Sunday, July 13, 2014

His Yoke

A Meditation on Matthew 11: 25 - 30

25 At that time Jesus exclaimed, "I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little ones: 


"At that time" refers back to what Christ just recently experienced, namely his rejection by the towns that should have received him with open arms. It amazes me that along with the frustration and grief of unrequited love the Lord carries within, he also pours out real joy in his prayer to his Father, the Father he knows as Lord of heaven and earth. He exclaims, i.e. cries out in a loud voice, from his heart, praising God the Father, and expressing the gratitude he feels for the the little ones who have received him, in spite of those who have not. That heartfelt exclamation is heard by the disciples around him.

 

What they do not hear with their ears, (what we also do not hear with ours, nor see with our eyes)  is that he is always speaking within himself, without audible words, as well as with his physical voice. He is quietly expressing himself to the Father, whose self -expression he is as Son; the Father whose Living Word he is, and from whom receives the gift of his being; the Father whom he is one with; the Father without whom he could not exist, nor be the Son. In short, the Father to whom he is inseparably yoked because they share the same divine nature.


Who are the little ones?  The disciples and other followers. They are the merest children, infants really, even though they are adults. But they are newborn, since they have new life in them, thanks to the Father who has entered their minds and hearts and enabled them to believe in his Son. How grateful Christ feels to the Father for them, for revealing his identity to them, while hiding it from the wise and the learned! But we who consider ourselves his little ones have yet to realize how completely we are yoked to him.


Who are the wise and the learned?  In addition to the towns that have rejected him,  they would certainly be the power elite: the professional religious leaders of the day, the Scribes, Pharisees, Sanhedrin, temple priests,  and rabbis who controlled and directed public opinion. These men had everything to lose if the people went over to Jesus. Everything in the way of status, power, authority, popularity, wealth, etc. would be taken from them if the townsfolk embraced this false messiah who was trying to mesmerize the people. Naturally the wise and the learned experience Jesus as threat and not as fulfillment. 

 

Who are the wise and the learned today? Anyone who believes in his personal autonomy, but especially we clergy, of course. We who are the professional religious leaders can still experience Jesus as threat to our self fulfillment, when we make the perennial error of looking for our fulfillment outside of him.  No matter who we are, we most experience Christ as enemy when we fail to recognize the ego-centrism and sinfulness which make us our own worst enemies. 


The more my self-image matters to me, i.e. the more I seek absolute freedom to define or invent myself, then the more I see Christ as extraneous and invasive. The more I make my thoughts and feelings the definitive measure of everything and everyone, then the more I instinctively reject him to protect myself and hold onto what I already have. Sadly,  my desire to control, to impress,  and be autonomous, is precisely what prevents him from giving me what I really do need, and what I can receive only from him: the gift of himself that I have to receive as gift and live with as a little one, in faith, hope, and charity. 


Today, who are his little ones? Those of us who put our faith, hope and love in him, and not in ourselves, nor in some idol we create and serve. Little ones are any and everyone who is honest enough to face our common state as creatures, i.e. the basic neediness and powerlessness which constitutes our being. Christ's heart goes out to us because of our structural helplessness. Our very neediness as creatures is what irresistibly moves him to pour himself out in a gift of endless, sacrificial love for us.


But Christ's self-gift faces us all  with a crisis of identity. Isn't it ironic to think we can be a self-made creature? Something in the order of being a square circle or a fire that burns cold? Consciously or unconsciously, we decide if we want to be among the wise and the learned who are dumb enough to think they are fulfilled without Christ or the little ones who are smart enough to realize that fulfillment comes only from him. No matter what group we choose, we adults each remain as big a bundle of needs as is an infant. That humble status of need never ceases to exist, no matter how much autonomy we think we achieve. As creatures before God we are always and only receivers, receivers who are always in total need of all the gifts that comes from his  hands. 

 

26 Yes, Father, such was your gracious will. 27 All things have been given to me by my Father... 

Our Lord is thrilled with the gracious will of his Father He is overjoyed by the divine wisdom and goodness that revealed the mysteries of the Godhead to those who would receive them as a gift, and not as our mental construct or imaginative projection. And he, Christ, will continue his Father's work, relating to us in the same way the Father relates to him.  

For all things have been given to him by his Father. The Son who receives his being as gift can only communicate by giving himself as gift. The Father's gift is meant for all of us. All means not only the little ones, but also the wise and the learned, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the sheep and the goats. All of us without differentiation are the Father's gift to the Son, which once again is why Christ loves us all to death and beyond. How could he not treasure all that is precious to the Father? How could he not love all that the Father has given him?  

No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to who the Son chooses to reveal him.

In revealing himself to us, he also reveals the Father. In revealing the Father to us, he cannot help but reveal himself. The one is the inner content of the other.

