Untitled Sermon

28. In a section peculiar to Matthew, arising out of this will to reveal, comes the gracious invitation. Come to me carries on with the thought that it is Jesus only who has access to the Father and to the resources of the Father. It is because he is the only one who knows the Father and because only those to whom he reveals the Father will have knowledge of him that it is so important to give heed to his invitation. The invitation is extended to all the troubled. All means that the invitation is universal—none of the troubled are omitted. Traditionally the first invited have been “ye that labor,” and there is a good deal to be said for that translation. But Jesus is not here speaking about work but about need. It seems that we should understand the term to mean the weary. The present tense points to a continuing state. With them are joined the heavily burdened, where there is no qualification added to indicate the nature of the burden. Jesus is calling anyone who is wearied with life’s burdens. To all such he says, “I will refresh you.” The verb seems not to imply the rest that is the complete cessation from labor, which is made clear when Jesus goes on to speak of his “yoke,” of learning, and of his “burden.” The rest in mind is the rest that enables the worker to go back to the task with renewed vigor. We should not miss the point that Jesus says that he will give rest, not that the Father will do this; this is underlined by the use of the emphatic pronoun I.

29. The thought is developed in a different way. Jesus speaks of people as his servants and his students. Take is a verb with the meaning “take up,” “lift up,” and yoke, of course, is a metaphor from carrying or ploughing; it was also a mark of servitude to a conqueror (Jer. 27:2–7; 28:10). Jesus is inviting people to follow him, to serve him, and to learn from him. In the New Testament yoke is always used metaphorically and signifies bondage or submission to authority of some kind. “The yoke of the law” and kindred expressions are common among the Jews (e.g., “He that takes upon himself the yoke of the Law, from him shall be taken away the yoke of the kingdom and the yoke of worldly care,” ’Abot 3:5; cf. Sir. 51:23–27 and the passages listed in SBk, I, pp. 608–10). The rabbis spoke lovingly about “the yoke of the law,” and there can be no doubt that for them it was a singular blessing. But their delight in the law was not necessarily shared by the common people, to whom it may well have appeared much more burdensome than the rabbis thought. “The arbitrary demands of Pharisaic legalism and the uncertainties of ever-proliferating case law” (AB, p. 146) point to a situation where what was a delight to the legal experts was intolerable to ordinary people. Jesus speaks of scribes and Pharisees as putting heavy burdens on people’s backs (23:4), and it is this sort of thing that is in mind. The New Testament believers did not agree with the rabbinic assessment. They took seriously what the yoke of the law meant, and, for example, Paul spoke of bringing Christians under the law as laying “on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers were able to bear” (Acts 15:10), and again of not being “entangled in a yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1; cf. 1 Tim. 6:1). In contrast with this yoke Jesus is holding out to his followers the thought of a yoke that was easy, not bondage. It was not that he demanded less from his followers, for the Sermon on the Mount shows that he looked for more. But it was of a different kind and in a different spirit so that it was kindly, not a burden.

Jesus further says, “learn from me.” Throughout this Gospel there is an emphasis on learning, on being a disciple, and the like, and the verb here is cognate with “disciple”; it means “learn through instruction.” To be a follower of Jesus is to be a disciple and therefore a learner. It is not enough to indicate that one would like to be a follower of Jesus; to commit oneself to him means to commit oneself to a learning process. This is not meant to scare people or make them think that the way Jesus teaches is much harder than that of the rabbis. Jesus affirms that he is gentle and humble in heart. This taking of a lowly place is noteworthy. Leaders and teachers have always tended to take a superior place, but Jesus has no need of such gimmicks. He left his place in heaven and on earth took the form of a slave (Phil. 2:7). In heart locates these qualities at the center of his being. It was not that he pretended to be humble and made a show of being lowly: he really was lowly, and that at the very center of all that he was. Because of what he is in his innermost being, meek and lowly, those who come to him find rest. This does not mean that they are excused henceforth from hard work. On the contrary, to be a follower of Jesus is to enter a way of life that necessarily involves hard work. But there is nothing of the hopelessness about it that characterizes life for far too many of the world’s afflicted. The calling must be fulfilled, but there is rest for your souls (see Jer. 6:16, and for souls on 10:28). That is to say, those who bear Christ’s yoke know rest at the center of their being. They do not worry and fuss about what they are doing, for their commitment to their Savior means that they recognize his sovereignty over all and the fact that he will never call them to something that is beyond their strength. Paradoxically those who take Christ’s yoke on them have rest, rest now and eternal rest in the hereafter.

30. Jesus adds a sentence that shows that the service to which he calls is no difficult and burdensome affair. His yoke, he says, is easy, where his adjective signifies what is good and pleasant. He does not call people to a burdensome and worrying existence. Another way of putting it is to say that his burden is a light one. The word for burden is a diminutive, which helps bring out the thought that his service is pleasant. So with light (cf. its use of a light affliction, 2 Cor. 4:17). It adds up to an invitation to service indeed; Jesus is not calling people to lives of careless ease. But it is service for which they will be glad. It will be a delight, not a painful drudgery.