The Yoke of Rest

Jesus the carpenter would have been well familiar with the yoke as an implement of agriculture. A piece of wood shaped to fit over the neck of animals that have been drafted to pull a heavy load, the yoke seems a most unlikely metaphor to use in conjunction with the idea of rest. What could be more antithetical than to be compared to a beast of burden? As a farm implement the yoke was itself a burden and its function was to enable the animal who wore it to bear someone else’s load. No wonder the yoke is a common symbol of submission and oppression in Scripture (Gen 27:40; Ex 6:6-7; 1 Kings 12:4; Is 9:4; 10:27; Gal 5:1; 1 Tim 6:1).

The yoke, after all, was more than a tool. It was an instrument of exploitation. The yoke was the means the farmer used to gain full advantage of the animal’s strength. It is true that the beast received a kind of benefit from the yoke. It enabled him to bear the weight of the load. But the load itself was a burden the animal would never have taken up if not for the intrusion of the farmer. The farmer thinks nothing of it. To the farmer the only reason the animal exists is to bear such burdens. The animal thinks nothing of it either, since it is a brute beast and lacks the capacity to reason. But we are not animals. We do not want to be anyone’s beast of burden. Why would Jesus think such an image would appeal to us?

The answer is that we are already under a yoke. Wendell Berry is right: “We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.” It would be equally foolish to pretend that the church does not bear its stamp. When Berry contrasts the values of the exploiter with those of the nurturer, it is hard not to feel that the contemporary church lines up on the wrong side: “The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care.”9 The exploiter’s primary interest is return on investment. The nurturer is concerned about health. As a result, Berry explains, “The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, ‘hard facts’; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.”

Of course, we do not consider what we do in the church exploitation. We have more spiritual words to describe our values and behavior. We speak of our programs and our efforts at branding as positioning and contextualization rather than consumerism. Our congregational busyness is a way to activate the ministry of our members, not use them. We justify our actions by saying that we are only trying to be effective. Perhaps we are.

Yet God in his dealings with the church betrays a disturbing a lack of interest in effectiveness as we have defined it. He does not seem interested in numbers. The people he sends to us are not strategic at all. They are a rabble who look more like the laborers, hookers and marginal people that Jesus consorted with in the Gospels than the gifted individuals we had hoped would fill out our ranks. And they are far from effective. Their lives, if they are not a complete shambles, are at least in serious disarray. No wonder we prefer our elegant systems to the roughhewn implement Jesus offers. Jesus does not offer us a system or a method. He offers us a yoke (Matthew 11:28-29). The yoke of rest that Jesus offers can be taken, but it cannot be seized by force. We do not manage ourselves into it, acquire it by bargain or even attain it by discipline. Rest as Jesus describes it must be done for us. This rest is as relational as it is experiential. We come to Christ and he refreshes us. We do not come to Christ, receive our rest and then go our way. By offering us rest, Christ offers himself.

John Koessler’s latest The Radical Pursuit of Rest: Escaping the Productivity Trap is now available from InterVarsity Press.