,
even when we have sinned and disappointed God. Indeed, God is more than we can
ever imagine, and the depth, the breadth and the height of his love
and care for us much more than we will ever know.
Jesus reiterates
this truth in today’s gospel. It is good
news: we do not have to worry about our lives; God will provide.
Consider how God
meets two needs we all worry about and that sometimes keep us from falling
asleep. The first is appearance. Some are preoccupied with power,
self-possession, and desirability. Others worry about projecting the right
public image. A few are anxious that their false appearances may unravel. The second is
nourishment for life. Yes, we worry about having enough food and drink for
ourselves and for others. But we also crave for popularity, acceptance and
adulation because these nourish our egos that starve for recognition and
celebration. Both needs make us anxious about our self-identity and self-worth.
We seek the material in life to support our fragile interiors.
Today Jesus reminds
us that God’s goodness is not
only already present in our lives but it is God’s promise to continue providing for our
needs. We hear his assurance that God will clothe us so well that we do not
need to worry about looking good and that God will nourish us with the
worthiness we need live secure in God and not according to other people’s expectations.
To live in God’s goodness that nourishes and sustains,
we have to make a choice. Hence, Jesus’ challenge that we choose between the
material to be our security or God. I believe you and I
do not want to choose money or material security to be our
"god". Hearing Jesus’
teaching, we instinctively know our choice. He voices our yearning to be with
God and to rest in him.
Wise are we who hear
in Jesus’ teaching the quiet
but sure call he makes to us to be free—free from being caught up in material
things, free from letting these determine our everyday decisions, free from
making them our life choices. And yes, free from letting these burden us with anxieties.
Being free to rest,
to fall asleep without having to keep awake, to sleep without having to toss
and turn is what we all want at the end of a long and tiring day. We can have such
rest and sleep if we heed Jesus’
call that we free ourselves from our inordinate attachment to material things.
This is how we can be freer to rest disturbed in God alone.
Let us strive
then to hand over more and more of our lives to God, especially the burdensome
and painful, the worrying and confusing, those parts of ourselves overwhelmed
by material concerns.
Let us ask God for
this grace so that we can look ahead to resting in God alone when our days end
but, more so, when our lives end and God beckons us home to him.
*Inspired by the Trappist monks, Spencer Monastery, Massachussetts
Preached at St
Ignatius Parish, Singapore
photo: from the
Internet
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