Faith

 

In Matthew chapters 11 and 12, Our Lord faces a painful reality: He is met not only with hate-filled religious opposition but with the deadening indifference of the masses. He is rejected for not fitting our expectations, despite all the miraculous enlightenment He shared. This profound apathy sets Him on a trajectory straight to the cross.

It is with a heavy, sorrowful heart that Jesus decries the unrepentant towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum. He warns that the very people who witness His greatest miracles will face a harsher judgment than Sodom, and, in a striking display of spiritual gravity, these villages ironically remain uninhabited to this day. Miracles often mean nothing to a heart that refuses to move.

 When the crowd walked away, Jesus didn’t chase their approval—He changed His focus and locked eyes with the Father. Listen to me: when rejection hit Him square in the face, Jesus didn’t look for a distraction, because the Father was already the ultimate attraction in His life! He stood up right in the middle of that pushback and said, “Thank You, Father, for hiding this from the experts and revealing it to the underdogs!”

It is a tragedy when the very people who spent generations memorising the prophecies could not even recognise the Presence. They were so busy looking for the Messiah of their expectations that they completely missed the Messiah of their reality standing right in front of them!

Faith must open our eyes, yet often it is men and women of faith who become the greatest hurdles to seeing what the simple and unlettered see so easily. The danger of spiritual maturity is assuming that because we know the text, we automatically know the Heart behind it. To the unlettered and simple Jesus says, “come to me.” Jesus is calling his faithful to him. That call is specifically made to those who are overburdened and weary.  

In a celebrity-driven culture where influencers build empires on likes, a true preacher’s only job is to go completely invisible so that Jesus can be seen. As preachers, we have a bonded duty to direct our faithful to Jesus alone. It is he who has the power to give the overburdened rest. In our media-saturated world, the modern temptation is to curate a personal brand and gather a crowd of fans rather than a community of disciples.

A preacher who draws people to himself is a false teacher. We are not the source of the living water; we are merely the pipes through which it flows. We are but instruments of the Master, pointing broken hearts away from our platforms and toward His presence.

Jesus never promised an escape room from life’s trouble; He promised a shelter right in the middle of the storm. Some of us are waiting for God to change your circumstances, but He wants to change your capacity! To the overburdened, the Lord does not make a false promise to take away the weight. The Lord is crystal clear when he says, “I will give you rest.” He never said, “If you become my disciple and keep my word, I will delete every trouble from your timeline.”

His promise isn’t a problem-free life—His promise is rest! Jesus doesn’t offer a relief from our obligations or a permanent vacation from reality. Instead, it’s a promise of partnership. We are invited to step into a shared yoke where the load feels lighter because we aren’t pulling it alone.

What he says next is even more intriguing. Our Lord says, “shoulder my yoke.” I like this translation to the words, “take my yoke.” Take my yoke almost sounds like Jesus is about to add to our burdens and walk away. That is not his intention; his intention is for us to go to him with the challenges of life and together, Jesus and you, shoulder this burden together. Our Lord shares in your burden, he does not leave you alone.

And while he shoulders the burden with you, he makes another proposition, “learn from me,” he says. It is as if our Lord is saying, while we carry this burden together, let’s make the best of the time we have together; you and I. Let me talk to you, let me tell you how a Christian disciple should handle his stress and burdens. The weight that forces you to your knees is actually an invitation to sit at the feet of the Master

One might still feel a bit cheated even though the Lord makes all this sound so nice. After all, did he not say shoulder my yoke and did he not say his burden, which he wants us to shoulder in addition to our burdens, is easy? Easier than what? Yes, the Lord does want us to shoulder his burden so that he can teach us his ways while we are at it, but his burden is not just easy it is ‘well fitting’. You see, the translation of the word “easy” in Greek is ‘chrestos’ and ‘chrestos’ does not accurately translate as ‘easy’ as much as it translates as ‘well fitting.’ Jesus isn’t offering a zero-gravity lifestyle; He’s offering a weight distribution plan that actually works.

