Everybody’s talking rest these days. Kelly’s doing it. Jennifer too. And Ann Voskamp and her quiet community are doing it for a month. So with my post for today unfinished, I’ll drop my contribution to the rest discussion in, reposting this from last September.

And if you’re joining us for the 7-Days-in-a-Psalm (or somewhere) challenge, be ready to drop your thoughts in the comment box on Friday. If you took it a step farther and posted on it, let me know and I’ll link you here.

It’s always so backward to me.

I have an organized brain, one neatly compartmentalized.

The earth, you know, travels on its axis in one direction only. Seems my mind follows the same pattern. What works for the earth surely will work for me. Straight lines, one foot in front of the other.

Stay in the lines, between the fences, on the path.

I imagine He cast a sideways grin my yet-unformed way when He breathed words into Matthew’s quill and parchment. Jesus stood teaching the crowd in Galilee and said such backward things.

He said He would hide understanding from the wise and learned, and instead reveal His knowledge to children.

Tiny minds would grasp what we smartypants could not.

And it was all for His good pleasure. It’s right there in the text.

That was His way of saying My Father delights in crazy backed up logic just because He knows two thousand years from now it’ll make my Beloved’s head spin right off her neck.

And there’s that sideways grin again.

Seems the child vs. grown-up remarks were just the prelude. There was more backwardiness to come.

He would utter such outrageous words and then turn and ask us to slip our heads into a constrictive apparatus meant for beasts of burden and heavy labor.

He would ask us to wear the yoke as though we were oxen, all so we could find a little rest.

And I ask myself: A little rest? Is He mad?

His pearly whites are flashing that grin.

All for His good pleasure.

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Jesus, the apprentice in the carpenter’s shop, sanded the crosspiece curves. He pressed into the bar, knowing how it would bear down on the strong backs of oxen as He worked the edges smooth.

Lost in a cloud of steam, He bent the oxbow, imagining how it would fit around a stubborn neck. He grasped the arced wood, pulling ends apart and wondering  if it would be strong enough to withstand the strain as a critter twisted it against the crosspiece.

The Carpenter knew for what purpose He crafted the appliance. He knew how His audience there in Galilee would see the yoke. They knew it was designed for work.

It was functional.

The yoke was made to constrain oxen to perform field work too grueling for human strength alone. Bound by their necks, oxen pulled unbearable loads across rough, uneven ground. Day after day, side by side. Were one to wander off to the side, it would drag the along without mercy.

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But more than functional, the yoke was figurative.

The Carpenter, He knew this as well.

This crowd heard for generations how the Lord rescued those before them from the yoke of slavery in Egypt.

“Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD.’ ” (Exodus 6:6-8, emphasis added)

How this same crowd yearned for the Lord to break another yoke, that of the Roman oppression.

To these Galileans, to find oneself bound in a yoke was nothing short of brutality.

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Yet it was to this very people that the Carpenter held up the yoke — the burdensome, oppressive yoke — and said, “Slip your head inside. Drop this over your shoulders. And find rest.”

Madness.

The earth, spinning calmly on its axis in its one solitary direction, skips back. I feel it lurch.

This is no straight line He follows. It defies all good sense.

Whether figurative or functional, no one with their wits would slip on the yoke. Not on purpose. And certainly not to find rest.

But the Carpenter went there. He said it. Matthew wrote it down.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 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.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

To an overwrought, burdened down, bone weary people, He held out an invitation to rest.

To wear His yoke, and find it easy. To find His burden light.

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When He calls us to rest, He knows the labor goes on. He does not beckon us to the recliner, offering bon bons and ice cream and a new flick from Blockbuster.

Was He thinking in that moment that foxes have holes, birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head? Was He considering the weight of that crosspiece that would be laid across His own back one day soon?

He knew from labor. He knew from burdens.

Yet He calls us to rest with our necks in the yoke. With the crosspiece over our backs.

He calls us to impossible rest in the midst of the labor.

And He wears that yoke alongside, walking with us through the uneven field. Stepping before us into neck-snapping holes. Tripping over knee-bloodying stones.

He takes the fall for us. He feels the torque when we twist the oxbow against the bar, straining to go our own way. He bears the back-breaking load.

And He invites us to walk the way with Him.

He calls out to us, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Could anybody out there use a little rest?

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