Be gentle and humble of heart
San Francisco Archbishop George H. Niederauer delivered the following homily at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral Oct. 3 and at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption Oct. 4.
Beginning this evening and continuing tomorrow, we in San Francisco celebrate the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron of our city and of our archdiocese. It is said that Francis of Assisi is the world’s favorite canonized saint, and that goes for non-Catholics and non-Christians as well. Indeed, Pope Gregory IX enrolled Francis among the saints less than two years after his death. Why? Because of what we hear in our first reading, from the Book of Sirach: if you live your life with humility, “you will be loved more than a giver of gifts.”
The truly humble person lives his or her life putting others first, ahead of self. The humble believer puts God first always. Francis’s simple, profound and pure love for God and all that God created speaks directly to our hearts, in every generation. However, let’s not sentimentally and safely put St. Francis aside as a lovely statue in the garden. In his following of Jesus Christ, Francis of Assisi experienced everything Jesus predicted for his disciples, and more besides.
First, Francis experienced a conversion, a turning around and away from a life of dead- end pleasure seeking to being centered in his beloved Savior. He literally stripped himself of worldly attachments. Francis took literally what Jesus calls each disciple to the Father forever. Francis also received the rare and difficult grace of the stigmata, of bearing in his own body the marks of Christ’s wounds on the Cross. Francis considered himself a rich man, and a happy one. He had so many followers so quickly partly because it was so wonderful to be around him. Francis was rich in the love of God and the love of all God’s children and all God’s creatures. His life echoed St. Paul, in our second reading from the Letter to the Galatians: “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,” a cross that both Paul and Francis met and embraced because of their love for God and God’s people. Francis’s gift of the stigmata enabled him to echo Paul further: “I bear the marks of Jesus in my body.” Francis of Assisi was holy because he tried always to do God’s will, to do what God wanted him to do with the gifts he had given him.
God’s will. What God wants. Those are big ideas. Many people will tell you they know what God really thinks and what God really wants. Preachers like me are famous for doing that. Sometimes we are right, and sometimes we are not. What is the test? It is in the gospel reading today from Matthew. Jesus, God’s divine Son, says, “No one knows the Son except the Father,” and “No one knows the Father but the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals the Father.” This is a big claim, and Jesus begins it with a prayer: “Father, I praise you – you have hidden from the learned and the clever what you have revealed to merest children.” That’s right: the intellectually proud rejected Jesus, but the ordinary folks believed in him, took a chance on him, in large part because he took a chance on them; he treated them as if they mattered. And Francis did the same: he wasn’t ranked among the learned; instead, his simple yet profound faith and hope and love drew people to him as those same gifts had drawn people to Jesus Christ.
Our-gospel reading concludes with some of the most beautiful, gentle and promising words in the Bible: “Come to me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you... Your souls will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden light.”
Some spiritual writers remind us that Jesus of Nazareth was a carpenter, a man who made yokes for oxen in the carpenter shop. Being a good and honest carpenter Jesus knew that some yokes fit perfectly, and did not chafe or hurt the oxen, while others were badly made and harmed them. Jesus knew from experience the meaning of this image for the burdens people bear in life.
By contrast, the burdens or yokes that we place on ourselves, or on each other, or that society places on us, are often very heavy, and those burdens can weaken and wound and even break us. However, God does not ask us to bear any burden that he does not equip us to carry, with the strength that our faith and our sisters and brothers in Christ make possible. God counts on working through us to strengthen others for the bearing of their burdens. That’s why St. Paul, in one of his letters, urges Christians to help carry one another’s burdens. We are graces to one another. If Francis of Assisi had not cooperated with God’s grace in his life, think of how much heavier the burden of doing God’s will would have been for people in his own time, and for each generation since then, deprived of his example and his love.
In this gospel passage, Jesus tells us why we can trust him as our taskmaster: “Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart.” Jesus lived his life, died his death, and rose from the dead so that we might have our sins forgiven and live his life now and forever.
In every age God raises up women and men to remind us again by their lives how gentle and humble and loving Christ is, and wants us to be. God raised up Francis of Assisi in that gentle, humble, loving way, and, 900 years later, we have not forgotten or lost the power of his example. Many feel that Mother Teresa of Calcutta was such a figure in the last century. They are graces, sources of strength for us in our journey of faith.
What does God want? Jesus Christ gives us the answer to that question: God wants life, love and salvation for us now, and forever, in Christ. Not because I say so, but because God has said so in Christ, and goes on saying so, to Francis of Assisi, to you, and to me.
We pray that God will say so to others through you and me as well.
By Archbishop George H. Niederauer
From October 9, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
