Jeremiah 23:1-6
Psalm 23:1-6
Ephesians 2:13-18
Mark 6:30-34

"He Said to Them, 'Rest a While'"

During Jesus' lifetime a primary aspect of Jewish culture was the task of understanding the Scriptures. What does it all mean? Who can unlock the Scriptures? Two great teachers of the first century, Shammai and Hillel, were famous for their debates on this subject. On one occasion, Hillel told Shammai he could recite the Law and the Prophets while standing on one foot. Shammai, amazed at such folly, challenged him to make good on this claim. So Hillel assumed the crane-like posture and said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets." Shammai could not dispute this.

Within the Kingdom of Heaven, therefore, are two ways: but not a choice between two. First comes the journey into friendship with God leading eventually to perfect harmony. The Lord will call us His friends if we will do His commandments and walk in His holy ways (Jn 15:14). Once we achieve this harmony with God, our lives and God's become a seamless unity. Our thoughts come much closer to becoming God's thoughts and our ways His ways. As He loves us, we find our own hearts having compassion for the precious human creatures he mysteriously loves so well.

You say some people are not so easy to love — violent people; loud, grasping people; calculating and exploitive con men; people deformed by compulsive sin and perversion. Yes, these are not easy to love. As a chaplain serving a psychiatric lockdown unit at a Catholic medical center, I can attest that among the truly psychotic men and women patients there, I also encountered lives deformed by daily vice to the point where their lives had hardened into viciousness. They had become their compulsive and unwholesome desires. It is not easy to love such people, for they do not want love, and entering their worlds means you must "hold" the monstrous scenes of their pasts and the compulsions of their present lives. But remember, the Beatitudes, where Jesus calls us to love our enemies, is the rule of life for Heaven. And those who have attempted to practice them in the world have discovered a great and immutable law: the world is the implacable enemy of Heaven, and heavenly people can very quickly be destroyed by the world.

Within the kingdom of Heaven there are two paths: the love of God and the love of neighbor. Last week, the Disciples were sent off to honor the second great commandment, and they encountered the world. They drove out demons. They healed. They anointed. And they returned with their many stories. They were exhausted. May I share that I have worked long days shoveling granite ballast on rail beds and spiking joints where rails meet, and I have hit the rack at night nearly collapsing into my bed. But I have never been as tired as when leaving the hospital after a full day of encountering the deep needs of patients. I don't mean fluffing pillows or playing a hand of gin rummy. I mean real heart-to-heart encounters where you are asked to hold the holy stories that they ask you to hold. Do you remember Jesus saying that when the woman of twelve-year hemorrhage touched His garment, He felt virtue, or strength, flow out of Him? This is the nature of service to others: real heart-to-heart ministry will drain you until there is not a drop left of what Jesus called dunamis, or power (Mk 5:30).

The Disciples have returned, and Jesus commands them to take their rest. But rest is not simply a stopping place along the path of service to others. It is not a temporary cessation of service, to be resumed shortly. No. Rest is a path. It is an essential quality of the first path, the one leading to friendship with God. Rest is a divine attribute. The first time the word appears in the Sacred Scriptures is Genesis 2:2:

Notice that the Third Commandment equates rest with keeping the Sabbath holy. Holiness signifies closeness and unity with God alone, for nothing else and no one else can truly be holy. Rest is to be a time spent alone with God, musing on His nature, remembering His great works, giving thanks for the many blessings you have received from Him, and nothing else.

Every rest commemorates Eden, which is the golden time of complete unity with God and harmony with God's ways. After the world is destroyed from the Great Flood, a time of rest is declared. The next appearance of this word following the Creation occurs as the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat.

The word does not occur again until the Holy Trinity comes to visit Abram and Sarai, signifying the Creation of God's people:

When God's people are called away from cruel labors in Egypt, they are summoned to a wilderness to have rest. They need not hunt nor toil in fields, for God will supply their needs. They need not dig wells, for God will make water to flow from arid ground and forbidding rock. It is a fallow time, a time for rest, a time to be alone with God.

All such rest recalls Eden, when Adam and Eve conversed with God in the cool in the afternoon, leading us back where we began. And we are invited to recall our beginnings. Yes, we look back wistfully to our life in a garden, but we may say that we have learned, that we have matured, that we have grown. For this time of rest, this great circle back to our starting point, invites us to compare our first innocence to a higher and converted innocence. Who can deny that our relationship with the God Who saves has deepened our bond of love with Him?

Moreover, we do not journey to Jerusalem, for it has been destroyed, but rather to a New Jerusalem (Rev 21:2). We do not seek Mt. Zion's Temple, for it is no more, but to a new Temple not made of human hands (Mk 14:58). We do not seek an earthly Paradise, for its gates are forbidden, but the Paradise of union with our God (Lk 23:43). And in all our journeys and all our roads, He guides us. His rod and staff, they comfort us. He leadeth us beside still waters, yea, in the presence of our enemies. Our table overflows. Our cup runneth over. He anoints us in that most profound act of acceptance. We are approved, loved, and folded into His bosom of friendship.

And now He bids us to rest, to be alone with Him, the One Who alone is life. And in these places deserted by men, He teaches us one prayer. In the Missal we hear, "We are bold to say..." for we make the audacious claim that God is our Father. We are told what we already know: that we depend entirely upon Him. We call this prayer simply the Paternoster, the Our Father, signifying family in the word our and Creator of this family, Father. In the biggest and highest picture we can conceive, He will provide our needs.

And as we take our rest, none of us may stray. For the tether is a short one, and research shows that all humans are remarkably similar in requiring eight hours of sleep every night. And there is another thing we cannot escape: in sleep all of us must assume the posture of death. Some of us sleep so peacefully that a loved one looking on may fear we have died. It is this fact that has given rise to another prayer, which we are taught from childhood, perhaps the very first prayer we ever learn: