When I was a toddler, I had a fascination with the buttons on the television set. What a feeling of power and wonder to pull the little silver knob and to watch the screen fill with pictures and sound! And then to give the knob just a little push and silence the life within it, all on my own. My parents, of course, did not want me turning the TV on and off, and they made a strict rule that I was not to touch the buttons, with a little hand slap as my punishment if I disobeyed. Even as a toddler, I was a child who wanted to obey the rules. I had figured out that I could earn my parents’ approval—and love—by my obedience, and I was scrupulous. The story goes that, in the case of the TV knobs, my mother would find me studying them with longing, quickly reaching out to touch them, and then slapping my own hand. Some might applaud my sense of compliance and self-censure at the young age of two …. Except that I had developed an ulcer from stress …by age five.
In today’s New Testament readings, both Paul and Jesus point out that it is a heavy burden indeed to live according to a system of reward and punishment. It’s not that the proscriptions of the law are bad things. We need God’s law to tell us what is right and what is wrong, for without a moral compass, we are lost. For Paul, however, the problem with the law is that the law can identify sin but not prevent it. The law cannot make us do the things that it teaches us are right. If the law shows us what we are to do, yet cannot make us do those things, it puts us under a terrible burden. New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson uses the metaphor of a dying patient who is given a prescription for medicine from the doctor. For the patient to live, he needs to ingest the medicine. The doctor’s prescription is like the law; it tells us what we need in order to live. But that paper prescription alone doesn’t have the power to give life. We need the medicine itself for that.[1] The medicine is not law but loving relationship--loving relationship with the God who freely pours out upon us the gift of life, the life that shines in the healing, saving acts of Jesus Christ.
The trouble is that, in living a life based on obeying certain rules, we close ourselves off to much of the full and abundant life that Jesus offers us. Often, our obedience is based on an attempt to control our relationships, through controlling others and ourselves with rules. Johnson explains in terms that enlighten my own unhealthy, perfectionist childhood: the loving relationship between parent and child, like our loving relationship with God, is not just about being obedient or following the rules. It is about a loving exchange of gifts above and beyond rules and expectations: parents want us to eat healthy food, but they still take us out sometimes for huge and delicious banana splits; parents want us to go to bed on time, but they still host slumber parties for us; babies don’t know the rules of etiquette, but they still spontaneously and lovingly offer their mom or dad half of their slobbered-on cookie. Like a child attempting to protect herself from the vulnerability of relationship, however, we anxiously concentrate only on obedience so that we can say to the parent (and God), “you must reward me because I did everything you said perfectly.” Living only by the rules, explains Johnson, is a “rigid form of self-protection and extortion,” that cuts us off from any unexpected, unusual gifts of love and grace.[2]
How easy it is to become frozen like the people that Jesus addresses in the marketplace in today’s Gospel, closed off from God while using the rules to judge God’s inspired ones, like John the Baptist, as crazy and to judge God’s own self-giving, as seen in Jesus, as rule-breaking and immoral. Cutting ourselves off from superabundant love in an effort to control our relationships, results in behavior like that of the Pharisees, who use the law to attack Jesus for healing on the Sabbath and welcoming even tax-collectors and prostitutes, and who are more concerned with what herbs one should tithe than with caring for the poor and bringing about justice. Frozen in what Paul Ricoeur calls a “logic of equivalence,” a “tit for tat” way of living that ignores unexpected grace, we have no way to cope with the wretched dilemma of our human failings. We can indeed feel as if we are yoked in slavery to desires beyond our control, bearing burdens that have become intolerable.
After returning home from vacation on Wednesday, as soon as I read Jesus’ famous invitation in today’s Gospel: “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest,” I pictured myself with my suitcases in the Paris Metro. When I left for vacation, my bags were slim and examples of restraint in packing. I was proud of myself for being so wise and frugal in my choice of wardrobe. As I traveled, however, temptation got the best of me. I was not able to do what I knew was right. I bought books and wine and souvenirs galore, and “just one more jar of paté.” My bags grew fatter and heavier, until, when it came time to tackle the subway stairs once again, I was in trouble. The weight of my bags became intolerable. Up the stairs, down the stairs, tripping on the escalator, hitting myself in the shins when pulling them, lifting them onto luggage racks and hoisting them on and off of trains, I began to hate my bags. I longed to be free of them just as much as I desired to keep what was inside. They became an unwelcome part of myself, a weight around my spirit and a literal pain in the neck. Twice, gentlemen stopped and offered to help me get one of the bags up or down the stairs, but mistrusting, I refused. What if they stole my precious treasures? Alone, I struggled on.
In Romans 7:7, just before today’s epistle begins, Paul chooses “covetousness” as the commandment that he continues to break, as the sin that controls his actions so that “the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.” Luke Timothy Johnson points out here that covetousness is the “desiring disease,” the “’I want to have’ passion.” It is the need “to have, possess, or acquire in order to secure being and worth.”[3] How often our desire to secure being and worth leads to baggage as intolerably heavy as my suitcases last week. Possessions, unhealthy relationships, addictions, compulsions …. What heavy baggage we all drag with us up and down the stairs, baggage that we just can’t let go of.
Jesus stops us on the stairs and offers us another way: the way of grace and loving relationship, the rest of Sabbath in the arms of God. If we muster the trust and courage to hand Jesus our bags, if we can just let go of all of the security and defenses and material “stuff” that we have packed away inside of them, then our hands are free to hold out to one another, our legs are free to go where we are called to go, and our hearts are free to love. We can’t haul our bags into the Kingdom of God; we can’t follow Jesus along the Way of Life if we can’t even make it up the Metro stairs. To be free, we must follow—follow not just the law, but the gentle, humble way of Christ, the way of self-giving love that has no bounds. It is a risky way, not a secure one, but it is a way without ulcers or self-recrimination. How can the way of the Cross be “easy” or kind? How can its burden be light? Ask Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the martyr/ theologian of World War II, who returned with joy and peace of mind from the security of asylum in America to rejoin his countrymen in the dangerous fight against Hitler. Ask St. Paul, who gave up one life in the secure confines of the Law to find new life in Christ. Jesus’ yoke is light and kind because it brings the only true freedom and the only true rest that we as human beings can ever know. As St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."
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