“Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30).
Not a few Christians have memorized these words from our Lord in Matthew. Those of us in the Ordinariate (along with many Christians in Anglican churches) know them well from a list of scriptural quotations called “The Comfortable Words.” They’re said immediately after the general confession of sin or the “penitential rite” of the Mass.
To be honest, it’s a bit of an odd insertion into a form of the Roman Rite. The original context, in the Reformation era, probably suggested a kind of reassurance to the faithful about the various theological anxieties of that time, anxieties that continue to plague much of modern Protestantism—that is, if salvation cannot be said to be mediated through the Church and her sacraments, how can we possibly have any assurance of our pardon and salvation? For the harsher elements of Reform, you just couldn’t: you just had to suffer in uncertainty. But here in the prayer book was a little “comfort,” a reminder of God’s love.
Again, that context isn’t the same for Catholics. Yet I don’t think that means we should not find the words “comfortable.” If anything, they are more comfortable. Many of those early modern Reformers wanted to throw off what they saw as the shackles of tradition and Church authority, but what they missed, and what many of us know, is that our bond to the Church is a real freedom. Take, especially, this particular realm of sin and pardon. To confess your sins to a priest and receive absolution isn’t a burden; it is a gift. I know that I have received the Lord’s pardon. This is not some mere abstract conclusion based on a deduction, but a concrete fact administered with the full authority of the apostles.
Some scholars think that, in Matthew 11, Jesus is making a subtle allusion to a moment in Jewish history, after the death of Solomon, when the new king in Jerusalem ends up breaking apart the kingdom due to his arrogance. Rehoboam proudly tells the people, “Whereas my father laid upon you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions” (1 Kings 12:11). Wow! As a newly assigned parish pastor, I have to read this as a little lesson in how not to approach leadership.
In today’s selection from Romans, St. Paul reminds us that we are to live in the Spirit, not in the flesh. For Paul, the gospel of Christ has lightened, in a way, the demands of the law, even while in other ways making them heavier. We can’t see Jesus as somehow abolishing all law—that would be an irresponsible and incoherent reading of Matthew, especially—but he does change our relationship with the law. The change centers on him—on who he is, what he does, and how he transforms us into his image.
The “comfortable” words of Jesus today aren’t an invitation to idleness or apathy: again, that would require us to ignore whole portions of the Gospels. They are precisely an invitation to work. But here’s the thing: the work that we do in Jesus works. That is, it is not fruitless labor. The word will, as God says in Isaiah, “not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:11). Those purposes and that work are, so often in this life, mysterious to us. But if we attempt to live, as Paul tells us, “in the Spirit,” we will learn to consider much more than the here and now. Further, the work of the Christian life can be easy because it is in good company, assisted constantly by the grace of the Holy Spirit.
We could spend a long time thinking about this dynamic of “easy” and “hard” in the Christian life. I think just last week I insisted that Christianity should not be easy if by that we mean that it will require no sacrifice or no change. But that doesn’t mean it’s hard for the sake of being hard. Here is where sometimes Catholics, maybe in their zeal not to be Protestant, can overstate things, treating the spiritual life as just one suffering after another, the more complicated and arcane, the better. It need not be so.
If you have no burdens whatsoever, if the spiritual life never seems a struggle, perhaps it is worth remembering St. Paul’s exhortation to life in the Spirit—what seems easy and light on a material level may in fact just be a kind of slavery to the flesh. But if you have many burdens, consider whether you have taken on the most important burden, Jesus himself, who promises to be with us in our work, and to carry us with him toward that state of perfect rest. He, as the promised bridegroom-king of Zechariah, has come to fulfill all God’s promises to Israel for a perfect Sabbath rest. Today he feeds us with heavenly food to refresh us on our way to that heavenly country.