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A sermon on Matthew 11:16-19,25-30 & Romans 7:15-25a by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
Could you hear the exasperation in Jesus’s words at the beginning of our gospel reading? “John was forever fasting, and he never drank, so you called him crazy. I eat and drink, so you call me a glutton and a drunk.” “When I give you this, you want that. When I give you that, you want this. Nothing is ever good enough for you people.”
Jesus was not describing a particular small group of malcontents here. He’s speaking of “this generation.” That’s people in general. All of us to some extent. And if I’m honest about it, I recognise myself in what he’s saying, much as I wish I didn’t. I used to think that it was just an unpleasant family trait that I had sadly inherited, but I’ve come to see that my family had no monopoly on it.
Somehow, when we are forming judgements about those who are not us, it doesn’t matter what they do, we’ll find fault with it somehow. Women often say that they have to work twice as hard as a man to be considered half as good. And they are not even a minority. Ask any of your Indigenous friends or recent migrant friends what its like for them trying to please anybody.
I’ve started to think that this actually overlaps with what we heard the Apostle Paul talking about in our reading from his letter to the Romans. He talks about this disconnect inside himself, this inability to do what he wants to do, and to avoid doing what he is quite clear he doesn’t want to do. A body of death, he calls it.
I think what he is saying is often misunderstood and preached on quite wrongly. It’s made to sound as though it is a call to try harder and do better. But that doesn’t seem to be where Paul goes with it. He is evidently quite mystified by what is going on. It’s not deliberate, and it is not that he fails to recognise the good or fails to want to do right. It’s that something keeps shipwrecking his best endeavours. Who will rescue me from this body of death?
What he seems to be saying is that we are actually blind to what is going on here, to what is driving us to do what we do. And if I’m right in connecting it to what Jesus was saying, it is not that we are deliberately choosing to be judgemental and hard to please, but that there is something driving us in ways we can’t see, and therefore can’t do anything about. Our inability to see it and understand it leaves it with free rein to drive us as it will.
And I think that connecting what Paul is saying with what Jesus is saying is important, because Paul’s words have too often been interpreted at the personal level – I fail to do what I wish to do. But Jesus says I’m not alone. It’s structural, systemic. It’s all of us failing to do what we intend to do, and all of us unable to see and comprehend why.
Immediately after saying that nobody’s pleased whatever he does, Jesus goes on to say that these things have been hidden from us, that even the wise and intelligent can’t see them. But, he says, they have been revealed to the little ones.
I said before that women report that they have to be twice as good as a man to be seen as half as good. I’m sure that’s true, but I am never much good at recognising the ways I’m a part of that. But you women recognise it. But then some women are critical of mainstream feminism because they say it is constructed by white women who are as blind as any man to the way they are unconsciously dismissing and disregarding black women.
None of us stand outside of this, untouched by it. It is written into the operating code of our group cultures. The victims of one unjust exclusion are just as likely to build their group identity around similarly excluding another group. Most of us have experiences of being excluded and mistreated, and when it is happening to us, we can see it. But none of us are much good at recognising it when we are doing it to someone else, or when we are inheriting benefits from the mistreatment of others.
A number of us have been meeting over the past couple of weeks to read together the “Truth be Told” report from the Yoorrook Justice Commission. Those of us who have been part of that have been experiencing exactly this dynamic. The truth of what has been going on in this country was hidden to our minds, but was revealed to those who were the victims of our ignorant judgements. And now they are precisely the ones who are inviting us to see through their eyes, to see the truth that they can see. Having our eyes opened is a bracing, but potentially liberating, experience.
This stuff can be difficult for a group like us to grapple with, precisely because we like to think we’ve already done it, and done it fairly well. We like to pride ourselves on being an inclusive church, a church that intentionally welcomes those who have often been rejected by other churches. I’ve often seen churches like ours struggle when they are challenged to go further and to become more inclusive still. Having prided ourselves on doing better than others, we can bristle at the suggestion that we are not doing as well as we could.
But there is more to it too, and I think this is at the heart of what both Paul and Jesus were talking about. It’s why they see it as a systemic issue rather than just a personal moral failing.
The hidden systemic sin is that we create and maintain the identity of our groups by defining who is in and who is out, and excluding them. That probably sounds like a big part of the national political debate at the moment, and it is, but it is just as true of the smaller scale groups that we belong to, like our church.
We are one of the churches that has recognised the injustice of rejecting and excluding many of the people churches have had a history of excluding, and so we have set out to be different, to be inclusive and welcoming. And that’s all very well and good. But on its own, it is just dealing with a symptom and not dealing with the underlying problem.
