For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Matchless paradox, even among the paradoxically couched maxims in which our Lord delights! That rest which the soul experiences when once safe under Christ's wing, makes all yokes easy, all burdens light.
Remarks:
(1) Perhaps in no section of this wonderful History is the veil so fully lifted from the Redeemer's soul, and His inmost thoughts and deepest emotions more affectingly disclosed, than here. When we think how much more profound and acute must have been His sensibilities than say other's-from the unsullied purity of His nature and the vast reach of His perceptions-we may understand, in some degree, what "a Man of sorrows" He must have been, and how "acquainted with grief" - to see His Person slighted, His errand misapprehended, and His message rejected, in the very region on which He bestowed the most of His presence and the richest of His labours. Even in ancient prophecy we find Him exclaiming, "I have laboured in vain, I have spent My strength for nought and in vain;" and falling back upon this affecting consolation, that there was One that knew Him, and was the Judge of His doings: "Yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work with my God" (Isaiah 49:4). But, as we turn to the bright side of the picture, who can fathom the depth of that exultant complacency with which His eye rested upon those "babes" into whose souls streamed the light of God's salvation, and with which He set His seal to that law of the divine procedure in virtue of which this was done, while from the self-sufficient it was hidden! And after thus seeming to wrap Himself and His Father up from all human penetration, except of some favoured class, what ineffable joy must it have been to His heart to disabuse the anxious of such a thought, by giving forth that most wonderful of all invitations, "Come unto Me!" etc. These are some of the lights and shadows of the Redeemer's life on earth; and what a reality do they impart to the Evangelical Narrative-what resistless attraction, what heavenly sanctity!
(2) Let those who, under the richest ministrations of the word of life, "repent not," but live on unrenewed in the spirit of their minds, remember the doom of the cities of Galilee-executed in part, but in its most dread elements yet to come-and rest assured that at the judgment-day the degree of guilt will be estimated, not by the flagrancy of outward transgression, but by the degree of violence habitually offered to the voice of conscience-the extent to which light is quenched and conviction stifled. (See the notes at Luke 12:47-48.) Ah! blighted Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum-who, and more particularly what pastor, can wander over that region somewhere in which ye once basked in the very sunshine of Heaven's light, as no other spots on earth ever did, and not enter thrillingly into the poet's soliloquy --
"These days are past-Bethsaida, where? Chorazin, where art thou? His tent the wild Arab pitches there,
The wild reed shades thy brow.
"Tell me, ye mouldering fragments, tell, Was the Saviour's city here? Lifted to heaven, has it sunk to hell,
With none to shed a tear?
"Ah! would my flock from thee might learn How days of grace will flee; How all an offered Christ who spurn Shall mourn at last like thee." (-McCHEYNE.)
(3) If it be true that "no man knoweth the Son but the Father," how unreasonable is it to measure the statements of Scripture regarding the Person and work of Christ by the limited standard of human apprehension-rejecting, modifying, or explaining away whatever we are unable fully to comprehend, even though clearly expressed in the oracles of God! Nay, in the light of what our Lord here says of it, are not the difficulties just what might have been expected?
(4) Let those who set the sovereignty of divine grace in opposition to the freedom and responsibility of the human will-rejecting now the one and now the other, as if they were irreconcileable-take the rebuke which our Lord here gives them. For while nowhere is there a more explicit declaration than here of the one doctrine-That the saving knowledge of the Father depends absolutely on the sovereign "will" of the Son to impart it; yet nowhere is there a brighter utterance of the other also-That this knowledge, and the rest it brings, is open to all who will come to Christ for it, and that all who sigh for rest unto their souls are freely invited, and will be cordially welcomed, under Christ's wing.
(5) But Whose voice do I hear in this incomparable Invitation? Moses was the divinely commissioned lawgiver of Israel, but I do not find him speaking so; nor did the chiefest of the apostles presume to speak so. But that is saying little. For no human lips ever ventured to come within any measurable approach to such language. We could fancy one saying-We might say it and have said it ourselves-`Come, and I will show you where rest is to be found.' But here the words are, "COME UNTO ME, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST." To give repose even to one weary, burdened soul-much more to all of every age and every land-what mortal ever undertook this? what creature is able to do it? But here is One who undertakes it, and is conscious that He has power to do it. It is the voice of my Beloved. It is not the syren voice of the Tempter, coming to steal away our hearts from the living God-it would be that, if the spokesman were a creature-but it is the Only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth; and in calling so lovingly, "Come hither to ME," He is but wooing us back to that blessed Bosom of the Father, that original and proper home of the heart, from which it is our misery that we were ever estranged.
(6) As the source of all unrest is estrangement from God, so the secret of true and abiding repose is that of the prodigal, who, when at length he came to say, "I will arise and go to my Father," straightway "arose and went." But as Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life of this return, so in subjection to Jesus-as Himself was in absolute subjection to His Father-is the heart's true rest. When "the love of Christ constrains us to live not unto ourselves, but unto Him who died for us, and rose again;" when we enter into His meekness and lowliness of heart who "made Himself of no reputation," and "pleased not Himself" in anything, but His Father in everything-then, and only then, shall we find rest unto our souls. Whereas those who chafe with restless discontent and ambition and self-seeking are "like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt."
(7) Although the Fathers of the Church were not wrong in calling the Fourth Gospel, 'the spiritual Gospel х to (G3588) pneumatikon (G4152)], in contradistinction to the First Three Gospels, which they called 'the corporeal' ones х ta (G3588) soomatika (G4984)] - striving thus to express the immensely higher platform of vision to which the Fourth Gospels lifts us-yet is it the same glorious Object who is held in all the Four; and while the Fourth Gospel enshrines some of its most divine and spiritual teachings in a framework of exquisitely concrete historical fact, the First Three Gospels rise at times-as Matthew here, and Luke in the corresponding passage (Luke 10:21-22) - into a region of pure Johanine thought; insomuch that on reading the last six verses of this section, we seem to be reading out of the 'spiritual' Gospel. In fact, it is all corporeal and all spiritual; only, the one side was committed peculiarly to the First Three Evangelists, "by the same Spirit;" the other, to the Fourth Evangelist, "by the same Spirit" - "but all these worketh that one and the self-same Spirit, dividing to every man severally as He will."