Yes, you read that right. This is your normal Sunday Scripture diary. Just not by your normal Sunday Scripture commentator. The Pastors are on vacation this week (and I think PD kinda needed one, judging by his last diary!), and they've asked me to fill in for this part of their weekly duties while they're away.
So come on down below the fold and I'll do my best to lay it out for ya.
The readings this week in the Catholic Church (which is my major spiritual home) are from Zechariah 9:9-10, Psalms 145:1-2, 8-9, 10-11, 13-14, Romans 8:9, 11-13, and the Gospel is Matthew 11:25-30. (You can access these readings--today--at
this page. The link won't work after today, because it will be showing a different Mass.) I'm not going to spend any time on Paul or the Psalm. Instead, I'm going to look at the two "outermost" readings--the first and the last.
Today is a day of contradictions. Zechariah tells us that the Messiah, the Anointed One, will come, not as a conquering hero riding with naked sword on a prancing warhorse, but as a gentle soul humbly riding on an ass:
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, on a colt, the foal of an ass.
He shall banish the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem; The warrior's bow shall be banished, and he shall proclaim peace to the nations. His dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.
I tend to suspect that this message was not happily received. The popular conception of the Messiah was exactly that warlike king riding in like an avenging angel, who would sweep Israel's enemies into the sea and establish God's reign upon the earth.
They didn't get that. (Or at least they haven't gotten it yet, if you consider the Jews' perspective that the Anointed One has yet to arrive.)
Instead, we got Jesus, who did ride humbly (albeit to great fanfare) into Jerusalem on a donkey. And he serves up a few contradictions of his own in today's Gospel reading:
At that time Jesus said in reply, "I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.
All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.
Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light."
Knowledge is withheld from the learned and the wise? Yokes are easy, and burdens are light? That's not the way most people see things.
But that is the way that the God whom Jesus revealed works. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light. As we read in the prophet Micah:
He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk modestly with your God.
(Micah 6:8, Jewish Publication Society)
That's not all that much to ask, is it? Certainly not in comparison to many of the routine tasks we take for granted in this life: how many pages of instructions does it take, for example, to tell us how to fill out our tax forms? Or to apply for a job (or worse, a mortgage loan)? Never having been to one, I can only imagine the kind of questionnaire you'd have to fill out to get into one of Bush the Unready's oh-so-carefully-scripted "town meetings"--but it has to be more complex than this.
The trouble is, we like to make things more complicated than they need to be. We like to magnify things beyond what is reasonable. (Just take a look at some of the doom-and-gloom diaries we've already seen in the wake of Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement here, for example: and we don't even know whom Bush is nominating to replace her, or what his/her record is, or any relevant information on which to base a justifiable concern.)
As I was sitting at Mass this morning (and that's a story in itself, that I'll probably tell in tonight's "Brothers and Sisters" thread), listening to the pastor's homily, I was reminded of a story that Robert Fulghum told in his book Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door.
When Fulghum was just a punk kid fresh out of college, he spent one summer working at an inn in northern California. He and the owner, his boss, did not exactly see eye-to-eye on how the place should be run. One thing that particularly irked Fulghum was the fact that he had to pay for his meals out of his salary, but the owner would often serve the same exact thing, day in and day out, with no change.
After a week of eating wieners and sauerkraut, and finding out that more of the same was on the menu for the weekend, Fulghum lost his temper and began raging to the night auditor, a quiet little man named Sigmund Wollman. Wollman was a Jew, and he'd managed to survive Auschwitz. He was perfectly happy to have a steady job and a ready supply of food, and he liked to work nights because it was quiet. Until Fulghum started ranting and raving about this or that injustice. Here's what Wollman had to say:
"Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You know what's wrong with you? It's not wieners and kraut and it's not the boss and it's not the chef and it's not this job."
"So what's wrong with me?"
"Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don't know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem.
If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire--then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience....
Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And you will not annoy people like me so much. Good night."
That's a pretty accurate description of a tendency I find all over, in people of all ages, all backgrounds. We lose sight of what's important, and we magnify the petty shit out of all possible proportion. Then we whine about how overwhelmed we are, how busy our lives are, and how many different things are yammering for our attention. I know I'm guilty of that a lot of times, and I'd bet good money that most of you, my faithful readers, fall into that trap on occasion as well.
We should take Sigmund Wollman's advice to heart. Learn to distinguish between an inconvenience and a real problem. We'll live longer, we'll be at least a little bit happier, and we'll find that Jesus' words are true. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light.
And a prayer to close it out:
May my bell of the holy ring out loudly,
O Spirit of Creation,
to inspire me to use the gifts
of creativity and imagination
that you, my Generous God,
have planted in every person
and particularly those holy gifts
you have seeded in me.
May my bell of the holy ring out, O God,
to banish the demons of self-doubt
that try to hold my creative gifts captive,
chaining them in the prison of the dogma
that it is only fortunate others who are creative.
May I use my creative gifts
to bring joy to those I love,
to serve those in need,
and to give you, O God, great glory.
Amen.
(From Edward Hays' book Psalms for Zero Gravity: Prayers for Life's Emigrants, Forest of Peace Publishing, 1998)