Love's Light and Easy Offices

For many years, I struggled to understand something that Jesus said and that we often quote as if its meaning were obvious. The statement comes at the end of the eleventh chapter of the gospel of Matthew. Having over the course of several chapters outlined his expectations for his disciples, Jesus adds: “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Given all that has preceded this observation, I often thought to myself: “I’m not so sure. It doesn’t sound that way.”

         Jesus calls us to have faith—and that can prove tough. He asks us to have hope—and that can seem challenging. And, most importantly, he beckons us to a life of love, compassion, and forgiveness—and that can feel almost impossible. How did I miss the light and easy part?

         Compliance with the law of love seems like a particularly daunting prospect. Make no mistake about it, though: Jesus views it as a law. In the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus declares: “A new commandment I give unto you—love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” In Latin, the “new commandment” was rendered “mandatum novum,” a corruption of which gives us “Maundy Thursday,” the day of Holy Week when Jesus spoke these words to his disciples.

         What that law commands may look like a heavy lift. It tells us to love everyone, to have compassion toward everyone, to forgive everyone. Even, indeed especially, our enemies. Even, indeed especially, when we have to sacrifice to do it. Even, indeed especially, when no one showers us with praise and prizes for being such wonderful human beings.

         Love often looks like that—difficult, tedious, burdensome, unappreciated. The poet Robert Hayden gets at this truth perfectly in his beautiful work “Those Winter Sundays”:

         Sundays too my father got up early

         and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

         then with cracked hands that ached

         from labor in the weekday weather made

         banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

         I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

         When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

         and slowly I would rise and dress,

         fearing the chronic angers of that house,

         Speaking indifferently to him,

         Who had driven out the cold

         and polished my good shoes as well.

         What did I know, what did I know

         of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Hayden’s poem gets at love’s central credential: we do it for someone else, and not for ourselves, or for thanks, or for recognition, or for anything else. We give it away “freely,” in every sense of that word—willingly, generously, and with no implicit price tag attached.

Beautiful? Yes. Moving? Absolutely. Light and easy? We might wonder.

As we enter into the doing of it, though, we discover that, of course, Jesus had this exactly right. Ours is a God of Infinite Love, and so hardwired us toward grace: as we give, we grow lighter; as we grow lighter, we become more free; as we become more free, happiness ensues—but only because we were not chasing it on our own behalf in the first place. And it works that way because ours is also a God with a keen fondness for paradox. Who else would appoint a shepherd to slay a giant? Who else would bring an impoverished child to serve as savior? Who else would show us the meaning of life through an empty tomb?  

And the other part of the equation holds true as well. Selfishness, narcissism, the studied indifference to the suffering of others, the harboring of old angers and resentments—these turn out to be the hardest and heaviest loads. They are the stuff of the temptations that Jesus resisted in the wilderness: materialism, egoism, self-aggrandizement. They weigh us down with false assurances of entitlement and fraudulent promises of reward. “I have decided to stick with love,” Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

As I write these words, the events of the day are calling us to a place of love that will require more from us than ever before. We are understandably concerned about what lies ahead. And what comes next will entail some of the hardest things we could possibly be asked to do … except, it turns out, for the alternatives.

In the living out and fulfilling of the new commandment that guides us, we will rediscover an eternal truth:

The yoke is easy.

The burden is light.

Especially when we all lift together.

Amen.