Chuck Larsen

In Matthew 11:28-29 Jesus invites us all who are weary and overburdened to come to Him so He can give us rest for our souls. In Jesus’ call to us who are overburdened, He speaks of taking His yoke upon us. Now we all know that a yoke in that agricultural society was a wooden press that bound two animals together who would then contribute equally to the pulling of the plow by putting their strength together. Some yokes were extremely heavy according to some commentators and some were lighter but all involved some kind of a burden. But the yoke that Jesus was referring to was the heavy burden that the religious leaders had placed around the necks of the people binding them to a law that was unbearable. That yoke, the Yoke of the Law, only drove us to the recognition of our true sinfulness. Jeremiah made this clear when he used the idea of a yoke in his lament. In Lamentations 1:14 we read “…My transgressions were bound into a yoke…they were set upon my neck.”

Many commentators suggest that Jesus’ yoke is still a yoke and still represents something we must bear up under but it’s slightly lighter or radically lighter than the yoke of the law. This is not possible! If Jesus is exchanging one yoke, the yoke of the law which condemns us of our sin, for His law, how can we fail to recognize that His yoke is much more severe than the yoke of the law that the religious leaders were strapping to the backs of the people. In Matthew 5:27-28, Jesus says (my paraphrase) the law teaches that you must not kill, but I teach you that if you have hatred for someone you’ve already committed murder. He then added that the law teaches that you should not commit adultery but I teach you that if you harbor lust in your heart when looking at a woman you are already guilty of adultery. No, Jesus’ law was much more severe than the law of the Pharisees in my opinion.

Jesus’ yoke is not a yoke with a lighter burden. It’s a yoke with no burden at all. It’s a yoke with someone who has already plowed the ground. It’s to yoke with someone when the work is all over. We are called to yoke ourselves with Jesus after the work has already been done. One commentator rightly concluded, “What makes Jesus’ yoke easy and his burden light is that in Jesus’ own active obedience (i.e., his perfect fulfillment of the Law of God), He carried the burden that we were meant to carry. His perfect obedience is applied (imputed) to us through faith, just as His righteousness was exchanged for our sin at the cross.” I don’t know about you, but that’s the only thing that really gives me rest for my soul.

In 1962 I joined the Sloan Boxing Club that had a gym above a bar on 13^th Street somewhere between Capital and Harney. I can’t remember exactly! I worked out there most nights and once in a while on Saturdays. I was 15 at the time turning 16 on January 15th of 1963. The City Golden Gloves Tournament was held on January 25-26. I just made the age cut off by 10 days. There were two requirements we had to meet. We had to be 16 years of age and we had to weigh at or below our weight class. I was a flyweight the lightest of all the classes which was the class of everything up to 112 pounds. I weighed in at 110 ¾ pounds. That was my sophomore year of High School. Now you know why I didn’t do well in football. I met the requirements! Interestingly enough I was the only 16 year old that weighed less than 112 pounds that year. I think I might be the only one, or one of a very few, that hold a Golden Glove Championship title without every throwing a punch or receiving a punch!

In Matthew 11:27 Jesus calls people to come to Him who have met two requirements. They must be “weary and heavy laden” (or overburdened). We don’t often think of those as requirements to Jesus’ call but it seems to me that Jesus didn’t come to heal the healthy. They don’t need Him. He came to heal the sick. Jesus didn’t come to save the righteous. The righteous don’t need Him. He came for sinners.  In the Greek Text the word for “burdened” is a passive voice verb. That means it was something that had happened to you or that someone else had done to you. Jesus used the same word when addressing the religious leaders. In Matthew 23:4 Jesus described the religious leaders: “…they bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not lift a finger to help them.”

I’m so glad that I meet those two requirements also. The burden of religious demands and expectations on me are impossible to bear. I am so tired of trying to live up to standards to which I’ll never be able to measure up. It doesn’t matter how hard I work at it. I always fail. It doesn’t matter how talented I am, I always fail. I’m overburdened and I’m weary. So I come to Jesus! He cleanses me of all my sin and applies to my account His very own righteousness! It’s not a righteousness that I must work for or demonstrate in myself. It’s a perfect righteousness transferred to my account without even having to throw a punch!

All of history is rift with man’s search for God. With this in mind, Blaise Pascal wrote, “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself”

Airing earlier this year on the National Geographic Channel was “The Story of God.” Morgan Freeman, who played God in several movies, traveled around the world to find God in all the world’s religions. When interviewed by FOX411, Freeman said, “”What we’ve done is go around the world asking, observing, trying to get that sense of what binds us all together. We came away with the idea that we’re much more the same than we are different. Every religion is after the same thing.”  One writer correctly observed that, “The end goal of ‘The Story of God’ is to open an interfaith dialogue about ideas and values that we all share, not that we disagree on.”

In my opinion, what Freeman discovered was that all humans have the same hunger for God. The human condition as Pascal describes is universal. But the various attempts to address that hunger for God as expressed in the many world religions is anything but “the same thing.” Jesus was presented in this series as just another option for approaching God. But I would argue that Jesus did not come to set up another “religion” but to destroy all religions and to give restless man rest in his search for God. In Matthew 11:27, Jesus said, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” I agree with Michael Green’s observation in his commentary on this verse. He writes, “Whatever revelation there may be, dispersed in human intellect and values, in virtuous action, in nature and in the history of humankind, the center of all God’s self-disclosure is Jesus of Nazareth. He fulfills all the hopes of the Old Testament, and is the heart of all revelation. In a dark world lit by candles and lamps, he comes as a searchlight.”