As I said earlier, the Lord did not promise to take away our burden, he promised to give us rest and while he did invite us to shoulder his burden the purpose was to grab an opportunity to learn from him. But even more, Jesus reveals a secret about the burden he asks us to share with him. He tells us that he has ‘measured us’ and found the burden well fitting for us. He has not overburdened us with his burden, he has just helped us to understand that what we carry has been measured for us. He won’t give us a burden we cannot handle. The tragedy of modern stress isn’t that the load is too heavy, but that we are trying to pull a two-man rig all by ourselves

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Faith

Friday, 15th Week in ordinary time – Matthew 12:1-8

Chapter 12 of the Gospel of Matthew throws Jesus straight into a ringside scrap with the Pharisees. It is tragic when religious leaders totally lose the plot, especially when they drew up the plan! To really grasp this drama, we have to look at the backstory of His critics

The Pharisees rose to prominence in the second temple period, which is somewhere between 586 BC-AD 70; from the time the Jews returned from exile in Babylon to the fall of the second temple of Jerusalem. The English word Pharisees originated from the Hebrew “Perisha” (the singular of “Perishaya” and translates as “one who separates himself,” or keeps away from persons or things impure, in order to attain the degree of holiness and righteousness. By doing this, they hoped to represent the religious views, practices, and hopes of the Jewish people. Their separation from others was also included their opposition to the priestly Sadducees.

The Pharisees were scrupulous observers of the Law, as interpreted by the scribes and in accordance with tradition. They formed a league or brotherhood of their own (“ḥaburah”), admitting only those who pledged themselves to the strict observance of Levitical purity, to the avoidance of any association with the ‘Am ha-Areẓ (the ignorant and careless boor), to the scrupulous payment of tithes and other contributions due to the priestly class and the poor and to a conscientious regard for vows and for other people’s property.

 Ironically, the ultimate planners completely lost the plot; the very group that isolated themselves to stay pure ended up networking to orchestrate a murder. They were so consumed by the fine print of religious tradition that they completely missed the headline of the Law.

Today’s Gospel is a controversy set in a field of grain. A simple and natural response to hunger on the Sabbath becomes an excuse for the Pharisees to pick up an argument with Jesus. Jesus was not anti-Torah or anti-Sabbath, He just challenged the interpretations of the Pharisees with regard to the Sabbath.

The field of grain becomes a courtroom where a simple act of human survival is treated as a major crime. When the hungry disciples pluck heads of grain on the Sabbath, the Pharisees do not see people in need; they only see rules being broken. Jesus does not trash the Sabbath here. Instead, He tries to rescue it from the suffocating trap of legalism.

The Sabbath was always meant to be a day of restoration, freedom, and life, but the critics turned it into a day of heavy burdens and anxious restriction. By challenging their narrow interpretations, Jesus reminds us that whenever our religious traditions cause us to value the rule over the person, we have completely lost the heart of God.  They built an empire of regulations on a postage stamp of Scripture, trading the heartbeat of God’s word for a checklist of restrictions.

Ironically the Old Testament, especially the First five books of the Law, have just one thing to say about the Sabbath; keep it holy (Exodus 20: 8- 11). Humanity, it seems, loves to make complex what the divine chose to simplify. The Rabbis, it appears, seemed unhappy with such a basic law and found it necessary to specify thirty-nine actions as those which are forbidden on the Sabbath. The Divine wrote a one-sentence rule to protect rest, but humanity wrote a thirty-nine-chapter manual to weaponize it.

Amongst these forbidden actions were reaping, winnowing, threshing and preparing a meal; the very actions that the disciples ‘broke’ on the Sabbath. But every law has an exception and this was no different. Humanitarian grounds exempted one from considering these actions as broken on the Sabbath. Saving a life took precedence over keeping the law. Scripture itself makes it clear that mercy trumps compliance; the Law was never designed to hold a life hostage to a calendar.

For the record, it was the disciples who plucked the grain and ate, not Jesus. Yet the nit-picking (should have been grain picking) Pharisees don’t correct the disciples but find fault with Jesus; “your disciples are breaking the law.” In reality, the disciples broke no law. Remember the exception made on humanitarian grounds? That comes into play now! The disciples were hungry and if the Sabbath rule was broken, then in was done so on humanitarian grounds.

To our modern, property-obsessed minds, the disciples look like thieves; but under God’s original law, walking into a neighbor’s field to satisfy immediate hunger wasn’t a crime, it was a safety net.  The laws of the Old Testament were laid down with great sensitivity for the good of human kind. While we might see property damage, the Old Testament saw a welfare system; the law expressly permitted a hungry traveler to snack from a field, proving God prioritized survival over strict ownership.

Unfortunately, human kind interpreted God’s laws very narrowly if not for their own convenience. There was no crime committed on this occasion because the law permitted a hungry traveler to pick grain so long as they did it with their hands and not a sickle. Simply put it, if you are hungry, eat and don’t starve.

