All who are weary

Part 3

18^th May 2013

We've been looking at this well-known saying of Jesus:

Matthew 11v28-30
"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, 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."

The last part is:

Matthew 11v30
"For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

People have different ideas about this:

Some think of a Christian being yoked together with Christ, in the way that two oxen may be yoked together to pull a plough, or two horses may be teamed to pull a carriage. This is a nice image, with a lot of truth in it, but I don't think it's what Jesus means here.
Others think of a Christian in a one-man yoke, such as may be used to carry a load, such as two buckets, one on each side (in the England of a few generations ago, we might think of a milkmaid with two buckets of milk). This is another nice image, the idea being that what Jesus gives us to carry is not too heavy for us and the yoke he gives us fits us well. Perhaps they think of the yoke as being a particular lifestyle, or ministry, or even an illness or a difficult relationship.
I suspect though, that Jesus is referring to His teaching. I'm told that an ancient rabbi would refer to his instruction as a "yoke" and anyone who wanted to become a disciple of a rabbi thought of himself as taking on that rabbi's yoke. Jesus, of course, is the greatest rabbi of all time.

I think Jesus is saying that we would benefit from accepting his instruction, rather than listening to others. Everybody has a philosophy, a world-view, a set of values and beliefs. Not just religious people; all people have a philosophy (even though it sounds a bit pretentious to say so). We all have a set of ideas into which we fit our experiences and from which we derive our decisions. That is, we interpret our experiences in terms of what we already (think we) know, and we make moral choices (and immoral choices) based on what we (think we) understand. Our world-view, our philosophy, is our yoke. We can make up our own world-view, or we can become the disciple of a rabbi, and take his world-view (his yoke) or, as increasingly happens in our culture, we can mix and match the ideas of many teachers (rabbis) and construct our own personal world-view, synthesised out of several others. Jesus is claiming that his world-view is better than anybody else's, that his philosophy fits us better than any other, and that the burdens that it imposes on us are lighter than those imposed by any other world-view.

The question is: Is he right? Are Jesus's ethics the best ethics? Is Jesus's understanding on the nature of God and of man the best understanding? And so on.

And, as before, the answer must be, "If Jesus is God then of course He's right. But if Jesus is just a man then He may be mistaken".

As ever, it comes down to faith. Do you believe that Jesus is God? If so, do you want to follow Him, accept His teaching, and live as he instructs you? Or do you choose to reject Him and bear the consequences?

I fear that we Christians neither fully accept Jesus as rabbi not fully reject Him as rabbi. We acknowledge that He is God but sometimes imagine that we know better than He does. We call Him "Lord" and yet sometimes choose to act as if He's not. And that, I suspect, is why we're not as full of joy and peace as we could be. We take His yoke, and then we add our own stuff on top of it. And we act surprised when the yoke doesn't fit and the burden is heavy.