Sunday Gospel Reflection, October 4, 2026: Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened...

Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened…
How do we come before the Lord? 

    In the case of St. Francis of Assisi, the Patron of San Francisco whose solemnity we celebrate this weekend, the answer was straightforward. Unlike Israel, whom God has put on trial for their infidelity in the Book of the Prophet Micah, Francis knew that he should come before the Lord, and bow before God most high with humility and virtue. As Micah tells the people: You have been told, O mortal, what the Lord requires of you: only to do justice and to love goodness and to walk humbly with your God. Francis let go of all he possessed in order to walk humbly with God, in order to understand all that God was calling him to. 

    St. Francis was able to, in the words of Psalm 16, say to the Lord, my Lord are you; you are my only good. The psalmist celebrates the fact that God and his rule over mankind are more important than any other inheritance. God counsels him, leads him, and cares for him; even in the night the psalmist’s heart exhorts him, urging him forward, toward God, that God might show him the path to life, abounding joy in God’s presence. Francis of Assisi found his joy in the Lord, as, on our best days, do we. 

    Yet St. Francis was not without suffering. Like Paul, whose scars spoke to the Galatians of his participation in Jesus’ suffering, Francis bore the marks of Jesus on his body in the form of the stigmata. Such marks proclaimed that Francis found his identity in Christ: the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world, as Paul writes. In the cross, Francis found salvation. 

   In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus speaks to those who have accepted his revelation of God’s love in the world: Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Unlike the yoke of the law that burdens the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus’ yoke allows Jesus to bear the weight of our struggles with us, walking beside us, guiding us along right paths. The Son of God, meek and humble of heart, was Francis’ invitation to become the vehicle by which God’s message would be transmitted to the world. Unlike the wise and learned who rejected Jesus, Francis saw himself as a humble instrument of God, obedient not out of fear but out of choice, full of faith in the Savior who died for him, and ready to live the message of Jesus’ love for the world with the whole of his being. 

    We come before Jesus laboring and heavily burdened, but, like our patron St. Francis of Assisi, we come with open hearts, ready to receive the revelation as ones to whom the Son wishes to reveal the Father. May we do so in humble obedience, accepting the Lord’s peace and mercy as we follow his rule, conforming our life to Christ’s. 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Our highest calling (Pope Francis / ullie-kaye)

     History teaches that pride, careerism, vanity and ostentation are the causes of many evils. And Jesus helps us to understand the necessity of choosing the last place, that is, of seeking to be small and hidden: humility. When we place ourselves before God in this dimension of humility, God exalts us, he stoops down to us so as to lift us up to himself; “For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” 

--Pope Francis 

                How ironic –
               that our highest calling is humility.
               To give quietly.
               To pray behind closed doors.
               To live small.
               To be like the lilies of the field
               and the birds of the air.
               To carry our crosses daily.
               To choose the road less traveled.
               To cherish the ordinary day. 

               The only thing we need to do
               with wild extravagance –
               is love. 

 --ullie-kaye                                           

Image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/MostBeautiful/comments/feuzwy/field_of_lilies/#lightbox Quotation source
Poem source

Surrendering our agendas (Jackie Bacon)

     What does being humble, being broken, have to do with our Gospel reading? Jesus shares the parable of the two sons, addressing this parable to the chief priests and elders of the people. We find the father requesting of his sons, “Go out and work in the vineyard”. The first son disrespectfully replies, “I will not” and then, changing his mind, works in the vineyard that day. Son #2, when asked, replies, “Yes Sir,” yet does not go. 

    What does this parable tell us? Both sons had the same Father who wanted them to be active and productive, to go out and work in the Vineyard… to improve it. The first son is not only disrespectful, he is impudent. His needs clearly come first, before the needs of his father. Even though he changes his mind and repents, thus doing his father’s work, his words and his actions are at odds. This incongruity diminishes who he is. 

    At first blush the second son is respectful. Yet he either forgets his commitment or he has lied. His words and actions are not in harmony and he, too is fragmented,  diminished. 

    In our Gospel, Jesus chastises those who dress in fine robes and accessories, the chief priests and elders who claim to be authorities on God. When John the Baptist, as scruffy as he is, points to the path of righteousness, these same chief priests and elders, do not believe, they act in ways that will NOT allow them to enter the Kingdom of God. There is a disconnect between their words and their actions. 

    We need to surrender our expectations, the notion that we are in charge. We need to surrender our agendas, our ambitions, our bitterness and our anger when our expectations are not met. We need to surrender our fears, and we need to surrender those fears that become anger. We need to humble our hearts… for we are not in charge. 

