Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
Ben and I were blessed during our travels last week to meet the families of many colleagues and friends, including children from 6 months to 16 years old. The teens were busy as most young people are these days, but the little ones were exceptionally hospitable hosts to us. Our friend’s six month old and four year old both took to Ben right away, and I was granted the enormous honor of being requested by the four-year-old to read the bedtime story when the time came. Throughout the week, I was reflecting on Jesus’s prayer of gratitude in today’s lesson. “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.” It’s a strange prayer, and even stranger because we don’t actually have many examples of what Jesus said when he prayed, especially if we assume that, like any devout Jewish man of his time, he prayed many times a day. So it is significant when we get a glimpse into the prayer life of Jesus, and the way he speaks to the one he calls Father. You have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants. As you might imagine, I have been doing a lot of thinking about infants lately, even before I spent a week holding other peoples’ infants. Before I was ordained, I spent 10 years, a third of my life, caring for other people’s children professionally. Before that, I was babysitting from a young age, including helping to care for my own youngest sibling. Although I have not yet had the privilege of living with an infant of my own, I think it’s fair to say I have quite a bit of experience with them. And what anyone who has spent any time caring for infants can confirm, is that while they can be very opinionated, they don’t actually know all that much. As a mentor of mine once put it, “They’re new here, every sight and smell and sensation is happening for the very first time.”
And yet, our Lord tells us that God has revealed truths to them that the wise and intelligent cannot uncover. God has graciously willed it that the newest among us understand things that are hidden from the rest of us. Jesus tells us this even as we find ourselves tasked with teaching those new beings how to do the most basic tasks of survival and endure their insistence on trying things that make it hard to believe they care to survive at all. It is the people who need the most support, the most care, the most attention, to whom God reveals the deepest truths. The wise and intelligent are tasked with listening to the people we assume know the least.
So what is it, exactly, that God reveals to infants? Is it the meaning of Jesus’s parables, the more obscure sayings? Is it the meaning of the verses omitted from the middle of our Gospel passage today, in which Jesus reproaches the cities that did not listen to his Good News? Perhaps. Perhaps if infants could communicate complex thoughts to us, we might have whole commentaries written entirely from their perspectives. But we wise and intelligent, we who have survived infancy and left behind the unique understanding that comes with being brand new, must simply listen, and interpret, and wonder what it is we understood before we grew to take in the ways of the world. What could we see, what was revealed to us, when the only revelation available to us came directly from God, uninterpreted and untranslated by those from whom truth has been hidden?
I think back to the eyes of the little one we visited recently. She is the daughter of a priest and a French teacher, two incredibly wise and intelligent and well-read parents, but that is not important to her yet. She did not care that her houseguests were priests with master’s degrees from a respectable seminary, or that the archdeacon of the diocese of Huron is who she interrupted with a joyful noise halfway through worship. She did not see any of us the way the world does. Perhaps who she saw when she looked at us is the truth that as we grow, we lose the ability to perceive. Perhaps, for that blessed and brief season of life, we see ourselves and all we meet with the eyes of God.
I think we have all known someone who found their way back to that sight, despite the fog of the world’s prejudices and assumptions that blur our vision. There have many saints of the church, canonized or otherwise, who could look at the world and be moved deeply by the love God has for all that God has made. One person who described this unhindered sight with particular clarity was the monk Thomas Merton, who experienced a divine revelation on a streetcorner in Louisville Kentucky.
He remembers it this way: “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world…This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. I have the immense joy of being human, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. […] And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
That sense of liberation, that shedding of a false separateness, is not unlike the experience of life’s beginnings. We know, or at least conjecture, that it takes months after birth for babies to understand that they are somehow separate beings from their caregivers. In the early days, that dream of separateness, that spurious isolation and illusory difference that Merton describes has not yet entered our understanding. What is revealed in infancy is the deeper reality, that we are not separate at all. It is one of the greatest mysteries of the church, that we are all members of one body, inseparably and irrevocably. We are all walking around shining like the sun, and for all our wisdom and intelligence and maturity, most of us simply cannot see it.
I wonder if this is how it can be that the yoke of Christ can be easy and his burden light. I’ve always wrestled with this beloved passage, as someone who has made sacrifices and choices and shaped my entire life around the intention to take that yoke upon me forever. The burden does not always feel easy or light, even as it is a privilege and a joy. But perhaps I, and maybe you too, have been thinking of the yoke all wrong. Perhaps its meaning has been hidden by our capitalist ideas of labor and our proud heritage of the protestant work ethic. What if the yoke of Christ is not work at all? What if it is the heavy burden of separateness, the wearying illusion of difference between us, that Christ is inviting us to lay down? What if what God has revealed to infants and hidden from the wise is the easy yoke of unity, of oneness? What if this is the rest Christ offers, that we will be made whole?
The yoke of separateness, of difference and distinction that leads to bigotry and hatred and fear, is too heavy a burden to bear. The illusion that we do not belong to one another, the lie that we are not all walking around shining like the sun, is wearing us down and exhausting us. This yoke of falsehoods forces us to walk alone, to bear it on our shoulders with no relief and no aid, walking parallel with others but held apart by our burdens. But the easy yoke of Jesus is light, because it is not borne alone. We can find rest for our souls even under its weight, because our siblings and our shepherd are beside us to lighten the load. I think of Brother Thomas’s impulse to laugh out loud at the revelation of this lightness, and I remember the easy laughter of babies and toddlers, not yet burdened with the isolating yoke of the world. Maybe they laugh so freely, because they know only the easy yoke of Jesus, the light burden of God’s love. I hope we can take it upon ourselves. We have so much to learn.
Mother A Writes 