Matthew 11:25 - 30
When I went into my specialty
training, my boss was a recognized leader in the field of cancer
medicine, which at that time was just beginning to be a thing. He
had published numerous papers, was co-author of the bible of Medical
Oncology, and had developed the first successful treatment for acute
leukemia. He always had something interesting to say, whether it was
about medicine or politics or whatever else we were talking about. I
think you could say he was a genius. He was wise and learned.
There is nothing wrong with being wise
and learned. God gave us brains and the capacity to explore the
universe, and I think he expects us to do so. So why does Jesus
praise the Father for hiding things from the wise and learned and
revealing them to little children?
I’ve known a lot of people who are
wise and learned. Unfortunately, they are like the rest of us; some
are pretty stuck-up, as we used to say; they think they know
everything. When you think you know everything, you cease being able
to learn anything new. But people like that also tend to think they
don’t need other people. I don’t mean that they think they don’t
need other people to get along in the world -- they need medical
care, they need policemen, they need grocery store workers -- but
they need other people in the sense that they fulfill needs, not in
the sense that they are equals, who deserve respect because they are
children of God; not because they recognize that without true friends
life isn’t what it could be. Being wise and learned for them has
covered over the child that is in all of us.
I think Jesus is telling us that we
won’t learn the secrets of life, we won’t appreciate the truths
of his revelation, until we allow that child to flourish. There are
a lot of things about little children that are not particularly
inviting; they are smelly and messy and noisy and demand a lot of
attention. They also ask some pretty strange questions. My son used
to ask me over and over again which animal would win if a
tyrannosaurus fought with a shark. I would tell him how improbable
that would be, but it didn’t help. If I said I didn’t know, he
would persist until finally I would choose a side. Then he would
argue against my position. This type of inquiry went on a lot. But
there are wonderful things about children that we all can see and
perhaps long for in ourselves.
They trust. They have no doubt that
they will be fed and sheltered and clothed and cared for. They know
that they are loved unconditionally, and it’s ok to let out your
frustrations on Mom or Dad, they won’t stop loving you. We adults
lose this wonderful trust -- perhaps because we have been betrayed
too often, but mostly because we have become wise and learned, and
depend on our own strength to see us through.
Children live in the present. If
you’ve ever gone on a walk with a three year old, you know how
their attention is on the present moment -- they see a dog, they want
to pet him; they see a flower, they want to smell it. It’s a
wonderful thing to live in the present. But we wise and learned
forget this; we live with a foot in the past, where we remember
moments of pain or pleasure; and a foot in the future where we think
about where we are going and what we will have when we arrive there.
Children also forgive. I have seen so
often two kids having a terrible fight and a half-hour later they are
playing happily together. And I have been forgiven many times by my
own children for things I said in anger or for not giving them the
attention they needed at a particular moment, or choosing work over
playing with them. And we wise and learned often fail to forgive, at
least with the degree that a child forgives.
And why is all this important? I
think Jesus gives us a hint in this gospel today. He says, “come
to me all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”
He says, “take my yoke upon you … and you will find rest for
your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light”. Jesus is
saying something that’s very hard for the wise and learned to grasp
-- true happiness, real joy, depends on surrendering everything to
Jesus, to trust him completely, to quit trying to carry our burdens
alone, and take him up on his offer to help us bear our burdens, to
yoke ourselves to him. And we who are wise and learned have a hard
time in really trusting Jesus, in really living in the present, which
is the only place we can find God; and really forgiving, which frees
us up to see our neighbor through Jesus’ eyes, Jesus who told us
that we are to forgive seventy times seven; Jesus who told the story
of the father who shows us what true forgiveness is really like.
So is it wrong to be wise and learned?
Not at all. What is wrong is to lose the child in us. And that
brings us back to my boss in my fellowship; he never did. He died a
few years ago. The last time I saw him he was in his early nineties,
and had undergone surgery for an aneurism. He had to take
antibiotics and was hooked up to an intravenous pump. After my
introduction he gave a brilliant lecture about his current field of
research, and you could see that he had never lost his childlike
fascination with the world of medicine; and when you compared notes
afterward and reminisced about the good old days, you might have
noted that he only spoke good things about the people in his life,
even those who had hurt him. And Jesus is telling us that little
children have no problem reaching out their hands to someone that can
help them, and that’s what he wants from us -- just a hand that he
can take to hold us up and help us get where he wants us to go.
