Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30
Jesus said, "You know what this generation reminds me of? Youths with nothing better to do but to sit in the public square and taunt people by calling out things like 'We played the flute for you, but you wouldn't dance; we sang a funeral song for you, but you didn't mourn.' Just keep in mind that John [the Baptizer] showed up refusing to eat and drink [with us], and people said he was crazy. The One Like Us also showed up, and he ate and drank [with you], and people said he was a glutton and a toper and, furthermore, that he consorted with toll collectors and other sinners. [What did those people know anyway?] Wisdom is vindicated by what she does." [After Jesus criticized the cities in which had performed many of his marvelous works, saying they had not as a result of them changed their ways, he exclaimed]: "I thank you, Father, Yahweh over heaven and earth because you have hidden [this wisdom] from the wise and the intellectuals and have disclosed them to uneducated ones. That's how you want it, father." [Addressing others Jesus went on]: "My father has ceded to me everything; and no one knows this son except the father; for that matter, no one knows the father except the son, and any to whom the son decides to disclose him. So, all you who work so hard and bear many a burden, come to me for relief. Take my yoke and put it on, thereby learning from me because I am humble and modest, and in your lives you will find release. My yoke is not an oppressive one; my burden is a light one."
(Translated, condensed and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)
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The passage at hand in 10 brief verses traverses a vast terrain beginning with a bizarre criticism Matthew imagined Jesus making to whom it may have concerned. (The editors of Luke included the passage in their own gospel narrative.) The criticism concerned a "can't win" type of situation: The Baptist was said to be a crackpot because of his asceticism; Jesus was said to be a gourmand and drunkard because he was not embarrassed to take nourishment and to break bread with other human beings regardless of their station in life. Thence, omitting vv. 20-24 of the chapter, the scene shifts as Jesus is depicted as addressing the absent father through the medium of prayer, thanking him for keeping the wise ignorant and making the ignorant wise -- a riff, perhaps, perhaps on Paul's denunciation of the wise in First Corinthians 1:18-25. Abruptly comes another to-whom-it-may-concern declarative to the effect that 1) The son is the access to the father and 2) following the son is, far from being difficult, easy in that the discipline in doing so is not onerous. That would be news to those in many a religious order.
The audience for the aforementioned critique, the prayer and the theological excursus is the crowds of 11:7. Just prior to this passage, Matthew and Luke include Q materials that condemn the Galilean cities in which Jesus' mission has presumably failed. In real historical terms, the object of condemnation would have been those of synagogue Judaism whom the leaders of the Matthean communities could not persuade to join the Jesus Judaism movement. It was on the occasion of Jesus' cursing of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum ("his own town" of 9:10) that, according to the Q tradition, Jesus made that public prayer thanking Yahweh that "these things" (the powerful acts which Chorazin and Bethsaida could not understand) had been revealed to the simple.
This suggests that Jesus' success was experienced with people outside the economic and political power structures of such cities and therefore among the uneducated. The passage probably reflects the conflict between the essential humanism of the emerging Jesus communities and the doctrinal rigors of rabbinical Judaism. The aforesaid humanism would soon be quashed by an emerging orthodoxy, thanks among others to Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian and Irenaeus. It was a clear case of class warfare, and it is an unsettling reminder of the difficulties encountered with the fundamentalists of our own time who never cease to berate, for example, the historical-critical approach to scripture and seek to reduce religion to a primary-color, ABC creed.
The Q tradition material embedded in this Matthean passage and its Lukan parallel depicts Jesus as, essentially, a Gnostic, saying that he knows the Father (in Luke "who the Father is") and that only the father knows the son -- and again in Luke "who the son is." It is not that Jesus was some kind of cultic wunderkind who plumbed the mystery of the ages, but rather one in whom the imagined father had entrusted all that was important - a sweeping claim for a community to have made for a dead teacher. But it fits with the evangelical and proselytizing efforts of many late-first century CE Jesus Jew communities as they dodged on-and-off trouble with Rome and aggravation from synagogue communities.
