Come to me, all you who labor 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 in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Mt 11:28-29).
Jesus today encourages us to take up the yoke and burden of discipleship, telling us that this yoke is easy and the burden light. Not all will agree. The yoke and burden of Christianity seems hard to many, and to others it seems pointless. How can it be called easy in the face of the difficulties? And what is the value of it? Jesus talks about discipleship here as though it were a liberation. From what?
So many people have a hard time with following Christ. Old habits die hard; vices aren’t easily overcome. Discipleship isn’t easy all at once. One has to work at it and be patient. Conversion shows itself to be a process of coming to be. St. Paul tells us to “walk in newness of life.” That means we are to conduct ourselves, seek to become new persons by fighting against our bad habits in order to build new ones, and thereby become new, better persons.
Shakespeare’s character Hamlet describes the process well. In his conversation with Gertrude, Hamlet tells her to do the right thing just once, and then the second time will be easier. The more she does the right thing, he insists, the easier it will become. He tells his mother, “For use almost can change the stamp of nature.” “Practice makes perfect,” the saying goes, and so it is with virtue. I’m told that within Alcoholics Anonymous they employ the saying, “Fake it till you make it.” All these sayings express the same idea: virtue begins with difficulty, but once the habit begins to take shape, one comes to experience first hand the newness of life described by Saint Paul.
Much the same is true for prayer. Building a habit of prayer is difficult. At first it seems forced, as though praying to the air’ one feels like one is going through the motions. The silence is oppressive, distractions seem relentless. But as one perseveres the perspective changes. We begin to perceive how noisy daily life is, how incessantly the meaningless images of advertising come to us; against the background of the quiet attention of prayer we can better perceive the mindlessness of the chitchat of random encounters, the repetition of daily life. We can see the world and its cycles of work and reward for what they are: important, perhaps, but not all important. And suddenly the silence and peace of prayer can be appreciated. Suddenly the silence and attention of prayer comes to be seen as a refuge. The time one can really be oneself, rather than a cog in the machine of daily life. But one will only experience it this way if he really tries and perseveres.
There’s another important dimension to the lightness of the burden, specifically, the lightness of resentment and the frustration that goes with that. I remember that when Pope Benedict was elected pope one of the first things he mentioned was that Christians were to be characterized by a spirit of forgiveness and a freedom from resentment. In my time as a priest I have seen how weighed down persons are under the burden of resentment and anger, angers pertaining to bad family experiences, bad work circumstances, anger even at God for illness and tragedy. All these are weigh terribly on the soul, and very often make of life a terribly heavy burden. Resentment arises when we see ourselves as victims of the persons who have done us wrong or even God who fails to eliminate hardship and misery.
An essential step in progress towards what St. Paul called “perfect manhood, that maturity which is proportioned to the completed growth of Christ” (Eph 4:13) is our recognition of Christ as the Victim of humanity. This is true of his death on the cross, of course, but it is not restricted to this. Christ is still the victim. In the Eucharistic prayers, for example, Christ is addressed as the victim as he is offered in sacrifice to God the Father. He is not simply one victim among many, but the Victim, i.e., the Victim par excellence, the only one who has a claim to the status of “victim.” When Jesus says that no one knows the Son except those to whom the Father has revealed him, he means, at least in part, that those who know him truly, as he is, know him to be the Victim of humanity. To recognize him as such can only result in our insisting less fervently on our own claims to victim-hood and the indignation that goes with that.
To know Christ in this way is to be released from the hard yoke and heavy burden of resentment and frustration and to take up the light yoke of Christ.
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