Thus Christ lead us to what comes next: the double yoke he simultaneously embraces: his union to the Father and us. 


Christ is united to us, whether we like it, know it, or hate it.  He is there, or if you prefer, here, present in the present, with a presence that is real, no matter how unaware of it we may be. My recognition of him is not what determines his presence and companionship throughout life, because his presence is gift. He is inescapable, inseparable from us,  even when we fancy that we walk and work by our own power, or feel alone and abandoned. He is Word-made-flesh. He shares our human nature, he is a human being.  He accompanies us even when we defy him, ignore him, or run from him. It is true to say he "pursues" us, but not by chasing after us as if we had gotten away. His pursuit is within. He pursues by illuminating our minds an enlivening our hearts to his presence.There is no getting away from him to whom we are yoked from our mother's womb.


Consider the image of a farmer's yoke that he  presents to us. The material, exterior yoke is meant to symbolize workings of the interior, deeper, meta-physical union. A yoke was a wooden frame with two openings, or a bar, usually of wood, to which a permanent, double harness was affixed. The yoke conjoined a pair of oxen together at the neck, so they had to work cooperatively, side by side, to plow a field. There was no way one of the pair could go off in a different direction and do his own thing, even if that animal felt tired or lazy. The smartest thing to do was plow on till the work was done. Anything less just prolonged the work and inevitably made it harder. When we resist Christ's presence, we only make matters more difficult for ourselves.



Christ is yoked  both to us and to the Father. As the man Jesus, a man united to all of us by his human nature, Christ acts from the core of his divine personhood, i.e. out of his eternal oneness with the Father. He, Jesus the God-man, carries his divine and human natures not as equal halves that he somehow fits together into a kind of artificial hybrid. Instead, with infinite humility he takes our created human neediness into the structure of his divine being. He makes his oneness with us part of his oneness with the Father. He takes us into the deeper unity he has/is as Son of the Father.



 28 Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. 


We usually find life burdensome, and expend a lot of energy simply in pressing on, because we consider ourselves the wise and the learned. Christ is not inviting us intelligent and autonomous persons to come to him for a breather, a temporary time of rest and relaxation, before we continue our separate struggle. He is calling us to be his little ones and receive rest from him by opening ourselves to his presence even as our burdens wear us down. This gives us a taste of the rest that is ours in eternity. It is akin to the resting the Creator does on the seventh day when he relaxes and enjoys the beauty of his creation, or the rest of the Sabbath when a man looks to where his labors are taking him, the life of Glory. As Paul urges in Hebrews 4: "Let us therefore strive to enter into that rest." This is a rest in the embrace of the Trinity and the glorious enjoyment of their divine life. Christ calls us to come to him for no less than that. But he gives it as a rest that begins here.


29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

 

How do we answer his call to come to him? By taking his yoke on our shoulders. Note, the yoke is not ours but his. We have to stop thinking that we walk alone and that he is there only when in desperation we call out to him for help. Because he is yoked to us from our beginning,  he is already there. He is never not there. We are present to him, he is conscious of us, even when we are blind to that fact. Again, he makes the point: when our mood or negativity makes us imagine ourselves alone and desolate, or our feelings tell us we are unloved and forsaken, our very unawareness of him calls forth his heartfelt compassion.


30 For my yoke is easy and my burden light."



 What exactly is his yoke, or as he calls it, his burden?  We are. That is why it is such a surprise for me to hear him say his yoke is easy. To me it seems hard and heavy. He is yoked to us in our sinfulness, our individual and collective evil, with all the quasi-infinite suffering that comes from it. On Calvary the yoke grows into the cross. There our sinfulness hangs and and is crucified in the Innocent One, as the endless ocean of our evil down through the ages sweeps through him, and hurls him into the abyss of death itself. How can he call that yoke easy and and that burden light, especially when what he suffers is a horror beyond our comprehension? 


I don't think any one person can fully answer to that question. It is almost a cliche to say "Love does such things". Only an insane, infinitely incomprehensible love does such things. Still, Christ actions and words give us dull creatures partial insights into the mystery of his sacrificial love. On the cross, as he cries out in desolation and forsakeness, he trusts in his Father, and offers his life to redeem us. His whole life was destined for that hour. What was his "raison d'etre",  why did he enter our world and become a man? To be forgiveness. That is why he was born. To be divine love poured out as endless love upon humanity. To catch that instant and make it eternal. To make the Father's mercy present in his own suffering flesh and blood, and make it ever present to us as a continuing gift in the host and chalice. His act of forgiveness constitutes us as a people, his people, his little ones. Without that act of loving mercy, all human life would forever remain incomplete and unfulfilled. With it, we are continually launched and relaunched forward on our journey to the Father. Receiving the gift of him who is forgiveness of my sins is the concrete act that catches me up in him as he is raised by his Father. 


No comments:

Post a Comment