I wonder why Jesus so often uses children to
illustrate his teaching?
Perhaps it’s because
he knows that the best way to make your point stick is to relate it to everyday
experience. And what’s more part of our everyday experience than the doings and
sayings of children?
Perhaps it’s because
the open-minded, trustful innocence of a child has something special to teach
us.
Or perhaps it is just
because Jesus loves children.
Whatever the reason,
the responses of children are an obvious link between the two short passages
we’ve just heard from St Matthew’s gospel (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30) – I suppose
that’s why the good compilers of the Lectionary put them together.
Let us look at them
more closely, to see what they tell us.
In the 1st passage, Jesus evokes the
image of children in the street who can’t agree what game to play.
‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you
did not mourn’, says
Jesus. You might hear something very similar on a street today:
‘Let’s play
weddings’ say one lot of kids;
‘Let’s not’, say another lot, ‘Let’s play funerals’;
‘No, we don’t want
to play funerals’ say the first lot, ‘We want to play weddings!’
Jesus applies this
image of squabbling children to the people of his generation. One lot won’t
listen to what John the Baptist says because he is too puritan; ‘He has a demon’ they say. Another lot
won’t listen to the Son of Man – Jesus - because he is too lax; ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax
collectors and sinners!’ You
can really feel Jesus’s exasperation, can’t you?
But what is going on
here? To understand it we need to look at the context of Jesus’s words.
Matthew has just told
us that John the Baptist had sent his disciples to ask Jesus a question, ‘Are you the one
who is to come?’ In other words, are you the Messiah? And Jesus has
answered, in a coded but unmistakable way, that he is: he says, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind
receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the
dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.’ These were the signs by which Jews believed they
would recognise the Messiah, based on Isaiah’s prophesy.
The Jews believed that
before the Messiah came, Elijah would return to herald his coming. Jesus then
addresses the crowd, saying that John is more than just a prophet; John ‘is Elijah who is to come. Let anyone with ears listen!’
Matthew has told us
that Jesus saw John as the new Elijah heralding himself as the Messiah. Their
styles may be different, but John and Jesus’s teaching go together like a hand
in a glove. There is no need to take one side and rubbish the other. This is
why Jesus is so exasperated with the squabbling factions.
Jesus finishes by saying ‘Yet wisdom is
vindicated by her deeds.’ Wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures is
seen as emanating from God – we have just used the Song of Wisdom as a canticle.
Jesus’s exasperation is tempered by his certainty that such squabbling will not
derail God’s plan, which will ultimately be successful.
I think there’s a great deal we
can learn from Jesus’s words in our
generation.
Take our Anglican Communion. We have all heard reports of the bitter
divisions in it. We have a self-styled Orthodox party struggling for power in
the Communion with a so-called Liberal party. Both parties vie for the support
of everyone else, while threatening to leave or to expel the others. On the
surface the issue is whether homosexual behaviour is sinful, but underlying this
are very different opinions on how literally or not to interpret scripture. It’s
all rather confusing and disturbing, isn’t it!
But isn’t the whole hubbub rather like Jesus’s squabbling children? I
don’t think we should allow their arguments to disturb our own faith. We should
continue prayerfully to follow Jesus in the way he calls us, recognising that
he may call others differently. They are still our brothers and sisters in
Christ. I for one intend to maintain Christian fellowship with all who look to
Jesus, whatever disagreements I may have with them. Like Jesus, we can be
certain that this squabbling cannot derail God’s plan. Perhaps the arguments
will ultimately strengthen our churches, no matter how painful we may find the
dissension now. Let us trust, like Jesus, that God’s Wisdom will be vindicated!
Turning to the 2nd
passage, Jesus starts by publicly thanking his loving-father God.
‘I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth’, he says, ‘because you
have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed
them to infants.’ The child theme again!
Jesus is surely speaking from experience: the experience that the wise
and intelligent, the rabbis, the intellectuals, reject him, while plain
ordinary folk accept him. I don’t think Jesus is condemning those who are
clever – rather he is condemning those who are puffed up with intellectual
pride. We must have the open-minded, trustful innocence of a child to believe
that Jesus is who he claims to be.
Jesus continues,
making the claim that is the heart and centre centre of our Christian faith, ‘All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and
no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the
Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’ What Jesus is saying is this: ‘If you want to
know what God is like, look at me!’ As Christians we believe that in
Jesus we see what God is like. But surely we can only see it if we are as
open-minded and trustful as children. Children really do have much to teach us!
Jesus then says the
‘comfortable words’ that we used to hear every Sunday in the old traditional
language Communion service: they are comfortable in the sense that they give us
comfort. ‘Come unto me, all you that are weary and
are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’ And he
continues, ‘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.’
We Irish use the word yoke these days for something whose name
we’ve forgotten. Unless we work with draught animals we probably know very
little about real yokes – those wooden bars that go over the shoulders of men
or animals to allow them to carry or pull heavy loads safely. But Jesus’s
audience would have been very familiar with yokes, and Jesus himself was quite
likely an expert in them. He may have made yokes as a youth in his father
Joseph’s carpenter’s shop. They would have been bespoke – the carpenter would
no doubt take measurements of the man or animal, trim the wood, and fit it
carefully, making fine adjustments until it fitted just right. Perhaps the
carpenter’s shop in Nazareth had a sign over the door saying something like ‘My yokes fit well!’
What Jesus is saying
to his audience, echoing down to us over the millennia to us, is this. ‘My way, the life I show you, is not a burden to cause
you pain; your task is made to measure to fit you’. Whatever God
sends us is made to fit our needs and our abilities perfectly. It is not that
life’s burdens are easy to carry, but God lays them on us in love, they are
meant to be carried in love following Jesus’s example, and love makes even the
heaviest burden light.
So, let me finish with the lovely
prayer of St Richard of Chichester;
Thanks be to you, Lord Jesus Christ,
For all the benefits you have given me,
For all the pains and insults you have borne for me.
O most merciful Redeemer, Friend, and Brother,
May I know you more clearly,
Love you more dearly,
Follow you more nearly,
Day by day. Amen.
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