Romans 7: 15-25a
Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-end
As we come towards the end of the academic year, the end of the school year, the end of the choir year, and we look forward to the summer holidays, Jesus’ words in today’s gospel might strike a chord: ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’ But the gospel isn’t a self-help book and Jesus’ isn’t simply telling us to take a holiday, as important as holidays are.
So what’s Jesus’ teaching about? ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’ Who are the weary, those carrying heavy burdens? One possibility is that Jesus is talking to people who carry the burdens of sin and guilt. For his immediate hearers, this might be the burden brought by the demands of trying to keep the Jewish law. Our first reading this morning is pointing us in that direction – it’s St. Paul’s meditation on sin and law. He writes to the Christians in Rome about the struggle to keep control of his will: “For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” So we come to Jesus with the burden of sin and guilt, exhausted by our attempts to live rightly, and he offers us forgiveness and mercy and love.
But I’d like to shift our focus to another aspect of Jesus’ teaching, and that’s the idea of ‘rest’. ‘I will give you rest’, says Jesus. When I mention the word ‘rest’, what comes to mind? I wonder if you think of the first chapter of the Bible in the book of Genesis and God’s rest on the seventh day. We might think of the sabbath, the seventh day of rest. And that’s what I’d like to reflect on this morning, the idea of ‘rest’, but I need go all the way back to Genesis so that we can see the importance of the ‘rest’ that Jesus offers to the weary and the burdened.
The book of Genesis is a compilation of several texts and traditions, some of them thousands of years old. Some of the themes come from the period when the Israelites were exiled in the kingdom of Babylon in the sixth century BC. When they were in Babylon, they heard ancient stories of how creation came to be and the place of humanity in the cosmic order. In one of those ancient Babylonian myths, human beings were created because the gods had an argument about who was going to labour for them to keep creation orderly. They created human beings to do the work. In this Babylonian story, to labour is human. The gods, on the other hand, rest. To be divine is to rest.
When the Israelites returned to Jerusalem in the late sixth century BC, they set about compiling the book we know as Genesis. The first chapter of Genesis was an account of ‘the beginning’, the creation, but their idea of God and humanity is deliberately different to the creation stories they’d heard in Babylon. God has no need of human labour. God rests on the seventh day and later, through the law, God grants humanity a share in his rest in the Sabbath. To labour is human, but through the Sabbath, we share in God’s rest: ‘Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God…’ (Exodus 20.8-9). The Sabbath is a gift to humanity, the gift of rest. In the disputes with the Pharisees about keeping the Sabbath, that’s why Jesus says to his disciples, ‘The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.’ (Mark 2.27-28). In the Jewish law, even the land is granted rest every seventh year, and every seventh year debts are cancelled. There’s a kind of rest and reset.
The ancient Christian tradition interpreted the Sabbath rest in a particular way. The seventh day of rest, which still structures our seven day week, comes and goes. But will there be an eternal Sabbath, a rest that never comes to an end? Lots of readers of Genesis pointed out that the first six days of creation all have an evening and a morning. Those days come to an end. But the seventh day of rest doesn’t have an evening. It doesn’t come to an end. Is this hinting at an everlasting Sabbath, an everlasting share in God’s life? Then think of the resurrection. This happens on the day after the Jewish Sabbath. It’s the first day of the week. This is a new Sabbath looking forward to an eternal Sabbath at the final resurrection of the dead. So the Christian tradition comes to an amazing conclusion: Christ is himself the eternal Sabbath, the one who gives us an eternal share in God’s rest, God’s life.
So Jesus says these words to his disciples: ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, 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.’ What he’s teaching us is that he is the eternal Sabbath. In him, in his life, is our eternal rest.
By ‘rest’, we don’t mean a kind of perpetual lie-in or a never-ending beach holiday. What Jesus means, I think, is the final completion of our work and the full share in the fulness of God’s life, in life for its own sake. Most importantly, that eternal Sabbath, that eternal rest, is when we are fully and completely human, fully and completely in God’s image and likeness, fully what God wants us to be. Our share in God’s life comes through Jesus and his resurrection, for the day of his resurrection to new life is the new and eternal Sabbath.
Many of us come to church weary and burdened this morning. Things lie very heavy on our hearts and minds. Our bodies feel those burdens. As we receive the Eucharist this morning, we receive Christ’s life. We can take his burden, which is light because he laboured for our salvation and has overcome the finality of death. As you receive communion, hold in Christ’s presence all that burdens you, for he shares that burden. Receive his life into your hands and renew your hope in Christ’s eternal rest. ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, 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.’