Thursday, July 17, 2014


Thursday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time

(Isaiah 26:7-9.12.16-19; Matthew 11:28-30)


The eighty year-old women knelt beside her bed every night.  Rosary in hand, she prayed for her family.  She did not have children of her own; she never married.  But she prayed for her sisters and brother, her nephews and niece, and her grand-nieces and nephew.  Did she pray for herself?  Probably she did since her life was not the happiest.  Her solitariness likely called within her like a broken record, “What’s wrong with you, Mary?  What’s wrong with you?

In today’s gospel Jesus particularly invites those who never married along with widows, the divorced and homosexuals who try to live chastely to share their burden with him.  He will give them support because he too felt loneliness as a trial.  Of course, he never married but that does not seem to have caused him grief.  Rather it was being betrayed by a trusted disciple and denied by another, being condemned by the leaders of his nation and being scorned by the great defenders of justice in his time that made him feel abandoned.  His forlornness is dramatically demonstrated on the cross when he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus also asks us to take upon ourselves his yoke.  He means that we heed his command that we love one another – friend and foe alike.  It seems like a daunting challenge, but it turns out to be the way to happiness, both now and forever.