The Comfortable Words

We continue our reading from St. Matthew’s Gospel each Sunday this year, and this Sunday’s Gospel Reading for the Fourteenth Sunday is of particular beauty. Matthew 11:25-30 is a well-known passage of scripture, especially the text that begins at verse 28:

Come to me, all you who labor 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.

Our Anglican brothers and sisters designate the above passage as The Comfortable Words, and in their earlier prayer books this scripture passage was recited by the priest at the beginning of every celebration of the Eucharist. The text is also important to our own Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as in this passage our fully human and fully divine Lord gives us insight about the quality and character of his own heart.

Our Sunday Gospel lesson may appear to have two independent sections. The opening words of the Gospel passage record the first public prayer of Jesus, and at first glance it can appear slightly self-aggrandizing and even a little off-putting:

At that time Jesus exclaimed:
“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to little ones.
Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.
All things have been handed over to me by my Father.
No one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.

The context may explain: in the verses just before our present text, Jesus is expressing frustration with those who have witnessed his saving work and teaching but have not changed their manner of thinking, attitudes, or way of life. He had rather strong words of condemnation for those who were too high-minded, omniscient or ‘know-it-alls’, for whom an open heart and mind to the seemingly upside-down values of God’s kingdom is not possible.

In this Gospel passage, Jesus invites us to put aside our pretenses and hardened minds and open ourselves to the wisdom of God. This wisdom is not that of human cleverness but of divine revelation wherein, as one scholar has put it, “even the best of human insight that relies only on its own resources cannot penetrate…”

R. T. France writes about these paradoxical values of the kingdom when he notes that Jesus’ “…character as meek and lowly in heart reflects the values of the Beatitudes, and his ‘yoke’, traditionally a symbol of oppressive power, is in fact ‘kind’ and a source not of misery but of ‘rest’…” for those who accept the invitation.

As noted above, taking a yoke upon oneself seems like a foolish act of self-oppression. This strange advice is also found in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, where this strikingly similar passage from Sirach 51:23-26 invites the Israelite people to take the yoke of wisdom:

Come aside to me, you untutored,
and take up lodging in the house of instruction;
How long will you deprive yourself of wisdom’s food,
how long endure such bitter thirst?
I open my mouth and speak of her:
gain wisdom for yourselves at no cost.
Take her yoke upon your neck;
that your mind may receive her teaching.
For she is close to those who seek her,
and the one who is in earnest finds her.

Today our loving God reaches out to us, saying, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.” The God who became small for us, coming as a helpless and vulnerable child, and who now offers himself to us in the broken bread of his body and the poured out wine of his blood, inviting us not to take only the yoke of wisdom, but that of Jesus himself, and thereby entering a lifelong process of learning the hidden ways of God.