At that time Jesus exclaimed: “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to little ones. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. . . Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11.25-26, 28-30)
In my estimation, Rick Bragg is one of the best, his stories about the South always on target and his words somehow waltz across the page in perfect step. A few years ago, he wrote a book about his dog–a stray that found its way to his house and into his heart–because he loved the way the old timers had told him stories about dogs when he was a boy wanting a dog for himself.
About halfway through the book, he tells of how his dog, an Australian collie, mixed with a little of this and that, seemed particularly annoyed at cars that pulled into the driveway, especially big fancy ones like a Lincoln, which happened to be the car of choice for drivers who picked up Bragg and took him to the Atlanta airport. It got to the point where the drivers wouldn’t get out of the car, although Bragg assured them his dog wouldn’t bite, although he might mess up a fancy suit.
One morning as he and his mom stood at the kitchen window watching another car take five minutes to get up the driveway because of the dog yelping at the tires, his mom said as he picked up his traveling bag, “You know why he does that?” The only explanation Bragg could come up with was that the dog was, as he said, “mush-headed.”
“No,” his mom replied, explaining, “He’s figured out that when you walk out the door with a suitcase in your hand and get in a black car, you’re gone a good while. He knows if you get in your truck, you come right back. You get in one of them black cars he doesn’t know when you’ll be back.” Bragg wasn’t convinced, telling his eighty-three-year old mom, “I think you’re overestimating how smart this dog is.”
However, the next time the dog wedged itself between Bragg and the car door so he couldn’t shut it and even tried to jump inside. Maybe there was something to what his mom had told him. Maybe his dog wasn’t mush-headed. Maybe, in fact, his dog was wise in his own way. So, Bragg rolled down the window of the car and said to the dog, “I’ll be right back,” making a promise to the dog that, if his mama was right, the dog might just understand.
A smart dog, any dog-owner will tell you, is a good thing to have. And being half-way smart yourself always has its benefits. That is the message that Rabbi Jesus is giving us today in that little speech he offered his followers, drawing a contrast for them between people “who get it” and people “who don’t get it.” The irony, as he points out, is that the folks we would think were “wise and learned”–his words–are the same ones that are slow to accept his words, believing themselves to be smarter than all get-out, while the simple-minded, whom he calls “little ones,” are actually the smart ones, eager to listen to him and to live in the way he urges them to live.
This would become much clearer if the passage presented to us today wasn’t chopped up or torn away from the preceding verses. Just a short while before these words we hear, Rabbi Jesus has reproached the towns he has visited because of their refusal to accept his teachings. He says, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you.”
His reference to Tyre and Sidon was intentional because these two towns had a history of being wild and wicked places. The prophets of old often railed against these two Phoenician cities, promising them peril for their depravity. So, for Rabbi Jesus to say that even Tyre and Sidon would have reformed their ways in the face of his mighty works and his challenging words was quite the putdown for the towns of Chorazin and Bethsaida, both of which remained staunchly unmoved by his person or by his proselytizing.
Having announced his unhappiness with these stubborn and–should we say stupid–towns, and having pronounced a prophetic curse upon them with his promise of woe coming to them, Rabbi Jesus then draws a contrast between the “wise and the learned,” a group everybody thinks is smart, and “the little ones,” the simple-minded that nobody thinks is smart.
And, as we see, he turns the common assumptions upside down, as he customarily does, and says that those who think they’re so smart really aren’t, and those who others dismiss as dummies really aren’t. In other words, as he sees things, the smart people are dummies, and the dummies are the smart people. We would be right to see a parallel with another of his favorite statements, the one where he says “the first will be last and the last will be first.”
So, we may want to ask why the Rabbi thinks “the wise and the learned” really aren’t so wise after all. And why does he say that the simple folks are actually some of the smartest people around? These are good questions to ask, especially since most everybody believes him or herself to be reasonably smart and nobody is quick to say he or she is simple-minded.
