Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (2)

Burdenless burden

burdensome + light

yoke stiffling neck like ox sweaty labor tugging... that is restful

Word absolute + true, [fade]

daily walk

but often pass w/o second look

fade into background

SO shock w/ paradoxes

Lord mean by a burdensome yoke is easy and gives rest?

His yoke..cross

easy give up pleasures

restful ridiculed by loved ones and world

light, as the blood of martyrs sands of the arena?

yes.…but how?

Ever feeling of 0 G?

how achieve beside space

dream,

pool,

free falling

Falling love is aptly ‘falling’

all things seem light

even sacrifices 4 beloved

although this feeling isnt actual love

emotions teach reality they symbolize

feeling of fear (not fear) pushes us to think something harmful

feeling of joy (not joy) pushes us to act like we have a good

feeling of love (not love) pushes us to abandon all for someone

Real fall

Real love, not feeling, is free fall, not just feel

b/c love involves letting go of everything for God

no more burdens, all is let go

all background concerns focused will on the thing loved

Free fall in all except the place of safe and place of harm are reversed.

Unlike a physical material cliff No splat, no security in standing on cliff’s edge.

jump off this spiritual cliff and soul fly up away from danger rather than stuck in the muck of earth

Fear

fear the wrong thing, loss of the earthy edge standing on

leap of faith (the loving God above all else) looks terrifying

as you look over the edge, things fly over:

fasting from luxurious foods,

kneeling on a floor for a while,

emptying pockets to poor,

being thought weird by former friends

maybe martyr

passing, things you will fly over in life if heart remains in God

seen in love of God, even the heaviest yokes you take on for God become joys because done for the Good

plus, all burdens believers and the faithless all are yoked with: age, disease, loss of loved ones

more bearable than any other way of life

yes leap of love, and constant little leaps might be hard

like

ice water,

pulling a tooth

But great peace (which nothing in world can give) follows, even in this life to heart firmly attached to God above every thing

ONLY by very leap into yoke Christ become lighter than air.

For us

What heavy weights tightly gripping to? what firmly have feet planted on? Lessen the grip, let those worries all melt away as the will (which is our act of love) turns to God above all

Light and easy.. This is the burden our Lord speaks of. Light and easy. What does he mean by this? How is it light and easy? Cannot set aside Scripture. The Word of the Lord is absolute and true. But He loves parables, stories that leave you stretching your head, taking a second look. We pass over his sayings often. We take them for granted like familiar sights on a walk. So what does our Lord mean by his cryptic words: easy and light? Easy to give up so many pleasures? Light to be ridiculed by loved ones and the world? ‘Easy’ as the blood of martyrs spilled on the parched dust of the coliseum’s floor? Was our Lord’s yoke of yokes, light and easy as he drug it as it grinded across the paths of Jerusalem? Are we really to think His burden is light and easy?... yes Falling in Love. Very appropriately named. It even has that feeling of a free fall, where all things seem light as a feather. Emotionally, all that seems to matter is the one you’ve fallen for. As you free fall, all of life’s obstacles seem light. You sit there and even think of sacrificing your very life for them as something joyful, a highlight a summit achievement in your life. Why do these great and heavy sacrifices suddenly become light? Because of the free fall. You let go of all other things but the one loved. You have to let go of them in order to free fall. Suddenly everything else just passes by you on your fall that you would have once cleaned harder to. Now you let go.

Though emotional, we can learn how to act from this experience of infatuation. We must choose to free fall for God. Not the emotions, good as they are, no, but the same action of free falling. Let go of all other things but God. Trust in Him and Him alone.

If you love Him above all things will you still face obstacles? Yes. Might you even face a martyrs death? Yes, but all else passes by easily for its not something you cling to. You accept it, and even rejoice being able to give greater and greater expressions of love in sacrifice. So, in this sacrifice of the priest and yours, offer your self up to God, abandon yourself to Him as he abandoned his life for you. Though a narrow path hard path, the door to it is like jumping into ice cold water or squeezing through a keyhole, once you are over that hurdle, it is light and easy as long as you can stay on it.

Notes:

Me:

weight of sophisticated learning and legalism to be abandonned.

though better than ignorant vice, this human virtue is not enough and is a barrier too

need to give all over.

exceed scribes and pharisees

if just following those 615 precepts, have really given ALL over?

this final surrender actually makes all these precepts second nature, not scrupulous observance

Not following acts, but a internal will [Jerome]

what one desires is not burdensome.

wrote observance doesnt please

Knowledge doesnt please

external good acts dont please

only singular will, rest from all else and even there u find rest

following Him

so doctrines are true and those who follow him always follow doctrines, but not about salvation in particular doctrine but him [work on this idea]

not wallowing in shallow comfort sentimentalism

uses good rhetoric: ill give rest, take yoke upon you..

Gospel is harder, not easier in regards to law

ASK:

(deep in core of your heart) doing this for God?

Promise is God will provide for such a person (seek ye first and all else)

Commentators:

Erasmo

the sophisticated and learned, but instead to inarticulate

learning obstacle when makes one store knowledge as if found it all and not constant nourishment

legalism as a “self-indulgent ...willfulness”

so obviously exhausting

[basically: life of Christ is not virtue, but total surrender to God]

Fathers

wisdom not to self-arrogating, but to humble

not to be taken as anti-intellectual