Jesus flips the script on the Pharisees by pulling a page straight from their own playbook. He drags them back to the Torah, reminding them of the time David and his starving men marched right into the holy place and ate the showbread—the bread exclusively reserved for the priests. Let’s be honest: the shock value shouldn’t have been when they ate, but what they ate! Yet, strangely enough, the ancient critics didn’t bat an eye at David’s rule-breaking, proving that the Pharisees were just manufacturing a cause to trap Jesus.

Jesus then drops another truth bomb on the Pharisees. He points right at the temple priests. They who were supposedly the guardians of the Sabbath, were literally working double shifts on the day of rest because the required sacrifices doubled! They were breaking the letter of the law every single week just to keep the religious machinery running.

Ultimately, Jesus is forcing them to look into the mirror of the Divine mind through the prophet Hosea. He reminds them of a God who fundamentally desires mercy, not sacrifice—proving that the Pharisees were so busy clocking the mileage of ritual compliance that they completely missed the heart of the Master.

If the Pharisees wanted to stage a coup against the King, they should have brought a better weapon than a petty grievance over a cornfield snack.

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Faith

Monday, 15th week in ordinary time – 13th July 2026 – Matthew 10:34-11:1

We come to the end of the second of five discourses found in the Gospel of Matthew. The mission discourse ends with no apology. It is not a diplomatic speech that has carefully tip toed safely past a minefield of difficult issues. In the mission discourse, Jesus had delivered a battle brief, not a business pitch.

The mission discourse has been more like a bull taken on by its horns or the elephant in the room addressed! Jesus hands his followers their crosses, warns them of intense persecution, and addresses the polarizing reality of his kingdom head-on. True leadership warns of the scars before promising the crown.

The mission discourse makes it abundantly clear that the Christian will always be to the world, a point of derision, an object of scorn. This is not merely from those who sit outside our green pastures but also include some ‘goats’ who mock the sheep within.

Making a choice for Christ clearly sets you on a collision course with the rest of the world and the world does not have to be on the other side of the globe but can be on the other side of your home. For the early Church, this domestic fracture was the first step on a road that often led to literal martyrdom. Rejecting the pagan family deities was viewed as a betrayal of both home and state, turning loved ones into informants.

Those in the early Church who followed Christ, leaving their pagan faiths, were the ones who did not just feel some heat under the collar; many felt the heat literally as they were burnt for Nero’s pleasure. The early saints did not risk social awkwardness; they risked becoming literal torches for Nero’s garden.

Jesus is emphatic; luke-warm Christians who have been bathing in their watered down understanding of the Catholic faith are “not worthy of him.” While we may propagate and promote our happy-clappy, kumbaya version of Christ, that version, good as it may be, must also be confronted with verse 38 where we are told that if Christ is not first in everything, then we stand nowhere in his court; we are not worthy of him. A watered-down faith does not dilute the truth; it completely invalidates it.

Christ completely dismantles the modern illusion of a risk-free, low-cost discipleship. He demands total supremacy in the human heart, refusing to be treated as a secondary lifestyle accessory or a comfortable weekend insurance policy.

While Christ did not ask us to actively seek persecutors so that we may be martyred, he actively asks us to die to ourselves in order that we may find him. He says “those who find THEIR life will lose it.” What Christ is saying is that those who make a life for themselves in which HE is not part of, that life is a life created for themselves, a life devoid of him. That life, as happy as it may seem to the world, is a life lost. Such a life is lived in quiet rebellion against God. You don’t have to curse Christ to reject Him; you just have to build a life without Him.

The mission discourse winds down with some respite for the ones sent out. So far, most of the discourse seems to border on not just the straight and narrow but the harrowing and challenging. So, Christ encourages us to promote and support the work of the evangelist.

By welcoming the missionary, you welcome Christ. That welcome may be just a cup of cold water that you can afford but each of us can afford to fund the mission and life of the Church. You don’t have to cross an ocean to advance the Gospel; you just have to being by opening your door.

A cup of cold water was the cheapest, most basic element of hospitality in the ancient Near East, yet Jesus attaches an eternal reward to it. This teaches us that supporting the priesthood, religious vocations, and parish missions is not a passive charity; it is an active, mystical participation in the work of Christ Himself. If your feet cannot carry the message across borders, your resources must carry the messenger.

The Gospel of today ends with the doctrine we all advocate but fail short of; to practice what we preach. Jesus did exactly that! Having “instructed the twelve he went on from there to teach and proclaim his message in their cities” till he walked to Jerusalem, walked up the steps of the Praetorium and then with a cross on his back, walked all the way up to Golgotha. Christ did not write a textbook on suffering; He became the living blueprint for it.