Because the underlying problem is mostly hidden from our eyes, from our comprehension. All that happens when we embrace a different set of values and build our identity around that is that the hidden dynamic mutates or relocates. Our pride in our own inclusivity blinds us to the reality that we are still constructing our identity around who’s in and who’s out, but the ones we are now defining out and excluding are the ones we have identified as the perpetrators and victimisers under the previous systems.
We might be excluding those who hold values we regard as regressive and harmful, but we are still excluding and rejecting. We are still building an identity that seems to need a despised other in order to hold itself together. And because it is almost impossible for us to see from the inside what we are doing, we are powerless to overcome it, and mystified as to why we keep finding ourselves doing things we don’t want to do. Who will rescue us from this body of death?
Now I alluded a minute ago to how this is paralleled in the national political debate, but that’s not all. You can see these dynamics in play at every level from an individual dysfunctional family all the way up to geopolitics and the threats of all-out war and climate catastrophe.
It is widely recognised that what is driving so many of these issues and making them virtually impossible to address, is our increasing polarisation, increasing tribalism. An issue like climate change comes to be associated with particular political tribes, and so those who identify as belonging to a rival political tribe feel unable to even acknowledge that it exists, let alone cooperate with their rivals to do anything about it. And global issues like that cannot be solved without large scale cooperation.
But the hidden dynamic that is so often at work here is our failure to see that we bolster our own tribal identities by treating one another with contempt, and that doing so is alienating us from one another more and more, and pushing us further and further from ever being able to build the bridges that need to be built. So much of the gospel message is about reconciliation precisely because it is our failure to unite across tribal boundaries that is plunging the world God loves into a fiery hell.
At the geopolitical level, the underlying issues might be the same, but most of us have no direct agency there. It is in our local communities, on the small stages we move on, that there are things we can do to become the change the world needs.
However, as we think about what it means to become that change, we need to make very sure that we are not falling back into the mistake of that old personal moralism reading of Paul’s words. In that reading, we just had to try harder, be more vigilant, more determined to resist the wrong and do the right. It is kind of ironic that we heard it that way, because Paul was quite clear that that approach didn’t work for him, so we’re unlikely to do any better.
What that old “increased vigilance” approach actually was was just the hidden sinful mechanism finding itself another disguise, a disguise in which our more strenuous efforts just made us even more hostile to those we identified as the problem. Who will rescue us from this body of death?
The answer that Jesus offers has little or nothing to do with trying harder to be good. The Jesus answer is all about reconciliation across our divides and about a new kind of belonging. In the words we heard from him tonight, he expresses it in the seemingly contradictory image of receiving rest from our weariness and heavy burdens by taking on a new yoke, Jesus’s own yoke. Seemingly contradictory because the yoke is unavoidably an image of heavy work.
If you’re not familiar with it, the yoke is the collar worn by draft horses, donkeys or bullocks to which whatever load it is pulling is attached. So you would expect that it would be having the yoke taken off your neck that would be the image of being given rest from your burdens. But Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Now I am sure that learning from the gentleness and humility of Jesus is an important part of what he is saying here, but he could have said that without needing this image of the yoke, this image of heavy work. So what’s he getting at? What is it about taking his yoke on our necks that can set us free and give us much needed rest?
The image of the yoke was used in Jesus’s day for taking on the teaching of a particular rabbi, so at the most obvious level, Jesus is simply saying, “Take on my teachings, and learn from me. Learn from my gentleness. Learn from my humble heart. Learn the law of love I am teaching you.” That’s absolutely part of it, but I think there is also something more too.
Depictions of the kind of yoke Jesus was talking about almost invariably show the version like this that goes across the shoulders of two animals, yoking them together to work together and share the burden.
That can still relate to what I was just saying about taking on the teachings of a rabbi, because the image was that you were yoking yourself with the rabbi. The yoke bound you and the rabbi to one another. So being yoked to Jesus in a shared endeavour is undoubtedly part of this. But there’s something more, isn’t there?
So much of Jesus’s message is a message of reconciliation, of breaking down the barriers that alienate us from one another. And what more powerful image of that process could there be that Jesus yoking us together with someone we would have instinctively preferred to exclude, and setting us to work together shoulder to shoulder in his work while we learn to love one another.
You can see Jesus doing that in his own group of twelve disciples. Simon is identified as a Zealot, an ultra-nationalist group whose modus operandi was murdering Jews who collaborated with the Roman occupation forces, but in Jesus’s band he is yoked with Matthew, who had made his living collecting taxes for the Romans. Both had laboured under the heavy burdens of their histories and animosities. But Jesus places a new yoke on them, that they might find rest for their souls in working together in Jesus’s mission of reconciliation.
They find rest and reconciliation in taking on Jesus’s yoke, and in becoming the change the world needs.
Who will rescue us from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, who breaks down that old hidden mechanism of sin by yoking us to one another in gentleness and humbleness of heart, and thus giving rest to our souls and rest to a war-weary world.