A Most Worthy Burden

A Most Worthy Burden December 11, 2016

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The business of removing the physical burden of ordinary material life through the ever increasing uses of technology, as I was muttering about yesterday, reminded me of practically the whole bible as I went on thinking about it. It seems to me that I myself, because of all the time saving gadgets that surround me, struggle all the time to put up with both myself and other people and even God. The easy nature of my life confirms me as the center of the cosmos, and it is hard for me to understand the reasonableness and goodness of something like bearing a burden.

In fact, the very word “burden” is sort of awful. A long time ago a very nice person gave my mother a packet of pieces of cloth onto which had been sewn some sort of straps. The person had had an idea that she thought would help the women of Africa. The cloth with the straps could be used to tie up burdens, she said. She called them Burden Cloths. Putting aside the fact that sending cloth to Africa is like sending coal to New Castle, it seemed to me, as a nasty young teenager, kind of a terrible thing to do–sending cloth to people so they could “tie up their burdens”. It implies that they don’t know how to do that already, and that they might as well go on carrying those burdens by themselves forever. No effort to remove the burden, just a different way to tie it up.

But even if that nice lady had been wrong, so also was I wrong. It’s not a good thing to remove all the burdens. The question is who bears them, and how they are borne.

I mean, consider how psychologically burdened so many of us are by the ordinary grind of life. We have the idea that it’s not to supped to be hard. It’s supposed to be fun, to make us happy, to be, dare I say it, fulfilling. And so when we’re stuck doing laundry for a whole day and vacuuming up Cheerios 34 times in a single fternoon we fall into clinical depression, because, guess what, it’s not fun, it’s not fulfilling. Not in the way we mean it. Then we look across the world at the women carrying tubs of unfiltered water for ten or twenty miles and feel guilty. We should be happy, because we don’t have to bear that burden. Of course, that woman a world away isn’t fulfilled either. But who knows if she is unhappy lugging her jug of water. She might be grateful for the water. How can I even know what she thinks and feels?

So why does this remind me of the Whole Entire Bible? Well, there’s a nice bookending quality to burdens in the Bible. On one end, towards the beginning, you have that lovely troubling description of the garments of the high priest. He has to wear a heavy and beautiful robe into which has been sewn twelve jewels, one for each tribe of Israel. They are laid on his breast, on his heart as it were, and he has to bear them on himself when he goes into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. He bears them like a burden. And all the way through the rest of the Old Testament, God refers back to that picture constantly. Only he says it of himself. I bore you like a burden. I carried you along. You didn’t want to be carried, but I carried you. You were heavy. You were difficult. But I carried you.

Finally, onto the stage walks Jesus. Sweet Kind Loving Jesus, filled with wrath against people who liked to wear fancy clothes, who looked like they should have been carrying the people on their breasts, in their hearts, but who were actually tying up extra difficulties and fastening them onto the people. As if staggering under the weight of yourself isn’t enough and you should add some more work to it.

So Jesus sits around preaching and teaching, and one of the things he says is, you can have Me as your burden. My yoke, my burden, is easy, is light. What can he possibly mean? Except that he carries you on his breast, in his heart, into the holy presence of God and perfectly atones for you there. And then he lets you carry him around on your breast, in your heart. Sometimes, I won’t lie, it feels heavy. But that’s only when I get into a war about who I’m actually carrying. Is it me? Is it him? Or is it rather that I am allowed to walk along and bear with others? That Jesus, bearing us up, let’s us bear with one another so that we can understand what kind of work he is always doing.

In this way, all those stupid Cheerios might be counted as “fulfilling”. Not because they themselves are worth anything, but because God, who carries you in his heart, lets you carry people along in yours. Not atoning for their sin, but going along in the difficult and time consuming way of worrying about their bodies, and their minds, and their souls.

Who can you bear with? Well, your children perhaps, if you have them, or the person next to you in your pew, or your parents, or neighbors, or anyone really, who, like you, might be staggering under the weight of too much everything. And how do you bear them? By lugging them along by the sheer power of your will? If you do that you will end up flinging them down in despair, or becoming so proud you stumble and fall.

No, the person that you carry in your very self–on your breast, in your heart as a burden–is born by Jesus himself. He picks up those people and carries them for you, through you. That’s why he says it’s Light. It’s Easy. Because he himself is doing the carrying.

Have a lovely Sunday.


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