Proper 8                                                                                 Matthew 11: 25-30

3 July 2011

There is an old prayer that is meant to be said by the priest vesting for Mass and putting on the chasuble.  It goes like this: “O Lord, who hast said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” enable me so to bear it that I may obtain thy grace.”  The older style of chasuble always had the orphreys arranged in the shape of a yoke, so that while praying the prayer, the priest would be putting on the yoke of the service of the altar. 

Of course, it is not only the priest that is to put on the yoke of Christ—Jesus was not talking only to the apostles, but to all who would seriously follow him.  In fact, the yoke he was speaking of was the yoke of discipleship.  “Come to me,” Jesus said, “and receive my yoke,” that is, become my disciple.  Now most of us are familiar with yokes only if we have visited a museum or watched the history channel—or maybe the Antiques Road Show.  They are of several types: first, there is the kind that joins draft animals together.  I don’t think the harnesses we see on the Amish draft horses are actually called yokes.  The word comes from the days of wooden contrivances made to join oxen together.  But there was also a human version and for some reason one thinks of the Dutch milk maid.  This was a device that spread out the weight of a burden evenly across her shoulders so that she could carry it easier—for example, two pails of milk dangling on either side.  A yoke, then, is an ancient piece of technology—a means of getting work done.

In Jesus’ day it would have been usual to hear people talk about a yoke in a metaphorical sense, too: the yoke of the law.  One took up obedience to the Torah as one took up a yoke.  One put it on, as it were, in order to get something done—in order to live as a righteous person in God’s sight.  By Jesus’ day this yoke had become a rather difficult, that is, heavy, burden—there were those who still delighted in it as the revelation of God’s will, but those who were serious about obeying it had so fenced it around with rules and regulations, that obeying it was more than an ordinary person could do.  It is reported that the Pharisees demanded obedience to 613 commandments!

So, when Jesus invited people to come to him and receive his yoke, everyone around who heard him would have immediately understood him to be offering his teaching as the true interpretation of the Torah.  But that is not all.  In Jesus’ words there is another echo of the Old Testament.  “Come to me, you ignorant, take your place in my school.  Why complain about lacking these things when your souls are so thirsty for them?  I have opened my mouth, I have said: Buy her without money, put your necks under her yoke, let your souls receive instruction, she is near, within your reach.  See for yourselves how slight my efforts have been to win so much peace.”  These are from Ecclesiasticus (51:23-27) and refer to God’s wisdom.  If one acquires wisdom, then one has taken on the yoke of obedience to the law that will result in peace.  This is the same thing Jesus promised: I will give you rest—rest for the soul.  Jesus, as the true wisdom of God, offers the true path to peace with God.

So far so good, then—when Jesus invites people to come to him and take the yoke of discipleship upon themselves, he is proclaiming to them the fulfillment of the law and the dawn of a new age, in which people will find rest for their souls in a relationship with him.  All the promise inherent in the Old Testament is realized in Jesus—that is the claim.  And as proof, he challenges those who come to him to try his yoke and see if it is not easy and light.  “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

But as I mentioned last week, this is the point at which we might want to disagree with our Lord—or at least beg for a little clarification.  Sometimes the yoke of discipleship seems neither easy nor light.  It seems very hard, indeed.  What could he have meant when he spoke of it as he did?  The word “easy” appears in most translations, but in other places it usually means useful, then suitable, good or kindly.  In other words, the yoke of Jesus is suitable for what it is intended to do—that is, produce people who live the life of the Kingdom of God.  It is kind or useful in the way that others are not.  And so, finally, it is easy because all the other alternatives are hardly possible at all. 

As I said last week, serving something or someone else is the really hard way, because it is finally a self-defeating way.  A false god leads you to a bad end.  The way to respond to the work of Christ for our salvation is to come to Him and sign on as his follower.  As you learn His way, you will find it does what it is intended to do—render you more and more pleasing to God in your life.  And so it is a light burden, too, in contrast with the heavy burdens or ways of life that do not produce what they promise, or end in frustration and meaninglessness.  Jesus’ yoke is not easy in the sense of requiring little effort—that kind of easiness he warned against when he said the gate was wide and the way was broad that led to destruction.

Our Lord’s words were welcomed in his day by those who felt their lives burdened in ways they could not deal with.  And so I was wondering if there are burdens we bear in our day for which the yoke of Jesus would come as a refreshingly light weight.  What are some of the things that get us down?  How would bearing Jesus’ yoke be a better alternative?  See what you think of my list.

