For My Yoke is Easy and My Burden Light
I don’t know about you, but every time I hear the Gospel reading1 that promises us that His yoke is easy and His burden light, I find myself a little skeptical. Don’t get me wrong, I believe Jesus when he says this. I’m just not sure if I know what he means…because from my experience, when I’m in trouble or when I’ve witness illness in others, the burden neither seems easy nor light.
The truth is, in order to experience this easy yoke that Jesus promises, we have to first do something. The best example I have is a common experience that I suspect many of you have undertaken—the team-building exercise of dividing into small groups of, say, ten individuals, and each person taking a turn falling backwards and letting the rest of the team catch you and lower you to safety.
I myself have done this—just once. It was when I was in college; I was a resident assistant or “RA,” one of those who were in charge of disciplining and counseling the residents on a floor of one of the many dorms at the University of Texas. Every new academic year, all of the resident assistants had to arrive about a week earlier than the rest of the student body for our training and to meet the other RAs with whom we would be working in our dorms. And to help build trust among team members, we did this very exercise of falling backwards and letting the rest of the team catch us. I have to admit, it wasn’t too bad…except for the one and a half seconds of experiencing the fall, even though I knew the rest of the team was right there, ready to catch me no matter what. And I was surprised at how easily they carried me—I thought my weight would be much heavier for them than it turned out to be the case.
If you think about it, we experience pain in our soul as well as our body. When we experience fear, sure, our body trembles, but our soul experiences the fear and the doubt. And when we are sick or burdened, yes, our body feels the painful symptoms, but it is our soul that experiences the deeper suffering of anguish and despair. And it is this burden on our soul that Our Lord desires to make light for us. But, as I mentioned before, we have to first do something. And that “something” is the soul’s equivalent of the falling backward, or purging ourselves, or whatever you want to call the process of letting go of any self-reliance and putting all of our trust in God. It is then that Christ can be our all.
A soul cannot experience the strength and power of God’s will until it has placed itself in His providential hands by casting its burden, its whole weight upon Him, Who alone can bear our burden. That’s when we experience it—the easy joke and the light burden promised to those who trust in Him.
1 Matthew 11:28–30.
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