The path Israel, God's chosen people, walks is difficult. Often this path is "against the goads" (to quote the Lord's words to Paul himself), a path of resistance to God's will. The apostle has already said much about this in his letter, and his pain for his kinsmen according to the flesh, for his brothers and sisters, is very great. And yet, speaking about the reasons that led to Israel's falling away from God, Paul persistently reminds us: yes, they fell away, but God did not take His election from them; God calls them, and Christ died for them as well. More than that, it is very important for the apostle to convey to the Roman community, and through it to all other Christians converted from paganism, an essential warning: one must remember the fate of those who fell away from God and draw the proper conclusions from it. And the chief thing from which he wants to protect the newborn Church is the disease of boasting.

Our personal encounter with the Lord is always an immense gift. At first we walk around stunned by grace unexpectedly received. I think we all remember the happiness of realizing divine love and forgiveness, on the one hand, and the undeservedness of this gift, our unworthiness, on the other. Yet human beings are made in such a way that they easily and gladly remember the first, and just as easily forget the second. And when we look at our brothers and sisters who for one reason or another turn away from God and fall away from the Church, we want to say to ourselves: well, that will not happen to me; it cannot happen.

And here it is, the message to us from the apostle Paul: "They were broken off because of unbelief, but you stand by faith. Do not be proud, but fear." Do not look at your brother's path; "before his own Lord he stands or falls" (Rom. 14:4). He has his own relationship with God, and the Creator's design for each of us is completely unique. Look at yourself, watch yourself, and fear falling away from the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Jesus sometimes describes the Kingdom in a completely astonishing, paradoxical way. What, for example, are we to make of a "good yoke" or a "light burden"! And yet such definitions very accurately describe what the Kingdom is for fallen humanity.

For a normal person, hardly anything positive can be associated with a yoke: in the original sense of the word, a yoke is a collar symbolically placed on an enslaved person as a sign of the person's new condition. And a burden is more readily associated in our minds with a weight that must be carried simply because it cannot be thrown off, and certainly not with the lightness of being. Yet for fallen human nature the Kingdom really is a burden, just as the fallen person can walk the path into the Kingdom only by taking upon himself what the learned rabbis of those times called the "yoke of the Torah."

On Jesus' lips, the "yoke of the Torah" becomes the "yoke of the Kingdom," for the same inner struggle is in view, the struggle characteristic of every fallen person who wants to walk the way of righteousness. It is no accident that Paul also said that through the Torah comes the knowledge of sin: it is precisely the attempts to walk the way of righteousness, to follow the Torah, that reveal to a person his true sinful nature, and then the way of righteousness becomes hard, and the Torah becomes a yoke voluntarily taken upon oneself.

But Jesus speaks of more: He brought into the world not the Torah, which the world knew before His coming, but the Kingdom, where the one walking the way of righteousness could finally receive relief by reaching the goal. Now even the burden of one's own sinfulness, which begins to be felt only when one tries to keep the commandments, becomes light, for now not only the fallen world is real, but also the Kingdom with its life; and the heavier one's own sin becomes, the more one senses the breath of the Kingdom easing its weight. This duality is inevitable. It will remain until the end of time, until the complete transfiguration of human nature. But this duality itself inspires hope, for it testifies that the Kingdom entering the world is not fiction, but reality.

It is strange to hear that what is inaccessible to the wise and prudent is revealed to infants. Of course, we are already used to the fact that Jesus' words contain not only a direct meaning but also a parable. And yet: how can infants contain what proved beyond the strength of the wisest?

Here Christ's words once again do not fit the logic of our everyday life. But human wisdom proclaimed already in antiquity: "I know only that I know nothing." Only by recognizing one's own limits can one hope to overcome them, and in order to begin understanding something, one must admit oneself to be ignorant. Meanwhile the scribes and Pharisees of every age find it hard to admit their own ignorance, and this pride blocks their ability to see something new with an unclouded gaze. And although the most important thing, as we know, cannot be seen with the eyes, much can be sensed by a soul not clogged with pseudo-knowledge, a soul that has preserved childlike openness.

When we hear Christ's promise to give rest to those who labor and are burdened, this rest first appears to us simply as relief from heavy labors. Only later do we remember the rest of the Seventh Day, communion with the Lord, who grants the possibility of entering His rest.

At first it looks paradoxical that Christ calls precisely those who labor and are burdened to take His yoke upon themselves. Yet this apparent contradiction is removed by the Savior Himself: He is the only One whose burden, when accepted freely, does not bend us down but straightens us up. His burden is light precisely because it gives strength and removes from us the unbearable weight of the burden of sin.