I think we are often burdened by a powerful sense that there are far more things that have to be done by us than we can actually do.  We have so much work, so many demands on our time, that we push ourselves to get them done, and still don’t feel satisfied when we quit for the day.  We don’t take days off, we don’t observe Sabbath—there is simply too much to do. 

We also live in a world that is more and more complicated, that moves faster and faster.  We can be burdened with the feeling that more is going on than we can comprehend and that it is all taking place at a pace that is faster than we can control, or even keep up with.

We also live in a world of great instability.  Many of us can no longer count on our jobs, our communities, or our relationships.  We have been deceived into putting the satisfaction of our desires at the center of our concern and have become consumers in every area of our lives—always looking for the better deal, comparison shopping.  Relationships are unstable because we are always evaluating those we live with in terms of how they satisfy our needs, wondering if other relationships would produce better results.  And we feel as if we are being evaluated in similar ways—by bosses, spouses, friends.  This leads us to be unsure of ourselves, and so we are encouraged to re-invent ourselves periodically.  As a recent sociological work put it, we live in the age of “liquid modernity.”

Some of us are burdened by the need to be successful, by having to be healthy, by having to stay young, by having to look good, and by having to keep up, whether socially, economically, or technologically.   And beneath it all there is the burden of not knowing if it means anything at all. 

Now here is the first place in which bearing Jesus’ yoke makes a difference.  When we take it up, we become part of his plan and purposes and for the first time in our lives really know what we are doing: we are living for God, we are living for eternity, we are becoming the kind of people he wants us to be, we are assisting him in the reclamation of this world.  This is the deep rest Jesus gives us.  I remember that when I was a teen-ager, it took me a long time to work through what seemed to me to be the futility of most of what life is about.  You are born and reared by your parents, who educate you so that you can get a job and marry and have a family.  You rear your children so that they can get a job and have a family and if you are lucky you may see your grandchildren before you die.  And on and on it goes.  What is the point?  Obviously, without some other information, there is no point.  Jesus provides that information.  Our lives are for God and what we get from them is who we become, not what we earn or what we have or how successful we are.

And that is the beginning of the lifting of the other burdens as well.  With regard to the burden of work, Jesus’ yoke means that we can stop sometimes.  We can take a Sabbath.  We don’t have to be compulsive about our labour.  God is in charge, we’re working for him.  He provides rest as well as work.

With regard to the complications and fast paced nature of our world, we rest assured that it is not so complicated that God doesn’t have it figured out.  Nor is it moving so fast he can’t keep track of it.  He has also located us, and will lead us through the maze.  This does not mean we shouldn’t try to understand our world, but it does mean we need not be anxious about it—it is still his and he is in charge.

With regard to the burden of instability, we know that God is stable.  Jesus is the same—yesterday, today, and forever.  His purposes endure.  So we have a fixed point in the flux of daily existence.  We don’t have to re-invent ourselves for we are who we are: Jesus’ disciples on the way to becoming what he wants us to be.  He is overseeing our growth and will guide us along the path to Christ-likeness.  This stability in ourselves—this rest in bearing Jesus’ yoke—also frees us from the insidious side of consumerism and the market approach to relationships.  We can keep faith with those who depend on us, because our desires no longer control us—our obedience does.  We are free to serve each other because we know that our deepest needs are being cared for by our Lord.  We can count on each other, too, because in the Church, God has given us to a community of people who bear the yoke together and who are there for each other, no matter what.

The burden of success has been changed also—because the success we really care for is pleasing our Lord.  Other people’s demands are no longer ultimate.  Whether worldly success or worldly failure, we can never be a failure if we are where God wants us to be.  Similarly with our health: we take reasonable care, but being well is no part of our anxiety.  Simply making it to an old age, surviving, is not a concern—eternity will last forever.  Being young is in any case impossible for us to maintain, so we give up the pretence and refuse to be burdened by the advertisers and those who are afraid of dying.  In any case, we are eternally young in the Lord.  And how we look is no longer a burden either.  Looking good is primarily a matter of the heart.  One day our bodies will be the perfect physical expression of the condition of our souls, so it pays to tend to our hearts—to the inner beauty which aging cannot touch. 

Finally, we no longer bear the burden of keeping up.  Following our Lord is our chief concern.  Where we fit socially, economically, or technologically will be shown to us as we are in constant communication with our Lord.

Jesus’ yoke, then, is not easy in the sense of being without effort.  It will take everything we are to wear it.  And we may never get it exactly right in this world.  But it is a kindly yoke, a useful and suitable one.  It is light in comparison with all of the other ways of life we might choose, which can never satisfy the heart, or give rest to our souls.