The following is one of the most consoling passages in the Gospels, even though the last verse may leave some souls perplexed: “Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and 
learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Mt: 11:28-30).
The first thing we find is an invitation that almost makes it unnecessary to say anything else: “Come to Me.” Our whole life can be hidden and secured in those three words. It speaks volumes about who Jesus is and what we mean to Him. It should also tell us something about ourselves, not only of our intrinsic value in his eyes but also the fact that there should be nothing—nothing—that should hinder us from responding wholeheartedly (though it be contrite-heartedly) to this gentle invitation.
He almost didn’t need to specify which group of persons He is addressing his invitation to (“all who labor and are heavy laden”). Are there any among us who are trying to live at least a decent life in our stress-inducing and even corrupt world, who are not laboring and laden with heavy burdens (or at least feel like we are)? I’ve noticed that other bloggers (and I’m no exception) sometimes make little jokes about our stress levels and all that, but this is just a little steam vent for the very real pressures that build up daily. I for one am very glad to hear that the Lord invites the heavy laden to come to Him.
Once we come (the common biblical expression is: “Here I am, Lord!”), what can we expect? He says to us: “I will give you rest.” This is most welcome to me, since I often think that for the first hundred years or so that I’m in Heaven (God willing), I’m just going to have to sleep in order to recover from this life. Once someone asked me what I thought Heaven would be like, and I immediately answered: “Rest, eternal rest!” But I digress. Let us see just what Jesus is talking about, for it isn’t sleep.
The word in the Greek text for “rest” is anapauo. There, it’s all clear now, right? Don’t feel bad, I had to look it up, too. Anyway, this does mean to give rest, to soothe, to refresh. Literally, it means to cause to rest. So the Lord isn’t just giving us permission to rest, He wants to cause us to rest, to give us rest, to make restfulness and refreshment happen within us. Rather than give us a day off, as it were, to do whatever we feel like, He wants to be a part of our rest, the source of it, personally engaged in it.
But there is more. The root of the word, without the prefix, is pauo. This does not mean quite the same thing. It’s a little more forceful. It means to cause to pause or cease, even to restrain. (For all you philologists: pauo, future pauso, whence the English “pause”.) So by giving us rest, Jesus is causing us to cease and desist from unrestful things, things that have nothing to do with the spiritual refreshment to which He invites us, things that would cause spiritual agitation or inner dis-ease. The Lord is inviting us to pause, to be still and know that He is God.
The next thing He invites us to do may not seem all that restful and refreshing: “Take my yoke upon you.” This sounds like he is calling the heavy-laden to assume yet another burden, yet in fact it is, paradoxically, the means to true spiritual rest and refreshment. How shall we know that? “Learn from Me” is his next counsel, and this is followed by an extraordinary revelation. Often Jesus reveals who He is (the Way, Truth, and Life, the Resurrection, the Good Shepherd, etc), but He rarely reveals how He is. We learn in this passage the precious truth that the eternal Son of the Living God, through whom the universe was made and is held in existence, is “gentle and humble of heart.”
Really, this revelation all by itself should remove huge burdens from the heavy-laden. For there are many threats in the Scriptures concerning the terrifying consequences of sin and the stubborn refusal to repent. But if we truly come to Jesus as He invites us to, our hearts will hear Him say: “I am gentle.” To me, this gentle revelation is like a ray of pure light from Heaven; it removes the angry (or at least disappointed) mask we may have placed upon the face of God. “I am gentle.” We have to know this if we are going to come to Him and lay the secrets of our hearts before Him, both the good and the bad. We have to know that He loves us and will treat us gently (even if firmly and without compromise whenever necessary).
