Jeremiah's
Yoke
Stephen
Terry
Commentary
for the November 28, 2015 Sabbath School Lesson
“Take
my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and
you will find rest for your souls.” Matthew 11:29, NIV
How differently our perception of the idea of a yoke
changes depending on what type of yoke we envision. Some would have Jeremiah’s
yoke to be similar to one worn by oxen. Such a yoke would need to be strong in
order to handle the strength of those beasts should they strain against it. It
would also enclose the neck of the animals so as not to be easily dislodged.
The ox is unable on its own to keep it in place. The ox is not yoked because of anything it
does to create, place or maintain the yoke. It is placed there by others
without regard to any of these factors. For these reasons, this may not have
been the style of yoke in question. It was apparently not difficult for Jeremiah’s
adversary, the false prophet Hananiah, to either remove or break.[i]
Perhaps the yoke Jeremiah placed upon himself was more
similar to the yoke the woman in the picture is wearing. Not only is it easily
removed, but because of the deep cut to make room for the neck, it might very
easily be broken. The metaphor with this yoke may have a richer meaning as
well. Culturally it was servants and women who used these yokes to carry water
and other heavy items. Therefore it was symbolic of service or even bondage. Because
the person wearing it placed it upon themselves, it could be also seen as
representing a desire to enter into that status. Wearing such a yoke was not an
easy proposition. Not only was it heavy when loaded, but one had to walk in an unusual
posture with the arms extended in order to grasp the buckets. This woman is
doing that so the buckets don’t swing to and fro and splash the water out or
strike her legs as she walks.
Jeremiah could have been trying to illustrate that the
alliances they sought and the military preparations taking place were little
more than demonstrating a willingness to put on a yoke and be bonded over to
service of others. In walking into that bondage earned by their failure to seek
the grace of God and live out that grace toward others, they declared that
their service was to human power and not to the God who lovingly created them. The
cruel results of that service to evil became all too clear when King Zedekiah’s
sons were slain before his eyes, and then he was blinded before being taken
into exile. It is difficult to imagine how horrible it would be for the murder
of your children to be the last thing you ever saw. Yet, he too had been
offered grace, if he would willingly surrender to the Babylonians.[ii] In the end, because the
Babylonians were enacting upon the Jews the fate commensurate with the scale of
their evil, perhaps submission to them became a metaphor for submission to God’s
will. Even when faced with disaster, destruction and death, many could not
humble their pride to the point of that submission.
We may fault them for their pride and stubbornness, but
are we any better today? If we look at much of what we call Western
Civilization and especially at the United States, a country that the late
President Ronald Reagan referred to as that “shining city on a hill,”[iii] we cannot help but see
some of the tarnish now present that diminishes that luster. We have a country
where the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very, very small minority.[iv] We also have a country
where we have a very high percentage of our population in prison. Only the
Seychelles, a small archipelago with about 90,000 citizens has a higher
percentage of their people incarcerated.[v] However, it is easy to see
the difference in degree when you compare that nation and one the size of the
United States. Also, even though we are the seventh richest country on earth
based on GDP per capita,[vi] children still go hungry[vii] and too many people are
homeless and destitute.[viii] These are problems that
also haunted ancient Israel if the words of the prophet Isaiah are any
indication.[ix] Jesus said that caring
for others in need is a vital value in God’s sight.[x] Seeing that these things
are central to the Kingdom of God and therefore to the Christian walk, why do
we still struggle with them? Is it so impossibly hard to see the needs around
us and minister to them?
For some reason we seem to feel a need to categorize
those around us into two primary groups, those who deserve help and those who
do not. While Jesus made it clear that there are indeed two groups He referred
to as sheep and goats, those two groups were not separated based on how worthy
they were, but on how attentive they were to the needs of others. No mention is
made of them getting “Brownie Points” for making sure only the deserving got helped.
That very idea might be anathema to the command to love our enemies[xi] and go the second mile
with them.[xii]
To our way of thinking, we must make sure the person deserves our help, and to
that end, we multiply forms and bureaucracies to make sure of exactly that,
creating huge burdens for the poor and needy to make sure only those strong
enough to overcome those barriers to assistance receive it. If some disabled,
some destitute, some homeless are unable to comply, then we deem them lazy and
unworthy of the miserly assistance we are willing to provide. To make sure we
weed them out still further, we cut funding for both benefits and workers to
assist them.
In doing these things, we claim our goal is to be fair,
but in reality perhaps our goal is to keep more of the wealth in our own
pockets and out of “theirs.” Our definition of fair seems not to be the same as
God’s for He bestows His largesse without regard to worth, sending his
blessings on both the just and the unjust.[xiii] Perhaps our pretension
in delineating mankind by worth is in contradiction to the Bible’s inference
that none of us is worthy. We have all fallen short of the mark.[xiv] How then do we have the
right to look down our long noses at those around us as though we were somehow
in a superior position to them? We may even look at the people of Jerusalem and
say we would never be foolish enough to ignore the warnings of God’s faithful
prophets, yet we do so daily when we diminish God’s image in others by placing
our worth above theirs.
In Jeremiah’s day, those who were enriching themselves
by ignoring or minimizing the needs of others in order to feed their own
desires so weakened Jerusalem that she was ready prey for the Babylonian army from
the east. But even prophets, like Habakkuk, could not understand how God could
use those who were apparently wickeder than the Jews as His instruments of
judgment.[xv]
In order to understand his horror at this idea, we might picture how we would
feel if we were told that Islamic extremists were the vehicle of God’s punishment
for the evils of our society. Our natural understanding is to view their
heinous acts and see them as more wicked than ourselves. However, we may be
deceived by the subtleness of our own evil. We may not behead our enemies or
drive them before us as we slaughter whole communities who do not bow to our
will, but with the tools of financial sharpness we drive legions of families
from their homes when the economy goes soft and many struggle to survive.
Instead of lamenting the suffering and doing what we can to relieve it, we smugly
tell ourselves that they should never have been allowed to buy a home in the
first place, and it is just “market forces” correcting the economy. We act as
though those forces are impersonal and somehow just, without acknowledging that
those with the power and wealth manipulate those same market forces to their
advantage and with little regard for the effect on the rest of humanity.
Jeremiah urged the people to surrender to Babylon and
was therefore seen to be a traitor to his people by those in power. They did
their best to make him suffer, something they were skilled at as they had made
so many others suffer in order to advance their own interests. While there is
no Jeremiah standing up in Washington Cathedral in our nation’s capital city
and no one is urging us to submit and surrender to the Islamic terrorists as
having been sent by God, still Someone will come from the east to execute
judgment. Riding on a white horse with His garments dipped in blood, He will
come as a conqueror, and as Jeremiah told the people of Jerusalem, our hope and
salvation lies in surrendering to Him now, before it is too late and before
judgment is at the gate. “The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.”
Romans 13:12a, NIV
