Following Jesus is Easy-Matthew 11

What‘s it like to follow Jesus? Never lose your temper. Never lust. Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. Be perfect. Never judge. Love Jesus more than your kids. Sounds impossible? Yet… Following Jesus is easy (Mt 11:30) and restful (Mt 11:28-29) … as long as you’re prepared, well-trained and willing to die and lose your life (Mt 10:39, 16:25). Start by training yourself to take time to dance like little children (Mt 11:25) and especially take the time on the Sabbath to worship God (12:1-14).

Why Peter doesn‘t understand his correct confession of Christ. The gospels are meant to be read retrospectively in light of the cross and resurrection. Retrospective moments are also internal to Matthew’s gospel. For eg., Mt 8–9 reads differently after Jesus’ sending of the disciples in Mt 10. Mt 8–9 exemplifies the cures and exorcisms Jesus performs so the disciples will know what they are to do with the power Jesus conferred on them. Beginning with Mt 11, Matthew prepares us for Peter’s declaration that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” in Mt 16. Matthew patiently tells of Jesus’ healings and the controversies to help us understand why Peter will not understand what he says when he confesses that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Organizational markers. Mt 11 begins with: “Now when Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples” (Mt 11:1). This sentence also occurs at the end of TSOM (Mt 7:28), at the end of Jesus’ parables (Mt 13:53), and in Mt 19:1 and Mt 26:1, totaling 5. This may be Matthew’s way of relating his gospel to the 5 books of Moses. Moses prefigures Jesus by giving the law; but Jesus is greater than Moses because he now is the gift of the law.

Who Jesus is is not easily recognized. Even John the Baptist sends his disciples to Jesus to ask if Jesus is the one long awaited or are they to wait for another (Mt 11:2-3). At Jesus’ baptism, John recognizes Jesus as the Messiah. Is John now reconsidering his judgment? Why? John in prison hears that Jesus is proclaiming his message in the cities of Israel, and from prison John sends his disciples to ask if Jesus is indeed the Messiah. John and Jesus both preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt 3:2; 4:17). But Jesus’ condemnation of the unrepentant cities (Mt 11:20–24) indicates that many remain unresponsive to John’s and Jesus’ calls for repentance. John, faced with failure, understandably sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he represents the kingdom that is near.

Jesus answers John’s query by directing attention to the fruits of his ministry throughout Galilee: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them (Mt 11:4-5; 9:35). This describes the jubilee year enacted in Jesus’ ministry, which involves national renewal and not simply individual repentance. From John’s perspective renewal is not occurring. He’s in prison–a strange place to be for one who has pointed to Jesus as the one who has come to set the captives free.

Does Jesus and John have the same understanding of the law? John is in prison for holding Herod to the law (Mt 14:1–11). John, like the Pharisees, thought it necessary to fast frequently (Mt 9:14). Jesus says he does not require his disciples to fast (Mt 9:15), and he befriends tax collectors and sinners (Mt 9:10). This earns Jesus a reputation for being a glutton and drunkard (Mt 11:19a). To John, Jesus’ behavior may not look like the repentance he preached in the wilderness (Mt 3:2). Jesus, it seems, has some explaining to do.

What you see and hear–the fruits of his ministry–is Jesus’ answer to John (Mt 11:5). To the charge that he’s a glutton and drunkard (Mt 11:19a), Jesus says,“wisdom is vindicated by her deeds” (Mt 11:19b). He calls attention to his deeds, noting that those who take no offense at him will be blessed (Mt 11:6). Jesus has no better answer for John than to direct attention to the power unleashed through his ministry.

A prophet. Jesus also helps the crowd understand who John is. They did not go into the wilderness to hear someone who would comfort them by saying what they wanted to hear. John wasn’t someone who’d change his message according to prevailing opinion (Mt 11:7). Nor did they go to the wilderness to see someone dressed in soft robes appropriate to living in palaces (Mt 11:8). Rather, they went to see a prophet (Mt 11:9), who aren’t known for softness or being well dressed. As a prophet, John stands in the line of prophets before him (Mt 11:13); it’s no surprise that he is in prison.

More than a prophet is a claim that only Jesus can make (Mt 11:9). John is more than a prophet because Malachi (3:1) said that one would come as the messenger to prepare the way for the Messiah (Mt 11:10). John is greater than the prophets (Mt 11:11a) because he has the unique office to herald Israel’s Messiah. He is Elijah (Mt 11:14), the prophet who was received into heaven without dying, who will be sent “before the great and terrible day of the LORD” (Mal 4:5). John is Elijah (Mt 11:14-15) because Jesus is the Messiah.

