“Yoked to Love”
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
7/6/14
Since John the Baptist casts a long shadow across today’s
text, it is worth backing up and remembering John’s place in Matthew’s telling
of Jesus’ story.
Matthew introduces us to John immediately after the birth
narratives in chapters 1 and 2. And it
is clear that Matthew wants to make an impression. John bursts out of the wilderness like one of
those dumbfounding and deadly thunderstorms on the Sea of Galilee. Matthew describes him with a clarity of detail
that is relatively uncommon in the New Testament.
John the Baptist, says Matthew, wears a frock made of
coarse hide of a camel. He gathers it
tight at his waist with a leather belt. When
he picks his teeth after a meal, out come the remains of locusts – bits of
legs, wings, and antennae. Flies buzz
excitedly around the mats of crystallized honey that have formed in the thicket
of his beard.
When John preaches, it is no-holds-barred. ‘You sons of snakes!’ he hisses. ‘You think you’re all that, but God can do
just as well with a pile of rocks as with the likes of you! Keep up with all your shenanigans and the
whole lot of you will be chopped down and sawn into firewood!’ (The
word of the Lord, thanks be to God.)
This is like creative writing 101. Matthew wants us to see, hear, feel, taste,
and smell John the Baptist. Matthew even
wants us to catch our breath as he dunks us in the ice cold water of John’s disturbing
judgment.
Matthew is setting us up, though. He turns our heads way to one side only to
jerk them back the other way, like a chiropractor popping a patient’s neck,
loosening stiffness and restoring flexibility.
By the time we arrive at chapter 11, you see, the
indomitable spirit that is John the Baptist languishes in Herod’s jail. He whose preaching had scrubbed with steel
wool and bleach, he who had challenged Jesus saying, “I need to be baptized by
you,” now sends his own disciples to that same Jesus and, in something of a
whimper, asks, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait [yet again] for another?”1
“Go and tell John what you hear and see,” answers
Jesus. “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.
And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” (Mt. 11:4-6)
Jesus then turns to his disciples and affirms John. ‘John is a good man,’ he says. ‘One of the best. But all who inhabit the kingdom of heaven
here and now, all who neighbor one another and care for the earth according to the
demanding rule of Love, all of these surpass John even on his best days.
‘Ever since John began his ministry,’ continues Jesus, “the
kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” Another way to translate that first phrase is
to say, “The kingdom of heaven has been coming violently.”
Casting his own holy judgment on the ways that humankind
tries to use violence to accomplish that which only Love can accomplish, Jesus
compares his entire generation to a bunch of children loitering in the
marketplaces, complaining to each other that no one is playing by the rules. The problem is, of course, that no one has
figured out the game. So all they can do
is argue about whose rules they must follow!
‘John came as an austere teatotaler,’ says Jesus, ‘and you
decided that the poor guy had issues. Bless his heart. Now the Son of Man is here, feasting and
enjoying spirits and spirited company, and you condemn him for being reckless
and immoral.’
“Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds,” says Jesus. In those words I hear Jesus reiterating his
answer to John’s earlier question. ‘Pay attention to what you hear and see,’ he
says. ‘Those who could not, now they can. And the astonishing things that are happening
reveal that God’s kingdom of earth-inheriting meekness and peace is arriving –
as we speak.’
Jesus is so utterly and fearlessly consistent in his
challenge to all violent power, be it the militant power of political empires,
the crucifying power of graceless and literal religion, the marginalizing power
of some illness, ethnicity, or other life situation, the seductive power of excess
wealth, the blinding power of excess pride, or even what often appears to be
the ultimate power of death itself. As
the recipient of “all things” from God, Jesus knows that violence, regardless of
form, never achieves lasting good. It
only breeds more violence.
The substance of Jesus’ life and ministry is to invite everyone
who is “weary and carrying [the] heavy burden” of a violent world to a new way
of life: The way of wisdom. To live
according to holy wisdom is to live in reconciling peace and humble gratitude
even in the face of violent powers, who, says Jesus, may “kill the body but cannot
kill the soul.” (Mt. 10:28) And according to Jesus, the only way to do
that is by living in the power of servant-hearted Love.
Of all the powers we can know and engage, only Love is
eternal. To Love, then, is to live the
eternal life that Jesus lives and proclaims.
Love opens the gates of the kingdom of heaven to all of us, and through
all of us – today.
Most of us have been taught that God’s kingdom is some sort
of platonic ideal, a state of changeless perfection. But Jesus invites us into something very
different, something much more organic.
He invites us into life of relentless becoming. It takes great
deal of creativity, and even more gritty, earthy, and disciplined faith to
embrace such a life, because it requires us to let go of so much of our
dualistic, black-and-white thinking and reacting. To inhabit the kingdom requires us to think
metaphorically. And metaphor is not some
kind of wishful thinking. Metaphor is
the realm of confluence between outer and inner worlds, between spiritual and
physical, between temporal and eternal – between experience and meaning.
If not for a determined yet vulnerable understanding of
metaphor, the giving a receiving of a cup of cold water never becomes a
threshold of the kingdom, one of countless moments of salvation for us. Instead, it is nothing more than some obligation
to perform, a work one does as a way to earn God’s favor. Without the deeper understanding available
through metaphor, service to God only distances the servant and the one served. And so the kingdom comes violently rather
than graciously.
At a communion table, around a baptismal font, in a
sanctuary, and wherever two or more gather in Jesus’ name, we are citizens of
the kingdom of God’s Love. All other
loyalties and belongings must fall away so that we belong exclusively to the
One who is even now in the midst of creating, redeeming, and uniting all things.
So today, when we gather around the sacrament prepared on
the table before us, we are swimming in metaphor. It is a Good Friday-to-Easter Sunday table. No one is denied their place on Sunday, but
no one is spared their Fridays, either. While
the Fridays through which we pass are real, the grace and the promise of Sunday
proclaim that the brutal offenses of every
Friday only reveal the futility of worldly powers.
So, we take up Jesus’ Sunday yoke. And to yoke ourselves to Sunday, to yoke
ourselves to the resurrecting power of Love, is to break out of John’s prison
cell – the cell of oppressive religion and of the violent politics of prejudice
and fear.
To yoke ourselves to Love is to declare that yes, Jesus is God’s Christ, and we need not wait
for another.
1For this insight on John the Baptist I am grateful to Dr.
Lance Pape in his article, Homiletical
Perspective. Feasting on the Word: Year A, Vol 3, Westminster John
Knox Press, 2011. David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. p. 213.
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