Most Sundays, I join a group of laypeople for a “liturgy in dispersion” following the readings and feasts of the Catholic Church. These liturgies have provided a much-needed and -missed sense of community during this pandemic, even as I have started attending Mass in my hometown in Wisconsin in the past two weeks.
This Sunday, I signed up to reflect on the readings for the Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, the readings for which you can find on the website of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops. That reflection is below. Before reading it, I encourage you to first read Frederick Douglass’ speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He gave that speech 168 years ago today, 5 July, and it offers a critique and hope to white Americans today as much as it did when he delivered it to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.
Many thanks to the organizers and members of this liturgy in dispersion, especially to Angelo for prompting me to add the line about and reflect more on the meek and humble of heart and to Joe for bringing up the beautiful prayer “Prophets of a Future Not Our Own” and its connections to this reflection.
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Gonna lay down my sleepy head
Gonna lay down my sleepy head
Down by the riverside
Gonna lay down my burden
Down by the riverside
I ain’t gonna study war no more
Study war no more
Ain’t gonna study war no more
First published 1918 in Plantation Melodies, “Down by the Riverside” is still a popular tune among gospel choirs and has even made its way onto a few contemporary albums. The spiritual dates from before the Civil War, and its upbeat tune is easy to dance and sing to as you let your burdens drop. I recommend giving it a listen today or whenever you have a chance.
What are some of the burdens laid down by the singer? The chorus implies what the lyrics make explicit: the sword and the shield, those heavy instruments of war that Isaiah prophesied would be burned or turned into farming tools on Judgment Day. The implements of violence are exchanged in the song for a long white robe, a starry crown, a meeting with the Prince of Peace, and shaking hands around the world: for peace, abundance, communion. The exchange comes with a cost, however: crossing the River Jordan, climbing up the mountain, walking the road to heaven.
Right now, let’s talk about this Prince of Peace, this Jesus character. We hear Zechariah today and in the synoptic Gospels’ passion accounts on Palm Sunday about the Messiah coming to Jerusalem on a colt or ass, a docile beast of burden, rather than a horse, the triumphant animal of war. In the second reading, Paul urges those claiming to be followers of the Way to really and totally give their lives to Christ. Only by dying to the “flesh,” the desire for an independence that requires the subjugation of others in a zero-sum game, may they find true life in the Spirit. In the Gospel, Jesus praises his Abba, creator and sustainer of the universe, for revealing the salvific wisdom of the cosmos to the little ones, those without worth, voice, or much anything else in the world.
God is a topsy turvy ruler if ever there was one. I mean three in one, one in three: don’t even get me started on the Trinity! (I’ve already rambled enough about that.) What we may miss, however, is that God incarnate in Jesus not only flips our world upside down and proceeds to rule it from a safe distance. No. Jesus rides a beast of burden but also bears burdens, our burdens, himself. God takes on the human experience fully, and that means the experiences of limits, frustration, desolation, ignorance, suffering, evil, and death that we all have – especially those of us born in the wrong hemisphere or on the wrong side of the zoning line.
I will hazard the guess that the slaves who first dredged “Down by the Riverside” from the depths of their souls and bodies yearning for freedom – as well as the generations who received, retuned, and passed along the song – knew this about Jesus much better than their white siblings in Christ who profited off their pain and perhaps in later years even sang the spiritual smilingly at Sunday service. I think they – along with people shoved to the edges from long before Jesus’ time and up until today – know which sort of prince Jesus is, which type of freedom he offers, which kind of yoke he gives.
You may well have heard this before, but it bears repeating. A yoke is a tool made for two oxen allowing them to plow a field much more quickly and easily than if one were to do it alone. Jesus, then, is offering us to take on a yoke he has already shouldered. Nothing we go through will be separated from his love, even if we fool ourselves (or are fooled) into thinking so, even if the experience is far from that a Galilean Jewish man in the first century would have had.
Jesus will bear the load with us. It’s not that he is taking away all pain and suffering here in an instant: he invites us to a yoke, not a chaise lounge. We have to work with Christ, and that work will be, well, work: we will sweat, cry, fall down, and probably curse more than once. But we will also find comfort, joy, strength, and even rest in the one plowing the field, sharing the yoke, with us.
The field awaits; the work – who knows how much? – remains. Will we lay down our burdens?
Well, yes, duh! Right? Why wouldn’t we? It’s so simple. Jesus said so himself!
And there lies the crux, the cross. To take up the easy yoke, the light burden, of Jesus is to take up the immense cross mentioned in last week’s gospel. The work of the field, of our lives, is the reign of God: it is our complete salvation and also our total undoing. The field fully harvested will be a transformation of the world as we know it – this world of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, neoliberal capitalism, and the other -isms and -archies that burden us individually and systemically. However, it will also be beyond the world even as we dream it, a harvest of fruits we’re pretty sure we didn’t plant, of a God whose ways are not our ways, even if we walk haltingly in them thanks to being yoked with Jesus through the Spirit.
We go about each day imagining that the cross comprises the world and every living creature in its history and that we must in a mighty effort bring this burden into paradise – if not in a day, then in a week, tops, no further extensions. We so easily forget that those who came before us, whom we laud and criticize (and we should often do both), worked too in this field. The best of them made their peace with leaving the work unfinished, of letting Christ who shared their yoke also control it, of accepting Christ as the servant and the master – of their lives, of the world. We have to make our peace with this, too.
The maddeningly difficult thing about Jesus’ yoke is precisely that it is so easy. Its simplicity baffles us, disarms us, overturns us because it quite simply and totally requires us – all of us, body and soul, flesh and spirit, fears and dreams, failures and triumphs. It requires us to find our independence in dependence, in relationships of give and take in imperfect reflection of our God who is powerful in vulnerability, control in letting go, one in three.
Dependence, of course, means other people, who are not hell (even if it sometimes feels like it) but rather our salvation. We love our God by loving our neighbor, especially the neighbor who is meek and humble of heart, whom we so often cast aside. We share the yoke with Christ in bearing each other’s crosses and sharing the work of God’s reign. Plowing this field, being a disciple, is not a zero-sum game. We do not need to – we should not – hoard justice and freedom any more than natural resources. We have done so for far too long. Air and water, food and shelter, liberty, justice, and love: these are for all, for every one of us together.
Let’s get about taking on this yoke, not as some once-in-a-lifetime herculean effort but rather in the furrows – maybe even the ruts – of everyday life. Let’s learn about and go about unlearning our racism as individuals and as a church and do the same with the other sins instilled in us. Let’s not study war anymore. Let’s lay down our burdens and let Jesus take them up with us as we go under and cross the waters of the Jordan, go to and come down from the mountaintop, wind our way to heaven.
The field awaits; the work – who knows how much? – remains. Again, Jesus asks us: will we lay down our burdens?
The Catholic Errant 