It's no yoke?

I was rather bemused, a few weeks ago, by the rumpus surrounding the decision of a priest in the UK to refuse permission for yoga classes in his church. Gospel churches have been resisting requests to host such classes for years, and mostly the reasons are well understood and not thought newsworthy.

It is no accident that the Sanskrit word “yoga” is linked to our word “yoke”. We have the right to ask of everyone who promotes yoga, “What exactly are you expecting us to yoke ourselves to?”

A lady who was brought on to the radio as a spokesperson for yoga had to admit that there was a religious dimension to the practice. While superficially yoga may simply be a set of physical exercises to bring about inner peace and calm, there are overtones of an Eastern spirituality that is foreign to what Christianity teaches. Put bluntly, the underlying philosophy goes like this: spirit - good, body - bad, and you must overcome the downward pull of the body by the exercise of mind over matter.

Now certainly, there is a place in Christianity for training the mind to stand up to the promptings of the flesh, whether those lead you to laziness or to unwholesome thoughts. “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6 ESV). “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1-3).

Yet at the same time Christianity views our bodies as important – too important to be suppressed or yoked to an oriental philosophy. Jesus Christ was raised bodily from the dead. It wasn’t simply a disembodied ghost that left Jesus’ tomb on resurrection day. And because we follow where Jesus leads, we who trust in Him can look forward to a bodily resurrection as well. Quite how this works out, I don’t know. It is beyond anything in our experience.

As dear suffering Job exclaims, “... after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God”, the God who in Christ has mercifully chosen me to be His own while still in the flesh, loved me, saved me from sin and takes me to live with Him forever. This is quite different from the way things are in many Eastern philosophies. These may talk of reincarnation, which holds that you may come back to life as someone or something completely different, depending on what you have done in this life. Or they may talk of the human spirit being so liberated from all care that it is totally unburdened and absorbed into the greater spirit, thereby arguably losing any sense of identity.

No doubt many yoga teachers present themselves as well-meaning, public-spirited people putting on a service to the community. As a leader of a gospel church, I would still wish to insist politely that their yoga with its dubious yoke belongs in buildings other than ours. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).