Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Come to me. The message from our God, “Come to me.” Not stay away, keep your distance, approach with caution and possibly at risk of your life- but come. Jesus does not ask that we prepare ourselves throughout life so that we are finally worthy to come before our God. We are not asked to achieve a certain level of holiness before we come to Jesus, nor are we expected to fast and pray for a specified number of hours before we come.
The theme of coming with nothing in our hands is illustrated in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah 55:1 Come everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come buy and eat! Come buy wine and milk without money and without price.
Our God willingly gives us more than we can imagine and invites us to come. It would be an insult to insist on bringing a bag of chips and an upside down cake to the party we are invited to when compared to the feast spread before us.
In John chapter 7 Jesus is attending the feast of Booths and he tells them about the gift of the Holy Spirit with the same language of come to me for abundance.
John 7:37 On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me as the scripture has said, out of his heart shall flow rivers of flowing water.
Jesus extends the invitation to come specifically to all those who labor and are heavy laden. He is talking about those who are in need. At the beginning of our gospel reading those in need are not those who are self proclaimed wise and understanding, but those who are little children, those who have a simple and honest need, who have no delusion that they can carrying their own weight.
Like children we are in need because we are weary and heavy laden with the trials of living in this fallen world. It is a heavy business to toil at the labors we are given because of the Fall.
Consider how heavy the labor and how heavy the burdens we carry with us. Even on days off and three day weekends, life has plenty of daily responsibilities that can make us tired. During this time of the year the heat can especially make us feel tired. What is more physical labor is only part of the burden we carry. What we try to carry on our own is the weight of our sin. What we carry with us is a natural desire to impress the rest of the world that we are good people, and also to impress God.
Our prayer of the day helps us to see one of the aspects of life in this fallen world that makes us heavy laden: Gracious God, “Be our strength and support amid the wearisome changes of this world, and at life’s end grant us Your promised rest and the full joys of Your salvation”
Change in life is indeed wearisome, no matter how comfortable we may be with life circumstances, everything changes, when we are comfortable being home with parents, we get older and are no longer around the same family support as before. We find new surroundings as adults only to face more change in the form of losing loved ones to death. Even our own bodies, because of the fall, constantly are changing to where we feel weariness and heaviness.
We are heavy laden with the weight of past criticism we have received from others, we are heavy with a sense of having let down and failed people in numerous ways throughout our lives, whether because of the selfishness of our sins or because our fears kept us from being capable of what we should have done.
The pharisees made the practice of faith itself a weighty and difficult task. Jesus talked about the heavy yoke of the pharisees: “ They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”
One way or another you probably have had parents or teachers or pastors lose sight of the teaching of the gospel where following Jesus represented heavy burdens that made you feel you could not live up to what is expected of you. We carry these burdens with us in the form of those feelings that we have not done enough, that our heart is not in the right place to earn our place in God’s kingdom. Jesus invites us to come to him for rest from all these burdens that weigh us down and receive the free gift he gives.
Our need along with all others who are weary and heavy laden is for forgiveness, mercy, new life. We need this incredible gift Jesus gives that lifts all the weight of our sin and even the weight and trial that our fallen world brings upon us.
The Lord’s Supper is a great place for us to hear this message of a free gift – my body given for you, my blood shed for you. As we receive the bread and wine, this gift reminds us of how simple and easy life is in God’s kingdom, ‘come and be nourished, taste and see that the Lord is good.’ Nothing in our hands we bring, just our heavy laden self.
And as weary as we are with the changes of this world, the Lord’s Supper is the same comfort, the same gift. Jesus does not change. In Him we are being prepared for eternal rest and eternal joys. This is why the Lord’s Supper has been called by the church fathers as the medicine of immortality, we are becoming like Jesus through receiving Jesus.
In a manner of speaking the traditions of counting Sundays of the month for when to receive the Lord’s Supper were inherited by the Lutheran church from a time period when people placed a heavy burden on themselves to emotionally feel the right things when receiving the Lord’s Supper, as in:
‘we are not worthy enough to come each week, lets build up good credit with prayers and preaching of the Word one or more Sundays and then come the next Sunday and receive the Lord’s Supper.’ Now my brothers and sister in Christ, you have the opportunity to taste and see that the Lord is good each and every Sunday. You are invited to come, to believe that your sins are forgiven through Christ.
Your sins are forgiven because Jesus carried all of these heavy burdens of the sin of the world on the cross. Because he has carried it, his yoke is marvelously light.
I think back to what it was like to see a teacher in public when I was in High School. If I was slouching in my seat at a restaurant, now I was sitting straight up, see I am on task, I am a good person, I am on my best behavior. The need to impress an authority was so deeply ingrained that it was certainly hard to just be myself in the presence of an authority.
Now it is different as an adult, I see authorities as simply people like me, playing a role, I do not need to prove things to them- it is only God who I am accountable to. This is the easy yoke of the gospel, to realize that we are loved by God, and we do not need other people’s approval, and we do not need to prove anything to others. Instead we are free to show love to others.
We live in a time where the message of the gospel is widely unknown in how the average American sees life. In my role as a counselor I see many ways in which depression and anxiety reigns in people’s lives because of life lived apart from the gospel. I see common themes of people’s unwillingness to trust others or be willing to care for others, and people feeling judged and unworthy of others.
We have the easy yoke of Christ that we are joined to. Instead of seeing others as a threat and weight to our lives, we are free instead to care for needs of those who are oppressed out of compassion or love because God has first loved us.
We love others through following Jesus, we walk with Jesus in love and it is an easy and light yoke to carry because it is filled with hope and promise, joy and peace.
Jesus yoke is light and easy, when we live life according to the plans of God’s Will life is easier. Divided priorities in life make life harder. When countless numbers in our society willingly break the commandments because they feel they are free from the law- then society suffers, families are broken, and children are not raised in the faith.
Our yoke seems so hard in this day and age in that we as a society live apart from God’s will in so many ways, where we are apart from God’s design for creation, apart from a focus on being caretakers of the earth and one another, apart from loving others as God has loved us.
Yet we as the church are free to live a different way than our culture, we can live as a people set apart in Christ to the glory of God. We can say no to the costly darkness of sin in order to embrace the light of Christ. We sang “Come unto Me, Ye Weary” to start our worship service. Stanza 2 describes this choice to walk in the light of Christ.
“Come unto Me, ye wanderers, and I will give you light. O loving voice of Jesus which comes to cheer the night! Our hearts were filled with sadness, and we had lost our way; but thou hast brought us gladness and Songs at break of day.” May the Lord bless us with this gladness and lightness at break of each day. Amen.