Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
This text is used for the Lectionary Year A on July 2, 2017.
In this selection, Jesus takes up the topic of whining. Which is appropriate since the parable contained within it will prove perplexing enough to elicit whining from any preacher who finds it assigned by the lectionary.
Jesus starts off by wondering out loud how to allegorize his contemporaries, what image best captures their character. What he settles on is not one of his clearer statements. Straightforwardly he might have said, “Y’all spend so much of your time whining that you miss what treasures sit right under your nose. You’re like a bunch of whining kids who fail to realize that they’ve been handed the keys to the kingdom.” Not Jesus, who goes on not only to give his not-clearest-parable ever but also to praise God’s mysterious nature, that God reveals truths by keeping things “hidden” “from the wise and intelligent” even while giving them to infants (that is, children who are not even quite children yet), such is God’s “gracious will” (v. 25 and v. 26).
Two interpretive questions arise. What is meant by the parable? And why is Jesus so squirrely about its meaning? About the parable, there are, as one might imagine, competing interpretations, but the best ones underscore Jesus’ invocation of “Son of Man” in v. 19. You will recall that Jesus’ reference draws one back to Daniel 7:13-14, where God is described “like a son of man” who rides on “the clouds of heaven” and ushers in God’s glorious and powerful kingdom which the Son of Man will rule and everyone will serve. Before one gets carried away imagining Jim Morrison’s amazingly rich baritone singing The Doors’ “riders on the storm, into this house we’re born” and catapulting oneself into Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrownness), we can safely say that that was probably not what Jesus had in mind. Rather, the reference to the Son of Man is meant to identify Jesus with the one about which Daniel prophesied. If that is the case, then those who might think Jesus a “glutton” or a “drunkard” or who defamed him because of his association with tax-collectors and sinners are made to look a bit silly and juvenile. Jesus is not to be judged as John was in announcing Jesus. No, Jesus brings the power and the glory, ushering in the arrival of the Kingdom and declaring his judgment of everything, including those who dared to judge him.
The “we” and the “you” of v. 17 (the least clear part of this not-clearest-of-parable) can then be read two ways: as saying that God does not do our bidding (we played the flute and God did not dance, etc.) or that we misunderstand God (God played the flute and we did not dance). Whichever way one goes, the point is made: we are like children in that we have no idea what is happening. We presume to know but know nothing, and in presuming we judge, and in so judging we are judged. The simile of the parable is meant to underscore the fact that there can be no similarity, for between us and God, between the judged and the Judge, there is a wide chasm, which the Christian philosopher Kierkegaard would call an “infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity.”
That we do no understand, that we are children, however, and this is the force of the passage, turns out to actually be good news. Who and what Jesus is, the Rider on the Storm (far beyond the imaginations of the respective genius of a Morrison or a Heidegger) would waylay anyone confronted by it. The truth of Jesus’ identity is hidden from the world, including his disciples, because it would crush them. No doubt their willful ignorance plays a role and sin is not to be underestimated in blinding us to the truth. However, even if we could will ourselves to look upon the coming storm, we would not be able to stand it. For our sake, because God shields us, Jesus thanks the Father who “hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants” (v. 25). Infants, remember, are not even children, which is good, because that means infants do not presume to know more than they can. They presume nothing and depend on everything for their survival. Theirs are lives undergirded by sheer gratuity; they live off grace. Before that which the Son of Man brings, that which the Son of Man is, we are rendered infants.
And lucky for us. For as infants, rather than children who presume to know and so would look to judge, we receive this Son of Man as one who is “gentle and humble in heart” and whose “burden is light” whereupon we will find rest for our souls. Again, barefaced before the Kingdom come, we would be waylaid. In our sin, in our silly and juvenile presumptuousness, we would foolishly seek that barefaced encounter. But in what Jesus calls “wisdom” God ordains over and against our presumptions a better way, a lighter touch, one fitting who we are and who God is (a mode of divine revelation Thomas Aquinas spoke of regarding ex convenientia, or fittingness).
Knowing our tendency to whine when we should worship, God gives us what we need in the way we need it. The difficulties faced in this passage epitomize the difficulty before us in understanding God in Christ. Which is not to say that we do not understand God in Christ. We do. We have been given in Christ to understand. But it has nothing to do with us and nothing to do with the clever preacher before the perplexing preaching assignment, and everything to do with God and the way he gives the Son of Man.
Jonathan Tran
Associate Professor of Religion and Faculty Steward of Honors Residential College
Baylor University
Jonathan_Tran@Baylor.edu
Tags: whining, parable, understanding, children, better way