Greatest
Thing in the
World
What
Yokes are
For
By:
Henry Drummond
There
is still one doubt to clear up.
After the statement, “Learn
of Me,” Christ throws in the
disconcerting qualification,
“Take My yoke upon you and
learn of Me.”
Why, if all
this be true, does He call it a
yoke? Why, while professing to
give Rest, does He with the next
breath whisper
“burden”?
Is the
Christian life after all, what
its enemies take it for—an
additional weight to the already
great woeof life, some extra
punctiliousness about duty, some
painful devotion to observances,
some heavy restriction and
trammelling of all that is joyous
and free in the world? Is life
not hard and sorrowful enough
without being fettered with yet
another yoke?
It is
astounding how so glaring a
misunderstanding of this plain
sentence should ever have passed
into currency.
Did you
ever stop to ask what a yoke is
really for? Is it to be a burden
to the animal which wears it? It
is just the opposite. It is to
make its burden light. Attached
to the oxen in any other way than
by a yoke, the plough would be
intolerable. Worked by means of a
yoke, it is light.
A yoke is
not an instrument of torture; it
is an instrument of mercy. It is
not a malicious contrivance for
making work hard; it is a gentle
device to make hard labour light.
It is not meant to give pain, but
to save pain.
And yet men
speak of the yoke of Christ as if
it were a slavery, and look upon
those who wear it as objects of
compassion? For generations we
have had homilies on “The
Yoke of Christ,” some
delighting in portraying its
narrow exactions; some seeking in
these exactions the marks of its
divinity; others apologising for
it, and toning it down; still
others assuring us that, although
it be very bad, it is not to be
compared with the positive
blessings of Christianity.
How many,
especially among the young, has
this one mistaken phrase driven
for ever away from the kingdom of
God? Instead of making Christ
attractive, it makes Him out a
taskmaster, narrowing life by
petty restrictions, calling for
self-denial where none is
necessary, making misery a virtue
under the plea that it is the
yoke of Christ, and happiness
criminal because it now and then
evades it.
According
to this conception, Christians
are at best the victims of a
depressing fate; their life is a
penance; and their hope for the
next world purchased by a slow
martyrdom in this.
The mistake
has arisen from taking the word
“yoke” here in the same
sense as in the expressions
“under the yoke,” or
“wear the yoke in his
youth.” But in Christ’s
illustration it is not the jugum
of the Roman soldier, but the
simple “harness” or
“ox-collar” of the
Eastern peasant. It is the
literal wooden yoke which He,
with His own hands in the
carpenter’s shop, had
probably often made.
He knew the
difference between a smooth yoke
and a rough one, a bad fit and a
good fit;the difference also it
made to the patient animal which
had to wear it. The rough yoke
galled, and the burden was heavy;
the smooth yoke caused no pain,
and the load was lightly drawn.
The badly fitted harness was a
misery; the well fitted collar
was “easy.”
And what
was the “burden”? It
was not some special burden laid
upon the Christian, some unique
infliction that he alone must
bear. It was what all men bear.
It was simply life, human life
itself, the general burden of
life which all must carry with
them from the cradle to the
grave.
Christ saw
that men took life painfully. To
some it was a weariness, to
others a failure, to many a
tragedy, to all a struggle and a
pain. How to carry this burden of
life had been the whole
world’s problem. It is still
the whole world’s problem.
And here is
Christ’s solution:
“Carry it as I do. Take life
as I take it. Look at it from My
point of view. Interpret it upon
My principles. Take My yoke and
learn of Me, and you will find it
easy. For My yoke is easy, works
easily, sits right upon the
shoulders, and therefore my
burden is light.”
There is no
suggestion here that religion
will absolve any man from bearing
burdens. That would be to absolve
him from living, since it is life
itself that is the burden.
What
Christianity does propose is to
make it tolerable. Christ’s
yoke is simply His secret for the
alleviation of human life, His
prescription for the best and
happiest method of living.
Men harness
themselves to the work and stress
of the world in clumsy and
unnatural ways. The harness they
put on is antiquated. A rough,
ill-fitted collar at the best,
they make its strain and friction
past enduring, by placing it
where the neck is most sensitive;
and by mere continuous irritation
this sensitiveness increases
until the whole nature is quick
and sore.
This is the
origin, among other things, of a
disease called
“touchiness”—a
disease which, in spite of its
innocent name, is one of the
gravest sources of restlessness
in the world.
Touchiness,
when it becomes chronic, is a
morbid condition of the inward
disposition. It is self-love
inflamed to the acute point;
conceit,with a hair-trigger.
The cure is
to shift the yoke to some other
place; to let men and things
touch us through some new and
perhaps as yet unused part of our
nature;to become meek and lowly
in heart while the old nature is
becoming numb from want of use.
It is the beautiful work of
Christianity everywhere to adjust
the burden of life to those who
bear it, and them to it. It has a
perfectly miraculous gift of
healing.
Without
doing any violence to human
nature it sets it right with
life, harmonizing it with all
surrounding things, and restoring
those who are jaded with the
fatigue and dust of the world to
a new grace of living. In the
mere matter of altering he
perspective of life and changing
the proportions of things, its
function in lightening the care
of man is altogether its own.
The weight
of a load depends upon the
attraction of the earth. But
suppose the attraction of the
earth were removed? A ton on some
other planet, where the
attraction of gravity is less,
does not weigh half a ton. Now
Christianity removes the
attraction of the earth, and this
is one way in which it diminishes
men’s burden. It makes them
citizens of another world. What
was a ton yesterday is not half a
ton today.
So, without
changing one’s
circumstances, merely by offering
a wider horizon and a different
standard, it alters the whole
aspect of the world.
Christianity
as Christ taught it is the truest
philosophy of life ever spoken.
But let us be quite sure when we
speak of Christianity that we
mean Christ’s Christianity.
Other
versions are either caricatures,
or exaggerations, or
misunderstandings, or
shortsighted and surface
readings. For the most part their
attainment is hopeless and the
results wretched.
But I care
not who the person is, or through
what vale of tears he has passed,
or is about to pass, there is a
new life for him along this
path.
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