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Faith

Tuesday, 15th Week in ordinary time – 14th July,2026 – Matthew 11:20-24

Matthew 11:1 marks the exact transition concluding the “Missionary Discourse” of Chapter 10. “Now when Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and proclaim his message in their cities. The lectionary omits verses 2-19 concerning John the Baptist. These texts will find their way in the liturgy of the Church several times in Advent and around the feast concerning John the Baptist.

The Gospel passage of today stands smack in between the sending out of the seventy into mission and the return of the seventy from mission.  It almost seems like an interlude of sorts to create the impression that a certain time has lapsed between the two events.

Principally, chapters eleven and twelve will cover the rejection of Our Lord and are referred to as the rejection passages. Verses 16-19, which precede this text, gives us a clear understanding of the rejection that Jesus faced. Nothing He does seems to make the people happy. The people of Jesus’s day wanted John the Baptist to lighten up and Jesus to tighten up. They wanted a faith that was “just right”—which inevitably meant a faith that demanded absolutely nothing from them.

Today’s churchgoers often suffer from the same  syndrome. One church is “too traditional,” the other is “too casual.” One preacher is “too political,” the next is “too superficial.” We have turned the sanctuary into a theater and the liturgy into a playlist. If the music doesn’t hit our exact emotional frequency, or if the sermon runs five minutes over, we “write a bad review” by excusing ourselves from Sunday mass.  We won’t dance when the flute is played, we won’t mourn when the dirge is sung. If John the Baptist is too radical for you, and Jesus is too scandalous for you, the problem isn’t the preacher—the problem is your appetite.  It seems like we want an omelet but do not want to break the eggs.

Jesus responds to this indifference towards him and to his mission and having confronted their behaviour (verse 16-19) he now decides to shake a fist at them. This is not Jesus losing His temper; this is Jesus declaring that indifference is not a neutral position—it is a catastrophic choice.

The text draws our attention to three predominantly Jewish cities in Galilee. The first two of the three Jewish cities mentioned are Chorazin and Bethsaida; towns situated near the Sea of Galilee and which today lie in ruin. However a good portion of the synagogue of Chorazin is still standing. The third Jewish city of Capernaum which is mentioned by Jesus in the text is the place that Jesus made his own headquarters for ministry.

Clearly, the Gospel tells us that these three cities were not places where he worked some random miracle or gave some small-time village religious teaching. Our Lord had put his heart and soul into bringing them the words of salvation and the acts of divine grace. We are told, “most of his deeds of power had been done here.” It is for this reason that he reproaches them

But what had Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum done? It’s not so much what they have done but rather what they failed to do. To them had the Gospel been preached vigorously. Capernaum was the Lord’s de facto headquarters in the region of Galilee. More than two thirds of the miracle of Jesus had been worked around the lake of Galilee where these cities were situated. They should have become cities of holiness and faith; light to the Gentiles who had outnumbered them in this region. Yet the ministry of Jesus had no effect on them personally.

We often assume that the closer someone is to the things of God, the more faithful they will be. The three cities or as they have come to be called, the “evangelical triangle” proves the exact opposite. Familiarity bred a lethal form of contempt, or worse, boredom. They became consumers of the supernatural. A miracle no longer was a call to repent; it was just Tuesday afternoon entertainment in Capernaum.

We live in a culture of spiritual surplus. We have endless resources, Christian podcasts, apps, and churches on every corner. Because grace is cheap and readily available to us, we treat it as disposable. Capernaum witnessed the maximum output of heaven, but offered the minimum response of earth.

What is it that Jesus wanted from them as a sign of acceptance of his ministry? He wanted them to repent. Jesus didn’t want their applause, their money, or their institutional validation. He wanted their brokenness. He wanted them to repent—a word that in Greek (metanoia) literally means a radical, total U-turn of the mind, heart, and lifestyle.

He says to them that if his words and deeds were preached in the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented. We know that these cities were known for their immorality and lust. If immoral cities could respond in repentance, then why were the cities that our Lord preached to, so indifferent to putting on a new heart and mind? I guess the answer to that question lies in the actions of each of us. Have I repented or do I take the love of the Lord for granted?

Sadly, the culture out there—addicts, outcasts, and those broken by secularism—often responds to the raw Gospel with immediate tears and transformation because they know they are dying. Meanwhile, the lifetime churchgoer sits in the pew checking their watch, utterly untouched, because they think they are already well. It is a terrifying truth that the gutter is often closer to grace than the front pew of a Church.