The gauntlet flung in the line no one knows This Son except the father; for that matter, no one knows the father except the Son, and any to whom the Son decides to disclose him demonstrates an exclusivist tendency that is part of the church to this day. Roman Catholic prelates have been wont to say that non-Catholic churches are "deficient: and all non-Christian religions "invalid."
Rubbish.
Matthew in speaking of the uninitiated or uneducated (νήπιος) may have been referring to the demographics of those with whom he imagined Jesus dealing: unskilled and landless laborers with little to no access to the corridors of acquired knowledge and power. They are the one who seemed invited to take on his yoke -- perhaps as opposed to that of the Pharisees or of other religious disciplines. This yoke is one, paradoxically, of relief of stress or tension (άναπαύσω from αναπαυσιν) as in the loosing of the strings of a violin.
Thus the text suggests that the yoke (ζυγός), meaning "bondage to authority," shall be easier on one who follows the ethical wisdom of Jesus as opposed to the multitudinous requirements of, for example, Pharisaic Judaism or what would become post-Constantinian Christianity.
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Religions are wont to think up all kinds of requirements, must-dos and mustn't dos, obligations and canon law for their adherents to fulfill, perform, refrain from performing, meet and obey. The burdens of such religions often feel like yokes and just as often are placed upon the less sophisticated -- or the "uninitiated and uneducated" to whom reference is made in the gospel passage. The purpose of such burdens is control.
Matthew's Jesus seemed to be saying that the knowledge which frees has been hidden from the very ones you'd think would have it in abundance and vouchsafed, rather, to the simple. A clearer way to hear that thought is first to think of "the simple" as neither ignorant nor clueless, but as skeptical, demanding rational explanations for what someone may attempt to require of them.
In 21st-century America, the yokes of religion tend to be such strictures as those laid down by fundamentalist hierarchs, viz. with regard to reproductive rights (they don't exist), political points of view (conservative, capitalistic Republican only) and scientific knowledge (don't believe it when it contradicts the Bible).
There seem to be two distinct understandings of religion's purpose: that it is 1) a body of settled beliefs and practices as a means of instructing people what to believe, how to behave and what is their duty; or 2) a broad field of intellectual and philosophical inquiry into the profound questions posed by life.
The first of those can be made into a burdensome yoke that admits of no freedom or self-determination, allowing neither for skepticism nor questioning. Socrates made a career out of answering questions with questions, prodding those whom he encountered in conversation to assume the inquirer's stance and to admit that one does not think he knows what he does not and cannot know.
That made Socrates a heretic or a pro-choice thinker, rather than an obedient catechumen repeating in rote style that with which he had been indoctrinated. Of course, Socrates was handed the cup of hemlock for his trouble. And if Plato was right, Socrates even in extremis did not warn others to leave off inquiry, suggesting that the hemlock was to be preferred to the yoke of forced belief.
The understanding of religion as an expansive consideration of as yet unanswered questions does not put upon the inquirer a yoke or burden other than that of responsibility and the need to practice intellectual honesty.
Still in the second decade of the first century of the Third Millennium, many churches require their congregations to recite a pre-Copernican, pre-Newtonian, pre-Darwinian 4th century CE creed as part of the liturgy, prefacing it by the words, "We believe."
Professors of astrophysics in accredited universities who would require students to recite as fact the astral meditations of ancient Persian astrologers would soon find themselves lecturing to empty auditoria and quite quickly deprived of their tenure.
As variously depicted in the gospels, the one known as Jesus was an itinerant teacher of wisdom, now here, now there, never in one place for very long, always moving on. That is a paradigm for the internal life of one who would follow such a Jesus: never settling for patent answers to questions that cannot be adequately answered by them. Those who "follow" in that way become centers of critical thinking and evolving belief. No yoke for them.
