Ordinary 14 Year A

Sermon Based on:
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.

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Quite a few years ago now I travelled to San Francisco and went to a Sunday service at an Episcopal church called St Gregory of Nyssa, in the Mission District. I was taking a liturgy course taught by the clergy of St Gregory’s, and I wanted to experience how they lived out their ideas in their parish.

When they built their church, the community decided to place the altar in the very centre of the building, so that it would be the first thing people saw as they entered. It was intended as a sign of hospitality. And around the curved edge of the altar they etched, in large gold letters, the outraged accusation made against Jesus by the Pharisees:

“This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

St Gregory’s decided that if that was the accusation levelled against Jesus, it was one they were willing to live with as well.

Jesus’ own generation struggled with his identity. They watched him offering grace and healing to all sorts of people, eating and drinking with them, celebrating life — remember the abundance of wine at the wedding in Cana? — and they called him a glutton and a drunkard. Then they looked at John the Baptist with his life of austerity and repentance, and decided he had a demon.

Whatever God did, it seemed, was unacceptable.

And – as we heard in today’s gospel – Jesus finally reacts. Like one of the prophets of Israel, he speaks with grief, and frustration, even anger. “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.”

We need some context to make sense of Jesus’ words here. Remember that in Jesus’ world, children had almost no social status. The Aramaic word for “child” could also mean a servant or slave.

So, once again Jesus is turning the world’s assumptions upside down. Those who believe they already possess wisdom fail to recognise God’s reign. Those who are open enough to learn — those on the margins, the teachable, the beginners, the pilgrims, the outsiders, and including Jesus’ disciples — begin to glimpse what God is doing.

Matthew’s first readers would have heard this very sharply. They lived in cities overshadowed by the Roman Empire. Every day they encountered reminders of imperial power: soldiers, taxes, public buildings, coins proclaiming Caesar’s victories, monuments celebrating Rome’s greatness. I’ve talked before about the Roman coins in circulation in that period portraying Judea as a woman on her knees with her hands bound behind her – imagine having to use money like that in your day to day life…

But into that world, the Jesus we encounter in Matthew’s gospel dares to proclaim another basileia — another reign, another kingdom.

We have become so accustomed to hearing “the kingdom of God” that we can easily miss how politically daring those words were. Matthew in particular uses the same Greek word, basileia, that described Caesar’s empire. Jesus is proclaiming not simply a private spirituality but an entirely different way of ordering human life.

No wonder people struggled to hear him.

But we have to notice where today’s reading finally leads us. After all the confrontation, all the challenge, all the frustration, Jesus’ voice suddenly softens. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

These might be among the most tender words in all the gospels.

What are the burdens Jesus is talking about? For his first hearers there were many. Life under Roman occupation. Heavy taxation. Political violence. Religious leaders who too often added burdens instead of lifting them. The daily struggle simply to survive.

But the burdens are not only political – they are also spiritual.

The burden of shame. The burden of believing we are never good enough. The burden of trying to earn God’s love. The burden of fear.

Jesus does not promise that life will suddenly become easy – he offers something deeper. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.”

That image of the yoke can sound strange to us. Yet in Jewish tradition, taking on a yoke was often a positive image. Students spoke of taking on the yoke of Torah — learning a way of life.

Everyone lives under some kind of yoke. The question is not whether we carry one, but whose yoke we carry. Jesus offers not the absence of responsibility, but a different way of living. A life shaped by mercy rather than domination, by grace rather than fear, and by compassion rather than competition.

Perhaps our burdens today look a bit different from those of Matthew’s first hearers. Many of us carry anxiety about the future. Many feel exhausted by the endless pressure to perform, to succeed, to consume, to keep up. Many experience loneliness, or the feeling that we somehow don’t measure up.

Many of us are weighed down by widening inequality, by housing pressures, by the state of our public life, by grief for the natural world, and by the relentless cycle of news that tells us, every day, of another crisis.

We no longer live under the Roman Empire. But empire is still at work in our world today – we still live under powers that diminish our humanity.

But Jesus invites us to lay down those burdens and learn another way. Not to withdraw from the world, not to stop caring. But to live under the reign of God instead of all the competing empires that seek our loyalty.

And this changes how we live. It changes how we spend our money. How we vote. How we treat colleagues and neighbours. How we speak about those with whom we disagree. How we welcome the stranger.

Every ordinary, daily decision becomes an opportunity to live under a different reign, to step out from under empire.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this well. Living under Nazi Germany, he came to see history from what he called “below” — from the perspective of the excluded, the powerless, and the suffering.

He believed that following Christ meant not only compassion for those crushed by injustice, but the courage to resist the systems that created that injustice in the first place.

His famous words still challenge us: “We are not simply to bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice; we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

That is what it means to take Christ’s yoke upon us; not because it is another impossible burden, but because, paradoxically, it is the yoke of freedom. It gives us the freedom to live under grace rather than fear. And the freedom to belong to God’s kingdom before any earthly empire.

The freedom to discover that, in Christ, the deepest burden has already been lifted.

Amen.