Our Venerable and God-bearing Father Sabbas the Sanctified (532)
Nativity Fast.
Read
Galatians 5:22-6:2; Matthew 11:27-30
Today’s gospel is chosen for the feast of St. Sabbas: it’s a passage from Matthew that is read on the feasts of monks. At first glance, this passage seems an odd choice: the concluding line (“my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”) doesn’t seem to jive with the difficult lives of the great monks and nuns of Christian history. After all, Sabbas’s claim to fame was the founding of a monastery where the monks spent all week alone in small caves, praying and fasting, and only gathered on Saturdays and Sundays – and even then, they spent most of their time in vigils that lasted all night. Sounds like a life filled with difficult yokes and heavy burdens.
Yet the life of St. Sabas paints a somewhat more complex picture. While the saint is certainly hard on himself, he is often gentle with his disciples, and especially with the local villages and Bedouin nomads who visit his monastery (and, after his death, his tomb) looking for help. Perhaps the great monastic saints, by rejecting the world and its comforts, came to discover that being yoked to the Lord was, paradoxically, much easier than any other type of life they could have chosen. Through their struggles, they were being recreated into new men and women, and thus were able to truly enter into the rest of the Lord, the rest prefigured by God on the first Sabbath of creation and promised to all who fully enter into Christ’s kingdom.