Seventh Sunday in Pentecost
3 July 2005
Fr. Joseph Dunne, Presiding
Dr. Donald Wacome, Lay Preaching
Zechariah 9.9-12
Psalm 145
Romans 7.21-8.6
Matthew 11.25-30
Gentle and Humble in Heart
Come to
me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you
rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle 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)
If you’re like me, you’re about as likely to remember last week’s Gospel lesson as “Car Talk’s” Tom Magliozzi is to remember last week’s ‘puzzler,’ and, when we hear what Jesus says today in Matthew 11, you might suspect he’s forgotten what he said in Chapter 10. There, sending his disciples out to proclaim the coming of God’s kingdom, Jesus warned them that they would be maligned and persecuted, betrayed and denounced, arrested, interrogated and killed. But now he says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (12.30). If being hated by everyone (10.22), flogged in synagogues (10.17), thrown in prison, and being put to death by your children (10.21) is what Jesus thinks of as an easy yoke, a light burden, we can only wonder what he’d consider a hard yoke, a heavy burden!
In fact,
the longer we look at today’s passage in the context Mathew creates for it, the
harder it is to understand Jesus’ words.
In the passage I want to focus on, he describes himself as “gentle and humble in heart,” which
doesn’t seem to fit very well with last week’s “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not
come to bring peace, but a sword” (10.34). It fits no better with the passage that comes right before today’s
lesson (11.16-24). There Jesus threatens the towns which have not accepted him
and welcomed the good news of the arrival of God’s kingdom, warning them that
they face obliteration unless they repent: “On
the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for the
For that matter, it’s not obvious how to square Jesus’ description of himself as “gentle and humble in heart” with the portrayal in the Gospels of a character who lived rough, consorted with some pretty tough characters, spoke to huge crowds without benefit of a sound system, berated his followers, bluntly confronted the powerful and finally goaded them into killing him as a blaspheming insurrectionist. (I was once party to a discussion in which everyone went on at length describing a colleague, a sweet, unassuming, and diffident fellow beloved by all, as “Christ like;” at last, exasperated by the facile equation of being like Jesus with being nice, I asked when he was going to annoy us so much that we’d crucify him.)
I don’t think that when Jesus describes
himself as humble and gentle that he’s telling us that he’s really a nice guy,
after all. I think instead that he’s
saying something absolutely crucial about the
With that background, consider this notoriously unclear passage (verses 9 through 12 of Chapter 11.) Jesus says:
What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more
than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written,
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before
you.” Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater
than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than
he. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has
suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.
Commentators have come up with a variety of
interpretations of what Jesus means here, but I want to suggest that when he
speaks of those who attempt to take the
For,
while John does not call upon the faithful to take up swords to drive out the
oppressor and purify the land in preparation for the coming of God, he is not
essentially different from those who do.
Jesus was willing to be baptized by John, to endorse his call for the
nation to repent and prepare itself for its long-delayed deliverance, but he
will not accept John’s ultimate assumptions about the character and purposes of
the God who comes to redeem
Thus the
kingdom John envisions—and for which he dies—is completely at odds with the
kingdom Jesus embodies. For the kingdom
of Jesus is one in which Israel is not closed off, the pure and elect people
over against the dirty and rejected gentiles, but open to them, giving itself
for them, a chosen people of kings and priests, a light to the nations, welcoming
them all and sundry into the limitless reign of a gracious God. Where John, and almost all his
contemporaries, excluded, Jesus embraced. Where they condemned, Jesus forgave.
They said repentance and baptism must come first, before acceptance. Jesus
accepted indiscriminately, and pointed to repentance and baptism as signs of
gratitude. They sought to restore
What
about that terrible warning to the towns that reject the good news of the
coming kingdom? The trajectory of John’s attempt to “take the kingdom of heaven
by force” is evident; he winds up with his head on a platter. The same fate awaits the nation as a whole if
it persists in imagining it can overcome power with power, rather than with
love, if it does not accept the good news, if it does not acknowledge Jesus as
God’s anointed. Again and again Jesus warns
Still, we’re left wondering how the way of Jesus can be easy, how the burden he asks us to bear can be light. As Jesus himself tells us, we can expect his good news of love and acceptance to encounter hate and rejection. We can expect his command for us to make peace with our enemies to evoke a violent response from those who can be satisfied with nothing but victory over them.
Beyond that, the truth is that for the likes of us nothing is so unnatural, so contrary to inclination, and in some ways so utterly unbelievable, as that good news. Inside each of us there’s a hairy, ranting John the Baptist; we’re all too willing to lose our heads for whatever moral or political or religious or whatever ideal we take as too dear to be trumped by God’s love. There is a sense in which the Christian faith is not difficult; it’s impossible. We will always, one way or another, cling to something other than the grace of God in Jesus to make ourselves whole and acceptable in our own eyes and God’s. And we will always be ready to see someone else as cut off from God’s grace.
His yoke
is easy, his burden is light, not because of what we are able to do for him,
not because we can do what he asks, but because he gives so much. His yoke is easy, his burden is light because
he accepts us and our desperately inadequate efforts with unbounded grace.
There’s an old story—its provenance is Sufi, not Christian, but we should
always be on the lookout for fragments of the good news breaking through in
unexpected places—about an old woman who dies and, as she approaches heaven,
she worries that she may not be worthy to enter. She fears that her faith has
been feeble, her piety inadequate, her good deeds paltry, her motives mixed.
But suddenly she sees God, running to welcome her.
Embracing her he says, “I made you so
small and weak and flawed but you have done so much! I made the stars and
planets to obey me. I made the angels and bright sprits to adore me. I made
you, I made you to surprise me!” May
we take up the burden and put on the yoke that Jesus gives us, confident not in
ourselves, but in the endless grace that holds us secure.
Amen.