Yokes--Easy or Otherwise

I'm doing my usual Thursday Sermon Prep Time--that means, among other things, reading the lections for Sunday and then following various threads of inquiry that arise from them. I also read some of my favorite church blogs to see what others have caught hold of in the upcoming lessons. This gem stands out from Jan Richardson's blog, The Painted Prayerbook:

I have to say, too, that I’ve struggled with Jesus’ use of the image of a yoke. On the surface, a yoke connotes bondage, servitude, and the diminishing of freedom and choice. In scanning the Web for images of yokes, however, I realized that I was imagining a single-user yoke, one that someone who has power over us places upon us, something that we have to pull alone. What I found more often on the Web were images of double yokes, designed for working animals to pull in tandem. How might it be to imagine this as the kind of yoke that Jesus was talking about, a yoke that we don’t have to pull alone, a yoke that he wears with us? A yoke not for servitude, not for bondage, but a tool of connection, a way of being in relationship with Christ that makes our work easier, not more difficult. (source)

I never really thought about what Jesus meant by asking us to take on his yoke except as a poetic way of saying burden. But yoking does, indeed, imply sharing the burden. We are yoked to Christ in fruitful, kingdom-building work...

-t