Tag: justice

Take my yoke…

Notes for a sermon preached at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Edmonton, Alberta on July 5, 2026. Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

What’s a yoke? And what does it mean to take Jesus’ yoke upon us?

As so often in Jesus’s teachings, the word has agricultural roots. Oxen were yoked together to pull a plow, sharing the burden of the work, and submitting to the farmer’s bidding. Another kind of yoke is the milkmaid’s yoke, a horizontal bar laid across the shoulders to allow the carrier to bear a heavier load more easily.[1]

Oxen were usually yoked together in unequal pairs, to help a younger ox learn the discipline of bearing the yoke from an older one. The younger submits to the older, and both submit to the farmer. The milkmaid carries her yoke because her job is to bring the milk to the master’s table: she doesn’t do it for her own reasons, but because her role in life is to submit to the master.

Clearly, Jesus uses the word as a metaphor for submission. “Yoke” turns up in a number of places in Scripture, in both positive and negative senses. It can refer to the process of learning the law from a rabbi, or to the law itself. It can also refer to oppression by an overlord of some kind, especially a conqueror. It implies a relationship based on submission. It may be to a person, to an employer, or to an authority of some kind, or to an inner urge like an addiction, but it’s always a superior/inferior situation.

When Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon you…”, we are hearing an invitation to submit to his authority. We hear a promise to do this in our baptismal rite when the candidates or their sponsors are asked, “Do you promise to obey [Jesus] as your Lord?” Submission to Jesus is baked into the life of the Church! We seek to do as Jesus would have us do. The question is not “What would Jesus do?” but “What would Jesus wish us (or me) to do?” Seeking to discern the answer to this question is at the foundation of what we call vocation—answering the call, accepting the invitation. And note this: on one level, vocation is a “once and done” proposition, which we affirm in baptism, but on another level, it’s a day-by-day process, as we seek the way ahead in our lives, both as individuals and as a church.

However we read it, submitting to Jesus’ authority—taking his yoke upon us—goes against the flow of cultural norms and expectations.

Many commentators on the passage see it as a comparison between Jesus’ teaching and the teaching of the Rabbis, making the Torah a heavy burden. If that is the sense of the passage, then Jesus is pointing away from the religious norms of his day to a new and less onerous understanding of the Law. It doesn’t take a great stretch to see that this reading can lead to anti-Semitism. However, other commentators look back to various passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, and find that the idea of a “yoke” is more often associated with harsh or imperial rule.[2] If we read the passage with that in mind, Jesus’ invitation is to shed the chains of the Kingdoms of this world, to live into the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom of justice, mercy, compassion, and love, a lighter burden than the chains of any worldly Kingdom. The invitation then becomes not just a call to live into his understanding of the Law, but to see that life as refusing the ultimacy of worldly rulers’ authority.

The religious invitation becomes a profoundly political one. In a world ruled by Caesar, saying “Jesus is Lord” was a challenge to Caesar’s rule.

In today’s liberty-loving political climate, the idea of taking anyone’s yoke on us is still counter-cultural. There are people who cling to the idea of the rugged individualist, whose idea of freedom is that no-one can tell them what to do. That’s a myth, of course—down that road lies chaos. I would suggest that the rugged individualist labours under the yoke of their own pride. Everyone bears some yoke or other, either externally or internally. As Bob Dylan sang,

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
   You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
   But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.[3]

We always have the choice to accept or reject Jesus’ yoke. The call to choose is deeply rooted in Scripture, going back at least as far as the Israelites’ time in the wilderness. When the Promised Land was in sight, Moses said to the people,

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him, for that means life to you and length of days…
                                                           Deuteronomy 30:19-20a

He had stated the consequences of choosing wrongly two chapters earlier:

Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and with gladness of heart for the abundance of everything, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and lack of everything. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.                                                             Deuteronomy 28:47-48

There’s that word “yoke” again!

We don’t have a choice about serving someone or something, but we do have a choice about whom to serve.

As Joshua said to the people of Israel,

… choose this day whom you will serve…
as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.
                                                                             Joshua 24:15

Jesus’ invitation to take his yoke upon us is a call to live into the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom of justice and joy, mercy and grace,[4] a Kingdom ruled by the God who is love, who calls us day by day to live in and into that love.

