14^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 5, 2020 – Zechariah 9: 9-10; Romans 8: 9, 11-13; Matthew 11: 25-30

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …” and the quote ends, “ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Most people know that those are the words on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Fewer people know that that’s the second stanza of a long poem called “ The New Colossus .” And not too many people know who wrote it.

Her name was Emma Lazarus. Emma Lazarus was a Jewish woman who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. But unlike many other Jewish people of her time, she was not an immigrant. Her family was here for about fifty years before the Revolutionary War. They were not poor; they left Europe to avoid persecution both from Catholics and from Protestants. They came here and they did well for themselves. Her family was wealthy, she was homeschooled, she spoke several languages fluently, and she had a massive career as a writer of essays, criticism, poetry, and novels. And she hobnobbed with some of the other famous writers of her time – Thoreau, Emerson, Henry James – they all knew each other. Among her friends was a woman named Rose Hawthorne Lathrop. If you hear the Hawthorne in there that tells you that there’s a connection there to another famous writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Rose Hawthorne was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter. She did the unthinkable. She became a Catholic. And she became a Dominican sister. And she was a very good friend of Emma Lazarus, and Emma of her. It was because of Emma Lazarus’ concern for the poor, the tireless fighting on their behalf, that Sister Rose decided to open the cancer hospital we now know as Calvary, in Westchester County. It is one of the most merciful places for a person to spend their last days if they have cancer. Not only that, but Sister Rose is now a candidate for sainthood. She might not have become who she became, she might not now be a candidate for sainthood if it hadn’t been for her Jewish friend, Emma Lazarus.

Why did Emma call her poem “ The New Colossus”? It’s a strange name for a poem, except that, in the nineteenth century people were much more familiar with ancient history than they are now. The OLD Colossus was the Colossus of Rhodes. Rhodes is a little, tiny island off the eastern coast of Greece, right at the bottom of western Turkey. Back about three hundred years before the birth of Christ, it was put under siege by one of the most powerful empires of the day, Macedon. If you look at a map, Rhodes is this little tiny speck and Macedonia takes up a huge, huge portion of the map. This huge superpower has descended with all its might on this little tiny island, but one of the paradoxes of history is that the islanders withstood the siege for so long that the Macedonians gave up. In thanksgiving to their gods, for being rescued from the siege – for enduring it – they took all the siege equipment that was left behind, and they built a statue. The statue was as tall as the Statue of Liberty is today. And it was built over the harbor, this little tiny port, between the mainland and the island of Rhodes. It was built as a thanksgiving to the sun god, Helios. The people said that it was built because the sun god gave them freedom. So Emma called her poem about the Statue of Liberty, “ The New Colossus,” because here is another noble person holding up the light of freedom, and justice, and liberty for everybody.

Why do I tell you this story, aside from the fact that it’s the Fourth of July? Because of the first reading. I said a couple of minutes ago, jokingly, about the palms, that it’s a good thing I put them out today, because today’s first reading is a template for Jesus entering into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

The book of the prophet Zechariah is one of the shortest books, and he’s one of the least important prophets of the Old Testament. Yet there are several passages that are used in helping us to understand Jesus. And what was said this morning was this, “Look, your King shall come to you: a just savior is he, meek, and riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass.” What’s so peculiar about that is that conquering kings never entered in procession to the capitol city on a donkey; they used a beautiful horse to show their might and power. So Zechariah is cueing his people in to the fact that this rescuer, this king, is going to be very different. He’s not going to rely on power; he’s going to rely on the virtue of humility. And it’s precisely that that Jesus was imitating when He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, riding on a donkey.

So what’s the point of it? Well, in today’s Gospel, Jesus begins with praise of His Father. He says, “I give You thanks that You did not reveal these things – His preachings – to the learned and the clever, to the mighty of the world, but rather to those who feel powerless, the little ones.” After He says that, then he says, “Come to me, you who feel burdened, laboring, and I will give you rest.” Now most of us have been trained to hear that as a sort of “me and Jesus” thing - I’m really feeling down and troubled, I go and talk to Jesus, and I’ll be ok again. That may be true to a certain extent, but that’s not what the Gospel’s all about. What the Gospel’s all about is something that St. Paul helps us to understand, in the second reading. Paul begins the little passage we heard for the second reading by saying, “You are not in the flesh, you are in the spirit, if only the spirit of Christ dwells in you.” What does that mean? Well, we were trained to think that the soul is locked in the body, and finally, when we die, it’s going to escape and go home to God. So body bad, soul good. That has nothing to do with real Christian teaching at all.

When St. Paul uses the word “body” and “spirit,” he’s not opposing them as parts of the same person. For St. Paul and for all Christians of the first century, flesh meant everything – your physical body, your mind, and your heart. Everything that makes up the human person was flesh. It becomes spirit through Jesus’ redemption. So after the crucifixion and resurrection, all those who follow Jesus, their body, their mind, and their heart, are all spirit, if only the spirit of Christ dwells within them. We can turn ourselves away from this gift that we’ve been given, but if we hold onto that gift, it means that, when we find those who are heavily burdened, troubled, sad, we have within us the power to deal with that.

And on this July4th weekend, what do we find in America? We find people who are heavily burdened by illness or the result of illness, heavily burdened by grief for the loved ones they’ve lost, heavily burdened by violence, heavily burdened by the feeling that in the land of the free and the home of the brave they are not free and they are not safe. We find people heavily burdened by the difficulty of governing, the difficulty of fulfilling the mandates of the Constitution. We find people who are burdened by the challenges of law enforcement. We find people who are burdened because they’ve lost their job and don’t know if they’re going to get another. This whole mass of burdens rests upon our people this weekend. To the extent that you and I are, as St. Paul says, “in the spirit,” we are challenged to help lift people’s burdens. And only when we find ourselves completely stymied, do we then turn to this One who said, “Come to me,” and He will lift our burdens. Because He, Jesus, is the true New Colossus.