John is the least in the kingdom of heaven–as great as he is (Mt 11:11b)–because John, like Moses, stands on the edge of the new age. Herods will try to defeat the kingdom heralded by John with violence (Mt 11:12), but it can not be so overwhelmed. John the Baptist can be arrested and killed, Jesus will be crucified, but the kingdom that John proclaims comes through the peace brought by Jesus. This kingdom is not some ideal of peace that requires the use of violence for its realization. Rather, the kingdom is Jesus, the one who has the power to overcome violence through love.

Sing and mourn with Jesus. Those who take “no offense” at Jesus are “blessed” (Mt 11:6). Jesus expresses the Beatitudes, inviting others to share in his new kingdom. Those without power are ready to dance with Jesus as he plays the flute (Mt 11:17a, 25). They’re ready to mourn with Jesus (Mt 11:17b) as he despairs over Israel’s unwillingness to repent. But those sitting in the marketplace (Mt 11:16), flourishing in the everyday world of exchange, are indifferent to prophets and only think John to be mad and Jesus to be immoral (Jn 11:18-19).

John and Jesus challenges the assumption that the way things are is the way they have to be. John and Jesus claim that the way things are is an illusion. We live life, particularly if we’re among those the market rewards (Mt 11:16), as if we are our own lords and creators. We respond violently to anyone who challenges our presumption that we’re in control of our existence (Mt 11:12). We don’t want to be reminded that when all is said and done, we’ll all be dead. It is, therefore, not surprising that we, like those who think John mad and Jesus immoral, try to turn the kingdom into an ideal rather than a reality known through judgment.

Why judgment makes us uncomfortable. The rejection of John and Jesus is assumed to be right (Mt 11:18-19). Jesus reproaches the cities in which he has done his great deeds of power because they don’t repent (Jn 11:20). He suggests that Sodom would have repented and survived if that city had witnessed the deeds of power that Jesus performed in Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum (Mt 11:21)–the collectivities of perverse normality who refuse to repent when facing God’s judgment. Thus, the day of judgment that Elijah heralds, will come on these cities, and it’ll be more terrible than what happened to Sodom (Mt 11:22). Jesus’ pronouncement of judgment on the cities in which he performed deeds of power makes us, contemporary Christians, profoundly uncomfortable. We want a gospel of love that insures when everything is said and done that everyone and everything is going to be okay. But we‘re not okay. Like those cities, we’ve turned Christianity into a status meant to protect us from recognizing the prophets who would point us to Jesus. We don’t like Jesus to pronounce judgment on the cities, because we don‘t want to recognize that we too are judged. But the gospel is judgment because otherwise it won’t be good news. Only through judgment are we forced to discover forms of life that can free us from our enchantment with sin and death.

Jesus thanks the Father for hiding the secrets of the kingdom from the wise and intelligent but revealing them to infants (Mt 11:25). Jesus later uses children to answer the disciples’ question about who’ll be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven (Mt 18:1–5). Only by becoming like children, by being humbled like a child, will we recognize those greatest in heaven. Intelligence and wisdom are often names for the power and violence employed to sustain our illusions of superiority.

God chooses the cross to “destroy the wisdom of the wise” (1 Cor 1:18–31). Paul points out that most of them are not wise by human standards or of noble birth. They’re chosen not because they’re strong, but because they were, in the world’s eyes, weak and foolish. Paul is not suggesting that Christians ought to be weak or foolish to show that they’re Christian, but rather that their weakness or foolishness is only fruitful as a witness to the cross. The cross is the deepest wisdom of God.

We are infants as those engrafted into the kingdom; we’re not trying to be infants. We’re just beginners, dependent on Jesus and one another for survival. We become a “new creation” (2 Cor 5:17). That the deaf, the mute, the blind, the poor, those rendered helpless in the face of suffering, recognize Jesus is not accidental. To be disabled doesn’t make one a faithful follower of Christ, but it puts you in the vicinity of the kingdom. To be disabled is to be forced to have the time to recognize that Jesus is the inauguration of a new time constituted by prayer. To be disabled is to begin to understand what it means to be an infant of the kingdom brought by Jesus.

Jesus prays to the Father, thanking the Father that some have had the kingdom revealed to them (Mt 10:25). Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, prays to his Father. Prayer is at the heart of the relation between the persons of the Trinity because prayer makes present the Father, who is present to the Son through the Spirit. We are privileged to overhear Jesus pray to the Father, revealing the intimacy that finds its most intense expression on the cross in Jesus’s cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). Jesus prays, and his prayer draws us into the deepest mystery of the faith—the Trinity.

Only Jesus makes the Father known. The prologue to the gospel of John is thought to be the expression of a high Christology. Yet we have seen that Matthew, like John, begins with the word that was in the beginning. Jesus’ declaration in Matthew that no one knows the Father except the Son (Mt 10:27), echoes John’s declaration that “no one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (Jn 1:18). Matthew, no less than John, reports that this Jesus is the Son who alone makes it possible for us to know that God is the Father. The Son will reveal the Father to those whom he chooses (Mt 10:26).

