Homily for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity (14th Week of the Year)

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matt 11:28-30)

This seems like a good message for summer vacations, though the heat of late makes it hard to do much of anything, including rest. Anyway it’s a wonderful passage, one that we rightly emphasize as a core description of the Christian life. We might ask, though, whether we like it because we understand what it means, or because we think it supports a form of easy Christianity that we find appealing.

Jesus does offer here rest from the weary world, but let us not confuse the rest that he offers with a kind of temporary reprieve from the real world, as if Church, or Christianity, is the place where you go, every so often, to escape the hard work and stress of everywhere else. This mentality shows itself pretty clearly among those who flee the Church the moment it becomes in any way difficult. In that way of thinking, Jesus, along with his Church, are a necessary part of life, but necessary in the way that occasional vacations are necessary, not necessary in the way that breathing is necessary.

To understand the kind of rest that Jesus offers here in Matthew, we need to grapple with the whole context of his invitation.

Apart from what we hear in the lectionary, the larger context of Matthew 11 is quite challenging. Jesus begins by comparing the current generation with children complaining in the marketplace. “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” (18-19). In other words, the crowds refuse to be satisfied. They are less interested in hearing the truth, or seeing it, than they are with argument. After this, he continues his criticism of the current generation, starting at verse 20:

Then he began to upbraid the cities where most of his mighty works had been done, because they did not repent. “Woe to you, Chorazin! woe to you, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I tell you that it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you.”

This sounds less like the peace-loving hippy Jesus of American pop-culture than it does like a fiery street preacher whom everyone tries to avoid. These are uncomfortable verses for our ears: a word of judgment that we do not want to hear, because we worry, when such judgments start, that they might soon enough fall on us. Whether or not this is why the lectionary cuts these verses, I don’t know.

I point out these verses not to explain the sins of Chorazin, Bethsaida, or Capernaum, but rather to point out the presence of a rather sharp judgment immediately before the invitation to rest and comfort. If we don’t have someidea about why this is there, we’ll have a hard time understanding what Jesus’ invitation really means.

Our uneasiness with the judgments in Scripture, I suspect, is that we do not want to believe that there can be any law that binds us other than the law that we freely submit to by our own will. That is basically the modern democratic ideal. And so we encounter, in scripture, the harsh light of divine judgment — all the more stark in the Old Testament law — and we think: I didn’t sign up for this! Who is this God making declarations about who is or who isn’t following his inscrutable will? And, while in secular and civil space, we can justify our submission to law, even when we don’t like it, by appeal to the self-interest of civic peace, we find it difficult to imagine any tangible benefit to the judgments of a God who is invisible, incomprehensible, and utterly transcendent.

And yet… this judging God is the same God whose invitation asserts itself anew: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”

What if judgment, and God’s authority to judge, is inseparable from the invitation to rest?

That is, I want to suggest, the key to this gospel reading. Judgment comes from the same place as love.

One writer puts it this way: “Only through judgment are we forced to discover forms of life that can free us from our enchantment with sin and death.”^[1]

Judgment, in other words, is inseparable, in this life, from freedom, and from the perfect rest which is only available in Christ. We believe, after all, and say every week, that Christ will “come again in glory, to judge both the quick and the dead.” In the present age, the kind of judgment that Jesus offers is designed not to wound us, but to show us the way that we are wounding ourselves, to judge and to name the ways that we ignore or reject the good gifts that God offers us, the ways that we choose the way of death over the way of life.

How, then, can Jesus say that his yoke is easy and his burden is light? How can he say that he will offer rest for our souls if he insists on judging us? And the answer is, quite simply, that it is only in being so judged, and so named, that we can find our rest and our light burden, because allowing ourselves to be judged truly by Christ means submitting to his yoke and his burden, however light it is. It is easy and light, but it still requires an act of submission, a giving over of the will.

The “rest” that Christ offers is, in part, rest from the impossible burden of our own desires. Like the children in the marketplace, we want God to want whatever we want. We want the Christian life to be the icing on the cake of whatever happy life we already envision. But the rest that Jesus invites us to includes a judgment on all forms of life that do not conform to his life.  His rest is not a generic happy state of escape from the world, but a recognition what is ultimately real.

There is nothing restful about Jesus without submission to his yoke. There is nothing comforting about his easy burden unless one takes it.

The fathers, reading this passage in Matthew, often asked how Christ’s burden could possibly be light when, so often in other parts of the New Testament, the opposite seems to be the case: Jesus asks us to take up our cross and follow him; St. Paul speaks of the necessity of persecution, and the hard cost of discipleship. And the conclusion they come to is quite simply this: in the eyes of the world, there is nothing easy about Christian discipleship. It is only something that makes sense on the inside, because it is a logic of love. Thus St. Augustine writes, “For love makes all, the hardest and most distressing things, altogether easy, and almost nothing.”

We are not called, first, to hard and distressing things. We are called first to love the one who loved us. But, like all loves, and more than all other loves, the love of God refocuses everything else in its light, making the hardest and most distressing things easier. Such is the witness of the martyrs, in the first century and today — whether they have given up their very lives, or whether they have given up their careers, or their security, or their personal desires, or anything else.

The Cross of Christ, whose memory we hold before us this morning, is and always will be a judgment on our souls — and this semiquincentennial weekend we ought to add that it is also a judgment on this nation, the true standard by which every nation will ultimately be judged; but it is also an invitation to the Sabbath rest of the Lord. Come, all you who labor and are heavy-laden; come and submit to the light burden of him who will teach you to fear nothing but the loss of him; come and allow your love and your desire and your taste to be reformed and redirected with an easy yoke; come and rest.

^[1] Hauerwas, Matthew, 116.