Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Inspiring words. Cherished words. But I struggle with these words from the Declaration of Independence, especially this weekend as we observe the 250th birthday of our nation. The semiquincentennial anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. Semiquincentennial: it literally means half of five hundred years. The word itself sounds like a thing unfinished, which is appropriate.
And that’s where I struggle with the Declaration of Independence. On the one hand, the words and the sentiment they inspire are noble and revolutionary in every sense of the word, especially the self-evident truth expressed in that core five-word phrase “all men are created equal.” On the other hand, I almost reflexively want to change “all men” to “all persons are created equal.” But that’s not what Mr. Jefferson wrote and it’s not what he meant. For him and Ben Franklin and John Adams and all the others who signed this declaration “all men” meant “all white males who owned property.” Women were certainly not included in that phrase in 1776 and neither were the 500,000 enslaved persons who made up more than 20% of the total population. Forty-one of the 56 men who signed the Declaration owned slaves and another 7 profited directly from slavery either by trading slaves or supplying goods to slavery camps. And, of course, no one at the 2nd Continental Congress was giving any thought to the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness of the Native Americans on whose ancestral lands this new nation was being established.
There’s an anonymous meme that keeps popping up in social media that says, “Studying history will sometimes disturb you. Studying history will sometimes upset you. Studying history will sometimes make you furious. If studying history always makes you feel proud and happy, you probably aren’t studying history.”
Still, having said all that, I have to tell you I love this Declaration of Independence and I love the country that has grown out of it. I still believe that, on the whole, despite all our faults and failings, the United States of America has been a powerful force for good in the world. On the whole.
The men of that 2nd Continental Congress were creatures of their time, but within the paradigm of their time they were prophetic enough to plant within the Declaration seeds of vision that would set goals and standards for future generations. Take, for instance, the idea that “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are unalienable rights and that governments are instituted to secure those rights. Not to control us, not to fleece us, not to oppress us, but to secure our rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness with a capital H. No one had ever said anything like that before.
Or take the idea that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government!” Right there, in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, is a warning to would-be tyrants, authoritarians or despots of every stripe and in every age that the People have a right and a duty to remove them when they interfere with the People’s rights.
The idea that “all men are created equal” was a spiritual truth that became an defining aspiration for us as a nation. We have lurched toward it in fits and starts and we have often failed to realize in either law or in practice that we are all created equal. In his 1963 I Have A Dream speech, Dr. Martin Luther King said that where Black people were concerned, the Declaration’s promise of equality was “a promissory note,” a “bad check” marked “insufficient funds.”
In his book The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin said that America is “guilty of the crime of innocence.” When Tripp Fuller asked Cornel West what Baldwin meant by that, Cornel West said,
“It’s Peter Pan. You know, you never grow up. You grow rich, you grow powerful, but you never grow up. The benchmark of maturity is not just humility but unflinching, unequivocal engagement with reality. And when you’re innocent, you evade reality, you avoid reality.”[1]
The reason some people want to quite literally Whitewash our history and perpetuate the illusion of our innocence is that confronting all our sins and shortcomings all at once feels like drowning. Thinking of our nation always and only as “the good guys” or “the shining city on the hill,” is a coping mechanism. It protects us from the pain of feeling guilty, but it also keeps us from growing up as a people. This conflict between those who want to perpetuate the illusion of American innocence and those who want us to acknowledge and deal with our sins is one of the main sources of our political dysfunction. The path of truth is painful, but it is the better way. Denial always sows the seeds of its own destruction.
And that brings us to today’s Gospel text on this sixth Sunday after Pentecost.
While John the Baptist was in prison, Jesus had just been visited by some of John’s disciples, so John was very much on his mind. In their proclamation of the kingdom of God, both John and Jesus were change agents, disrupters of the status quo, so those who were afraid of rocking the boat found reasons to object to both of them. That’s what Jesus is reacting to when he says, “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”
When Jesus talks about “this generation,” genea is the Greek word here, he is not talking about the Jewish people or even any particular chronological generation of people. “This generation” is meant to identify any people of any place or time who decide to blame the messenger when God’s truth cuts too close for comfort. Derek Penwell says that “this generation” is “the spirit that tolerates prophecy only as long as prophecy minds its own business. When it refuses to cooperate, that spirit reaches for whatever tools of silencing are available: stones, crosses, prison cells, budget cuts, deportation orders, or whatever is close at hand.”
