I’ve come to understand that being a Christian is less about believing the right things than about learning, day by day, to embody Christ. My way of embodying Christ will be different from yours, just as my circumstances and perceptions are different from yours. In this week’s gospel reading* we have been extended a great invitation: Come to me, all who are weary. Jesus is inviting us to leave behind our masks and step out of the driven, performing self and into something more fundamental – an openness to the new and unexpected that children come by naturally. What some call a ‘beginner’s mind,” a posture of receptivity, that allows us to encounter God without first deciding what God ought to be like. The yoke Jesus offers is not another demand layered on top of our existing burdens. It is a different way of carrying what we carry, with God and others, rather than alone. This embodiment of God’s love doesn’t necessarily change what we carry; it changes how we carry it.
But the reading doesn’t bring us to that invitation right away. Earlier Jesus contrasts for us what the “before” picture looks like. No one is satisfied — not by John’s austerity, not by Jesus’ table fellowship with sinners and outcasts. This generation, he says, is like children squabbling in the marketplace, complaining that no one will play the right game. In other words, in our desire to control process and outcomes, we construct rules and criteria for what God should be like and then reject the very things God sends because they don’t fit our expectations.
Jesus shows us a path for transformation. Instead of claiming his own authority, Jesus prays. He thanks God for the wisdom of infants — the little ones who haven’t yet learned to be impressed by themselves. Jesus invites us to face our circumstances with open hands rather than clenched fists. The “expert mind” often cannot receive what only vulnerability can hold. What the theologians miss, a child can find. What we are yoked to is not achievement or certainty, but a presence that meets us exactly where we are.
Rest, it turns out, is not the absence of everyday burdens. It is discovering that we are not carrying them alone.
