Rest

Preached at Holmfirth Methodist Church
6th July 2014: 3rd Sunday after Trinity (Prayer Service)
Psalm 145:8-14; Matthew 11:25-30

“Lord, you are great, and greatly to be praised. Awaken us to delight in your praises, for you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”

St. Augustine, who first prayed this prayer some 1,600 odd years ago, was, for much of his youth, a rather restless young man. He spent many years searching for meaning, purpose and direction to his life, and that search led him to look for it in many different places. It was during this time, in fact, that he famously asked God to grant him chastity and continence (that is, self-restraint), just not yet. St. Augustine, like so many of us, sought things which would make him happy, things which would give him some sense of satisfaction or significance, things which would give rest to his restless soul. What he found was that only Jesus, the Creator-Lord, could fill the void inside of him.

“Come to me, all who labour and heavy-laden,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.” No doubt, in a few hours times, there will be a good many cyclists passing through here for whom the promise of rest would be an enticing prospect. And yet, this is a particular kind of rest that Jesus is talking about. The truth that St. Augustine discovered was that if there is a God who created us, who made us in love to relate to him, then any attempt to define ourselves, to build a life or identity apart from him will leave us empty and unfulfilled. If we were made by God for life with God, then only life with God at the centre will give us the rest, the fulfilment, we crave.

Whatever we life for, whatever we derive our sense of self from, whatever we look to in order to give us our identity—who we are, that is our god, our Lord. For some people, like the young St. Augustine, their god is sex. For others, it might be family. For others still, it might be their career. Suppose, however, you make being a parent the centre of your life and your children grow up and leave home or don’t turn out as you’d hoped, you’ll be devastated. Alternatively, suppose you make your job the most important thing in your life and you’re made redundant or you have an accident which prevents you from doing it any more, your self-worth and security will be shaken to the core. It’s not that a career or family are bad things, not at all; it’s just that when we try to make them the main thing, they can’t bear the load we’re trying to put on them.

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me,” Jesus says, “for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” What we need is a wholesale reorientation of our lives until they are entirely centred on God. This is what we are to learn from Jesus. And we are to learn it from Jesus because Jesus is the only human whose life is entirely centred on God, who is completely in tune with God; he is the One whose wholehearted devotion to God led him to the Cross. And it is the Cross which is the yoke that Jesus would place upon us. “If anyone would come after me,” he says, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24).

“Wait a minute!” I hear you saying, “That’s not ‘easy’ or ‘light’, is it?” Welcome to the paradoxical world of costly grace. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” It is costly because it asks us to take up our cross, and it is grace because it asks us follow Jesus, who is “gentle and lowly in heart” and who has already taken up his cross for us. Jesus is the only Lord we can live for who gave up his life for us. Jesus is the only Lord we can live for who, no matter how badly we fail him, will buy us back and forgive us. Jesus is the only Lord we can live for who, if we come to him, will give us the rest we so desperately desire. Though the yoke might appear heavy at first, we’ll find that being yoked to him is, in fact, perfect freedom.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.