Why Christ’s Yoke Is Easy

We can prove by the plain teaching of our own experience that the saying of our Lord and Savior is perfectly true, if we approach the way of perfection properly and as Christ wills. That means putting to death all our desires and cutting off harmful likings; not only letting nothing of this world’s goods remain with us, since in them our adversary would find, whenever he pleased, chances to destroy and damage us, but actually recognizing that we are not our own masters, and truly making the apostle’s words our own: “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” For what can be burdensome or hard to someone who has taken up the yoke of Christ with his whole heart, who is established in true humility, who always keeps his eyes fixed on the Lord’s sufferings and rejoices in all the wrongs done to him, saying, “That is why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong”? [a]

By the loss of what ordinary thing, I ask, will he be harmed, who boasts of perfect renunciation, who of his own will rejects all the pomp of this world for Christ’s sake and counts each and every one of its desires as dung, so that he may gain Christ? By constantly meditating on this command of the gospel, he scorns all agitation at every loss and is rid of it: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” Over the loss of what will he be upset, when he recognizes that everything that can be taken away from others is not really theirs, and declares with unconquered courage, “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out”? By the pressure of what need will his courage be overcome, when he knows how to do without “a bag for the road, or money for the purse,” and, like the apostle, glories “in many fasts, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness”? What effort, or what hard command of an elder, can disturb the peace in the heart of a man who has no will of his own, who accepts what he is told to do not only patiently but even gratefully, and after our Savior’s example seeks to do not his own will but the Father’s, as he himself says to his Father: “Yet not as I will, but as you will”? By what wrongs, too, by what persecution will he be frightened? Indeed, what punishment can fail to be a delight to him, who always rejoices with the apostles in their beatings and longs to be counted worthy to suffer shame for the name of Christ?