Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Our Lord tells us in the Gospel today that finding relief actually requires effort.
He says to us, come to me. If you are burdened, come to me.
We have to make that effort. And he says if you are burdened, take my yoke upon you.
Take my burden upon you. And if we put in that effort, then there's the promise of relief.
I will give you rest. But to find that relief, we have to first understand and then accept the apparent paradox.
It appears to us as a paradox because our way of thinking is clouded because of sin.
Our desires are disordered because of sin. And we cannot understand, or we struggle to understand our Lord's teachings.
Finding relief requires effort. It requires taking our Lord's yoke upon ourselves.
And what is that yoke? It's a yoke of self-denial. Our Lord says, if you wish to follow me, and he says, come to me to find that relief, come to me. And if you wish to follow me, do what?
Deny yourself. Take my cross upon you.
So self-denial is actually relief, and self-indulgence is a great burden.
As Christians, hopefully, we can at least accept that, understand that and accept that.
But then it's a whole other question of living our life that way. Wow, it's true.
Self-denial is relief. Self-indulgence is a great burden.
It's true abstractly, but to live our life according to it, it's another question.
It's very difficult to do. 
And this leads us to the question of penance.
If we are burdened, self-denial and penance is actually the relief, not self-indulgence.
As difficult as that might be, not maybe to understand, but actually to put into practice.
Because frequently what we say to ourselves is, oh, I need a break. I need to indulge my senses.
I need a break from all this penance. I need a break from all this self-denial.
That will give me relief. Lord, I'll go back to penance later.
I'm going to take off your yoke from me for just a moment because I need rest.
I'm going to take off your burden from me for just a little while because I need relief.
And what do we find instead? Weariness, burden, more suffering.
But we keep doing that. I need a break. So I'm going to stop penance for a while.
Indulge myself. Give myself some rest.
We do that. Why? Because unfortunately our way of thinking has become clouded with sin.
And we've interiorly become one big disorder.
So to really experience the truth of this, we need to experience it in our own persons.
Self-denial with love and for love gives us a great relief.
And as the Fathers say, and it's become an axiom of spiritual theology, with this we can conclude that he who loves does not suffer.
Why? Because he loves what he suffers.
So self-denial has to be done with love and for love.
What does that mean? We have to deny ourselves. Why?
To have something better. To have something greater.
To possess, of course, our Lord Himself.
To follow Him more closely. To love Him more profoundly.
To experience that life of heaven already here on earth.
With love and for love, self-denial becomes easy we can say.
Because he who loves does not suffer because he loves what he suffers.
So our Lord tells us, finding relief requires effort.
Come to me. Take my yoke.
If we can ask our Lord, ask our Lady, to give us the grace to put this into practice, we will find that it's true.
If we choose not to, then our life will be weirdness and a burden and nothing more.
So let's accept this paradox.
Let's take our Lord's yoke upon ourselves and receive His promise of relief.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.