The heavy burden of sin

569 the heavy burden of sinHave you ever wondered how Jesus could say that his yoke was gentle and his burden light considering what he endured as the flesh-born Son of God during his earthly existence?

Born as a prophesied Messiah, King Herod sought after him when he was a baby. He ordered all male children in Bethlehem who were two years old or younger to be killed. As a youth, Jesus, like any other adolescent, faced all temptations. When Jesus announced in the temple that he was anointed by God, people in the synagogue chased him out of the city and tried to push him over a ledge. He said he had no place to lay his head. He wept bitterly in the face of his beloved Jerusalem's disbelief and was continually maligned, questioned and mocked by the religious leaders of his time. He has been referred to as an illegitimate child, a wine drunkard, a sinner, and even a demon-possessed false prophet. All his life he lived in the knowledge that one day he would be betrayed by his friends, abandoned, beaten and brutally crucified by soldiers. Most of all, he knew that his destiny was to take upon himself all the heinous sins of men in order to serve as an atonement for all humanity. Yet despite all that he had to endure, he proclaimed: "My yoke is gentle and my burden is light" (Matthew 11,30).

Jesus asks us to come to him to find rest and relief from the burden and burden of sin. Jesus says a few verses before it: «Everything has been given to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father but the Son and to whom the Son will reveal it »(Matthew 11,27).

We get a glimpse of the immense burden on people that Jesus promises to relieve. Jesus reveals to us the true face of the fatherly heart when we come to him by faith. He invites us to the intimate, perfect relationship that unites him alone with the Father, in which it is unequivocally established that the Father loves us and always remains loyal to us with that love. "But that is eternal life, that they know you, who you are the only true God and whom you have sent, Jesus Christ" (John 17,3Time and again throughout his life, Jesus was challenged to withstand the attacks of Satan. These showed up in temptation and afflictions. But he remained true to his divine commission to save people even on the cross when he bore all the guilt of humanity. Under the burden of all sin, Jesus, as God and at the same time as a dying man, expressed his human abandonment by shouting: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Matthew (27,46).

As a sign of his unshakable trust in his father, he said shortly before his death: "Father, I command my spirit into your hands!" (Luke 23,46) He gave us to understand that the Father had never forsaken him, not even when he was bearing the burden of sin of all people.
Jesus gives us the belief that we are united with him in his death, burial and resurrection to a new eternal life. Through this we experience true peace of mind and freedom from the yoke of the spiritual blindness that Adam brought upon us with the Fall.

Jesus said explicitly the aim and purpose for which he came to us: "But I came to bring them life - life in all its fullness" (John (10,10 New Geneva translation). Life in fullness means that Jesus has given us back the true knowledge of God's nature, which separated us from him because of sin. Furthermore, Jesus proclaims that he is "the reflection of his Father's glory, and the likeness of his own nature" (Hebrews 1,3). The Son of God not only reflects the glory of God, but he himself is God and radiates that glory.

May you recognize with the Father, his Son in communion with the Holy Spirit, and truly experience in full that life full of love, which he has prepared for you from the beginning of the world!

by Brad Campbell