Bible reading: Matthew 11:1, 25-30.

Message.

I was brought up in the Church of England; we weren’t regular church-goers but we attended the Parish Communion service once or twice a month. In those days the traditional 1662 Prayer Book, compiled by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and reckoned to be one of the greatest influences of the English language reigned supreme, although (little do we know it) modern-language versions were lurking just around the corner. And of course the Prayer Book, being old, contained words which were archaic or which had changed their meaning over time.

One phrase always made me smile. For, in the run-up to Communion, the Vicar would say: “Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him”. This phrase was followed by four encouraging verses from the Bible. To me, “comfortable” seemed to have more to do with beds or armchairs than words, so I suppose that I mentally changed it to “comforting”. But even that wasn’t quite good enough, as the word primarily meant to “strengthen” or “fortify”. A commentary written soon after the Prayer Book was published says, “Here are selected four of the most full and proper sentences in all the New Testament containing in them the very marrow of the gospel, so overflowing with sweet and powerful comforts, that if duly considered they will satisfy the most jealous souls, and cheer the most broken hearts, if believed and embraced they will utterly banish all clouds of sorrow and despair”. And the very first of the four verses comes from today’s passage, the words of Jesus himself: “Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you”.

That verse has, I’m sure, been a great encouragement to many people, and it echoes others in the Bible, for instance one in Jeremiah which says, “Stand at the crossroads, ask where the good way is, walk in it and you will find rest for your souls” and one in Hebrews which says, “There remains a Sabbath-rest for the people of God”. There is also, for instance, the beginning of Psalm 62: “Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from him. He is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken”. In his invitation Jesus is following an old tradition – although he doesn’t actually spell out how he will give us refreshment or rest. Certainly I can’t believe in the idea that we can come to Jesus and instantly find all our worries and fears miraculously disappearing. Sadly things aren’t that simple!

As I’ve said, that verse has been a great encouragement for many. But we can’t take nice Bible verses in isolation, nice as that would be; we have to see them in context. This means that the verse which follows comes as a bit of a shock, for in it Jesus asks his listeners to, “Take his yoke upon them”. That must have immediately brought to their minds the heavy piece of wood which binds together two animals such as oxen so they can pull a plough or a cart. A yoked animal isn’t free to gambol and gallop around the field; it has to work, pulling at its master’s command. So why does Jesus, who has just spoken of rest and refreshment, ask us to put on this restricting encumbrance? I know he then says that it is “easy” or “well-fitting” and that the burden it will place upon us is “light”, but it all feels a bit dubious.

A common way of understanding this passage is to say that Jesus was talking to people who felt “burdened” or “yoked” by the detailed demands of Jewish Law: the requirements he was placing on them are far less restrictive. That understanding seems to be born out, not just by him declaring, “If the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed!” but also by his action in the next chapter where he and his disciples gaily pluck seeds from a cornfield on the Sabbath day, enraging the Pharisees. There are other Bible verses which seem to say much the same thing. So we have Paul, writing to the Galatian Christians, who are finding it hard to navigate the world without the constraints of Jewish Law: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery”. We also have Peter, speaking to the gathered worthies of the early Church at the Council of Jerusalem: “Why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentile believers a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear?” His passionate speech enabled Christianity to break from its Jewish roots and take on a life of its own.

However -you probably realised that was coming! – this may not in fact be the correct way of treating Jesus’s words. I say this because speaking of the Law as a “yoke” was not uncommon in Jewish circles. And this “yoke” was seen in a favourable light; for instance Rabbi Nehunya ben HaKanah said, “Whoever receives upon them the yoke, of the Law, they remove from them the yoke of royalty and the yoke of worldly care; and whoever breaks from them the yoke of the Law, they lay upon them the yoke of royalty and the yoke of worldly care”. This Rabbi was probably writing a decade or two after Jesus’s time, so it would be interesting to know if he was familiar with Jesus’s words. Sadly, that’s something we’ll never find out. In any case, this positive view of the Law goes back many centuries: for instance the author of Psalm 119 finds comfort in God’s Law and declares that it is precious, gets up in the middle of the night to give thanks for it, stands in awe of it, loves and is delighted by it. Whoever wrote this Psalm clearly felt that the Law was not a burden, but a useful guide for life.

However (there’s that word again!), I came across another intriguing thought, which is that it wasn’t the Jewish Law in itself which was heavy, but the way in which those in authority were imposing it on ordinary people. In other words, they were “letter of the Law” people, what we’d call “jobsworths,” rather than folk who were prepared to allow more freedom so long as the “spirit of the Law” was upheld. They were weighing down ordinary people with rules but didn’t feel any burden themselves as they were using those rules to maintain their authority. The leaders were weaponising the Law to constantly remind the people of their failure to comply, of their need to do better. That was unbearable: Jesus (who, you’ll remember, didn’t say that he was going to do away with the Law but that he was going to fulfil it) was offering a far less rigid and lighter approach. I’m reminded of the line in Isaac Watts’s hymn “Come, we that love the Lord” which says, “Religion never was designed to make our pleasures less”. I’m pretty sure that Jesus would have said, “Amen” to that!

Of course, British society isn’t run according to restrictive religious laws (and here we must think of places where this still is very much the case, such as Afghanistan). Religious “dos” and “don’ts” have however sometimes been very strong in the past: I was watching a quiz programme the other night and one of the questions asked for the connection between maypoles, horse racing, spoken theatre and mince pies – the answer being that they were all things banned by Oliver Cromwell. More recently Nonconformist chapels often had a set of unspoken rules covering clothing, language, habits and, notoriously, what one could and couldn’t do on Sundays. If you stepped out of line and broke these rules, especially in a tight-knit village community, you were clearly a bad person and your name was mud. Hopefully that is no longer the case; indeed some folk might argue that Christians have slipped too far away from proper values and behaviour.

So we aren’t burdened by these religious rules. But there are many other things that burden us – you don’t really need me to list them. Here are just a few in (as they say) no particular order: work commitments, financial worries, addictions to drink, drugs or simply social media, fear of illness, family responsibilities (real or imposed upon us), guilt for past failures which we can’t rectify, possibly our perfectionism and inner pressure to achieve … most of us are burdened and stressed by something. As I’ve already said, “coming to Jesus” can’t solve those problems instantly – but yoking ourselves together with him through prayer and the support of the Church can hopefully mean that the load is shared, the task of life made easier, the demands on us less stressful to balance, the sense of “having to do it alone” removed.

“Coming to Jesus” for rest and “taking his yoke upon us” may seem to be contradictions. So does Paul’s comment: “You were set free from sin and became the slaves of righteousness”. But they are not contradictory, in fact they are two sides of the same coin. Harnessing ourselves to Jesus spreads the load and gives us strength to carry on.