Getting the Right Yoke Around Our Necks

In the gospel lesson for this week, Matthew 11.25-30, Jesus says that God's "yoke is easy and his burden is light." A yoke is a wooden beam that has been used since ancient times, most commonly used between two oxen to enable them to more efficiently pull a load when working in pairs. In ancient Isreal and in other ancient cultures, a yoke was commonly used symbolically to represent servitude or subserviance. For example, in some acnient cultures, a defeated enemy was forced to pass through a symbolic yoke of spears and swords of the victor, to represent the enemy's subserviance.

Read in this context, Jesus' statement of an "easy yoke" seems to present an oxymoronic image. By definition, a yoke was not easy.

To understand the meaning of Jesus' statement, we have to begin with the nature of human beings. One of our primary characteristics is our propensity to voluntarily create yokes for ourselves. Through our fears, anxieties, and addictions, we place yokes upon ourselves. These yokes make our lives miserable, frustrating, and difficult, and sometimes our yokes make other peoples lives miserable, frustrating, and difficult. We find ourselves today in a world of suffering and servitude because of the poor choices that we have made, individually, and as a culture, collectively. Our yokes, figuratively speaking, literally begin to run our lives.

Discipleship is the process of surendering ourselves to God and to become agents of the initiation of the reign of God. The process of becoming holy begins with removing the yokes that we have voluntarily placed upon ourselves. Once we have removed these yokes, we can then accept the yoke of discipleship. In contrast to the yokes with which we have bound ourselves, God's yoke is easy and God's burden is light. In fact, by being bound by God's yoke, we agree to "submit" ourselves to living a life of joy, peace, and to live life in a spirit of reconciliation and mercy.

The fact that submitting to God's yoke of joy and peace requires continued discipline and dilligence speaks volumes about human nature. Because of our own ignorance and odd propensity to hurt ourselves and one another, we actually have to discipline ourselves to what we know, on a deep level, is best for us. You would think that the opposite would be true.

The good news, as always, is that God's yoke is available to us. We have the freedom to take the yokes off our next and accept a new yoke that is easy and a burden that is light.