“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Jesus, Matthew 11:29-30
I was captured by the poetry in motion that was the men’s synchronized diving in the Rio 2016 Olympic games. My personal aquatic claim to fame is the one time I dove off the 3 meter spring board in high school. So standing on a platform 33 feet about a pool does not sound like my idea of good Sunday night.
I noticed something even smaller than the splashes made by the aerial acrobats of the pool, but possibly even more important. The men moved in unison, but only one voice counted them off. In the silence of the Maria Lenks Aqautic Center, you would hear 1-2-3 or uno-dos-tres or Yī-Èr-Sān.
These men moved in near perfection as if tied together by an invisible cord. Then as if attached by an unbreakable bond twisted, flipped and vent vertical into the pool below.
Jesus said these words “my yoke is easy”. Unless you are living in an Amish community you don’t use a yoke on the regular. It was a farm tool that hooks up to animals such as oxen to employ the power of both animals. These animals will be linked together until released or the yoke gets broken. No matter the struggle with bond around the neck of the beast he will be hooked to going where the other animal goes.
All of us are “yoked” in some way. Our life is linked up to someone or something that is leading us. Marriages are yoking of two lives. Friendships are forms of ways we are connected by the ties of love. But we also get all tangled in the yokes of addictions, complicated relationships, and vices that are leading us to destruction.
So often the biblical context of a yoke (especially in the Old Testament) was one of slavery and bondage. It was often depicted as Israel greatest struggle. My mind runs like a movie projector as I read these words. I see the men and woman of God with a bar around their neck that they are unable to break free from in constant struggle to undo that slavery. Led by the master into more and more heartbreak.
I have often felt that same emotion in my life. Yoked to the wrong thing or person. Fighting and flailing to get free. Being led wherever that thing or person wants to go despite my fight. Unable to ever really get free. Bound in a slavery of poor relationships, personal struggle, and even near depression. I have fought and fought to get my neck free from he clamp of the yoke, only to get worn out from the struggle.
What I am discovering is that the God who spoke of Israel’s bondage is the same God that wants to set you and me free.
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high.
The yoke, the tie, the bond you are struggling with it can be broken in the power of Jesus. Time after time the Lord spoke of his people his desire to “break the yoke”. And at that moment you walk out of the bondage with heads held high.
God said through the prophet Isaiah in reference to the breaking of the yoke of slavery:
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness[a] will go before you,
and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
When the bar breaks you get your THEN…you get your healing, you have righteousness restored, God will answer you with “here I am.”
Back to the platform in Rio. What captured my attention was the ease with which the divers moved. Nothing they did was a struggle. It was gliding. Jesus said that his yoke “would be easy and burden light.” That when we break the yoke of our bondage and take up the yoke of Christ the neck breaking bar that had existed is not there with him.
It is simply as if he says 1-2-3 and we dive in sync with him.
