God’s Vocation is Recreation
Even the pope is packing for Castel Gandolfo this month. Sunday’s Gospel offers rest to everyone who has grown tired of trying to earn what God already gave.
Dear friends,
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“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28
Pope Leo XIV is going on vacation. This month, the papal household moves to Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence in the hills above Lake Albano where popes fled the Roman heat for four centuries until Francis let the custom fall into disuse. Leo revived it last July, and he has shown no embarrassment about resuming it this summer.
I cannot say the same about myself. I am bad at rest. Writing a newsletter means every day is a potential workday, and Sunday has the weakest defenses. Most weeks something in me insists the world will wobble if the phone goes in a drawer. That voice is lying, and I keep believing it.
The Gospel for this Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time moves in two steps.
First Jesus prays aloud: “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 little ones.”
Then he turns to the crowd with the invitation Matthew has been building toward for eleven chapters: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” The smallness comes before the rest, and the order carries the whole lesson. Only people who have quit pretending to hold up the sky can lie down.
Leo preached on this passage at the Angelus in St. Peter’s Square Sunday morning. God “delights in revealing himself” to infants, he said, while the wise and the intelligent are “so filled” with “their own ideas that they fail to recognize the presence of Christ.”
He continued: “Human wisdom thus becomes arrogance, and doctrine degenerates into pride.” Zechariah saw this coming five centuries before Bethlehem, promising a king “meek, and riding on an ass,” a savior who arrives small on purpose and banishes the warrior’s bow.
Jesus goes on to reach for an image from his own temporal vocation.
