Come, take, learn

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.