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Here is what I checked off my bucket list today: Teach a priesthood lesson about castration and tell a room full of Mormon men that it is a procedure that God, at least metaphorically, wants them to undergo.

It didn’t start off like this. Really. It was just going to be a standard, correlated, out-of-the box lesson based on Elder Bednar’s recent conference talk “Meek and Lowly of Heart.” It’s all stuff I’ve taught before: God wants us to be teachable, humble, compliant–so obey stuff and you will be happy. You know, the only real lesson we really ever teach.

But then I started thinking too much about some of the places in the scriptures where “meek and lowly of heart” occur. Especially this one from Matthew 11: 28-30:

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

I know how this one is supposed to go. God is comparing us to a team of oxen. We need to submit to him and keep his commandments, and, if we do, he will take our suffering on himself because that what a yoke is: it is a device for distributing a load and not just a burden placed upon our backs. If we keep the commandments, Jesus will be our yoke-mate.

This is one of those readings that struck me as so profound when I first heard it that I just accepted it and started teaching it to everyone else. It is comforting to think of Jesus as my yoke-mate–my partner in all of the suffering and horribleness that the world has to offer. What a great understanding of the atonement!

But the more I thought about, the less sense this reading made. In the first place, Jesus is asking us to accept both a burden and a yoke. Both, it seems, are voluntary choices that we make and not things that we have to accept because life is just hard. And nothing in the text suggests that Jesus is offering to be part of the yoke-deal. He is the driver in this metaphor, not another one of the oxen. If we are yoked together, it is with our fellow beasts.

But here’s where it really gets tricky: you don’t have to convince an ox to accept a yoke. Being willing to accept a burden is just part of oxen nature–part of the definition of what it means to be an ox instead of something else. There is no species of animal called an “ox.” It is a term that describes how an animal is used. An ox is just the name we give to a male bovine that has been made willing to pull a load, which is not something that male bovines are born willing to do. An ox is a bull who has changed its nature.

This is important. Bulls are the poster-bovines of toxic masculinity. They snort and belch and charge at you with their horns. If you try to put a yoke on a bull, you will probably end up gored or tossed over a fence or otherwise incapacitated. Oxen, on the other hand, will happily submit to load. It’s what they have been trained to do. It’s why they exist. It is in their nature. And how do you turn a bull into an ox? It is an extensive process that involves training, re-education, operant conditioning . . . . and castration. Mainly castration.

What Jesus seems to be telling us in Matthew 11 is not, “be an ox that takes the yoke instead of an ox who doesn’t take yoke.” There is no such thing as an ox who won’t take a yoke. What Jesus is telling us is that we should be oxen and not bulls, which is the same as telling us that we need to change because He can’t use is the way we are. Bulls, when they are alone and following their natures, wreck china shops. But when they change that nature and accept a yoke, they join with other recovering bulls to plant crops, plow fields, haul granite, and build kingdoms.

Keep this in mind as we turn to a passage in the Book of Mormon that also talks about meek-and-lowliness: King Benjamin’s address to the Nephites in the first part of Mosiah (3:19):

For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.

See how it connects? In much the same way that the natural bull is useless to someone who wants to plow a field or build a city, the natural man is useless to someone who wants to build the Kingdom of God. For the bull the answer is castration and sensitivity training. For the disciple, it is the only slightly less frightening prospect of a mighty change of heart that makes us willing to sacrifice everything that is not the Kingdom of God.

Now, let’s be honest here. Metaphors have their limits, and this one has more limits than most. In the first place, it is unforgivably sexist. It treats male experience as universally human and completely writes female nature out of the equation. It is also a metaphor that can be easily used to tell people to be complacent in their servitude and not to seek justice in this life. And then there’s the fact that eeewww–it’s so icky. I have no defenses to offer on any of these grounds.

But it would be difficult to imagine, in the ancient world, a more concrete and vivid illustration of the doctrine that human nature needs to change in order to accept God. We have to become less proud, less violent, less toxic, and more willing to share the work with other people. We have to allow God to yoke us to each other–to work together to do something worthwhile. And we can’t do that until we yield to the enticings of the holy spirit and become something fundamentally different. We have to change our natures. If we don’t, we are no use to Christ in building His kingdom.

Anyway, that was my lesson today, full of polite, but anatomically correct discussions of what happens when a bull becomes an ox. Snip, snip. And how, you may ask, did it go over?



Well, you know, some people just can’t take a yoke.