Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30 NLT)
Read the passage again.
Did you notice Jesus saying that all we who are weary would get to put down our heavy burdens and carry his light one instead?
I didn’t either.
Which makes this an odd passage, but also right. Because his listeners had many burdens they couldn’t put down:
- scraping out a subsistence living
- paying ever-increasing taxes
- being subjects of Rome
- if a slave or a woman, being unable to make choices to determine your fate
- miscarriage and infertility
- social stigma
- illness
- injury
- physical disability.
As do we:
- poverty and job insecurity
- paying ever-increasing taxes
- many people live in dangerous and violent situations
- racism
- slaves (aka victims of human trafficking) unable to make choices to determine their fate
- miscarriage and infertility
- social stigma
- addiction
- mental illness
- although we’ve made astonishing advances in medicine, people must still live with chronic illnesses, and with the side-affects of surgeries and medicines.
Although there were and are miraculous healings, and people being cured of addictions and illnesses, and injuries disappearing, and relationships being restored, and wombs opening — not everyone who asks gets healed; justice does not always come.
And Jesus tells us to add his yoke to the burdens we already carry.
our burdens + Jesus’s yoke = rest for our souls
That’s some weird spiritual math (weirder than the actual equation in the post image). But it’s true.
Somehow, the love and comfort and strength of God makes a difference. Our burdens may still be heavy, but we can bear them, or we can bear them differently, because we can share them with Jesus and with others who also love Jesus. We can experience deep rest during prayer, or worship, or communing with God in whatever way he reaches us. And somehow we can go on, and even thrive, with our burdens.
I cannot explain it, but I’ve found it to be true. I’ve had a year of horrible and crushing burdens that I never imagined carrying and didn’t have the choice to put down, but the love of God and of those who also love God sustained me. And those burdens lightened. They are still there, but a year later, they don’t weigh me down like they did.
Happily, we don’t need to explain this weird spiritual math to trust that it’s true, and to keep choosing to add Jesus’s yoke to our burdens and thereby find rest for our souls.*
* This passage is often interpreted as being about the heavy burdens of religious rigamarole, but Jesus usually spoke on a number of levels, so I think this works, too.