Archbishop's Message

“Come to Me all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden light (Mt.11:28-29).”

These are the gracious words uttered by the incarnate Eternal Son of God with the human lips of His Sacred Heart to every human person who has accepted ‘the yoke’ of the Lord God’s covenantal commandments but experiences difficulty and failure in fulfilling their demands while endeavouring to enter into the eternal rest of His promised salvation: “For the needy who groan and the poor who are oppressed, I Myself shall arise, says the Lord, with the salvation for which they thirst (Ps.12:8).” Surprisingly, in contradistinction to this ‘yoke’ of the Sinai covenant, the incarnate Son of God speaks of His yoke and guarantees that every person who accepts the yoke of His new covenant in the Holy Spirit, will not only enter the rest of His Eternal Father’s promised salvation but will also find delight in fulfilling the demands of His yoke! What then is the yoke of the new covenant in the Holy Spirit that the Son of God Jesus counsels us to accept from Him? It is the denial of the ‘self’ that every human person experiences in his or her very consciousness and names it ‘myself’: “If any one would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.” This ‘self’ is not the human person existing and expressing himself or herself in his or her human soul with its innate need for eternal life with the Eternal Father which God’s incarnate Son seeks to fulfil through His high-priestly work and compassionate zeal of His Sacred Heart. It is the psychological and psychosomatic self, constituted of three sinful needs condemned by God but unceasingly created by the Devil and his angels in the intimacy of one’s own human consciousness to express oneself against the Eternal Father in His own created world: ‘the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life (1 Jn.2:15).’ And the mind of this self, the flesh, ‘is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed it cannot (Rom.8:7).’