Spirituality of the Readings
A Righteous Reward
How can Jesus say such a thing to us? “Whoever receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man's reward.” (Gospel). We have only recently experienced Jesus’ Passion and Cross, which do not seem rewarding at all.
And how about September 11, and Iraq, and African Aids, and the warming trend? Citizens do not find these peaceful. Yes we turn to the Lord and maybe find some comfort but it is in the midst of terror and shock. It seems a cold comfort.
And, of course, there are those, our own, who abuse children and young people even having taken up the Lord’s life explicitly and made themselves public witnesses of it. Have these men ever slept an undisturbed sleep since their crimes? Even if they have, clearly the survivors have not.
“I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves,” the Gospel says. Can it be true? How can we welcome a savior who is meek and humble instead of one fiercely opposing the disastrous wrongs?
Jesus’ words do bring some fledgling kind of calm. Somehow they compel, console. Actually you might say that they reveal one of life’s secrets that we might never have guessed. What can it be? Let us look.
Long ago I began quoting with gusto the words of Dylan Thomas, that ragged poet, who if rumor is true drank himself to the death he dreaded. But he wrote this to his father who was upon his death bed.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old Age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Yes, rage. And in his great poem, “Fern Hill,” the same poet says,
Oh as I was young and easy
in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Time steals away the life and liveliness of human beings, whatever of it the world has not already plundered, and death ends it all. How does Jesus give us reward from these kinds of weariness and burden? In what way does he make death easy?
Years and years ago, I began to search for some way in which death was continuous with life instead of its cancellation. Could it be simply a transition from what was to what will be? Can there be a view of life and death in common with the fullness of life? What is the source and goal of them both?
Seek it in me, Jesus says. I am “meek, and riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass” (First Reading). Watch me on the sad height of Calvary and see. I have let it all go—belongings, beloved's, repute, all. But one thing remains. Make it your life, in the midst of sorrow, in every act of living and of dying. It is the center of my life.
Love.
If you can let go into the arms of the Great Love, give your life away instead of raging, you will know rest in your burdens; you will see how death is the ultimate act of giving yourself away, as Jesus did, burdens or not.
John Foley, SJ
**From Saint Louis University