So let us say “Yes!” to this gracious call—today, tomorrow, and always.

Amen.

[1] https://www.christianity.com/jesus/life-of-jesus/teaching-and-messages/the-yoke-of-jesus-biblical-meaning-and-importance.html

[2] I first encountered this interpretation in the annotations on this passage in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible, Abingdon Press, 2003, p. 1766f.

[3] © 1979 by Special Rider Music.

[4] See Hymn #631 in Common Praise, Anglican Church of Canada, 1998

From 1965 to today

Think back to 1965 if you can. I suspect some readers of this post weren’t even born then. But in that year I was seventeen, a first-year student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. I had skipped one year of school, so I was a year younger than most of my fellow frosh. I had also graduated at the top of my high school class, and was headed into the first year of an Honors program in Mathematics. I loved music, and was devoted to my church.

U of A logoSome of my high school colleagues were “rushed” by fraternities at U. of A. Not wanting to be left out, I went with them to a couple of rush parties, and experienced something close to outright disdain, as in “Who the heck are you, and what are you doing here?” It wasn’t a lot of fun. Some of my friends ended up as frat members, and for a while I was deeply envious. Until…

I started hearing stories about how they behaved at their parties, and how women were treated there. Do you know what a “Purple Jesus” is? Neither did I, but apparently it was a standard ruse to get young women drunk and take advantage of them. (It’s a mixture of port wine and vodka, BTW).

As I started to get into U. life, I found friends and like-minded people in choral, religious, and political circles. I sang, I prayed with people, and I was drawn into the peace movement of the late ’60’s. I lost touch with my high school friends who had joined fraternities, most of them with the avowed aim of making connections to get ahead in the future.

Clearly, I wasn’t welcome at those rush parties, and I couldn’t figure out why at the time. It seems I was a bit too much of a nerd, although that word wasn’t current at the time. I suspect also that my family didn’t have the “right” connections. My father was well-respected in medical circles, but we had no real roots in Alberta, having only arrived in Canada from the U.K. in 1952.

And now…
I have come to see the culture of those fraternities as part of the disease infecting our society. It’s a culture of entitlement: male, white, and connected. It is full of misogyny, racism, and “good-ol’-boy” thinking. I went my own way in University days and afterward, and ceased to have any real connection with that part of life. I have no regrets, as I have worked to build a life based on respect for ALL people, which eventually led me into the vocation I followed for most of my adult life.

I retired as a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada in 2013, having held a number of responsible positions in that church, but all the while refusing the attitude of entitlement that I found in many of my co-religionists.

brett-kavanaugh-1026586Which brings me to this past couple of weeks, watching the spectacle of the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, now sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the USA. The process made me glad that I live in Canada, where the judiciary is far less politicized than in the U.S. The way the process worked out both astonished and appalled me: the duplicity evinced by partisans on both sides was almost beyond belief. But what struck me more than anything else was the attitude displayed by the nominee. He’s a frat boy, I realized. And in some ways that says it all. He is there because he’s entitled to be there, whether or not he has abused other people on the way to where he has arrived. For the record, I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the Senate committee.

These events took me back to the humiliation I experienced at those rush parties, where the people in charge looked at me as less than them, and derided me for who I was.

Does Brett Kavanaugh deserve to be where he is now? Many people seem to think so. But for me, his elevation to such a high office is further testimony to how warped our society has become. I know I’m writing from Canada, where we do not have such a process, but it is clear to me that we are not immune to this kind of entitlement thinking.

I look for the day when our courts are visibly representative of, and speak to, all segments of our society, especially those who have been seen as underclasses in the past and still today. I think particularly of women, Indigenous people, the poor, the LBGTQB2+ community, religious minorities, racial minorities, immigrants of all origins, and all who have felt the sting of not being entitled.

I follow the way of Jesus, the one who came to invite all people into the Kingdom of the God whom he called “Abba.” No-one should be excluded, just as no-one should believe themselves entitled to inclusion.

We are all here and beloved by the Grace of God. May our courts and our legislatures live by that truth.