How often do we laughingly say, “….Out of the mouths of babes!” We usually say it when one of the junior members of our family has stated a glaring or embarrassing truth. To children the truth is black and white, but the older we get the more we tend to complicate issues that really ought to be very simple. Perhaps we want to dress up the truth with our own interpretations. Perhaps we want to disguise truths that make us feel uncomfortable. Whatever the reasons, as we get older the truth is harder for us to recognise.
Today Jesus criticizes the religious leaders who over complicate the law. Jesus was concerned for those people at the bottom of the social heap who could not live up to the six hundred and thirteen commandments of the Jewish law. Jesus’ intention was not to do away with the law, but he could not support the lawyers who spent their time manufacturing new and insufferable burdens for broken people. To the broken people Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”
The demands of the twenty first century puts many challenges our way, and we spend a lot of our time juggling priorities and trying to live our lives by more than one agenda. Our lives are complicated and overly burdened. We look for the solutions to our problems in lifestyle magazines and in bottles of pills no longer able to recognise simple truths. Why don’t we look more to God for solutions? God wants us all to have peace and fulfilment; all we have to do is to yield to God’s agenda. The smallest child knows the difference between what is important and what is not. Why can’t we?
When Jesus says, “My burden is light,” he does not mean that Christianity is an easy way out … he simply means that his demands aren’t weighed down with rules and regulations that we aren’t capable of meeting. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”
