The Light Yoke, The Easy Burden

I want to write on this idea that the Christian life is so hard and arduous that it somehow cannot at the same time be positive and optimistic…I think this is one of those mysteries where contradicting statements must both be true – that the fruit of the Christian life is peace, love, joy and yet the price of the Christian life is persecution and division. That in the Church we are all part of Christ’s body and yet the wheat and the tares will grow together. That we must embrace hope and faith that in Christ all things come to good for those who love him, and yet every day we experience disappointment and the cost of our own sin. We are both our brother’s keeper and we are commanded to leave judgment to God.

Anyway…thinking about all of these things and trying to figure out where to start sorting out my own thoughts on the subject, I remembered that the pastor at the parish DH and I used to go to had a homily we heard from him on a couple of different occasions that tackled this mystery head on with an exegesis of the verse “my yoke is easy and my burden light.” I looked to see if the homily was available on the parish website and lo and behold, there was the full text.

An excerpt:

How close does Jesus want us to come to Him? He wants us to come close enough so that the yoke is easy and the burden is light, so that our experience of the fruits of the Spirit is real in our life. And what are the three primary fruits of the Spirit that everybody wants: love and joy and peace. Sometimes we delude ourselves into thinking that love and joy and peace is a consequence of a stress free life. Well, the only people that have a stress free life are probably pre-natal folks, and it’s only stress free because they don’t know any better.

Please go and read the whole thing. It was exactly what I needed to read today.