Jesus this day has died for us. He paid it all, and all to him we owe. Coming to Jesus, taking on salvation, gives rest and comfort to all. Taking on the identity of the saved people of God, “kingdom people,” gives us belonging, rest, in the knowledge that God has met us exactly where we are. How beautiful it is to know that this weight has been lifted from our shoulders, making us free to live, love, and walk eternally with God? 

Jesus extends an open invitation, to all people, for them to thrust their burdens, fears, struggles, oppression, inhibitions, all of it, on him. In doing this, he aligns himself with the weak, the lowly, those on the margins, and those who carry a lot with them– pain and struggle in their bodies, pain in their spirits. 

But in this invitation to cast all on him, we certainly aren’t done. There is more to being a Christian than simply finding rest in God. Though God offers this freely to all people, oftentimes, the inhibitions of the world keep people from experiencing the full embrace of God’s love and compassion for them in Creation. Our world is one full of burdens. All God’s people for hundreds of years have had to face the effects of sin on the world– genocide, hunger, poverty, systemic oppression, cancer, chronic illness, death, and loss. Our singular conversion, acceptance of God’s dwelling within our hearts, in no way takes away the suffering all people will have to endure. Even if our singular lives are relatively good, or we don’t see the suffering happening immediately to us, there is always going to be burdens in need of lifting throughout the world. And God empowers us. 

Jesus has taken all of it on himself as a way of modeling how we should take on the burdens of others, in our positions of privilege and blessing. Jesus left heaven to be born into poverty and be crucified by an oppressive systemic power. He left perfection and ease, and didn’t choose to create the world easy, but instead made it so he could demonstrate the greatest love the world has ever known. He left convenience in order to take on the suffering of all those he loved. 

We, too, are called to take this yoke and learn from Jesus.  I who have much find it difficult to understand how to sell all my possessions and give to the poor, the way Jesus did without question. But it is somehow in this pursuit of Jesus’s attitude and compassionate selfless love to all the world that we are able to discover easy, beautiful, restful love. If we unpack and deny the attitudes which make it difficult for us to love other people, perhaps love will be easy. If we give it all to God, who already died for it on the cross, perhaps this is where we find freedom to love. God’s “yoke is easy, my burden is light.” Perhaps the purpose of us being created, and the order of things we have been given—where God allowed for man to choose sin so that God could demonstrate love for all the world through his sacrifice and resurrection—is for us to find God in each other, to experience and give that love to each other as long as we’re here. 

Without the burden of bias, systemic oppression, discomfort, and other things that keep us from loving each other, which Jesus takes from us as he transforms us into “kingdom people,” let us find rest in the Creator who himself is love. May we, as a people, as Christ’s body of believers, the hands and feet of Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit. find that Creator in each other, as we bandage up each other’s wounds, sit with one another in suffering, and do life together in love. This is what we were made for. 

Mackenzie Smith