NOTES for Mat 11:27-30

Jesus sometimes describes the Kingdom in a completely astonishing, paradoxical way. What are we to make, for example, of an "easy yoke" or a "light burden"! And yet such definitions describe very precisely what the Kingdom becomes for fallen man.

For a healthy person, a yoke can hardly be associated with anything positive: in the original sense of the corresponding Greek word, a yoke is the wooden frame placed on a person being enslaved as a symbolic sign of his new condition. And a burden may be associated in a person's mind with a weight that has to be carried because it cannot be thrown off, but certainly not with lightness of being.

And yet, for fallen human nature, the Kingdom really does become a burden, just as a fallen person can make the journey into the Kingdom only if he takes upon himself, as the learned rabbis of those times used to say, the "yoke of the Torah." On the lips of Jesus, the "yoke of the Torah" becomes the "yoke of the Kingdom," because the same inner struggle is in view, the struggle proper to every fallen person who wants to walk the path of righteousness. It is no accident that Paul also said that through the Torah comes the knowledge of sin: it is precisely attempts to walk the path of righteousness and follow the Torah that reveal a person's real sinful nature, and then the path of righteousness becomes heavy, and the Torah becomes a yoke voluntarily taken upon oneself.

But Jesus speaks of something greater: He brought into the world not the Torah, which the world had known before His coming, but the Kingdom, where the one walking the path of righteousness could finally find relief, having reached 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, because now not only the fallen world is reality, but also the Kingdom with its life; and the heavier one's own sin becomes, the more one feels the breath of the Kingdom, easing its weight. Such duality is unavoidable. It will remain until the end of time, until the full transformation of human nature. But this duality itself gives hope, because it testifies that the Kingdom entering the world is not an invention, but reality.