The Jewish people at the time of Jesus suffered greatly under the yoke of the Pharisees. These self-important, and to a large extent self-appointed, religious leaders placed some heavy burdens upon the people while finding many opportunities to excuse themselves from the same burdens. As the faithful sincerely sought to follow the laws, the demands placed upon them became onerous, causing many people great distress.

At the same time there was the genuine pursuit of Wisdom – the true teaching from God – that had been introduced and promised in the more recent writings of the Sacred Scriptures. The Pharisees, unlike the Sadducees, accepted those writings (e.g. Ecclesiastes) as canonical scripture.

In a sense, there is the tension between Wisdom as the pursuit of God’s truth and obedience to the Law of Moses as the means of salvation. Jesus offers them another way, one that provides both an insight into Wisdom and the means of salvation.

In his development of the Gospel, St. Matthew draws our attention to the teaching of Jesus. We have come to that point in the Gospel where we are transitioning from one section of teaching to another and one where we will begin to see Jesus preaching in the parabolic style instead of the didactic form as in the Sermon on the Mount. This passage then stands as a further explanation of who Jesus is and what his message is for both the Jewish people and his other disciples.

While the learned (i.e., Pharisees and Sadducees) are seen as rejecting Jesus and his message as something apart from Judaism, Jesus tells the crowds that it is the learned who have rejected God’s revelation in their midst. The prayer of Jesus to the Father in thanksgiving for the “little ones” (literally infants) places them in a favorable juxtaposition from the learned ones. Those who seek wisdom have found it; those who think they have wisdom have instead rejected it.

At the same time Jesus tells the little ones to reject the yoke of the Pharisees. The interpretation of the Law of Moses, that the Pharisees were more burdensome than freeing. Jesus invited them to take his yoke for it is easy and light. Jesus called his followers to find their rest in him.

This is a fair and important warning for us. While Jesus does not discount the value of Law – and indeed lays down his own very expansive interpretation of the law in the Sermon on the Mount – Jesus does not see law as an end in itself. The law is meant to be liberating and not burdensome. While it is true that we have some strict interpretations of law, and some of the laws of Christianity and of the Catholic Church might seem to be onerous and as burdensome as those of the Jews, the teaching of the Church is that law is always tempered by mercy and justice.

As disciples of Jesus we are called to faithfulness and to do our best to live out the demands of the Gospel and the precepts of the Church. We do not do so alone nor do we do so merely to follow a law. Unlike the Pharisees who wore extensive phylacteries to show their strength in holding up the law, we are called to show lives of mercy and humility and to seek justice in following Jesus.

We must all be careful of placing stumbling blocks in the way of those who seek an authentic relationship with Christ and his Church, for his task is easy and his burden is light.

July 13 – What kind of soil is dominant in your heart?

The great parable of the sower and the seed becomes almost too obvious for anyone familiar with the text. Jesus teaches a parable which seems simple enough to understand. In his Gospel, Matthew makes sure that he includes Jesus’ own exegesis of the parable. In a sense this parable seems not to be open to further or other interpretation.

Nonetheless, we might attempt to probe around the parable to see what else might lie in there.

If we take the basic sense that the soil represents the hearts of the hearers, we might continue to think of our own disposition to the teaching of the Gospel. Each of us is a disciple of Jesus, and each of us has those areas of our faith life that are open, fertile and ready to blossom. For each of us, that might be a different section of our heart – someone might be enthusiastic for Eucharistic adoration, another at the study of Scripture, perhaps another enjoys being of service to the poor, while another is vigilant in social concerns.

This is the seedbed of our lives where the Gospel has really taken root. Here we dismiss the importance of any of the aforementioned examples or any other dutiful and proper form of discipleship. We might even find ourselves criticizing or mocking those who prefer a discipleship style different than our own.

Often in our lives we hear the Gospel on rocky ground. There are many times when we enthusiastically respond to something new, but then seem to shut it down in favor of the familiar routine in relatively short order. This happens perhaps when we hear a good homily or a fired up speaker only to bore ourselves with the details later. Some of us sign up for everything and show up for nothing.

Even more challenging are the thorny places of our hearts. This is where we turn off a message from the Gospel because we don’t want to be challenged by it. We are too certain that our own way is the best and only way to be a good Catholic that we dismiss as lesser and perhaps as sinful the other ways. If your priorities aren’t mine then yours are wrong. This is a very dangerous, divisive and yet not uncommon response to other Catholics and other Christians.

The challenge for each of us is to know our hearts. We are called to look into our own style of discipleship and to allow ourselves to grow and change. For all of us our hearts are comprised of different kinds of soil – paths, rocks, thorns and rich fertile soil. The exact percentage of each kind of soil is unique to each of us. We must each come to know the areas of life where we need to plough over the paths, rocks and thorns so that we might create within ourselves more and more rich soil so that we might bear more fruit. This is not an easy task, but certainly one that we must all undertake with much haste.

Father Garry Koch is parochial vicar of St. Joseph Parish, Toms River.