 --Jackie Bacon,
OLMC Communion Service

Image source: https://aleteia.org/2017/10/07/am-i-helping-the-church-be-fruitful/

The Kingdom of God is among us (Fr. Dave Ghiorso)

    Jesus remind us that the Kingdom of God is not something you can point to on a map, that the Kingdom of God is among us. It’s not built with walls or boundaries, but with hearts that love and serve. 

    When Jesus says, The Kingdom of God is among you, he means wherever compassion, faith, self-giving, love flourish, there is the Kingdom, breaking in. 

    Maybe today, we can pray that, living ordinary lives, sometimes difficult lives, we will always do so with a firm commitment and firm belief that the Kingdom resides in each and every one of us, so people will say, Truly God is among us. 

--Fr. Dave Ghiorso,
Homily, November 13, 2025

Image source: https://elmhurstdaycare.com/2020/04/01/teaching-children-the-importance-of-kindness/

Against his own obstinacy (Fr .Peter John Cameron)

   Against his own obstinacy and resistance, the son [in today's parable] who initially refused changes his mind and goes to the vineyard. Perhaps he senses how untrue he is being to himself — to his very meaning and purpose. St. Augustine says that “weak people are those who appear to be zealous in doing good works but are unwilling or unable to endure the sufferings that threaten.” And maybe the refusing son does not want to be like that. 

    His decision to go to the vineyard is an act of obedience. Obedience is not slavery. Obedience is a loving surrender to Another who enables me to be myself. “Obedience,” instructs St. Gregory the Great, “is the way that we overcome ourselves in our heart.” Without the Father’s invitation to obedience, we would never be able to overcome the false self, and then the hope for happiness would be forever impossible. 

    The son goes to the vineyard because that is where the father is. And “by the background radiation of a father’s presence,” writes Catholic journalist John Waters, “a father lets his children become themselves. A father is one who leaves spaces for the competences of his children to grow.” 

    We change our mind and go into the vineyard so that there we can experience “the radiation of fatherhood”: “One must enter the radiation of fatherhood, since only there does everything become fully real” (Pope Saint John Paul II). 

--Fr. Peter John Cameron, OP 

Image source: https://parishableitems.com/2023/09/30/the-parable-of-two-sons-jesus-christ-us/
Quotation source

The unity of love (Karl Rahner)

        We are those who have been called away from the loneliness and isolation of the individual into the unity of the love and grace of God. So we must be in the everyday world too. We cannot pray here together if outside we cannot get on together in love and mutual trust, associate in mutual forbearance. 

--Karl Rahner,
Mary, Mother of God

Image source: Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Mill Valley, April 28, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1434955155336561&set=a.1434956835336393

What is the lesson here? (Ryan Di Corpo)

   The Swiss theologian Ulrich Luz writes that our understanding of this Sunday’s Gospel—which features the Parable of the Two Sons—is influenced by which son we consider its focus. 

   

    In Matthew 21, Jesus is scrutinized by the chief priests and elders, who question his teaching. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they ask him (v. 23). When they cannot come up with an answer, Jesus tells them the story of two sons: the first, who initially refuses to work in his father’s vineyard but then relents, and a second, who promises to work but does not follow through. 

    The chief priests and elders say that only the first son obeyed his father. Jesus then utters the famous reply: “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you” (v. 31). 

    What is the lesson here? Is Jesus, through the example of the first son, calling us to turn towards him and away from sin? Or is he rather, by way of the second son, chastising people who say one thing and then do another? “Depending on one’s decision,” writes Luz, “our parable is either an exhortation to repentance or a warning against disobedience.” 

    When interrogated by Jewish authorities, Christ is teaching in the temple—which is technically controlled by his questioners. Jesus’s divine authority, given to him by the Father, clashes with the temporal authority of his biblical opponents. Furthermore, the chief priests and elders are specifically skeptical of preaching by John the Baptist, whose power they also view critically.

    Luz writes that Jesus forces the Jewish leaders to select the more righteous son, implying that there is a right and wrong answer. The first son initially refuses to obey his father, but has a change of heart, while the temple leaders both reject John the Baptist and then also fail to correct their error. 

    Therefore, Luz notes, Jesus designates his interrogators as “worse than both sons of the parable,” despite their lofty standing in Jerusalem. Greater than the chief priests and elders, then, are the pariahs of Jesus’s time—people on the margins who accepted the words of John the Baptist and embraced Christ. The faithful “go ahead” (προάγω) of those who wield power on earth. 

--Ryan Di Corpo 

Image source: https://sfodan.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/%E2%80%9Clet-us-walk-and-talk-together%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93matthew-2128-32%E2%80%A0/
Quotation source