From Sea to Sea

 

His dominion shall be from sea to sea [Zechariah 9:10]. So said Zechariah in today’s First Reading, foretelling the coming of the Messiah.  A mari usque ad mare (“From sea to sea”) is the motto on the Canadian Coat of Arms - a reminder of the ubiquity of the concept of manifest destiny, a concept common to Zechariah’s ancient Israel, to our neighbor to the north, and, of course, to our own country.

We hear this reminder today, just days after our national holiday, which celebrates this dominion from sea to sea with cookouts and hot dogs, parades and fireworks - our contemporary version of John Adams' famous prescription that it "be commemorated … by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty” and “solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more." (Along the way, somehow the “solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty” have gotten lost among all the cookouts, hot dogs, parades, and fireworks.)

Especially coming so soon after the Fourth of July, Zechariah reminds us that, over and above all the many inter-related networks of human relationships of which we are a part and which we need to care about – family, work, country – we are also citizens of the kingdom of God, a relationship which gives added meaning and transforms all those other relationships, even while we remain thoroughly engaged in all those other relationships, in the otherwise ordinary-seeming life of our day-to-day world of family, work, and country.

Now nobody needs me to tell you that, for all the  festivity, marred this year by so many shootings, Americans are apparently a relatively unhappy lot. This is neither the place nor the time to examine those issues, except perhaps to recall that as Catholics we have a long history (going back to the Roman Empire) of thinking seriously about these matters, about how to relate our faith to civil society – a long tradition of practical wisdom concerning social and political life, a tradition we may need to take more seriously both as disciples and as citizens.

This is, however, an appropriate place and time to recall that the complexities and burdens of living in our world and taking seriously the responsibilities that come with that have not been erased or solved in some simple way by the fact of our becoming disciples of Jesus. In fact, what Jesus seems to be proposing in today’s Gospel [Matthew 11:25-30] may at first appear as if he were just adding yet another additional burden – the burden of following him – to all the complexities and burdens we already have in our lives. Yet it is precisely this added dimension – this yoke, as Jesus calls it - which is meant to put all the other complications and burdens of living in a totally new context – an insight, which (Jesus warns) is sometimes lost to the wise and the learned of the world.

As Paul put it to the Christians in Rome, Christ’s new life has become our new life too, thereby reversing the death-ward direction of our ordinary existence and empowering us to allow ourselves and our entire lives – individual and communal, private and public, social and political - to be re-shaped by the Gospel’s stirring call to a total reorientation of our lives.

So, the rest that Jesus promises us is not a release from our ties to the world and the tough realities and responsibilities of ordinary human life. It is rather a new way of living and being involved with one another in the world, a new way of making sense of our relationships and responsibilities with and for one another.

Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, New York, July 9, 2023.