Journey's Weekly Homilies

JULY 7 (14th Sunday, Ordinary Time)
Homily: Marcia (Zec.9:9-10, Rom.8:9,11-13, Mt.11:25-30)

          “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Is Jesus crazy?  What does he mean, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light”?  In the Sermon on the Mount, earlier in Matthew, he said; “I have come not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them.” “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” and “you have heard it said ‘thou shalt not kill’, but I say to you, ‘anyone who hates his brother is liable to judgment.’   A lot of what Jesus asks us to do in the Sermon on the Mount sounds very difficult.  Why is he talking about his yoke being easy and his burden being light?

          Even the God Jesus refers to doesn’t sound easy to follow.  Jesus is thinking of the God of Israel.  This is the God that the Pharaoh of Egypt refused to take seriously.  He’d never heard of the God of Israel.  He ended up with ten plagues.  The people of Israel followed this God out of slavery in Egypt.  They ended up in the desert without food or water.  They started wondering whether they would be better off returning to Egypt and becoming slaves again.   At least that way they would have food and water.  Did God do as they wanted? Did God return them to Egypt and slavery?  No.  The God of Israel is not a God who values safety over freedom.  So what does Jesus mean when he says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light”?

          There were a lot of marginal people in first century Palestine.  Because of Roman taxes and commercial expansion, farmers were gradually being pushed off their land by debt.  Being without land meant being without a stable income.  Carpenters like Jesus had to wander about looking for work.  Other people, without marketable skill, were less fortunate.  They became prostitutes and beggars.  Many simply starved.  There were lots of throwaway people.

          Other passages in the Sermon on the Mount say, “Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink” “Look at the birds of the air:  they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not of more value than they?”  Later in Matthew, Jesus says, “do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.”  Jesus is talking to people on the edge, people without material possessions.  He is offering them a chance to be part of a family, the family of God.  He is saying that if they accept God as their patron, they can regain their honor, or attain an honor and self-respect they never had.  Honor in Mediterranean society was derived partly from family associations and partly from one own conduct.  Jesus is offering people honor if they join God’s family and are loyal to God and God’s people.  “do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.”

Jesus is offering people without status a chance to attain honor and a sense of belonging.  It’s not surprising that poor people, marginalized people, responded to his message.  What’s surprising is that people who weren’t poor also responded.  Not as many as Matthew would have liked.  He’s clearly frustrated when he writes, “you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes.”  He wants more scribes like himself to accept Jesus.  He’s doing his best to persuade them by quoting scripture and showing how Jesus resembles Moses.  But in the end lots of learned people don’t accept Jesus’ message.

  I’m at a loss to explain why anyone does.  “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Right.  Jesus can tell me not to worry about what I will eat or drink, but I’m not sure I have the faith of a Saint Francis.  Saint Francis, who gave up his life as the heir of a rich merchant to become a beggar.  But other people have that kind of faith, and other people have given up everything.  The word ‘easy’ could also be translated ‘effective’.  Maybe ‘easy’ doesn’t mean the ease I tend to think of, sleeping in until noon.  Maybe it means something more like:  If you pick the right wrench, the one that fits correctly, it’s easier to loosen or tighten a bolt.  Maybe Jesus is offering us a more effective life, not a more comfortable one.  The most spectacular examples of the effectiveness of principles from the Sermon on the Mount, whether used by Christians or nonchristians, are the nonviolence movements in the 20th century, led by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela.  What people participating in those movements did qualifies more as effective than easy.  Of course not all successes by Christian are as spectacular as those.  Simply forgiving someone who wronged you, and so letting go of a resentment and bitterness that could poison your life, is also a success.  Some Christians may not appear from the outside to be successful.  Some, when they stand up against injustice, are just killed.  I’m not as brave as those people, but for me it comes down to a simple question.  Which family do you want to be part of?  The one that includes St. Francis, Oscar Romero, and Harriet Tubman; or the one their opponents belong to?  I come to this church because I can see the commitment each of you has to the family of God.  You don’t come here solely because it’s expected, by society and the institutional church.  You don’t come here just because that’s what everyone does on Sunday.  You all want to be part of something more, of building a society based on compassion and acceptance.

What does Jesus mean when he says, “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”?  My lightness comes from being part of the family of God.  It comes from learning to trust God rather than externals.  When the people of Israel were in the desert, God did not take them back to Egypt, back to safety.  But God did give them manna to eat.  The manna lasted only one day.  They couldn’t store it.  They had to trust that God would continue to provide.  They couldn’t make it across the desert on their own, through their own efforts.  The God we follow is not a God of safety, but a God who leads us into the unknown, and stays by our side as we cross the desert.

In the end, the ease of the yoke Jesus offers comes from its effectiveness as a guide for our lives; from knowing that we are part of the family of God; and from knowing that God will sustain us, will give us what we need to cross the desert.  So let us walk together across the desert and work together to build the kingdom of God.