A Reflection for Monday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
When reading the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus, I am sometimes struck by the loneliness that inhabits the soul of Jesus the man. Today’s reading from Matthew, which contains a small passage that also appears in the Gospel of Luke (Lk 9:57-62), begins with Jesus wanting - or rather, giving an order- to cross to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. He is keen to get away from the crowd of people who want something from him. He seems to feel that he has nothing left for them, that he needs to recharge. His reply to the scribe who says he will follow him has such a human, plaintive quality that it breaks my heart a little: “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.”
Stories like this show us that Jesus the man is as complicated as every human. This is the man whose relatives have tried to stop him from preaching, from saying problematic things, from ruffling the feathers of the authorities. They’ve tried to drag him home, proclaiming him out of his mind (Mk 3:21-35). For their troubles, Jesus discounts his blood ties to his family and instead calls his followers his real family. Yikes. Now, we believe and know that Jesus is fully divine and fully human, but sometimes we fail to connect the fully human Jesus to our own fully human hearts and heartaches. Jesus got frustrated. Jesus felt overextended. Jesus got overwhelmed. Jesus felt lonely. We can forget the fragile humanity Jesus once shared with us.
Today’s responsorial psalm takes a correspondingly forlorn tone: “Remember this, you who never think of God.” My first defensive reaction is that, on the contrary, we think of God every time we pray, don’t we? But then I take a breath: Do we really think of God? Many of my prayers involve asking God for help, for strength, for clarity, for grace, for a sign, for something I need. I rarely stop to think about what God may need from me. But since God is God, does God actually need anything from me?
And Jesus answers. He needs me to be a place for him to rest his weary head. He needs me to be a little nest, a little den for him. He needs me to follow him, to call him my brother. And I never know when or where he’ll show up, or in whose face I’ll see him and his need for me. I just have to be ready, as much as my own fragile humanity can allow.
