July 3, 2005 - Seventh Sunday after Pentecost - Father Barry Woods

FIRST READING: Zechariah 9: 9-12
PSALM: 145¨8-15
SECOND READING: Romans 7:15 - 25a
GOSPEL: Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30

(Audience participation will be noted in bold print and italics)

The higher the loyalty, the lighter the yoke.

The lower the loyalty, the heavier the yoke.

AMEN

(Father Barry then sat down, and silence ensued!)

Did you really think you would get off that easy this morning?!

The last part of this morning's Gospel is about exchanging yokes. Of course, in the Gospel this morning, Jesus was speaking to Jews of the First Century, and He was talking about exchanging the yoke of obedience to the Jewish Law for the yoke of the faith and love of Christ. He was talking about exchanging the strict obedience to hundreds of laws in order to establish our relationship with God - exchanging that heavy yoke for the lighter yoke of faith and trust in God's love and goodness.

Those are the yokes He was talking about exchanging in the Gospel long ago, but the idea of exchanging yokes applies to you and to me this morning, even though we are no longer under the yoke of the Jewish Law. The idea of exchanging yokes still applies to you and to me this morning. We all take on yokes, don't we? We all take on loyalties and duties and responsibilities and burdens. We all take on yokes. I do not know why we do that. It is a mystery to me - why we voluntarily submit ourselves to burdens and yokes and duties and responsibilities - there is something in our nature that is a mystery to me. It seems, I guess, that we were simply created to take on these kinds of things, and, to me, the greatest mystery of all is what I said earlier: The higher the loyalty, the lighter the yoke; and the lower the loyalty, the heavier the yoke.

Loyalty to some great cause or some great idea - of course that creates a yoke, but it is a yoke that can be borne. It is only when that loyalty lowers, when it becomes self-serving, when the motives for supporting the cause become ulterior, when it becomes something that we do for personal advantage - only then, when the loyalty lowers - then the yoke gets very heavy.

Loyalty to other people, to family and friends and loved-ones, produces a yoke, to be sure, but it is a yoke that can be borne. It is only when that loyalty lowers, when that loyalty to other people becomes coercive and manipulative and the exercise of power over them to do our will - only then does the yoke become so heavy that it is hard to bear.

Loyalty to ourselves - a loyalty to ourselves that says, "I want to be independent; I want to be productive; and I want to be not a burden on other people" - loyalty to ourselves creates a yoke, to be sure, but it is a yoke that can be borne. It is only when that loyalty lowers, when it becomes greed and grasping for more than our share of things - then the yoke gets very heavy indeed.

This Gospel this morning is not about exchanging all of our low yokes for high yokes. It is not about getting rid of all of our low loyalties and exchanging them for high ones. Some of our loyalties, some of our burdens, some of our duties, some of our yokes cannot be exchanged, nor should they be. But we can exchange some of our yokes. We can exchange our lower loyalties, some of them, for higher loyalties.

We have two choices this morning, faced with this Gospel. We can walk out of here, and pretend we never heard it, and just let its power and its greatness be water off of our backs; or we can use this Gospel to help us to begin a journey - a journey of upgrading as many of our loyalties as we can; a journey that will, one day, end up with you and I having only the highest loyalty of all - only loyalty to Christ and His power and His love. That day may be still far off, but the journey can begin this morning - a journey to that time and that place when you and I will truly live out the words from Gospel this morning, when He says:

"Take my yoke upon you, for My yoke is easy, and My burden is light".

AMEN