Jesus
said:“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
and you will find rest for yourselves.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”
Matthew
11:28-30
This
is not something we expect to hear from Jesus.
We expect him to be demanding. We
expect his yoke to be heavy – to be a cross on which we are supposed to suffer
and maybe die. We expect to hear how we
are not good enough - that we depend on God to withhold wrath for expectations
not met, not the lack of any expectations at all. We are inclined not to see God as Someone in
whom to rest, but Someone that it takes hard labor to reach.
What
sense does it make that we can make a lifetime of bad choices, indulge in hate,
pettiness, meanness, ignore God altogether, and still warrant His loving concern? But
story after story makes exactly this point:
bread is multiplied so that there is no need to ration it between the
good and the bad, the productive and the unproductive. Vineyard workers who arrive in the last hour
get paid as much as those who worked all day – and it is implied that those who
never showed up for work would be paid just as much too. The rain, Matthew notes, falls on the good
and the bad alike (5:45).
We
can kick against this goad, mitigate it, compromise it, or accept it as the
divine message.
