Child's Play
Scripture Reading: Matt. 11:16-30
Last week I drove up to Connecticut for the day to visit with family. I got a chance to see my oldest nephew Thomas, who was visiting from Nashville. Thomas is a board-game obsessive. He has an entire room of his house dedicated to board games. So when I walked into my mother’s house, I was not at all surprised to see the dining room table covered with a game board and dozens, if not hundreds, of playing pieces of various sizes, shapes, and colors.
As a child, I also loved board games, but being the youngest of five, I would have to badger my older siblings to join me for a game. We had the usual staples: Clue, Risk, Scrabble, and of course, Monopoly. But while all those games can be played by adults as well as children, they are child’s play compared with the games that interest Thomas. Rather than word-building, Thomas’s games focus on world-building. Before solving a mystery, you first need to solve the instructions! You could finish a game of Monopoly in the time it takes to read the instructions for some of Thomas’s games!
While I do enjoy playing many of those games with Thomas and the rest of the family, I was recently reminded that a game doesn’t have to be complicated to be fun. A few days ago I was home alone in the early evening. The windows were open because it was 150 degrees, and I won’t turn on the AC until the temperature reaches at least 160. With the windows open I could hear children from the neighborhood playing in a nearby backyard. Although most of the conversations I hear in my neighborhood are in Spanish, I heard the voice of a young girl shouting in English, “Here I come, ready or not!”
I smiled to myself. She was playing hide-and-seek. As a child, what game was simpler or more fun than hide-and-seek? There’s no board to set up, no pieces to move, no instructions to read, no equipment at all. You can explain the rules in five seconds. “You go hide. I’ll count to ten. And then I’ll try to find you.” Now, my point is not that simpler is always better, be it for games or anything else. My point is that something doesn’t have to be complicated to be worth our while.
This is true for the gospel. We have a tendency to make the gospel more complicated than it really is. We add on amendments and make qualifications so that Jesus more readily reflects our social class, cultural background, and political leanings. Or we think that we have to do something more than simply trusting in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins. It can’t be that easy! Don’t I have to contribute something as well? At least aren’t there rules I need to follow?
We have a tendency to make the gospel more complicated than it really is.
But who does Jesus say gets the gospel right away? Who understands and accepts it without hesitation or qualification? Religious professionals? Scholars? No, infants! “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.”
This is not the sole reference to “children” in today’s passage. The passage begins with Jesus asking, “But to what will I compare this generation?” This being a rhetorical question, Jesus answers himself. “It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another:
‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’”
Jesus is using children as a metaphor. The children who will not dance or mourn represent those who earlier rejected the ministry of John the Baptist and now reject Jesus’s ministry as well. If John’s ministry was like a child wailing, they didn’t respond with mourning, as one naturally would. If Jesus’s ministry is like a child playing a cheerful song on the flute, they didn’t respond with dancing.
No matter how the message is conveyed, some people find a reason to reject it. John came with fire and brimstone, calling for people to repent and branding the religious leaders a “brood of vipers.” He denied himself the creature comforts, opting to wear camel’s hair, which was coarse and uncomfortable, and he subsisted on a diet of locusts and wild honey. He abstained from alcohol and fasted. Despite John having the appearance of a prophet and the message of a prophet, the religious leaders rejected him.
Jesus, by contrast, has a much softer touch. Not only does he not fast in the manner that John does, he also drinks. In fact, his first miracle occurs at a wedding reception where he keeps the party going by turning water into wine. Despite this miracle, the religious leaders reject Jesus as well. They don’t like the company he keeps. After all, what kind of “prophet” hangs around with tax collectors and sinners? Not any prophet of God!
There’s something of a Goldilocks scenario at work here, as far as the religious leaders are concerned. In the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Goldilocks initially finds the bears’ beds too hard or too soft. If John’s ministry was too harsh (“he has a demon”), then Jesus’s ministry is too soft (“Look, a glutton and a drunkard”). The critics want to hear from a prophet who is more…moderate, more reasonable, more in line with their expectations, more like them. They want to hear a word that’s not as demanding as John’s fiery message of repentance. At the same time, they’d prefer a message that’s a little more strict than Jesus’s scandalous message of extravagant grace for sinners.
