The “Rest” of Our Lives

A homily for the 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time

When Jesus says to his disciples, and to each on of us: “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest awhile.” He isn’t inviting us to some nostalgic summer holiday on the coast, at the lake house or in the mountain cottage, but he is inviting us into the Rest of our Lives. The Rest that is so necessary for the life of our world today.

There is a restlessness that resides within us, between us and among us. It is not just the inability to settle down and be still, but rather it is about the innate human struggle to “allow God full room for acting as the true creator of our being.” The Rest Christ invites us into is the rest that requires a radical reversal. We must surrender our own devising and let God lead. The Rest of Christ is the Rest of our Lives, the Rest that is Life, and the Rest that gives Life.

We see daily the results of our deep-down restlessness fueled by our own blind insistence that we depend on our own devising: Hateful rhetoric, Political violence, Tribalism and the kind of Fake Goodness that is dependent on the sacrifice of those who are not like us; to bring us some sense of fragile peace that actually has no roots so it withers and dies as soon as it’s born.

As men and women who believe… who desire to put our lives at stake for the sake of Christ… we have been given such a great gift: the gift of the Rest of our Lives. And St. Paul captures it so brilliantly for us today as he writes:

“For he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh, abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims, that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross putting that enmity to death by it.”

We are, you and I, the “one new person” created in Christ. As Thomas Merton once so beautifully wrote: “My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

We don’t need to go looking for it. We don’t need to take a class, read a book, buy into the latest ideology or political agenda. The enmity that Christ has already reconciled by his cross is the divided hearts in each of us. It is in such divided hearts where the culture of death finds its source. But Jesus has broken down the dividing wall in me, in you, and between me and you, between us and them. You are the “one new person.” I am the “one new person.” We are the “one new person.” Jesus has given us the peace that is the Rest of our Lives, the Rest that is Life, and the Rest that gives Life.

We human beings, though, like to complicate things unnecessarily. I don’t know why. I suppose it gives us some sense of control, some means by which we can justify our behavior or excuse it. A mechanism by which we can determine who deserves what, who is in and who is out, who belongs and who doesn’t.

Perhaps the one thing we don’t want to accept is just how disturbingly simple it all is. If your heart is divided your life will cause division and if your heart is healed (as Christ has already healed it) your life will work reconciliation in the world. But are we willing to accept this radical simplicity? Are we willing to resist our dependence on our own devising and give Go full room to act as the true Creator of our being? Are we willing to enter into that Rest to which Christ beckons us today: the Rest of our Lives, the Rest that is Life, the Rest that gives Life.

Jesus says, strikingly, elsewhere in the gospels: “If your light is darkness, how great will that darkness be.” I would add, if our unity is division (if our sense of union is dependent on division and exclusion) how great will that division be. And the culture of death will rage on.

As Merton wrote: “All we have to be is what we are.” Men and women already made one by the cross of Christ. Each of us, every day, is walking around with the answer to the division in our world already resting in our undivided hearts. But will we surrender our own devising, our own over-complications, and live in the simple truth: We are already one.