Love song of the greater ox.

"28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” - Matthew 11

Jesus is calling on all who labor but whose work is never done. You understand that literally. You know the physical toll. You are aware that, at some point, even if the burden isn’t exhausted your body will be.

And some of us have to do the work mentally every day. We carry a heavy burden that starts with cognitive behavioral therapy; telling ourselves it’s worth it to get out of bed before we even get out of bed. We take our meds and start the day with a heavy yoke. We don’t expect it to be gone, we just expect the work to be bearable. Work that will be waiting for us when we wake up tomorrow.

But what about a burden of the soul? Jesus is speaking of those who labor to make themselves acceptable to God. There are those of us, even those who would claim a grace-centered, Jesus-believing faith, who have been wearying ourselves seeking to be clean enough, sinless enough, moralistic and exacting enough, that we can experience deep rest. When we fail we labor to make up for it, or we hide it, or cover ourselves in misdirection or gossip or anger. What Jesus knows is that the person seeking to be content by some moral code is never, ever at rest. There is always some more exacting standard to meet. Some small failure, some way of being better that keeps us under a burden. The book you read about how to finally get your life in order and rest is replaced by the next book, marketed to increase your anxiety. Jesus is speaking to those who have tried to live a life good enough to quiet their conscience. And Jesus says "come to me," but we will not.

I was thinking about this text when I remembered how some farm dogs are trained to stop eating chickens. Farmers will find a chicken killed by one of their dogs and will take the carcass of the dead chicken and tie it to the dog for a time. The dog will learn the smell of the dead chicken as it enters decomposition, and will learn to detest it. They will take on the smell of the chicken and will despise it. There are alterations to the method too. This one, a suggestion by a rancher, got me:

"Grab up the chicken, or what is left of it, hug it to you, run around after the dog, sounding really upset, rather than mad and ask, "what did you do? Oh my, what did you do?" almost like you are going to cry. It took a few times, but now she lets the chickens sleep right next to her if they want to.”

The idea, obviously was to traumatize the dog into aversion. I’m not kidding about this.

But what Jesus understands about every human being listening to his words is that they all labor with the scent of their own deadliness clinging to them. No one is truly un-yoked. Forgive me while I list the things we carry, because sometimes it is easy to marginalize Jesus’ words—believing them for tidy, polite little sins other people commit. You did not get the job because of something a reference remembered about a bawdy lunch you had with a client, your teenager stole something from the neighbor’s garage. You cannot seem to overcome your pornography habit. You bend the truth because you cannot bear the disapproval of even the most casual acquaintances. You spend your free thought at work or in the grocery store, trying to hook someone outside your marriage, and you blame your spouse. Your little hobby of online poker has led to a mountain of secret debt, and you manage it by robbing Peter to pay Paul. You told your husband you would not get drunk again, you would not scare the children again, but here you are. You manage your burdens through blame-shifting or the power of denial, but every once in a while you get stuck. You are tired of being wrong and want to be right again but what can you do? You can’t white-knuckle your way out of your moral debt. You can’t forget how you’ve failed to love those you’re supposed to love even if you half-way believe that God forgives the penitent. So here you are, exhausted. Here you are, guilty as a dog tied to a dead chicken. Here you are going through life hoping no one smells it, no one sees it. Here you are: what did you do?!

To you who are working at it and still carrying your heavy load, Jesus says "Come to me."

Take my yoke. If by “my yoke” Jesus means that we will wear the yoke and he will move us wherever we should go - it is a good truth. If God our father, if God our Lord and shepherd is in the master's seat and we are the beasts then so it is. Let him be the teamster and let me be an ox for all I care, in God’s green earth. If that’s what it takes to be clean, to be right again, we’ll eat straw, we’ll eat dirt, even. God our father be blessed. It’s a message that could pass in many churches, one that forms the backbone of Christian duty in most places, a message for your dinner table in a nice Christian home. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

But Jesus says he has come, himself, to fulfill the Law. Jesus' criticism of the teachers of moralistic living is that they love to add to the burden without moving a muscle to help lift it, which leads me to this conclusion:

The yoke belongs to Jesus not because he owns it but because he wears it.

It is Jesus who bears the heavy load, the greater burden. Jesus calls us to be yoked not by ourselves but with Him. This is not how you would plan a working team. They would walk in circles, the stronger dragging along the weaker. Rather by Jesus’ strength in fulfilling the law we are able to bear an easier burden, the law without the weight of condemnation becomes beautiful. We learn from Him at the yoke and he shapes us into people who live ethically and lighten the burdens of others. The Greater Ox bears the burden of loving, sacrificial sorrow, and the Lesser Ox bears the burden of bewildered joy, now confessing every debt through tears of relief, announcing to the world, by the sheer comedy of their imbalanced yoke, by the ground they plough together, the strong shoulders of a strong God.