Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Who Is The Commanding General Of  Your Life?

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, Brooklyn Center, MN

Sunday, July 9, 2023

Our readings for this Sunday examine what it would be like to have Jesus Christ for a King. In our first reading, prophet Zechariah said, “Rejoice heartily, O daughter Zion, shout for joy, O daughter Jerusalem! See, your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, meek, and riding on an ass… His dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from River to the ends of the earth.” Five hundred years after prophet Zechariah, Jesus enters the holy city of David, just as Zechariah had said. He enters Jerusalem on a colt, on a foal of an ass. He rode in as the peaceful King, and as the one who would banish the weapons of war and introduce a whole new way of ordering things. Where is the kingship of Jesus expressed? On the cross! On that gory instrument of torture and death, he submits to the violence of the world. That’s what the cross was meant to symbolize. It does not represent Roman punishment alone, it also shines a spotlight on the whole human dysfunction and the dark ways of the world. On that cross, Jesus takes all that darkness upon himself and allows it to overwhelm him. After that he swallows it up in the ever greater divine mercy. The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead shows his lordship over the darkness of the world. It shows that he represents a new kind of kingship. He is the new King who addresses the cruelty, the violence, the disorder of the world not through more cruelty or more violence or more disorder, not through an explosion of divine vengeance but through a radiation of divine love and redeeming mercy. So, what prophet Zechariah prophesied long ago, the coming of the new David happened in Christ.

With that in mind, let us look at the Gospel today. Let us listen to what this new King, this strange, counter-cultural Davidic King said: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” Who are those who labor and are burdened? Everybody! Everybody who lives under the burden of the old rule. Original sin poisoned the world from the very beginning, as such, we have violence meeting violence, hatred meeting hatred, vengeance giving rise to vengeance. I hate you, and you hate me. My family hates your family because your family hates my family. We are all caught in this dangerous game. We are born into it, we breed our children into it and it becomes our way of being. In the Gospel, John calls it “the world.” That’s what it means to labor and be burdened. What’s Jesus saying to us today? Come to me all of you in that situation and I will give you rest. People with economic worries, physical sufferings, oppression, depression, deepened injustice, moral failures, sins, spiritual dryness, fear of death and whatever it is, come to him. While commenting on this invitation of Jesus, St. John Chrysostom said, “Not this or that person, but all that are in anxiety, in sorrows, in sins. Come, not that I may call you to account, but that I may do away with your sins; come, not because I want your honor, but because I want your salvation. “And I,” says he, “will give you rest.”

What should be our response to his invitation? Submit to his kingship! Submit to his new ways of ordering things. Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not, you are somebody’s slave. We all are! We are all slaves to this system I have described. We are all slaves to this world of cruelty, violence and injustice, the old way of being. But the new King is saying, Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. Think of a cattle with a yoke tied on its shoulder. With the yoke on its back and under the command of the farmer, the cattle accomplishes what the farmer wants. This might seem demeaning but that is what submission to Christ’s lordship looks like. It means we serve the purposes of the new King. We go where he wants us to go. So, the question today is, is Jesus the commanding General of your life? Is your family under his guidance? Is your professional and recreational life under his command? Is Jesus the Lord of every room in your house? Is your private and public life under the lordship of Jesus? Is your sexual life under his lordship? Your sexual life belongs to him, your friendship serves his purpose. Have you totally surrendered to his lordship? Does this sound oppressive? Maybe. But remember what he said, My yoke is easy, and my burden light. What does that mean? When we surrender to the path of love, which he laid out to us, when we surrender to the discipline of this new world where he reigns as King, our life becomes infinitely lighter, easier, more joyful, and we begin to move according to the divine rhythm and divine purposes. What makes our life burdensome is that we are held captive by the old ways of ordering things. But Jesus the new King has come in peace as Zechariah prophesied to establish a new order where divine love is more powerful than the system St. John calls “the world.” Do you want his peace and rest? Submit to him! Get under his yoke. Move according to the rhythm and pattern of his reign. Jesus wants to enter into your life and my life just as he entered the holy city of Jerusalem. And don’t forget we are meant to be the holy city in person. 

God bless you!