Jesus likens “this generation” to children who play games in the marketplace but can’t agree on which game to play. These aren’t innocent, sweet natured children from your Bible storybook, these are petulant, quarrelsome kids who refuse to play at all when they can’t have it their own way.
Our designated text then skips over verses 20 through 24 where Jesus chastises “the cities in which most of his deeds of power had been done, because they did not repent.” It’s very much a variation on the same theme. He has harsh words for these cities because they had preferred to maintain the illusion that everything was fine—or at least manageable—rather than face the reality of their situation under Rome’s domination. The influencers of those cities decided it was safer to slog along under Rome’s thumb and Herod’s watchful eye than to embrace the kingdom of God that Jesus was announcing.
When Jesus had finished venting his disappointment, he prayed saying, “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.”
When Jesus says that God has “hidden these things” from “the wise and intelligent” he may be speaking indirectly about the scribes and Pharisees who frequently challenged him. These were generally the most well educated and well situated members of the Galilean community but, as with smart people everywhere, their knowledge of how things are supposed to go and how things are supposed to happen and who is authorized to make changes ran headlong into Jesus who didn’t fit any of their preconceived ideas. Instead, Jesus says that God has revealed the vision and knowledge of the kingdom to nepios. Infants. This term usually refers to a young child, but here it is used to refer to those with no credentials or recognized status among the well-educated. This term is akin to “little ones” which Matthew often uses to identify the economically marginal, the politically irrelevant and the socially disposable. The point here is that God’s wisdom often comes to those whom the world fails to notice.
Jesus ends with an invitation: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 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.”
Just about everybody in Galilee was weary and carrying heavy burdens. Galilee was rich in agricultural production and the Sea of Galilee was a goldmine for fishing. But everything was heavily taxed by Rome and Herod. Priestly tithes and temple dues added to the economic burden so that Galilean families paid out about half of what they produced in taxes and tithes.
When Jesus talks about the yoke they were laboring under he is using a standard Jewish metaphor. The rabbis often spoke of “the yoke of Torah.” Sirach 51 invites the reader to “put your neck under the yoke of wisdom.” Zugos, the Greek word for yoke, also referred to a balancing scale, the kind used in the marketplace, so there is a kind of double meaning here. He is telling people who stagger under the yoke of Imperial systems and centralized religious authority that his yoke involves a different way of life, laboring for a different kind of world and weighing the world around you with a different kind of balance.
Jesus tells us that his yoke is easy. That’s the traditional translation, but a better translation might be to say benevolent or kind. The word that’s used here carries a feeling of goodness and generosity. The yoke of Christ is not effortless, but it is humane, merciful and life-giving. Those who take that yoke upon themselves will find rest for their souls. This is the deep Sabbath rest promised by Israel’s scriptures—a rest from busyness and anxiety, a rest from endless competitiveness.
The ministry of Jesus and John the Baptist was a disruption of the Empire’s business as usual. Jesus invited people to acknowledge the truth of their situation and visualize with him a better way.
In the same way, the Declaration of Independence was a moment of disruption. The revolution it ignited was, in Cornel West’s words, “the beginning of an anti-imperial movement against the largest empire of the day.” Tripp Fuller says it was, “a courageous wager that ordinary people could build arrangements where each person carries equal worth and dignity.” That, too, is part of our reality, part of our truth on this semiquincentennial weekend in our celebration of unfinished business. Can we make arrangements where each person carries equal worth and dignity? Our track record is kind of spotty, but I’m willing to wager that we can…if we weigh our choices with the yoke—the balancing scale—of Christ.
[1] Guilty of Our Own Innocence with Cornel West; processthi@substack.com
Thoughts Along the Way 