Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "The Yoke is on Us!"

Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

I don’t just mean difficult to live as it suggests;

that’s nearly always challenging!

I mean, some days it’s just plain difficult to understand.

Not only do we have to sort through

a world-view that’s two thousand years old,

where the earth is flat and the sun moves around it,

and any kind of illness must be caused by a demon …

we also have to translate its images and stories and metaphors

into ones that make sense for our own day and time.

For example:

Now, in the early twenty-first century,

between 80 and 90 percent of the world’s population live in cities.

Only about 100 years ago,

the reverse was true:

80-90% of us were agriculturalists,

and only a small percentage lived in cities.

This was also true in Jesus’ time:

lots of busy-ness and intrigue took place in Rome, and in Jerusalem …

but most people lived in small towns or villages,

and made their living from the land.

So, you could tell parables about weeds and wheat,

about sowing seeds on the path and on good ground,

and about lost sheep …

and your listeners would know immediately

what those things were like.

Jesus’ parables surprised them

precisely because the characters in them

did things that seemed counterintuitive, that seemed foolish.

Don’t pull up the weeds?!

Carelessly sow the precious seeds among a bunch of rocks?

Leave your ninety-nine sheep at risk to go looking for one?

Nobody with the brains God gave them

would do such silly stuff.

So why would Jesus even suggest it?

Well, listen close, he tells them …

and I’ll explain it to you.

But how many of us

have any real familiarity with an agricultural style of life?

Okay, most of us have probably ridden a horse

at some time or another,

especially if we grew up in Texas.

But how many of us have actually worked riding a horse?

Sheared a sheep?

Ground our own corn or wheat?

Fed an abandoned calf?

Plowed a field using a yoke of oxen?

For most of us,

those are images from a story book,

or tales of our grandparents’ lives.

We get our food from the grocery store, thank you very much;

and our wool at the clothing store,

and if we ride a horse at all,

it’s probably just as something "fun to do" when we’re on vacation.

Jesus has to be translated for us,

not just from Aramaic to Greek to English,

but from first-century to twenty-first,

and from rural to urban.

It isn’t always immediately apparent

what he’s talking about.

So, for example,

the last few verses of today’s lesson

are frequently misunderstood by us city kids, today.

When Jesus says "Take my yoke upon you,"

that sounds like an oppressive thing.

At the very least,

we have seen yokes in museums …

we can see that they are heavy wood,

they would attach one ox to another,

across the withers, more or less,

so they could pull some god-awful huge load.

Great, so Jesus wants us to be a beast of burden.

Or at least, that’s what it sounds like.

In which case, who among us wouldn’t say,

no thanks, think I’ll go play golf next Sunday!

But you see,

that’s really an urban misunderstanding of a rural metaphor.

To make sense of Jesus here,

we have to remember what the purpose of a yoke really was.

It wasn’t to make the ox work hard …

the ox was going to have to do that, regardless;

it was his job description!

The purpose of a yoke was to share the burden.

That’s one reason that biblical writers

sometimes talked about marriage as a yoke:

it was not the equivalent of the "old ball-and-chain" image

that we sometimes like to play with,

of being stuck and unfree.

It was about a life shared,

about burdens borne together,

and making it through difficulties

that might be too much for one person alone.

A yoke was a blessing, not a curse …

just exactly the reverse of how we tend to interpret that device today.

So then, given all that rural-to-urban clarification,

what exactly is Jesus suggesting

when he invites us to "take his yoke" upon ourselves?

Is he begging for assistance in carrying the heavy load

that God gave him to carry?

Perhaps, in a certain sense.

We do understand that a part of our calling as Christ’s people

is to do the same kind of work that he did.

But I think it’s mostly more subtle than that.

Because Jesus talks about giving us rest

when we choose to share his yoke …

and that’s not what being yoked to someone or something else

is usually about.

"My yoke is easy, and my burden is light,"

says Jesus.

Even so,

why choose to be yoked at all;

why not just do Jesus’ work when we can,

and blow it off when we can’t?

It seems to me that what Jesus is implying –

and he doesn’t say this directly, but it does seem to be there "between the lines" –

is that, as human beings,

we are always going to be yoked to something.

The only question is, what.

In the very individualistic culture that we live in,

we assume that we are free agents,

and are bound to other people or things

only if we choose to be;

otherwise we are independent individuals,

who owe nothing to anyone,

and to whom nothing is owed.

We believe that our choice is between

being yoked and being unyoked.

Jesus, on the other hand,

appears to be suggesting that whether we will be yoked is not optional.

The only choice we get is,

to what will we choose to join ourselves?

In a sense, this is what Paul is driving at

as he struggles aloud on paper with the Romans

over his relationship to the law.

What he’s describing is,

what life was like when he was yoked to the law.

The law was supposed to help him to live,

to make it easier to do the right thing,

to avoid sin and death.

Instead, he has found that being yoked to the law

still leaves him struggling,

doing evil when he wants to do good,

at war within himself.

And Paul’s story, his testimony, is that

only by throwing off the yoke of the law

and taking on the yoke of Christ

does he find the freedom to do what is right

and to be at peace within himself.

For Paul as well,

it’s not a question of whether you will be yoked or "free,"

but rather, what will you yoke yourself with.

Even "translated,"

this may cause us some doubts and questions.

We are so accustomed to thinking of ourselves

as individuals, as "free" –

especially on a Fourth of July weekend, right? –

we don’t like to think about the ways in which we are bound.

About the kinds of things to which we are yoked.

At a very simple level, we are linked into a power grid.

And if all the electricity went off for a few weeks,

we might be able to survive the heat,

but what would happen once our food started to spoil?

We are yoked to all kinds of information that is "out there" about us …

have you checked your free credit reports yet? …

one of mine has me born on the wrong date,

in the wrong month, in the wrong year.

How do I feel about being yoked, somehow,

to that level of incompetence?

How do we feel about the yokes we share

with our spouses or partners?

And what’s it like when that person is gone,

and we have to carry the whole thing alone, or at least, it feels that way?

What friends and neighbors have we chosen to yoke ourselves with?

Are we stuck yoked with some people at work

that we wish would go away?

Do we let the media, and the advertising industry,

yoke us to "stuff" we didn’t really need,

and debts we could do without?

How many of these yokes are easy,

and how many are burdensome?

Think about those relationships, those connections, those "yokings,"

that make your days more joyous,

your burdens more bearable,

your life worth living,

and realize,

this is the yoke that Jesus offers us.

Not something to make us miserable,

to wear us down, or to hold us back,

but a lightweight yoke,

that allows us to share our burdens with him.

Remember that it was John the Baptist, not Jesus,

who was accused of being a doom-and-gloom,

ascetic, party-pooper.

Jesus was accused of being a glutton and a drunk

and, if anything, a party animal!

He ate, he drank, he spent time with people he loved,

yes, even tax-collectors and hookers and other sinners,

and he eased their lives.

He also called them into a relationship

that would make demands on them,

as does any relationship that means anything to us.

Perhaps Jesus’ yoke scares us,

because we know where he ended up.

He chose to yoke himself to us,

with all of our sins and failings and occasional outright evil,

and it took him to the cross.

And so we fear that if we yoke ourselves with him,

we might end up the same place.

Remember, though, that the cross wasn’t the end,

isn’t the end.

Just as Jesus will never ask us to go

any place that he isn’t willing to go …

remember, that’s what the yoke is about,

we’re in this linked together …

so also, there is no blessing or reward that he receives

that we will not also receive.

His yoke is easy, and his burden is light.

If we truly desire to be his people,

then, the yoke is on us!

Amen.