Daily Reflection Friday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time

On this feast of the Sacred Heart we are blessed with very beautiful readings. First, Moses speaks to the people of being chosen. We have all been chosen but we do not understand at all why or how or anything else about it. It is certainly not a reward, certainly not about us being in any way worthy or deserving. It is not really about us at all. The question is, having been chosen (“No one knows the Father but the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him”), what is our response?

The amazing reading from the first letter of John today gives us some understanding. God is love and that love has been revealed to us so that we might also love one another. That is why we were chosen, to carry that love given to us to others along with the message of that love, that God has loved us so greatly that God has sent his Son so that we can now be filled with that love and proclaim it to others in our love for them in turn. We must not hold that gift to ourselves but give it to everyone we meet.

Having been chosen to share in the great gift of God’s unending love for us means that we must accept the responsibility of being disciples of Jesus, becoming obedient as he was obedient, faithful as he was faithful and gentle and loving as he was always. Sometimes we draw back from that responsibility, thinking that it is altogether too much. That is because we think that we must testify to the Spirit with our own power or abilities when nothing could be further from the truth. “Without me you can do nothing.” God gives us everything we need to serve him. It is all from above, all from God’s grace.

If we are finding life burdensome and heavy, if so much seems to weigh on us causing us fear and worry, it is because we have not yet taken on the yoke of Christ that he offers us. We are still carrying our own. To take on the yoke of Jesus, the yoke made for us with his own meek and humble and loving hands, would be to find rest, to find everything become easy and light, if we would only believe it. It would be to discover that God does for us, all those things we could never do for ourselves. Our weariness and weakness would leave us, and we would find strength and peace to bear anything with joy, the joy that Jesus felt constantly within his sacred heart.

But for that to happen we must become willing to give up the yoke we have yoked ourselves with, the yoke of pride and willfulness and self. We must seek to trust God enough to abandon it all into his hands, abandon all we desire and think we need believing it is somehow valuable when it is actually a prison and a lie. If we would but seek to surrender, then God would set us free to do only God’s will. Then our fears would fall away and we would be lifted up and filled with gratitude and joy and strength. Jesus is offering it to us, all we have to do is take it. Pray for it every day. Jesus is waiting for you to come, come and see, so that he may give it to you in its fulness. “Seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”