We should note that John the Baptist also is not sure about Jesus because he finds Jesus’s message of radical inclusiveness a bit disconcerting. If you remember, John had described the one who was to come after him, meaning Jesus, as carrying a winnowing fork in his hand so as to separate the wheat from the chaff. “He will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” John was not one to mince words! This was what he expected Jesus’s ministry to look like: a ministry of judgment in which Jesus would separate the wheat from the chaff, the righteous from the unrighteous.
This was what [John] expected Jesus’s ministry to look like: a ministry of judgment…
But now John, who is in prison, has heard reports about Jesus that have unsettled him. These reports have even caused him to question whether Jesus is really the Messiah. Far from what John had expected, Jesus is not separating the chaff, he’s sitting down to dinner with them! He’s making friends with tax collectors, sinners, and all sorts of unrighteous types. He’s healing people on the Sabbath, a day of rest, in violation of God’s law. How can the Messiah disregard the law?
John is so confused and concerned by what he’s heard that he sends messengers to Jesus to ask him if he is indeed the Messiah or if John should wait for another. Jesus answers by telling John’s people, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive theirs sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor hear good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense to me.”
And yet people do take offense to Jesus. In town after town Jesus meets with resistance. In Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum—all towns within his home region of Galilee—he is rejected by the religious authorities. He doesn’t conform to their understanding of what the Messiah should do or say.
But I’m not so sure that things are all that different these days. We also want a Jesus who looks like we do, who thinks like we do, who votes like we do, and…let’s be honest…who dislikes the same people we do. Because if the gospel is truly for all who are weary and carrying heavy burdens—as Jesus says—then we’re going to have to reconsider all the barriers that we want to erect in front of it and all the boundaries that we want to draw around it. And we will no longer be able to write off anyone who rejects the gospel as too lost to be saved.
But isn’t that what Jesus does? Isn’t that the meaning of the “woes” that he utters against the towns whose leaders rejected him? “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!” And of Capernaum—home to Peter and Andrew, as well as James and John—Jesus says, “I tell you that on the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom than for you.” Boy! That sounds ominous!
But here’s the thing: the day of judgment is not a threat that Jesus holds over the heads of nonbelievers or anyone else for that matter. The day of judgment is a day of mercy because it’s the day in which all sins are forgiven. The day of judgment already occurred on Good Friday 2,000 years ago when Jesus was judged in place of all sinners: you and me and everyone who ever was, is, or will be.
The day of judgment is a day of mercy because it’s the day in which all sins are forgiven.
“All things have been handed over to me by my Father,” Jesus says. All things have been handed over to Jesus, which includes not only the power to judge sinners but also the compassion to allow himself to be judged in their place. This is the central truth of the gospel: Jesus is not only the judge, but he’s also the one who is judged in our place. He pronounces judgment on himself.
Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine standing in a courtroom to receive a sentence for a crime of which you are unquestionably guilty. This is only a thought experiment, so let’s say the charge against you is for murder. (We’ve all wanted to kill someone at one time, if not with our hands then with our words.) There is no jury, only a judge who issues the harshest sentence possible. You bow your head in resignation, but then the judge does something shocking. He orders you released from custody and has himself placed under arrest. He will undertake your sentence himself. You are free to go. Not only are you free, but your record is wiped clean.
It sounds too good to be true! How can it be that simple? Jesus is just going to forgive everything I’ve done in one fell swoop? Yes, he is, and he already has. What’s more, he invites you to lay down the burden of guilt and shame that you’ve been carrying all these years. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
Jesus replaces the weight of guilt that we’ve been shouldering with the yoke of his mercy and forgiveness. This is not a yoke for oxen like Jeremiah placed upon himself, as we heard in last week’s reading. It’s a yoke more like this stole that I’m wearing, which in fact symbolizes the yoke of Jesus Christ because it’s so light.
“Take my yoke upon you,” he says, “and learn from me.” Learn how easy it is to be yoked to Jesus. It’s so easy that a child can do it. All that’s required is a willingness to lay down your burdens.