Come unto me, all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
May I speak in the name of the Father,
Few of us manage to get through the trials and tribulations of this life without needing Matthew 11:28. Come unto me all that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.
This is one of the favourite verses of the New Testament. When we are hard pressed and heavy laden and when we turn to God, these few words give us, and millions of other people over the years and over the world, comfort and reassurance. When we are worried by life, by health, by the future, by the past, by responsibilities, by families, by financial difficulties, these words have come to our help. Come unto me all that labour and our heavy laden and I will give you rest.
Perhaps this is, after all, the most basic human longing – just the way we are made - to turn to a higher power when things go wrong here below, to long for healing and for peace, for fulfilment and wholeness, to long for rest when life bears down on us. La condition humaine.
But all that being said, you don’t need to be much of a religious sceptic to wonder what Jesus actually meant with these rather beautiful words. Yes, human beings have always turned to God, yes Christians have turned to Jesus in times of sorrow and persecution and yes many have found internal rest for their souls – but most have not found that their sorrows, their pains, their persecutions have gone away. Loved ones have still left home or died, diagnoses have still been frightening, painful and incurable, and as for persecutions, the Church is awash with the blood of martyrs who have faithfully served our Lord and have died in his cause. Did not Jesus himself tells us in the previous chapter of the very same Gospel that brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and that children will rise up against parents and put them to death and that each one of us will have to take up our cross – just as he did. Whatever Jesus meant by “Come unto me all that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” he didn’t mean that he would just magic away all our pain - because if that’s what he meant, then he was lying to us.
So what does he mean? Come unto me, all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
When I think of that saying I imagine the rather famous painting “The haywain” by the artist John Constable. The painting depicts the English countryside and a large cart pulled by a couple of black horses set in the middle of a calm mill pond. The trees are green and leafy, the farmer looks calm and restful. All is well in deepest
Jesus uses the word ‘burden’ elsewhere in the Gospel and it has nothing to do with oxen.
They bind heavy burdens, and lay them on people’s shoulders; but they themselves will not lift a finger to move them
The burden Jesus describes is the burden of the 613 commandments of the law as defined and regulated by the lawyers, scribes and pharisees of the day. The Mishnah – that early book of Rabbinical teaching which makes up part of the Oral Torah - tells us that the yoke is the yoke of the Kingdom and the yoke of the Commandments. The learning - when Jesus says “learn of me” – mathete - would be in hebrew ‘tilmdu’ – the word from which ‘Talmud’ comes, and is the study of the Torah,
and the “rest for our souls” are the words the prophet Jeremiah used when he told us to walk in the old way of the Commandments. "Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.
The meek and the humble – in Greek the ‘praus’ and ‘tapeinon’ are the ‘anawim’ – the oppressed poor which the prophet Zephaniah describes when he rails against the priests and longs for the coming of the Messiah: I will also leave in the midst of thee an afflicted and poor people,- praun kai tapeinon in the Greek verson of the Old Testament - exactly the same words which Jesus uses and which our New Testament translaters have translated ‘meek and humble’.
So Jesus knew very well what he was doing when he confronted the pharisees, scribes and lawyers with their own images, their own scriptures, their own words.
And, to make matters worse, in the next chapter of the same Gospel Jesus will break the sabbath laws by picking corn and by curing a man on the Sabbath – because “The Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath”. Jesus will end that chapter by calling the pharisees “a brood of vipers” - Matthew 11:28, these beautiful, comforting words are, in fact, fighting talk.
Come to me, all you who are weighed down with guilt and rules and religious regulations and endless lists of ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Thou shalt nots’, and I will set you free. Join with me, learn what I say because I am simple and unpretentious. And I promise you, you will find peace for your souls – because being with me is not complicated and the demands I make on you are good news.
And now, 2000 years on, we’re used to thinking of Pharisees as the bad guys.. but in their own way they were trying to get it right. If they could they would challenge Jesus .. “we don’t know what you mean. It’s not good enough for religious leaders to say that people can do anything and that we don’t need rules. Get real Jesus! “ they would say “You have taught us to love God with all our heart and all our mind, all our soul and all our strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves.” and isn’t that exactly what we are trying to do with our 613 commandments? Isn’t that exactly what we are trying to do when we study of the Torah– learning how to govern every detail of our lives so that we can get it right – learning from each other to love God and love our neighbour - your way, Jesus, all sounds very attractive – no rules, no obligations, no sacrifices, do what you like and I will give you rest for your souls – but it’s not realistic, is it. People need rules.”
