Matthew 11:29, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” + Psalm 23:1-3
Short Thoughts:
Our souls will find rest in green pastures and beside still waters when we learn from our Master to bear the yoke of self-giving love (the yoke that He has borne for us)
Long Thoughts:
The Christian faith is full of seeming paradoxes—death that leads to life, sight that is blindness, blindness that is sight, God who is Man, divine sovereignty and human responsibility. This, I’d argue, is because reality itself is full of seeming paradoxes. And reality is full of seeming paradoxes because the wellspring of all existence is the God who is “Many and One”; the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit and yet One God.
One of the roles of these paradoxes in our relationship to God is to force us to see what we would not have otherwise seen….as we live with the tension that these things created (refusing to toss out one or the other or to force them together into a monistic unity), we begin to see new things, deeper things, true things. For example, forcing our minds and hearts to sit within the tension of the Christ who is fully God and yet fully man has borne untold fruits of insight and beauty for the Church these 2,000 years, and the same goes for the others.
Well, in this text, we see one such tension. Jesus says that His yoke (the wooden bar placed over an ox’s neck as it worked in the field) brings rest. A yoke is a tool for work—and hard work at that—how can this bring rest to our souls? That is the tension within which Jesus calls us to sit and muse and know Him.
One thing that can be said right away is that we see that our natural division of work and rest might not be as clear as we’d thought…there seems to be a sort of work that is itself a deeper rest than any mere cessation of activity could produce…..rest that comes from walking with Christ, the rest that comes from obedience to Christ, the rest that comes to our soul when we know ourselves to be His servants doing what He has given us to do in the strength with which He has given us to do it. His yoke is the cross, it is light because He has borne it in our place, and as we take it upon our own shoulders and love others even as He loved us, we will find that our obedience is enabled by His grace and a means of deep rejuvenation for our soul.
In this sense, Jesus’ words here are not far removed from the teaching of Isaiah 58:6-11. When we share our bread with the hungry and care for the destitute, then our healing will come….when we pour ourselves out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then our light will rise and our gloom will be dispelled and we will be like well watered gardens in the wilderness. When we come to Jesus and take upon ourselves the cross-yoke of self-giving love (the love with which we ourselves have been loved!), then we will find rest for our souls. God, grant that it be so for each of us
