A yoke is a wooden frame fitted on working animals to evenly balance the load on each individual animal and allow them to work as a team. Jesus wears the yoke and we are yoked to him.
A teacher read to her class the text, “My yoke is easy.”
“Who can tell me what a yoke is?” she asked.
A boy said, “A yoke is something they put on the necks of animals.”
Then the teacher asked, “What is the yoke God puts on us?”
A little girl said, “It is God putting His arms around our necks.”
1.Jesus’s yoke helps us to lay-down unnecessary burdens; to illustrate:
Dr. George McCauslin was a very effective YMCA director. But some years ago, he was selected to serve at a particularly challenging YMCA in western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. And that western Pennsylvania YMCA was losing membership, had financial difficulties and a multitude of staff problems, so George McCauslin found himself working 85 hours a week. He found himself getting little sleep at night. He took little to no time off. And when he was not working, he was worrying and fretting about the problems at his job.
He went to a therapist who told him he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He realized that he had to learn somehow to let go and let God into his problems. He didn’t know quite how to do that.
So George McCauslin took an afternoon off, took a pad and paper, and took a long, unhurried walk in the western Pennsylvania woods. As he walked through the cool woods, he could eventually start to feel his tight body and his tight neck start to relax. He kept walking, and eventually sat down under a tree and just sighed and breathed deeply. For the first time in months he felt relaxed.
He got out his pad and paper, and he decided that although he would keep his job, he would release his mental “over-control” in trying to manage every detail. He wrote God a letter. He said, "Dear God, today I hereby resign as general manager of the universe. Love, George."
Then, with a twinkle in his eye, George McCauslin said, "And wonder of wonders, God accepted my resignation."
2. George McCauslin stopped his obsessive work habits. One lesson George teaches us is that if our religion is primarily about obsessively or fearfully meeting religious duties and other obligations, then it is indeed a hard yoke and heavy burden.
Jesus wanted to free us from the burdensome religious and legal interpretations of the scribes and Pharisees, and our own.
It is an act not of juggling balls on a stage, but of carrying eggs from a barn.
Make no mistake: it is sometimes the act of carrying a cross. But it is "light" in the sense when our purpose and priorities in life are clear.
Regarding George’s case, sometimes, among devout or practicing religious people, there can be a resistance to self-care because of fear of putting “self” at the center, as in self-centeredness. They would make the argument that we’re not the priority: the people we serve are. Yet, this concern may reflect an individualistic understanding of “self” shaped by the dominant culture.
Self-care is not self-absorption or isolation, and self-care emphasizes the importance of relationships and community in the way we do self-care. The purpose of self-care is to put vitality back into one’s ministry and vocation over time.
Like a woman who said that she used to obsess over her daughter’s mental illness, believing that the right combination of labels would lead to her daughter’s healing. The daughter now is hopefully receiving treatment, and the mother is hopefully leaving the labels or diagnosis to doctors so she can just concentrate in loving her daughter as a labor of love. The difficulty is when we take up the labor before love. When we get it right, the work of love is hardly work at all.
What other “yokes” need to be broken today besides workaholism , and over-functioning by care-givers?
2.The greatest yoke is the oppression and slavery of sin. It’s like “you used to hold the Yoke but now the Yoke holds you.”
I am speaking of those who are tired and weighed down with the burden of self, those who want to be rid of the load but can’t. It’s a tiredness of spirit. It’s a call to those who are trapped in the prison of self by sin but know no way out. It’s okay to be absolutely powerless over self. This is where we join the human race. There is the help of grace that comes through powerlessness, because we are yoked to Jesus who is our highest power.
Notice that, like George McCauslin, we first must come to the admission of powerlessness over our afflictions and powerlessness over our defects.
E.g. Our Second Reading speaks of being freed from being “debtors to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.” The word in Greek is “sarx” which means the whole fleshy existence of persons, including all the human passions and emotions, which can range from greed, prestige to jealousy, and any kind of temptation such as the list given in Galatians 5:19.
In that verse, St. Paul is telling of his response to God from his sin-enslaved “I” who cried for deliverance, and God’s intervention. Such a cry is the point where self-honesty begins to grow, e.g. in our Opening Prayer, we hear through the humiliated God, who was an “abasement,” a fallen world was raised up.
So too with us, it is only by the humility of heart to make an admission of powerlessness over what afflicts us and then receiving victory through the grace of God, will we feel yoked to Jesus as our higher power.
It is only by the Spirit, not raw willpower, that the deeds of the body are put to death or quieted. Galatians 5:22 is very enlightening: among the gifts of the spirit is love, generosity, self-control.
It is true that spiritual warfare is part of our daily Catholic faith simply because fighting temptation and striving for virtue are themselves forms of spiritual warfare.
Thankfully, God promises in Ezekiel 34:27, “I break the bars of their yoke and rescue them from the hands of those who enslaved them.” The enemy is constantly trying to force his own yoke upon us—a yoke of slavery and bondage of sin.
In the Aramaic tradition, "yoke" and "lordship" were seen to be synonymous ideas.
Jesus’ yoke helps us hold our tongue or choose encouraging words, to be giving to a person in material need, keeping holy the Sabbath by the Sunday Mass obligation. An easy yoke means we are not afflicted by an onslaught of greed, envy, greed, etc.; it’s the joy of a quiet conscience.
3. Whether rabbinical or political (or ecclesiastical, for those of us who wear stoles), a yoke is the set of laws, interpretations and expectations laid upon one by a higher authority. Jesus says that God has “hidden these things from the wise and the learned [and has] revealed them to little ones.”
Those with expertise are often the hardest to reach. Jesus is not being anti-education or anti-intellectual; rather included as wise is any expert who seeks to be humble and still teachable. Matthew 11:29, “learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.”
Hans Dieter Betz described these verses about being yoked to Christ as being “like a vessel which itself has no content, but which stands ready to be filled.”
So, identify your own yokes, and ask yourself if they are yoked to Christ or not.
There are different yokes for different folks.
4. Lastly, Sirach 6:19-31 equates yoke with wisdom. Come to (Wisdom) like one who plows and sows. Put your neck into her collar.
in the Bible’s wisdom literature, thematically, "rest" is known to be the final consequence of wisdom's call. For instance, Sirach 6,28 states: "at last you will find the rest she gives." Amen.
