He ain't heavy

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be found here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11: 28-30) is an extract from a longer address of the Lord in which He berates the towns of Israel who had heard His preaching and not repented. Woe unto them, is His searing message – no sweetening of the pill from the Lord of all sweetness. And then comes this gentle coda to the chapter, a word of kindness to His little ones: Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. … For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

We are unsure of how to take these words that on their surface are so inviting. Is this how it is really, Lord, we wonder? Can it be this straightforward? It seems all the harder to believe Jesus in this instance because our own experience apparently contradicts His infallible word. After all, if being a disciple were that easy, why aren’t more of us saints? Why aren’t more of us simply just competent at bearing the yoke of the Lord? We remember His other injunction of course: if any man will be my disciple, he must deny himself, take us his cross and follow me… How are we to square this with the ease and lightness of His yoke and burden? We gaze at the sky and we wonder: does it all depend on what mood He is in? How is this so, Lord?

But what we fail to see or to appreciate is that it is not Jesus’ burden that is heavy; it is not His yoke that makes things such a struggle for us; rather, it is our own. Jesus says Follow me, and along we wish to go. But the trouble with us is that we want to bring all our stuff with us, mostly unconsciously although not always. Committing to Him in our grandiloquent prayers, we unconsciously bring our self-centredness with us, our latent assumptions about who are number 1 and number 2 around here (me and Jesus of course). We make our donations to the Lord, and then, in a perverse tribute to His advice, we do not let our righthand see that our lefthand is holding back from giving what it needs to give. Our supposed all is in the end only a fraction. In other words, deep down we give half-heartedly. We want to have our cake and eat it. We love without surrender, and we sacrifice only with calculation.

And thus, we feel the cross and the burdens are heavy. We know none of the lightness that possessed the soul of Jesus, even in His desolation on the Cross. Centred on ourselves, all the forces of the sinner’s gravity weigh on our shoulders; and thus, unwittingly, we are the cause of most of our grief. Our souls bathe not in a liquor of gratitude but in a stew of when will it endism? We feel we deserve better; we have not really considered what we are owed.

Human nature does not change down the ages. It is very much as the fourth-century St Augustine put it in his prayer for Holy Communion:

 

If we examine the evil we have wrought, what we suffer is little, what we deserve is great.

What we have committed is very grievous, what we have suffered is very slight.

 

And, Augustine himself acknowledges in the prayer our inconstancy in resolution:

 

In time of correction we confess our wrongdoing: after Thy visitation we forget that we have wept.

If Thou stretchest forth Thy hand, we promise amendment; if Thou withholdest the sword, we keep not our promise.

 

How then, we wonder, can we know the lightness of His burden and the easiness of His yoke? Here we must surrender to the divine pedagogy, to the training that He offers us every day, making - like Mary our Model - our yes and thank you to Him and in every minute of every day. Deep down, His pedagogy enacts that one great command that Jesus issued to His fisherman followers: put out into the deep. Let go and surrender. In other words, believe the gospel, embrace the path and all that it means for us as individuals … with our own wounds and attachments.

Unless we are gifted by some special grace, this is not the work of one day or one night; it is not the work of one prayer or one retreat. How could we learn of Him – the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end – in so short a time? Through this slow discipleship, the reality of our becoming Him, conformed to His image, becoming an icon of the Father to others, can be seen in all its incarnational reality.

Only slowly do we set down our own burdens, shed our false selves, and become the dream that the Father had of us from all time. Only gradually will we know just how light and easy are the burdens of Christ. And then, and only then, please God, He will give us rest.