There’s just no pleasing some people, is there? Last winter was too wet. The spring was unseasonably cold. But this summer is shaping up to be just way too hot. Like Goldilocks, we so often seem to move from one bowl of porridge to another, proclaiming one too hot, another too cold, another too salty or too sweet, restlessly moving from one to another in search of the one that’s just right…
And – dare I say it? – we can be like that about our faith too (and, yes, I do include myself in this). Smells and bells or happy-clappy? Traditional hymns or modern worship songs? The Book of Common Prayer with its ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, or Common Worship and inclusive language? How often do we let our personal preferences get in the way of our desire to meet with God in worship?
If – like me – you recognise something of yourself in this ‘Goldilocks’ approach to worship, then it may reassure you to know that Jesus himself had to contend with this same attitude.
In the verses that immediately precede today’s Gospel reading, he has been singing the praises of his cousin John the Baptist, the one sent to prepare the way for the Messiah, a prophet, a new Elijah… And you can almost feel the people – or some of them – rolling their eyes. ‘That John… always banging on about sin, policing people’s behaviour, wanting to wash them clean… Blimey, he could do with a good wash. Yeah, and a square meal…’. And, yes, you can also imagine the retorts of others in that crowd: ‘Yes, well, maybe John has a point. Look at this guy, this Jesus… he certainly doesn’t just eat locusts; he always seems to be out partying. And just look at the folk he mixes with! That lass over there? You know what she does for a living, right? And what about him…? He works for the Romans. Getting rich off our taxes. What a gang of good-for-nothings!’.
John wails, and the people do not mourn with him. Jesus plays the flute, and the people do not dance. They are never satisfied. We are never satisfied. Just like the people of Jesus’s own time, we so often try to mould Jesus into the kind of Messiah that we would like him to be: nice Jesus, cuddly Jesus, the kind of Jesus who casts judgement on those people we find it hard to forgive (tax collectors! sinners! litterbugs! people who park in the church car park when they’re going to the hairdresser’s!), but who holds out hope of reconciliation to people like us… yes, even when we know that we too have messed up.
Last week we welcomed over 100 children from Year 6 in some of our local primary schools for ‘Experience Church’, a series of activities in which the young people had the chance to reflect on the parts of the church (the kneelers, the font, the altar, the lectern and so on), what they are used for, and what they mean to those who worship here. Some of the most interesting conversations took place around the stained-glass windows.
Like many in Western Europe, our stained-glass windows depict a very western-looking Jesus… a very white, very blonde Jesus is taken down from the cross; Jesus rises from the tomb, watched by a very white, very blonde angel; an, if anything, even whiter resurrected Jesus greets an extremely blonde Mary Magdalene in the garden. The children – even those who had never been in a church before – understood that these were not, and were probably never intended to be, realistic images of Jesus. At best, our windows reflect the truth that Jesus is for all people, everywhere. But, more likely, what they really show, in the end, is that we all want Jesus to look a bit like us: a God made in our image and likeness, rather than vice versa… We are never satisfied. To be unsatisfied is, it seems, part of the human condition. We always want something more, something we haven’t found yet, something that is just right…
St Augustine, in a famous prayer, suggested that perhaps this is inevitable: ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord’, he wrote, ‘and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you’. There is a place, he suggests, which is, truly, just right, but finding it involves not trying to make God more like us, but the much more challenging task of working to make ourselves more like God, working our way back to the God who created us, in order to find, finally, the resting-place where all our restless dissatisfaction finally ends.
So what is the answer? How do we get to that just right place where our restlessness finds its rest in God?
Our Old Testament reading seems to suggest one model for this. Abraham sends his servant out to find a wife for his son Isaac. The journey is long – right back to the place from which Abraham’s journey had begun – and its outcome uncertain. ‘What if I go all that way and the woman I choose is unwilling to leave her homeland and come to marry Isaac?’ the servant asks. But he need not have worried. Rebekah is, of course, just right as the wife for Isaac. She appears just as the servant had envisioned in prayer, as an answer to prayer, and is immediately willing to follow him to a new life, the life ordained for her by God, a new life which she seems immediately to recognise as the one that is just right for her. For Rebekah, as for Abraham, finding rest in God means embracing a period of restlessness, of wandering, of exploring the unknown… but doing so full of trust in God’s provision and God’s promises.
Jesus, in the final verses of our Gospel reading, puts this another way.
At first sight these verses seem paradoxical; they don’t seem to make a lot of sense. ‘Come to me’, Jesus says, ‘if you’re carrying a heavy burden – if you’re restless, aware of your own sinfulness, dissatisfied with your life and with yourself – and I will give you rest’. But, here’s the thing. Jesus doesn’t say ‘Come to me and give me your burden’. Jesus doesn’t offer to take our burdens – our restlessness and our dissatisfaction – away from us. No, instead he says, ‘Take my yoke upon you’. Wait! So if we’re feeling burdened down with sin and care, we should – what? – harness ourselves up and take on another yoke, something else to carry, something else to feel bad about?
Well, not quite. Because the thing about a yoke is, yes, that it’s used to carry something, but not alone. A yoke is a joining device: at its simplest, a crossbar, which attaches two oxen or other beasts of burden together to enable them to carry or pull a heavy weight. ‘Take my yoke upon you’, Jesus says. Bind yourself to me. Join yourself to me and I won’t take your weight off you entirely – your life, with its ups and downs, its good and bad, its ‘too hot’s and ‘too cold’s, is yours to bear, yours to live. But join yourself to me – yes, like a loving couple, like Isaac and Rebekah, sharing life’s adventures and its burdens – and I will carry that weight with you. Not only that, but, because we are bound together, I will also guide you. Step by step. Day by day. Burden by burden. Until weight feels lighter, the yoke easier to bear.
I have always been struck by Sieger Koder’s image of Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus to carry his cross. In contrast to other images in the same sequence, where Jesus struggles and falls under the cross’s weight, the two men seem to carry the cross easily between them. They are not bowed down by it, but look up and forward, beyond the weight and the pain, and beyond death, to a place where burdens are light and restless hearts find peace.
We are restless, sinful, bad at following through on our good resolutions, fundamentally dissatisfied… but if we yoke ourselves to Jesus we can find that just right place. And we can, too, learn to live in the here-and-now in hope rather than dissatisfaction and in love rather than judgement. You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. As we seek that rest, may we yoke ourselves to Jesus, walk to his pace, sing to his tune, and learn to be who we were made to be in the just-rightness of his love. Amen.