I have to confess something to you this afternoon. I cheated on Sunday. I knew something about the text that made my sermon a bit of a stretch, but I so wanted to tell the story of our time in Mississippi that I chose to ignore it. Preachers do that sometimes. They even have a term for it. Good preachers do what is called exegesis – which in Greek means “to lead out.” It is doing research on a passage of scripture in order to tease out its meaning. Most Sunday’s I have done some sort of exegesis so that I can, to the best of my ability, share with you what I think the Scriptures are trying to say to us as a community of disciples. Bad preachers don’t do exegesis. Really bad preachers do eisegesis – which in Greek means “to lead in.” It is a way of interpreting Scripture in order to introduce one’s own ideas. On some level I was a very bad preacher on Sunday because I eisegeted Jesus’ claim that “his yoke is easy and his burden is light” to fit my desire to tell the important story of our trip to Mission on the Bay.
I will make up for it, I hope, on some level, today by repenting of being a bad preacher – maybe not a bad preacher, but preacher that my homiletics professor would not be proud of – AND by sharing with you what I know, through good exegesis.
It is a fairly recent phenomenon to believe that by intrepret study one can fully understand the meaning of Scripture without bias or interpretation. Really, it is a concept that came out of the scientific quest for truth that developed from about 1630 through the mid-19hundreds. Before that Scripture was understood to be fluid - living – “open-ended and needing interpretation.” Rabbis around the time of Jesus “understood their role in the community was to study and meditate and discuss and pray and then make decisions of how God meant us to understand the Scriptures… Different Rabbis had different sets of rules, which were really different lists of what they forbade and what they permitted. A rabbi’s set of rules and lists, which was really that rabbi’s interpretation of how to live the Torah, was called the rabbi’s yoke. When you followed a certain rabbi, you were following him because you believed that rabbi’s set of interpretations were the closest to what God intended in the Scriptures. And when you followed that rabbi, you were taking up that rabbi’s yoke. Jesus said his yoke was easy. The intent of a rabbi having a yoke wasn’t just to interpret the words correctly [as modernists hoped]; it was to live them out. In the Jewish context, action was always the goal.”[1]
Jesus, a rabbi, said his yoke was easy. Jesus could say his yoke was easy because he could live it. Every dream God had for humanity in giving the rules of the community – the law of the covenant – Jesus lived in flesh and blood. He wasn’t stooped over – weighed down by all the rules of the law, but was free to live life to the fullest – the way God intended it – because he knew what it meant to live out the will of God. His yoke was not heavey with the burden of law, but light with the freedom of grace.
“Jesus expects his followers to be engaged in the endless process of deciding what it means to actually live the Scriptures.”[2] Together, as a community of disciples, we are expected to do the work of interpreting God’s will for Creation. We hear the Scriptures, a preacher offers a suggestion, but really it is up to us all to figure out what God has in store. Whatever it is we pursue as the dream of God; family promise, foley elementary school, draughting theology, whatever – Jesus promises that if it is what God has in mind it will give rest to our souls. Where our deepest desire meets the worlds greatest need – that is where God is calling this community of followers. May we take on his yoke, and please forgive me for weighing down my own yoke with eisegesis. Amen.
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