We live in heavy times.
Gravity seems to have grown stronger.
We have become very grave.
We can feel ourselves sagging under the weight, under the burden.
Jesus lived in heavy times.
People weighing each other down.
Yoking each other like oxen pulling a plow.
Jesus liked games.
We see and hear that in today’s reading from Matthew.
Jesus spoke of children playing games with weddings and funerals, children making fun of grown ups and the heavy games we play. Resenting people for celebrating, resenting people for grieving, resenting resentment. A bunch of sour faces, permanently puckered.
That is what Jesus likens his generation, and our own.
Jesus plays another game today as well, a word game, with yokes, weighing people down with lightness, with the burden of levity. My burden is light. My burden is unburdened. The burden that isn’t. It brings a smile, a good game.
Playing with words has always tripped me up. I am easily tricked with word play.
My burden is light. For the longest time as a child and even today, I hear that and I think of light, as in brightness and radiance rather than the lack of weight.
My burden is radiance. Like sun light on the skin, the brightness of God.
My burden is light. My burden is radiant.
It still catches me every time, playing with words.
The burden of gravity and levity.
The weight of weighing each other down and the weight of glory, of radiance, of being lifted up.
There are funny stories of saints having the disruptive habit of floating away when they were praying. Their friends and families would have to tie them down so that they wouldn’t get carried away.
Likewise, there are less than funny stories of Satan falling by force of his own gravity, he was very grave, with the weight of death, the gravity of the grave, the heaviness of hell.
There were no games. No playing with words.
Only an ever-increasing gravity, an ever-increasing density of mass, from which even light can’t escape. There seems to be no escape from the event horizon of our fallen countenance.
Except for the Light uncreate, the Light inaccessible, the burden that is light.
Heavy times.
The good news of God comes to us in heavy times, the Gospel of lightness.
Jesus taking the burden of our yoke, lightening the load.
Jesus enjoyed the goodness of life, and he welcomed everyone, no matter. That is the teaching we hear today. Lightness. Radiance. Lifting the load.
We are invited to take on his yoke, the way of Jesus, of thanks for this day, of welcoming everyone, of lifting burdens.
God easing the burden. Not God being just more of the same, just another way for us to weigh on one another. But rather, God in a good way, something new, something different, lifting the load, lifting one another, resurrection, rapture, levity, radiance, the weight of glory.
Heavy times.
God brings a new game to play.
The burden of radiance.
Tag, you’re it.
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