Tag: kingdom of heaven

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

On Earth as In Heaven

Notes for a sermon preached on July 27, 2014 at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Edmonton.
Text: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Recent world and local news has given me occasion to give thanks.

Two weeks ago, my spouse & I were at a family gathering, which included a BBQ on a beach. No incoming artillery threatened the crowd enjoying the BC sun. Thanks be to God.

This week, we will travel by air to Vancouver Island. We can be quite sure that no one will aim a surface-to-air missile at our flight. Thanks be to God.

The reports about the condo fire in SW Edmonton made me grateful that we live in a building with a full sprinkler system and a non-combustible exterior. Thanks be to God.

None of these—or any other bits of dire news—point us toward God’s Kingdom, except in a negative sense. This is not what God desires for his people. For that, we turn to the Gospel—the Good News!

That gospel passage we just heard could almost make us a bit dizzy, with its repeated refrain “The kingdom of heaven is like…” We hear it five times, associated with five very different images: a mustard seed, yeast, treasure, a merchant, a net—images with no apparent connection with each other—they are just piled up together. The closing comment about the scribe trained for the kingdom adds another layer.

We’re talking about parables here, most of them coming without any explanation. As Fr. Paul Fromberg said from this pulpit last Sunday, explanations actually go against the nature of parables, which are less like object lessons than Zen koans: they just sit there, challenging us to find meaning in them.

The theologian Sally McFague says that parables open “cracks in reality,” to allow us to see things freshly.

As Leonard Cohen wrote:

There’s a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

Jesus uses parables to open cracks in our carefully built world-view, challenging us to see things in a new light. He takes the stuff of ordinary life, and gives it a twist, and all of a sudden new light is streaming!

He asks his disciples if they have understood, and they answer “Yes.” I recall a saying of Albert Einstein:

If one is asked “Do you believe in God,”
the answer least likely to be understood is “Yes.”

Even the shortest parables have multiple layers and shades of meaning.

Recall that Jesus says “The kingdom of heaven,” a term found only in Matthew, generally in contexts where Mark and Luke use “the kingdom of God.” Matthew’s use of this term is widely believed to be a circumlocution: Jews avoid misusing the name of God by avoiding talking directly about God. It is one of the reasons many scholars believe this Gospel was written for a church composed mainly of Jewish converts. The two expressions mean the same, so it is important not to assume that “heaven” points to something entirely beyond this world. Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for the coming of the kingdom:

Your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.

God reigns in heaven—he always has and always will—but our prayer is for God’s reign to come in its fullness on earth. God’s kingdom will be fulfilled when the holy will is done in all of creation—on earth as in heaven.

When will that be? How will we know it? The five short parables have one thing in common—they all involve action, as people do things that point to what life looks like when we seek to allow God’s will to govern our lives. Let’s take a look at just the first two of them, beginning with the mustard seed.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field…

It sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? It has a “standard” interpretation, stressing how the very small becomes the very large. That’s correct, as far as it goes, but if we end there, we’ve missed the point. Mustard gives useful seeds and oil, but it is actually a weed—a fast-growing, invasive plant that is almost impossible to eradicate once it is established. What sane person would sow mustard in a field, where it crowds out the wheat, and provides shelter for birds that eat the growing grain? So why does Jesus liken the kingdom to such an apparently counter-productive action? The people who first heard this parable would surely have sat up straight, and scratched their heads at such a suggestion.

And so? The kingdom of heaven is like… well, it’s not always what we expect it to be.

A mustard plant in the middle of a wheat field may be unwelcome, but it can’t be ignored. It is urgent business. The kingdom Jesus announces can also at times be unwelcome, as he challenges us:

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. (Matt 4:17)

The urgency of God’s business puts demands on us: action, commitment, sometimes extreme behaviour, as we work for the coming of God’s kingdom, on earth as in heaven.

Mustard seeds remind us that even the simplest and seemingly most insignificant actions can have big consequences—sometimes unexpected, even undesired. What about yeast? Same thing! The yeast used in ancient Palestine wasn’t the nice domesticated stuff we are familiar with. It was more like what we today call sourdough starter, kept over from the previous batch of bread to leaven the next one. It goes bad or dies very easily, and must be refreshed from time to time. If proper care is not taken, you can produce a loaf of bread laced with poison.

Just so, small actions can produce very large and very negative results, not because people mean to do evil, but more often because they do not take the proper care and attention. This past week, a single cigarette butt caused $10M in damage to a west-end condo, and made 400 people homeless for months or years.

Jesus invites us to be part of that kingdom which has come near. The invitation is a challenge—to us individually, to the church, and to the world around us. The call to follow Jesus can mean being a nuisance like the mustard bush—sometimes unwelcome, but unavoidable in its urgency.

However urgent it may be, the call to follow Jesus is not a call to act blindly or rashly, but to take care in what we do, seeking always to do God’s will, seeking to be good yeast in a world that critically needs God’s leavening.

Far be it from me to suggest that these interpretations are anything more than an opening of a crack—how do YOU hear?

We do have urgent matters before us. Let us therefore seek to know God’s will, through prayer, study, and worship—and then in the holy action—God’s Mission!—that arises from these disciplines. Let us be wise and diligent in attending to them, and may our lives reflect our prayer:

Your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.