The answer is not all that difficult to find. By this point in his journey, Rabbi Jesus has had plenty of experience–the bad kind–with people who were considered the scholars of the law and the authorities on religion, namely the scribes and the Pharisees, and his encounters with them had left a bad taste in his mouth. These purportedly smart guys out and out rejected what he had to say, refusing to open their minds to the possibility of their being wrong, and reasoned that he was a rabble-rouser and a renegade out to upset the right order of things.
At every turn in the road, these “wise and learned” people have critiqued and criticized his words and his ways, intentionally setting up clever traps to catch him in some contradiction, and pouncing on his outward practices as prime examples of personal impropriety. In fact, a few sentences before the ones we are studying, he repeats one of their favorite putdowns of him, when they refer to him as “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”
On the other hand, he has found acceptance from the “little ones,” the people typically ignored or scorned, dismissed or denounced. These little ones have none of the credentials or cleverness of their counterparts, “the wise and the learned,” and yet they are the ones who find something credible in his words and follow him in his ways. Rejected and ridiculed by those who hold the places of power and the seats of scholarship, these little ones, tax-collectors and sinners and their sort, flock to Rabbi Jesus, seeing something in him that apparently the smart guys can’t or won’t see.
What is it exactly about the little ones that allow them to see what others, supposedly clear-sighted and sharp-witted, can’t see? Maybe it’s their humility, another way of saying they don’t think they have all the answers. They aren’t stuffed to the gills with themselves, believing they know all there is to know. These little ones, generally kicked around and skipped over by important people, understand the world in a way those in high places can’t, their perspective vastly different from those with perches in ivory towers, who don’t know the grit and the grime of life as it is lived by ordinary people on the streets.
These little ones know they can’t make it on their own. They need help and cry out to Rabbi Jesus to touch them in their infirmity, in their brokenness, in their lostness. We hear their cries throughout the pages of the gospels, each cry an admission of need, an acknowledgement of dependency, an acceptance of their ignorance.
Unlike their counterparts who need nobody, always self-assured and self-important, these simple ones living on the street, struggling for survival, are the first to say they need God. And so when Rabbi Jesus assures them, as he does today, that the Most High God cares about them and cares for them, they are open to that message, finding in it solace and grace.
“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,” we hear Rabbi Jesus say to them, “and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” With those words, he offers to remove the yoke around their necks that force them to live lives of drudgery and dread, and promises them a yoke that is easy to carry because he carries it with them.
There is something comforting and consoling in those words, at least to those who labor and who are burdened. Again, the so-called wise and the learned rarely feel that they are yoked to a life of hardship and heartbreak. They call the shots and they collect the bounties. Life is good for them. So when they hear Rabbi Jesus say, “learn from me,” their response is, “What in the world can we learn from you? We already know how to make it big in the world, how to get the power, how to sit in the places of honor.” In their minds, there is nothing that a Galilean teacher who surrounds himself with low-lifes and cripples on crutches can teach them.
I suppose that is the big question for us to sort out today. Can we admit we can learn something from Rabbi Jesus, or do we already have all the answers we need? Does his way of life offer us something we can’t find elsewhere, or are we satisfied with our life as it is? Is there an emptiness in our hearts that he can fill, or have we already filled ourselves with the good things of life?
The “little ones” that Rabbi Jesus speaks of today, those who labor and are burdened, know enough to know that they can learn from him. The cruel lessons of the world have taught them that there has to be a better way, a more decent society, a different way of looking at things. With the knowledge that they can learn from him, they answer his call, “Come to me,” an exclamation that expresses the urgency of his message, while recognizing the inefficacy of the “wise and the learned” of the world to make things right for the little people.
So, if we can admit we are dummies, that we can learn from Rabbi Jesus, then discipleship is for us. If we like the way things are, believe in the ways of the world, and, overall, are quite satisfied with the way we live, then there is nothing Rabbi Jesus can teach us. We apparently like living in Chorazin and Bethsaida, even if Rabbi Jesus called out their citizens for being dim-witted and mush-headed.
Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 