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Wednesday, 15th week in ordinary time – Matthew 11:25-27

Unlike our usual tendency to offer gratitude only when specific desires are met, Jesus models a radical form of thanksgiving. His praise to the Father emerges directly in the face of rejection and mission setbacks, teaching us to anchor our hearts in God’s divine purpose rather than worldly success. True faith thanks God in the valley of rejection, not just on the mountain of answered prayer

We know from scripture, that the cities that Jesus preached to and worked miracles in, would not repent (11:20-23). Supernatural signs may amaze the eyes, but they cannot convert a stubborn will. The people to whom Our Lord ministered to were perpetually ungrateful; they would not mourn even if a dirge was sung nor dance when the flute was player (11:17-18).

People who teach the skills in the art of staying positive need to take a leaf out of Our Lord’s life. In the face of such rejection, Jesus does not walk away, rather he says a prayer of thanksgiving. In the face of hostility, he sees the plan of God. He is not consumed by the negativity that his mission receives but rather sees that God had a method to this apparent madness. Modern ‘positivity gurus’ teach us how to manifest success; Jesus models how to give thanks in the middle of a shipwreck.

The text of today has two parts; a prayer of thanksgiving for the revelation of God (verses 25&26) and then we are given the content of that revelation (verse 27). Tomorrow’s text has an invitation that is extended as a result of this revelation. It consists of those ever-loved words of Jesus, “come to me all you who labour and are overburdened.”

For now, let us focus on the prayer of thanksgiving and the revelation made. The thanksgiving is not for some super achievement. It is a thanksgiving to God for the way He works. We usually thank God only when we win, but Jesus thanked Him simply for how He works.

We are told that his plan is not revealed to the wise and the learned. That should not lead one to falsely assume that God is opposed to scholars and scholarship. For the message of God to sink into our hearts, we have to place our human learning aside and become students in God’s university of simple surprises. Stepping into God’s university does not mean abandoning our intelligence; it means humbling it. This is the first lesson we take away from today’s text.

But to this prayer of thanksgiving is added the secret itself. God reveals his top-secret plans and he gives Jesus the honour to ‘reveal’ it. “ALL things have been handed to me by my Father,” says Jesus, “no one knows the son except the Father and no one knows the Father except the son and anyone to whom the son chooses to reveal him.”

God handed over to his son Jesus, ALL things; not some things. It is in the power of Jesus to give all things that we need. We frequently live with a mindset of spiritual scarcity, treating God’s provisions as if they are limited or rationed. We carefully calculate our requests, wondering if our problems are too big or if we are asking for too much. Yet, Jesus shatters this scarcity mindset by declaring that the Father has handed over all things to Him—not a partial custody, not a restricted allowance, but absolute ownership.

It is for this reason that tomorrow’s text begins with the words “come to me.” Does this take away the important role that God the creator plays in our lives? Does he stop functioning as a loving father? Not at all. It is easy to misinterpret the phrase “all things have been handed over to me” as a celestial transfer of power, as if the Father has stepped back into passive retirement.

Because the Father hands over all things to Jesus that does not mean he as Father can’t also hand things to us. But now like Mary, he gently nudges us to go to his Son. Our Blessed Mother said, “do whatever he asks you” and those thoughts seem to resonate in the revelation of God to us, through Jesus. From the halls of heaven to the wedding at Cana, the divine directive remains beautifully unchanged; ‘look to the Son’.

But Jesus also has the intimate knowledge of God as Abba. The God of the Old Testament was rendered nameless because his name could not be taken in vain or just about any time. The God of the Old Testament was feared and held in awe as if he was distant from his people.

Jesus knows the father and he calls him ABBA. He shares with us that intimate knowledge of the Abba he knows. Yet this is not some mutual admiration society that Jesus and God the Father are exclusive members of. Jesus cracked open the inner circle of heaven to turn strangers into sons and daughters of Abba. This deep knowledge of who God is, was meant to be shared and that knowledge is shared by Jesus.

Is this knowledge of the Father meant for all? No! Jesus makes this very clear. While this knowledge could be for anyone the decision to reveal it is left with Jesus alone. It is for this reason that the next verse which we will study tomorrow begins with the words, “come to me.”

Yet we may choose to reject that call of Jesus but by doing that we reject the way to Father. “NO ONE can come to the Father”, says Jesus, “except through me.” (John 14:6). God’s love has no boundaries, but His access has a name: to decline the call of Jesus is to lock the door to the Father.

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