Jesus Give Rest

BY Erin Davis

It’s one of those moments so deeply seared onto my heart that I still glance at the memories and wince. I was in a Jamaican infirmary, tasked with offering some measure of comfort to the sick and dying housed there. Their beds were jammed together, packing every room. Many patients wailed incessantly. My comfort-craving brain wanted to find the escape hatch, to look somewhere other than at the faces of these people I could do so little for. Maybe that’s why my eyes kept drifting out the windows at the sugary white sand and emerald-blue Caribbean waters that sparkled just beyond the compound’s walls.

The juxtaposition of human sorrow and breathtaking beauty sticks with me still. In His life, Jesus was on the shore and in the suffering at the same time. We find a moment just as jarring in Matthew 11.

John the Baptist was imprisoned for his faith, sitting on death row. In the middle of that hardship, Jesus was using John’s predicament as an example of true discipleship when He delivered these comforting words.

“Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take up my yoke and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” 
—Matthew 11:28–30

Rest. Our bleary eyes and exhausted souls crave it, don’t they? And yet, John would remain in prison until his gruesome death. Humanly speaking, John’s yoke was not easy. His burden was not light. So what did Jesus mean?

I imagine John must have looked around his prison cell and felt tired from the weight of it all. He sent messengers to make sure Jesus had something better to offer (vv.1–3). Our weary hearts often wonder the same thing, don’t they?

Jesus responds like this: “Go and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are told the good news” (vv.4–5).

When this world leaves me weary, I want to take a nap. But Jesus wants to show me how He works in the middle of what is weary. If the kind of burden Christ offers doesn’t look like I think it will, He must be promising so much more.

Rest from pain, suffering, and worry is certainly something we can all readily give our “Amen!” to. But then here comes that juxtaposition again—that same tension—when Jesus adds, “And blessed is the one who isn’t offended by me” (v.6).

If a good night’s sleep and an easy life was all Jesus had to give John, it would not have been enough to keep him chained to Christ. Instead, John would die for his faith—not just for a handful of miracles that had already happened, but for a tsunami of healing that he believed was to come. Somewhere along the way, John must’ve resolved that the rest he needed most was not simply relief from his circumstance.

We are all broken by sin, longing for a cure. Jesus walks among us, removing the yoke of sin that bends our backs and breaks our hearts. Suffering and sleeplessness may remain temporarily, but the burden of sin is no longer ours to carry. Jesus took that burden so we could know the kind of rest that seeps past our bones and into our weary souls.