Jesus
said to the crowds:“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.”
Matt
11:28-30
Here’s
something you don’t expect to hear from Jesus:
that his yoke is easy, and his burden light.
What
happened to the demanding Jesus who requires us to give everything away, take
up our cross and follow him into the teeth of death?
The
truth is, Jesus’s message and, indeed, the message of all of Scripture is
impossibly good news. We are not given a
map to self-redeem. We are already
redeemed not by our actions but by the act of God.
This
sounds like gibberish if we are committed to the view that Scripture if a description
of a moral code we must follow. But once we realize that Scripture is the moral
code God is committed to following, and that it is unlike the give and take,
reward and punishment, and tit for tat that comes so instinctual to us, it opens
a window into the divine ethic. And it
is characterized by love.
