(1) First, He invites those who labour; or, perhaps more correctly, all who are toiling. Can we venture to reconstruct the scene? Close beside Him stand His immediate disciples, who alone had been privileged to hear the language of His prayer. But beyond the circle of His immediate followers is gathered a crowd of the inhabitants of Capernaum, who had been passing homeward at the close of the day. Labourers would be there in plenty, coming back from their toil in the fields; women also, returning from the market or the well ; and fishermen too, doubtless, who had stopped awhile to listen on the way to their nocturnal labours on the deep. On the outskirts of the crowd there might be others, shop-keepers, working men, and farmers ; and perhaps women such as Mary Magdalene, for Magdala was not far from Capernaum. Such, in some degree at least, was the character of the multitude on whom our Lord's eyes could rest. And as He gazed upon that group of peasants, representative as they were of human weariness and suffering, there welled up in
1 W. Temple, in Foundation*, 245.
ST. MATTHEW xi. 28 261
His heart a great compassion for the souls before Him, weighed down with a load that was too heavy for them to bear. So, con- scious of His power to alleviate the woes and sorrows of humanity and to lighten the common burdens of mankind, He who claimed a knowledge of the unknown God, and had been rejoicing in communion with the Father, opened His arms to the listening multitude and cried, " Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
(2) But Christ called not only those who labour or toil ; He called those also who are burdened or heavy laden to Him. As the idea of toil refers to what we may call the active side of life, to what we do or attempt to do, so the term " heavy laden " or " burdened " refers to the passive side, to that which we bear or endure. Frequently this latter is a condition added to, or even responsible for, the former. We may be toiling while we are heavy laden, or our work may actually be toil because while we work we have also to bear a heavy burden. If we consider the burdens of life they fall into two classes ; we may term these the self-imposed and the inevitable : those which are due, and those which are not due, to our own actions. And many of us would be surprised, after a strict self-examination, to find how large a proportion of the whole of our burdens the self-imposed ones are. We may not like to confess this, but still it is true. The burdens imposed by carelessness and thoughtlessness, by sin in the present and in the past, by the force of evil habits which have been allowed to grow unchecked, by our declining to exercise self- discipline and by our refusing to submit to the wise discipline of others — all these various not inevitable burdens will be found to outweigh and outnumber the burdens which are really outside our own control.
(3) What must especially have distressed Jesus and filled Him with pity was that men turned their very religion into a burden and a toil. That which was meant to give them strength to bear all other burdens they turned into an additional load. Instead of using their carriage to carry themselves and all their belongings, they strove to take it on their backs and carry it. All that religion seemed to do for them was to make life harder, to fill it with a thousand restrictions and fretting duties. They toiled to keep a multitude of observances which no man could keep; they
262 THE GREAT INVITATION
bound heavy burdens of penances and duties and laid them on their backs, as if thus they could please God. The sinner was in despair, and the religious man a heartless performer. They had fancied that God was like themselves, a poor little creature, revengeful, spiteful, liking to see men suffering for sin and crushed under His petty tyrannies. They thought of a God who must be propitiated by careful and exact performances and to whom the sinner could find access only after crushing penances. As if the pain of sin were not enough, and as if the bitterness of a misspent life were not itself intolerable, they sought to embitter life still further by emptying it of all natural joy and by hampering it with countless scruples.
T| The kernel of the law was found in the Jewish scriptures. But this was augmented by four tremendous accumulations. First, there was the Mishna, which was an elaborate reiteration of the law with innumerable embellishments. Then there was the Midrash, which consisted of volumes of the minutest explana- tions of the meaning of every part of the law. Then there were other bulky tomes called the Talmud, which was a formulation of the law into doctrine at portentous length. And finally there was an intricate mass of comments and legal decisions of the Eabbis. And for a Jew to live right he must be in complete harmony with all this mass of accumulated tradition, speculation, allegory, and fantastic comment. And as every Eabbi had the right and, indeed, the duty to add to it, it is easy to see how the burden would grow. Rabbis were said to make the law heavy, to burden people, and many of them regarded this as their chief duty.1