LEAN YOUR WEIGHT ON GOD
Isaiah 66:10-14c; Galatians 6:14-18; Luke 10:1-12, 17-20
A missionary, after working several years in the South Pacific Islands, was translating the Gospel according to John. He couldn’t translate the phrase “to trust in” because there was no word for ‘trust’ in the language; nobody trusted the other!
Just then an islander entered. Sitting at his desk, the missionary raised both feet off the floor, and asked: “What am I doing?” The islander used a verb which means “to lean your weight on.” That’s the phrase the missionary used to translate “to trust in.”
The Word of God today invites us to lean our weight on the Lord.
In the Gospel, Jesus sends out seventy-two disciples to proclaim the kingdom. His instructions are striking: “carry no staff, no money bag, no sack, no sandals.” No one in his/her right mind travelled the Palestinian roads without staff, sack, and sandals. Without a staff, one was defenceless; without a sack, one could not carry money, food, clothes; without sandals, one wouldn’t be able to walk on the rocky terrain or run from danger. Anyone thus travelling would communicate, through attention-getting behaviour, this message: we lean our weight on God; we trust in God for our defence and depend on his providence for sustenance.
Paul concludes his letter to the Galatians with a similar thrust: “May I never boast except in the cross of Jesus Christ.” For Paul, boasting is an expression of absolute confidence, not in himself, but in Jesus.
In the first reading, Isaiah looks to the restoration of Jerusalem, not by human achievement but by God’s grace. He invites her to lean her weight on God, who nurses her as a mother nurses her infant and who comforts her as a mother comforts her child.
How often we think that the success of our tasks depends on us! We need to lean our weight on God; we need to depend on him.
May you and I “travel light,” lean our weight of God, and live a little more trustingly in him, his grace, and his providence.
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