COME TAKE LEARN
Mathew 11: 28-29
These words are very
comforting to the laborer toiling without any hope of reprieve or respite.
Jesus “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest. Take my yoke, and learn of me.”
The verbs here are come, take, and learn.
We often place great
emphasis and draw much comfort from the call to come. The comfort that Jesus is
perpetually there for us to come to at any time is a solace and succor. We think of times of retreat, and meditation,
when a holy glow pervades the room we are in, and even may place an imaginary
wreath on our perspiring foreheads. However, the call is not to a wilderness
retreat, but a call given in the thick of manual work. In the daily humdrum of
our lives, the call to come, eclipses the others, which remain forgotten injunctions.
We rest our tools in the glow of comfort, forgetting the compulsions that
follow.
Take my yoke. A yoke is always used to hitch two
oxen. Jesus never asks us to bear the yoke alone. We confuse crosses with our
yoke, and the daily burden of our lives are transformed by us into a cross,
which we think we grudgingly have to bear. We are to remember, that it is His
yoke, not ours. Often in arenas of work, we delude ourselves that the work is
ours, and then possess it. The yoke is never ours. It is always His. We are
asked only to come alongside. He bears it with us. This removes from us the
weight and the burden of it. It is His work anyway.
Learn of
me. How do we learn from a Master? We accompany Him as He works. We observe, we
follow, we pay attention. We can never learn of the master from out of under
the yoke. When students shadow a teacher they admire and respect, they find
themselves unconsciously mimicking his methods and his mannerisms. Reading a
book can never teach them the lessons they learn from him. Sir William Osler, a nineteenth century
physician had said, “He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted
sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.”.
Jesus asks us to learn of
him. For, He says, He is meek and gentle. Only when we feel the muscles strain
in the heat of the day on hard ground, can we learn about meekness and
gentleness. These lessons are rarely inherited. They are learn in the furrows
of labour alongside the Master.
We have to come to him.
How can we come but in brokenness, and poverty. We can come only when He draws.
From then on, He may not take away the labour and the furrow, but He asks us to
accompany Him and learn from within the furrow.
