Rev. Fr. Rommel M. Arcilla
“Come to me, all of you who work hard and who carry heavy burdens and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me that I am gentle and humble of heart; and you will find rest. For my yoke is good and my burden is light.”
Come to me all of you who find life burdensome and I will give you rest! This is one of the most consoling Gospel passages I ever came across and reflected upon. After all the burdens, problems and hardships that we encountered for a day, Jesus is inviting us to come to Him and take a well-deserved rest.
Physically we can really get tired of all the things that are placed on our shoulders to carry and sometimes we even arrive at the point of surrendering and breaking up because of too much heavy load. Sometimes we have no one to turn to for help and support and so we feel alone, depressed and so sad. Our burdens in life can affect the whole of it and almost always they could put us down.
Looking back, though, we can only feel upset after realizing that all our problems and burdens in life were all self-inflicted. We are the ones to blame why we are in this present situation, simply because we just let it happen to us because of some unforeseeable results and ambitious goals in life that we have set to follow.
Now the Lord is inviting us to come to Him. I wonder how many of us would come to Him in times like this. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed with our talents and capacities that’s why we think we can always manage. The world is so far advanced in science and technology that sometimes we feel that God is no longer needed.
As the days go by, the world advanced so greatly especially with almost everything that a man can ever need. We now have the means of communication to connect us with the whole world. We have various branches of science and medicine which specialize in the psychological, physical and almost every aspect of our bodies. We do not only have the usual banks but we have a lot other sectors that deal with our finances and other assets. So, in effect, people no longer go to the church because the church has become a very lonely place and what you can see inside the church are images of saints, the sad old padre (as described in the green, green grass of home), and the collection bags hanging in every corner.
The world is so busy and the people in it are so absorbed with their individual jobs and assignments. It just saddens me, though, because we are somehow fascinated with things that are not needed in our human existence. We are so engrossed with building hi-tech weapons that are only aimed at destroying our enemies who are also humans. I do believe that this Covid-19 pandemic is a weapon for mass destruction which may have gone wrong and uncontrollable.
In the aspect of medical science, they had started to interfere with the plans of God by the administration of the sex-change and by trying to control the number of births by killing those unwanted babies even before they were born.
Who wouldn’t get tired of things like these around us? All the problems, this global pandemic, the depressions and stress that we feel would be enough to make us stretch out our hands asking for a little help from anybody who could. But sometimes even that much awaited help is hard to pass us by and so we feel so weary and tired. God comes to our rescue by saying; “Come to me you who are weary and I will give you rest.”
There is no other notion of genuine rest than that which is being offered by Jesus. The rest that He is trying to give us will lead us to the heavenly feeling that and tranquility and that rest can only come to us through Christ. It is when we are not so absorbed with any worldly desires, dreams and wants that Christ becomes present to us to give us rest. Let us therefore take a time out from all our worldly affairs so that the presence of Jesus will be appreciated in our lives. “Come to me… my yoke is easy and I will give you rest!”
Our coming to Christ is our own gesture of humility with the realization that we are nothing without Him in our lives. It is our turning back away from all our worldly sources of safety and security and confess that He alone matters in our lives. It is our resolve to do nothing but His will. Coming to Him means we are now ready to walk down the road that will lead us to His cross… our salvation and our well-deserved rest in His peace.