Wednesday in the Second Week of Advent, December 9, 2020

Matthew 11:28-30

Jesus said to the crowds: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

When Isaac, the son of Abraham, had grown old, he sent his son Jacob into the northeastern country in order to marry a daughter of Laban, Jacob’s uncle.  After a hard journey, Jacob found Laban’s camp and met his daughter, the beautiful Rachel.  When Laban saw that Jacob intended to remain in the area for some time, he offered wages for him to work for him.  But Jacob desired only Rachel, with whom he had fallen in love, and asked to marry her.  Laban agreed, under the condition that Jacob first work seven years, taking care of his herds for him.  As the Book of Genesis tells us, “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel: and they seemed but a few days, because of the greatness of his love.”  Then, tricked by Laban into marrying her sister Leah instead, Jacob worked a further seven years for his true love.

“They seemed but a few days, because of the greatness of his love.”  The loveliness of this verse is due to the concision and clarity with which it expresses a genuine human experience.  At the same time, as Scripture, it reveals a supernatural reality as well: the life of the soul in love with God.  For the soul in love with God and knowing God’s love, the most difficult toil can be joyfully undertaken for the Lord’s sake: missionary work; the life of the hermit; service to the destitute, to the sick, to prisoners; teaching and raising children.  Likewise, sufferings of sickness and loss can be borne, and penance performed.  

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells his disciples, newly returned from days of exhausting work spreading the Gospel in towns and villages, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened.”  More literally, “Come to me, you toilers and you who are loaded down.”  The Lord speaks to them not as workers away from their jobs but as to those in the middle of their jobs.  “And I will give you rest.”  The tense of the Greek verb is the present: “I give you rest”, or “I am giving you rest”.  He says, “Take my yoke upon you”, telling them to lay aside the yokes they already bore, which are heavy with selfishness and sin, “and learn from me”, that is, Learn from me how to bear a yoke, which all in this world must do.  The Lord tells us to bear our yokes in his manner, “meek and humble of heart”.  And certainly it would be silly to go about proudly with our yokes.  The Lord says to bear our yokes naturally and not to fight against them.  Most of all we are to keep in mind that they are the Lord’s yokes.  They are, in fact, custom made for each of us.  Thus, humbly accepting our yokes from him and taking them upon ourselves, and not rebelling and attempting in vain to throw them off, we may truly “find rest” for ourselves, for the yoke he gives us is easy and the burden he sets upon us is light in comparison with the yoke of the Cross and the burden of our sins which he carries.  He gives us a share in what he carries, but no more than that, and nothing more than we can handle.  And when we pull the plow to which we are hitched, we know that it his work that we do, and that it is for his sake that we do it, so all our lives as his followers here on earth will seem “but a few days, because of the greatness” of our love for him.