At the Synod of the Church of England at York Minster last month, just before the Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury preached a brave and important sermon—brave and important because he sought to apply the truth of Scripture to the situation in which the Anglican Communion finds itself. In so doing, he offered some characterizations of different parties within Anglicanism with which I don’t agree, but any such quibbles are secondary; the core of his message was wise and deeply biblical. This is in keeping with what I’ve come to expect from Dr. Rowan Williams: even when he arrives at positions with which I disagree (as he fairly often does), he consistently gets there for the right reasons. That’s as true as ever in this sermon, which is at heart a meditation on the ways in which we try to replace Jesus’ well-fitted yoke with (in the words of one of the Desert Fathers) “the heavy yoke of self-justification.”
There’s a phrase to ponder—a heavy yoke of self-justification. That’s the law, that’s the curse. That’s the waterless pit indeed—where we struggle ceaselessly, unrelentingly, to make ourselves more right, and to lay hold upon our future. We lay upon ourselves a heavy yoke, from which only the grace of Jesus Christ can deliver us. In a nutshell, we lay upon ourselves the yoke of desperate seriousness about ourselves.
And Christ’s promise is so difficult because it’s so simple. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, as the novelist says, that is what Christ offers to us: receiving it is hard. Naaman of Assyria when he came to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy, could not believe that the answer was easy. There must be something complicated for him to do. There must be some magic to be done. The word alone, “release” is not enough. We long for, we are in love with the heavy yoke of self justification. Naaman wanted to go away from Elisha, able to say, “Well I had some part in that—I did the difficult things the prophet asked me”. And Elisha, in the name of God, tells him to do something simple, to immerse himself in the mercy of God. And when Jesus says, “Our yoke is easy and my burden is light”, that is what he says, to all of us as individuals, to us as a Synod, to us as a Church, to us as a society, to us as a human world: lay aside the obsession to possess the future, receive the word of promise, here. And that’s why, as Jesus himself says in the gospel, that’s why only some people really do hear the word easily—only the tax collectors and the sinners. . . .
He alone rests in that eternal, unifiable life. That is why he says, “Come to me and I will give you rest; I will give you sight; I will bring you hope.””My yoke is easy; my burden is light”, which is why we need to be where he is, nowhere else, where he is with the Father.
This is a sermon to read (or listen to; video is available below and on the page with the transcript) with our hearts wide open, that the Spirit may use it to bring us to repentance, and to greater wisdom.
HT: Alan Jacobs
Photo: “Strongman Event: the Yoke Race,” 2010, Artur Andrzej. Public domain.
