HOMILY ADVENT WEEK 02 03 – Year II
Faith, Forgiveness, Healing and Rest:
Memorial of St. Damasus I
(Is 40:25-31; Ps 103; Mt 11:28-30)
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How strong is your faith?
The readings today invite us to have a strong faith in God experienced through forgiveness, healing and rest.
The first reading from Isaiah and Psalm 103 tell us succinctly who our God is, and what our God does. For Isaiah, God is without equal, creator of all things, great in strength and mighty in power, everlasting and unsearchable.
What God does for Isaiah, is give power to the faint, strengthen the powerless, and renew those who “wait for the Lord.” This ties in with one of the main themes of Advent – expectant waiting for what is to come.
Psalm 103 adds to the attributes of our God, stressing that God is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and very forgiving. Significantly, in the second stanza of today’s passage we find a marvelous description of the two-fold role of the Messiah which shifts us from who God is, to what God does. That two-fold role was to redeem and sanctify.
Here is how it is stated in the psalm: “It is the Lord who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.”
To redeem is to save and to forgive, the first mission of the Messiah. To sanctify is to heal and to crown one with steadfast love and mercy. So, the task of Advent, indeed the continuous task of a believer, is to come to Jesus, the Messiah, for forgiveness of our sins, and healing of our sinfulness, that which makes us sin – our painful emotions and our defects of character. These two dynamics make up the path of our divinization or transformation that is to be the hallmark of our faith life.
In the gospel, we see Jesus, the Word made flesh, add the dimension of peace and rest for our troubled souls. We are to come to him for strength and support when the going gets tough and obstacles and trials threaten to overwhelm us. Jesus speaks of his yoke being easy and his burden being light. An incident that happened to me when visiting Cree Lake in northern Saskatchewan offers an insight into that saying of Jesus. Fr. Jim Fiori OMI and I stayed in a log cabin built for legendary Oblate missionary Fr. Louis Moraud, perched high up on a point overlooking the spring-fed lake from which we drew our water. Using two pails the first evening, I spilled much of the contents climbing the hill.
When we closed the door to the cabin that night, we discovered a hand-carved neck yoke hanging on the wall. The next morning, I used it to get water, and was both shocked and delighted to be able to almost jog up the steep hill without spilling a drop. That task was made very light and easy by the neck yoke!
That is similar to St. Peter’s experience with Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. Responding to Jesus’ invitation to walk on the water, Peter was filled with pride, took his eyes off Jesus when he looked back to the boat to show off a bit, felt the wind, started to sink and suddenly, his prayer changed to three words coming from his gut – “Lord, save me!” Immediately, Jesus was there lifting him up by the shoulder and chiding him, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?”
What do you think Peter did next? Tell Jesus he could manage on his own again, or hang on to Jesus and together walk back to the boat? I am certain Peter hung on for dear life and walked back to the boat together with Jesus. That is what Jesus means when he invites us to come to him, for his yoke is easy and burden light. It truly is easy and light when he is helping us to carry it, one day at a time.
Bishop Robert Barron adds another similar dimension to this experience of Peter’s. In today’s Gospel Jesus offers to free us from the burden of our pride, the same pride Peter displayed. What is it that makes our lives heavy and weighed down? Precisely the burden of our own egos, the weight of one’s own self. When I am puffing myself up with my own self-importance, I’m laboring under all that weight. Jesus is saying, “Become a child. Take that weight off your shoulders and put on the weight of my yoke, the yoke of my obedience to the Father.”
Anthony de Mello proposed the following parable to describe us prideful souls. A group of people sit on a bus that is passing through the most glorious countryside, but they have the shades pulled down on all the windows and are bickering about who gets front seat on the bus. This is the burden of pride: preferring the narrow and stuffy confines of the bus to the beauty that is effortlessly available all around. This, of course, is why Jesus can say, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” What the Lord proposes is not a freedom from suffering but, what is much more important, a freedom from the self.
Today the Church invites us to honor Pope Damasus, who was born in Rome about 305. His father, who was likely of Spanish descent, was a priest. Damasus also became a priest and in 366 was chosen pope, an office he fulfilled until his death in 384. He presided over the Council of Rome in 382 that determined the canon or official list of Sacred Scripture. He spoke out against major heresies in the church, including Apollinarianism and Macedonianism, and commissioned St. Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin, a version known as the Vulgate. He helped reconcile relations between the Church of Rome and the Church of Antioch and encouraged the veneration of martyrs.
The Eucharist is an act of faith, an experience of God’s love as forgiveness and healing, and certainly an invitation to rest in the love of God made present in Jesus, whose Body and Blood we consume. May our celebration strengthen our faith, transform us into Christlikeness, and help us to truly take up his yoke and rest in him.
