…the implication that Jesus is making [in Matthew 11] by calling his yoke “easy” and burden “light” is that we are, all of us, apart from him, striving under a cruel yoke and a crushing burden. And maybe one way to say that, and to see it, is to say \u201d\u201c as Jesus elsewhere did \u201d\u201c that knowing the truth will set us free, and that lies, falsehoods, not only deceive, they enslave.<\/p>\n
But to make any sense of that, we have to understand what freedom is. Our modern, evolved notion of freedom is largely, I think almost exclusively, negative. It is always freedom from something: freedom from moral or legal restraint, freedom from limit, from being told what to do. So, it’s “Keep your laws off my body,” or, “The government can’t make me buy health insurance,” to choose left and right examples.<\/p>\n
But there is another and older idea of freedom. It conceives of freedom as a positive capability. It is freedom for. It has to do with understanding what sort of a creature I am, and then the pursuit of those good things to which my being, my nature, is ordered.<\/p>\n
In other words, a fish is not more free if it decides to forsake the limits of water and flop up on the dock and go for a stroll; it is decidedly less so.<\/p>\n