And of course – if we’re honest with ourselves - we agree with the pharisees, not with Jesus, don’t we! People do need rules – a highway code for our streets and a highway code for our lives. There is such a thing as sin, after all, isn’t there? a world without rules is anarchy where the weak suffer and the strong run riot.
And so – on our behalf, and with our consent - the Christian Church preferred to learn from the pharisees: fish on Fridays and Confession before Communion, rules about sex and marriage, money and going to church.
Come to the Church, - they said - all you that labour and are heavy laden, and we are the ones who will give you rest. Take our yoke upon you, and do what we say. For we are strong and we hold the keys of the kingdom, and in the confessional we will give you rest for your souls.
But I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant when he say “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” , do you? So what did he mean?
The Greek word for a yoke is ‘zugos’ - it is the word from which we get zygote – that first stage of new life when egg and sperm are mysteriously and permanently joined together to form the very beginnings, the first possibility of a new life. Might it be just be possible, then, that this biological, creation way, is a better way, a more biblical way of thinking about salvation? .. that Jesus is talking about something entirely different – not laws and the rules of religion which we keep or break, but about being joined mysteriously and permanently to him? Let me explain – a crash course in systematic theology!
Once upon a time God made the world – he made it good, but he made it free and evil came into the world. And evil is not only out there – on our streets and in countries far away, but evil is in here too, in our very hearts.
“I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind ….Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
What
To take all the old atoms which make up this confused and confusing world and make a new creation. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” that is exactly what the New Tesament tells us that God does :
We are to put on Christ, we are to be a new creation in Christ, We are to believe in the restoration of all things, the recapitulation of all things - in Christ.
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2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone [is] in Christ, [that person is] a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Galatians 3:27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Act 3:19 Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that He may send Jesus Christ, who was preached to you before, whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things. Eph 1:10 in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both [fn] which are in heaven and which are on earth--in Him. |
Not some legal theory about paying the price to an angry Father – but a mystical ‘at-one-ment’ – atonement - of all creation in Christ - being yoked with Christ, this broken world of ours being fertilised anew into a Christ Zygote which shares the DNA of the divine Logos in exactly the same way as the divine Logos shared our DNA when the Word became flesh.
that “God "became what we are in order to make us what God is himself” wrote St Irenaenus:
Irenaeus : Adversus haereses, book 5, preface) - Factus est quod sumus nos, uti nos perficeret quod et ipse.
Not that ‘he died to make us good’ but that "God became human so that humans might become gods."
"Αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐνηνθρώπισεν, ἵνα ἡμεῖς θεοποιηθῶμεν (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, 25, 192 B De incarnatione Verbi, 54: literally, "... that we might become ...", not "that men might become". Grammatically, the verb θεοποιηθῶμεν could be translated as "be made God" or "be made gods": a more literal translation is "that we might be deified".
I think we have forgotten much of this teaching in the Christian West!
yoke yourself to me, - said Jesus - learn meekness and humility and you shall find rest for your souls.
And yet, I want to ask, what does this look like in practice for me? what is this being yoked with Christ, being at one with the Divine Word of God? a Christ zygote - being ‘a new creation’ ‘in Christ’ - When I go to work, do my shopping, cook my dinner and feed my cat – what does this mean?
When you walk out of this Cathedral later this morning how are you be a new creation, transformed utterly and forever –one in Christ, yoked with him in an eternal and unbreakable bond?
I’m sorry to say I can’t give you an easy answer… something simple you can just take away with you this morning. You can read Romans 12 if you want to know how to live. You can read 1 Corinthians 13 and see if you can replace the word love with your own name and see if you are ‘patient and kind’ see if you ‘bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. There are many ways in which we can see if we are a new creation.
but I want to offer a couple of thoughts: and as is often the case they are a paradox.
First because we are now ‘joined at the hip with Christ’ - I believe we are called to live as if we were already living in the perfect
Secondly the image of the zygotes should be a comfort to us – for we are far from being fully formed – as far as a clump of cells is from an adult human. We are, in a sense, gestating Christians: day by day, year by year, three score years and ten, twenty,thirty, forty – growing up into the full stature of Christ – and we still have a long way to go. We do not expect an embryo to write a symphony or read Shakespeare, - although one day they might. And God does not expect us to be perfect although one day we will be, as our heavenly Father is perfect.
This world is in transition, we are in transition – it is a realised but still realising eschatology,
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!
And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known.
But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
1Jo 3:2
