Zechariah 9. 9 – 12
Matthew 11. 16 – 19, 25 – 30
With Holy Baptism
Fr Alex
Today we see a pretty frustrated Jesus – and a bit of a sarcastic Jesus, too.
He’s been going round the towns and villages, preaching and doing amazing things – but still people are suspicious, or reject him outright.
So he bursts out, “What are you lot like? You’re like a bunch of children in the street complaining.”
He says, when John the Baptist came out in his hair shirt and eating nothing, people rejected him and thought he was possessed.
When Jesus comes and lives life to the full – turning water into wine, going to all these weddings and feasts – what do these same people say? “Ooh, look at him, guzzling and boozing and hanging around with wrong-uns.”
So what’s the moral of the story? Is it that you can never please everyone? I’m tempted to say I know his pain…
But of course there’s a lot more going on. It’s not just that people are hard to please. These people who are suspicious and reject John and Jesus, think they know better. They think they know what they want; and they think they know what a Saviour should look like, how he should behave. What he should say.
They’re so blinkered by their preconceptions of what God is like, that they cannot see that God is there right in front of them, in Jesus.
And Jesus is frustrated because that’s exactly what he’s trying to show them. He longs to make his Father known. He longs for people to have the same intimate relationship with God that he has, as God’s own Son.
“No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
And this is what we’re doing this morning, as we celebrate Finn’s baptism. We’re celebrating the beginning of this relationship with God. Through the washing with water, the anointing with oil, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit: Finn will be able truly to know God; to enter into this life-long and life-giving relationship with the one who created him.
But what does it mean to live with God in this way? Well Jesus today gives us the image of the yoke. He calls those who are “weary and carrying heavy burdens” to take his yoke upon them. And he tells us that “his yoke is easy, and his burden is light.”
It’s a bit of an unusual sales pitch. How would you respond to someone encouraging you to take their yoke upon you? But it tells us a great deal about how Jesus wants to engage with us, and what it might mean to enter into this relationship with God.
Consider the function of a yoke: to bind two animals together, in order to share the weight of a burden. There’s an acknowledgement in this simple image that there are burdens we must carry in the journey of life. Some of them will be heavy and hard to bear. We might become exhausted on our own.
But if we bring them to Jesus – if we take his yoke upon us and bind ourselves to him – he will help us to carry them, and they won’t seem so heavy after all.
But it means even more than that. There’s another kind of yoke, the one a person might use to carry buckets of water. There are many people around the world who need to use just such a thing every day. A wooden beam that goes right across your shoulders, buckets hanging off the ends, and your arms end up on the top, something like this.
Where have we seen this image before? On the cross. When Christ carries his cross to the place of crucifixion, he carries it like a yoke over his shoulders. He carries the terrible weight of all the world’s sins and evils.
He bears that weight so that we don’t have to. He has borne the heaviest yoke of all, so that when we find ourselves weighed down by all the things we don’t like about ourselves, or all the things we wish we could change: we know that Jesus has already carried the weight of all that.
We are freed from falling under the weight of our sin, because Jesus shows us the way to throw it all off. Through our baptism, and through a life with him and with his Father.
But the wonderful thing that today’s reading reveals to us, is that there’s no great secret to enjoying this freedom. It’s given freely as a gift. We don’t have to have some great understanding, or pass some difficult test. All we have to do is receive it with openness and trust. Receive it as a child might, from a loving parent.
“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.”
Jesus himself had come to know his Father the way a child does: not by studying books about him, but by living in his presence, listening for his voice, and trusting him to help him carry whatever burden might be placed upon him.
The most difficult thing, perhaps, about being a follower of Christ in today’s world is keeping that kind of holy innocence – the kind of sacred trust that an infant has for their loving parents.
It’s easy to become distracted and confused by all the various yokes and burdens that modern life place upon us. Or to think, like the people in our reading, that we know better than God, that we can do just fine the way we are.
But easier still is the yoke that Jesus offers us, and light is the burden he places upon us. May we seek to come to him afresh – as Finn comes to him today – and receive with joy the gift of his freedom; and the true peace and rest that comes from life in him. Amen.