Take My Yoke

Mt 11:28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 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. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

If this is true then I haven’t yet found the easy yoke. What keeps me from fully following the teachings of Jesus? Interesting that the first thought that comes to mind is embarrassment. Embarrassment that all of those years I’ve been wrong and have to admit to others that my forcefulness (my Will to Power?) was just a front for insecurity or worse than that it was simply done in ignorance – a cardinal sin for someone whose intellectual satisfaction derives from being perceived by others as living intentionally.

How weary am I? Obviously not so much that I don’t continue striving by my own power to achieve things that don’t really matter to God. When I get to that point, Jesus says “Come.” When I’ve exhausted all of my faculties to the point that I’m ready to trust in God’s provision, then I’m ready to respond to the invitation given to those who are “weary and heavy burdened.” But not until I’m ready to hand over my burden.

The ease with which one hands over their heavy burden is a direct result of having exhausted oneself. It seems hard now, of course, because I’m still holding on to my burden, convinced that I can still carry it alone. Not to worry, though. I will exhaust myself carrying around all of this baggage. And when I do, in faith, Jesus invites me to come to him.

He invites me to come to him to do what? To give up my burden? To share my burden? To have someone else carry my burden? No. He invites me to come to take on another load, another “yoke” as it were. To someone already carrying a load this is heard as utter nonsense. How can I possibly carry more than I already am? And it’s a good question.

The answer to that question is again found in Jesus’s invitation to take on HIS yoke. This is another of Jesus’s paradoxes. Trade off my yoke for his yoke which is no yoke at all and yet is the most difficult yoke of all to bear. That’s the paradox. Difficult because I’ll never bear his yoke as long as I’m stubbornly intent on carrying my own.

Rob Bell has descibed in the Nooma Video Series that a rabbi’s yoke was their teaching. So to take on a yoke was to take on their teaching. But Jesus’s yoke wasn’t so much a compendium of teachings as is was a entirely different way of life. Something about Jesus’s yoke – about his teaching – has something to do with being humble and gentle in heart.

It’s interesting as I carry MY yoke how prideful I am about it even though I despise the very thing I carry. This is MY yoke – MY burden. My identity has become so caught up in my own pain and suffering that I can’t see past it to another identity that carries with it the promise of Life and Freedom. It’s the old adage that it’s better to trust the demon you know than the demon you don’t. At least that’s the calculation that occurs in my spirit when I’m finally reaching the point of exhaustion, finally at the point of giving up my yoke and taking on the yoke of freedom in Jesus.

Because when I do, I just might find rest through a new-found humility and gentleness. And my life of striving through which I have so completely identified myself for all of these years might just come to the end. My yoke would be lifted. Still, even in the face of absolute REST, my fear kicks in – that in that rest I might not recognize myself. What I have longed for – freedom from the burden I’ve been carrying – is the place where I must cross the wilderness in faith. It is the point of crisis and the point of decision. It is the point of exhaustion. It is where I say in fear and trembling and tears “No More!” and in submission and humility cry out “Yes” to the invitation of Jesus to “come.”