What about other faiths? Jesus claims that the Son alone reveals the Father (Mt 10:27). So we can’t know that God is the Father unless we know that Jesus is the Son. Some worry about the implications of this claim for those who aren’t Christian. What, they ask, might it mean for people who are of other faiths or those who have no faith, to claim that we know the Father only through the Son? Such worries and questions is often that of an established church made up of the wise and intelligent. If followers of Christ are infants from the perspective of the wise and intelligent, from the perspective of those in power, they’ll find that they don’t need to account for the status of those who are not Christians. Rather, they need only to be a people whose lives are so captured by the Son that others may find that they are also captivated by the joy that animates the lives of those claimed by Jesus.

To be a follower of Christ is to learn to dance when children play the flute. Rowan Williams reports how such a dance might look by describing the work of a young Chilean teacher in Australia who developed dance and drama with the mentally handicapped. Williams learned about the story of the Laura Hodgkinson Sunshine Home in Sydney, Australia, in a British television documentary called Stepping Out. The documentary begins with scenes showing the very first stages, as these young people in their twenties and thirties gradually learned controlled breathing, coordinated movement, learned to relax into their bodies and live in them. Then we saw the build-up, as costumes and masks were tried on, the music became more adventurous, the dancing more subtle; and the emergence of 31 y/o Chris as the natural soloist of the group, dancing to Villa-Lobos and Puccini, portraying the death of Madame Butterfly with total conviction, at a level of ritual pathos which few professionals could manage. You watched the awkward, superficial, lumpy and vacant face of a “retarded” man turn into a tragic mask: every inch, every corner of the body answering the music with discipline, accuracy, complete engagement. And the climax, a breathtaking performance in the Sydney Opera House, no less, was greeted with a standing ovation. (Williams 1994, 72)

Williams confesses that anyone, himself included, might have watched Stepping Out, ready to be moved in a patronizing way by the so-called retarded trying to dance. It is hard to avoid the attitude that what one is watching is touching but pathetic. Yet Williams observes that the “only final response worth making was humble, awed delight. We’d been watching grace in every sense. We’d been watching love, the patient, humorous, grave care of the teacher, getting these people to value and admire their bodies, giving words and hugs of encouragement to each one as they prepared to perform” (1994, 72–73).

That is what it means for the Son to reveal the Father to the infants. To learn to dance to the flute (Mt 11:17) means that we are so caught up in the dance that questions about those who are not part of the dance do not arise. At least they do not arise as a question of power. Rather, they arise only because we so desire to share with others the wonder of the dance. So Williams suggests that we learn to listen to the invitation:   “Sit down, all of you handicapped, lumpish, empty, afraid, and start to feel that you too are rooted in a firm, rich earth. Opposite you is someone who, it seems, doesn’t need to learn. His roots are very deep, very deep indeed; he knows he is lovely and loved. Dancing is natural to him, he has no paralyzing, self-conscious dread, no self-protection to overcome. So he begins: he stretches out his arms, wide as he can. And so do you. Then he rises up, arms to the sky. And so do you. Then he takes your hand and swings you loose and leaves you to improvise the music—on your own, then combining with the others, then alone again, then with one or two, then all together, and alone again.” (Williams 1994, 73–74)

The rest Jesus offers to all who are weary (Mt 11:28) is the gentleness and humility of heart he offers (Mt 11:29). This is the blessedness of the Beatitudes (5:1-12). Given the agony that awaits Jesus, it’s strange that he calls this yoke rest, and that we can and should take on his yoke and learn from him (Mt 11:29). Yet we can take on his yoke, because he bore for us the yoke that only he could bear. That he did so makes possible our sharing his yoke, which is now easy (Mt 11:30). It’s easy because his yoke is a welcome alternative to the burdens we carry that give no rest.

The answer Jesus gives to the question asked by the disciples of John the Baptist (Mt 11:3) is that he has revealed the Father (Mt 11:27) to little children (Mt 11:26) and to those who dance with the music (Mt 11:17). He is the one to come, the Messiah of Israel. The kingdom he brings is one of gentleness and humility (Mt 11:29) that cannot help but reveal the violence of the world. The very gentleness of the kingdom judges those who refuse to believe that the love that moves the sun and the stars is the same love found in this man. We’ll not be surprised that after Jesus has plainly said who he is and what he has come to do, that everything he says and does invites controversy and resistance.

Reference:

1. Hauerwas, Stanley. Matthew. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2006.  MATTHEW 11–12 “Are You the One to Come?”
2. Hauerwas, Stanley. Cross-Shattered Christ. Meditations on the Seven Last Words. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004.
3. Hauerwas, Stanley; Willimon, William. Where Resident Aliens Live. Exercises for Christian Practice. Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN, 1996.