Most icons of Jesus are rather stern of visage and hence somewhat difficult to pray before, especially if one happens to be particularly conscious of one’s sins. But the one pictured here is the one I pray before the most, for in that 
holy face I see One who is gentle and humble of heart. He is pictured in the midst of his passion, wearing the crown of thorns, bound and holding the reed, wearing the scarlet cloak of mockery. This icon is entitled “The Bridegroom,” for the altar of his nuptial covenant with mankind is the Cross, and this blood-red robe is his wedding garment. In the Byzantine tradition the bride and groom are crowned in the wedding rite with crowns of gold or of flowers, crowned “for” each other as a seal of their love and a foreshadowing of their heavenly coronations. But He who is gentle and humble of heart wears a crown of thorns, for his bride is a harlot and He must expiate her sins before she can enter into his joy.
So He says “learn from Me” precisely insofar as He is gentle and humble. The Lord is many things: almighty, all-knowing, omnipresent, eternal, etc. But He never said, “Learn from Me, for I am almighty.” What He wants us to learn is gentleness and humility. For those of us without a naturally gentle disposition (and we are legion), this is a hard lesson to learn. But it must be a very important one, for He has asked us little else in the way of imitating Him. While He does give general counsels about following Him, and certain prophecies about our being like Him (“if they persecuted Me, they will persecute you,” etc), if I’m not mistaken there is only one other place in the Gospels where Jesus explicitly asks us to be like Him. And it is the same message of humility, for He tells us to follow his example right after He washed the feet of his disciples (Jn. 13:14-15). St Peter also tells us that Jesus gave us an example to follow, and this takes us back to the Bridegroom icon: “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps” (1Peter 2:21).
Again, once we learn from Him who is gentle and humble, He says that in this we will find rest for our souls. And so we come to the last line, which many find hard to believe: “For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” One might be tempted to question whether anything in the Christian life is easy and light. Isn’t the Cross really what is meant by his yoke that we have to shoulder? And isn’t the Cross all about self-denial and suffering?
There are a couple things I can say about this. First of all, let’s just get it out of the way and accept that life, any life, Christian or not, is going to meet with suffering and trouble and burdens and sorrows. So accepting the yoke of Christ is not going to give anyone a pain-free or trouble-free life. That much should be common sense. But if we learn from Him gentleness and humility, we’re already well on the way to finding that soul-rest, which is inner peace that springs from hope, and which is secure in the gentleness of Him who loved us unto death. Our putting on the yoke of Christ is the way Jesus makes us pause, makes us cease our ceaseless pursuit of pleasure or possessions, and restrains us from accepting yokes that are truly heavy and burdensome. In one of our long Lenten Offices, we say that we have pursued material things and pleasures, and now we wear a heavy yoke, and so we cry out, “Take from me the heavy yoke of sin!”
Finally, I wonder if it is not the yoke of Christ itself that is the heavy thing, but rather the fear of the yoke of Christ that is our burden. We think it will involve all sorts of deprivations and disagreeable things, so we never get around to humbly accepting it, or we positively flee from it. I’m still too chicken-hearted to ask for sufferings as some of the saints did, but Jesus doesn’t ask us to ask for sufferings, only to accept and do the Father’s will. In the final analysis, to learn from Jesus by accepting his “easy” yoke and “light” burden is simply to say yes to the Father’s will. The verse before this passage gives us an insight into the intimacy of Father and Son: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” We can infer from this that Jesus is just like his Father, that is, the Father is gentle, too, and not the distant, fire-breathing Avenger of transgressions that much art and literature has made Him out to be. He is just, to be sure, but his justice does not diminish his gentleness. Much has to do with us. If we learn gentleness and humility from Jesus, we will discover that the Father is gentle. If we reject Jesus and choose malice, violence, and a life of sin, we will meet Father’s justice, and it will be none too gentle. But even the most hardened sinner will still meet with gentleness if he repents, for God is the Father of prodigal sons and daughters, and his heart is rent as He anxiously waits for all to return.
Come to Jesus, then. Don’t fear his yoke, but willingly accept it. Learn gentleness and humility from Him. He will give rest—both now and forever—to your soul.
