A Christian Koan

July 3, 2005 (Seventh Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 9)

by The Rev. Bruce Hall, Deacon

- Zechariah 9:9-12
- Psalm 145 or 145:8-14
- Romans 7:21-8:6
- Matthew 11:25-30

Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?

What was your face like before your ancestors were born?

These are the words of two well known Koans. Koans are a variety of questions, stories, or statements that have found an important place in the practice of Buddhism. They are written with the purpose of tying our brain in knots and confounding us with paradox as a mean to find answers inaccessible to the rational mind. Through meditation and study, Zen Buddhism employs the Koan to break the mind of the novice while at the same time, Zen Masters may use it as a means to test a monk’s progress towards enlightenment. If successful, one may have used the Koan to know things in fundamentally altered ways and not merely see the same thing from another angle. By swimming, for example, a swimmer will understand the practice of swimming differently from the person who merely reads books on the techniques of swimming but never touches water. A hiker deep in the rain forest will have an experience of wilderness solitude that armchair explorers merely think about. Living life, rather than thinking about it, can be a Koan’s lesson. Last week’s gospel gave us a Koan of sorts.

Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

What are we to make of today’s Gospel? What is the weight of a light burden? What is the feel of an easy yoke? These too seem to be paradoxical.

For their part, yokes have advantages. Harnessing the power of an ox, they can direct power into the breaking of new ground and turning fresh earth for cultivation. As a tool, it makes the farmer more productive and efficient. And for that matter, their weight is relatively inconsequential as their vital purpose is to restrain and direct. Of course, no one is asking the ox about all this.  I’m sure the ox’s experience is somewhat different as the yoke limits their direction, restricts their movements and, basically, tells them where someone else wants to send them.

What about us? Don’t we have our own yokes? Indeed, we seem to be people of many yokes, some by inheritance, some by chance, others by choice, with each of them possessing their own reigns and control upon the paths we are to take. There are school yokes and work yokes, teenage yokes and senior yokes, marriage yokes and single yokes, the yokes of poverty and unemployment, yokes of family and loving relationships, yokes of illness and yokes of caring for those we love, yokes of divorce and yokes of adoption. We accept these as part of life lived with others and we accept their weight and control.

In Paul’s day, the term “yoke” was sometimes associated with the Jewish Law of which he writes. For one to be yoked to the law was understood to be a means for achieving a holy life by adhering to customs, rules, and rituals found in the Torah. Paul, a fervent follower of The Law and tormenter of the church before his conversion, speaks to the conflict he experienced between an old life directed by Law and one dominated by a new commandment to love others.

“So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.”

In short, to live as a Christian is to live out our faith within the tension of desiring to live a holy life and, at the same time being human.

Rather than live by a detailed code of conduct and ritual, we are invited to wrestle with a simple command—love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

This tension doesn’t disappear as we grow in Christ but rather, that as we mature and perceive the disparity between our elevated desires and more modest acts, our need for God’s grace to live our intentions becomes clearer. We realize that the only way we can live this life desire is to acknowledge our inability to realize this life under our own power. We must give up and seek God’s control. As we turn to God to be the true source of our love, Grace gives altered meaning and direction to the choices we make and the paths we walk. Returning to our Creator, we learn that a yoke which directs, restrains, and guides us is the very instrument of our freedom from bondage to ourselves, our ox-life. By embracing His teaching we rediscover our true nature. By loosing ourselves in Christ, we find ourselves. By submitting we find lasting freedom.

This is the yoke of Christ.

It is the “easy yoke.”

This is our Koan.