Trinity 5 2026

I wonder if you have you ever noticed how difficult it can be to please some people?

No matter what you do, it is never quite right. Be too quiet and someone says you are

distant. Be too enthusiastic and you are told to calm down. Change too slowly and you

are resistant. Change too quickly and you are reckless. Whatever tune is played,

someone wishes it had been different.

Jesus knew exactly what that felt like.

He compares his generation to children sitting in the marketplace arguing with one

another. “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did

not mourn.” It is an image that is almost humorous until we realise how familiar it is.

The children refuse to join the game unless everyone plays by their rules.

Jesus sees the same pattern in the adults around him. John the Baptist lives an

austere, disciplined life and people dismiss him as mad. Jesus comes sharing meals,

celebrating with ordinary people, and he is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard.

Neither man fits the expectations that others have already decided God should fulfil.

Perhaps that is the real problem. Sometimes we become so certain about what God

ought to be doing that we fail to notice what God is actually doing.

Fear has a way of narrowing our vision. When we become anxious, we begin to

interpret everything through the lens of suspicion. We expect the worst. We judge

quickly. We assume people are beyond hope before we have even taken the time to

know them.

It happens more often than we might like to admit.

We can do the same in the Church. We can become anxious that unless every service

is perfect, every Bible study exciting, every event imaginative, people will lose interest.

We work harder and harder, quietly believing that everything depends on us.

Yet perhaps that anxiety says more about us than it does about God.

After all, Jesus does not say, “Come to my bible study.”

He does not say, “Come to my strategy meeting.”

He simply says:

“Come to me.”

And there is something wonderfully freeing about those words.

Faith begins not with getting everything right, but with coming into the presence of

Christ.

That has always been the heartbeat of Christian discipleship. Before we are called to

achieve anything, we are invited to be with Jesus. Before we carry anything for him, we

discover that he is already carrying us.

Perhaps that is why these verses have brought comfort to weary people for centuries.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give

you rest.”

Many of us hear those words as an invitation to slow down after a busy week. They

certainly offer that comfort. But Jesus is speaking into a world weighed down by

something even heavier: oppression, uncertainty, injustice and the crushing demands

of competing loyalties.

His promise is not that every burden disappears.

It is that we do not carry it alone.

When Jesus speaks of taking his yoke upon us, he uses an image that farmers would

have recognised immediately. A yoke joins two animals together so that the weight is

shared. The invitation is not to work harder but to walk alongside him.

Perhaps that is why, later in the story, Simon of Cyrene is invited to carry the cross

with Jesus. The burden becomes shared. Suffering is transformed into companionship.

How different that is from the exhausting pressure to hold everything together by

ourselves.

Many of us carry burdens that Jesus never actually asked us to carry. We carry the

need to control every outcome. We carry the expectation that everyone should

approve of us. We carry responsibility for fixing every problem in our family, our

workplace or our church. We carry guilt for things beyond our control.

No wonder we become tired.

Jesus offers another way.

His way is gentleness rather than force.

Humility rather than performance.

Presence rather than pressure.

Perhaps that is why the simple chant from the Iona Community in Scotland  has

touched so many people over the years:

Take, oh take me as I am;

Summon out what I shall be;

Set your seal upon my heart

And live in me.

There is something wonderfully freeing about those words. They move us from striving

to surrender, from trying to prove ourselves to simply placing ourselves in Christ’s

hands. They echo Jesus’ own invitation: “Come to me.” We do not come because we

have everything sorted or because our burdens have disappeared. We come just as

we are, trusting that, as we walk beside him, he will gently shape us into all that we are

called to become.

He reminds us that holiness is not found by keeping our distance from difficult people

but by drawing alongside them with compassion. After all, Jesus was criticised

precisely because of the people he chose to eat with. Others believed that closeness

meant compromise. Jesus showed that closeness could become the very place where

healing begins.

Perhaps that is still true today.

The world often teaches us to protect ourselves by creating distance. Jesus teaches us

to discover God through relationship.

The children in the marketplace wanted everyone else to dance to their tune. Jesus

simply invites us to walk with him.

That invitation remains as gentle and as radical as ever.

Not because life suddenly becomes easy.

But because we discover that we were never meant to carry it on our own.

So today, I wonder where you may be expecting God to act according to your plans,

when instead Jesus is quietly inviting you simply to come, to walk beside him, and to

discover that his presence is enough?

Amen