Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

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.