Sunday 9 July 2017

Fourth Sunday after Trinity 2017


On any term-time Tuesday morning in the Minster, you will find the Minstrels, our playgroup for pre-schoolers and their grown-ups. From an early age, the children play with dolls, with a kitchen, with cars and other vehicles. They play because they will grow up to be adults who have babies of their own, who must cook, who might drive. The play of infants—whether cubs or kittens or children—is a rehearsal for adulthood. It always has been.

It was no different in Jesus’ culture. He was clearly familiar with the games children played in the marketplaces—of course he was: as a child, he would have taken part in such games on many occasions.

In the culture in which Jesus grew up, the men of the community took the lead in orchestrating celebrations, such as weddings. A band of musicians would head the parade, with everyone else joining-in and following them from the bridegroom’s home to the home of the parents of the bride, and back again. Likewise, the women of the community took the lead in times of mourning, such as funerals. Their rising and falling ululation both honoured the dead and gave voice to the grief of the living. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus refers to the game in which the boys and the girls have taken turns, the boys drawing the girls into a wedding dance, the girls drawing the boys into a funeral march, the dance and the march flowing back and forth, perhaps for hours on end as the amused market-sellers look on with half an eye.

But something has gone wrong. The children aren’t playing together now. And it isn’t simply that they have grown tired, or bored of this game; that they are resting, or have gone on to something else. The boys and the girls sit in two groups, on opposite sides of the square, at an impasse. Each group is blaming the other for the breakdown of their play. We started up the wedding dance again, shout the boys, and you didn’t join in: why, then, should we join in with your funeral march?

We only refused to join in because you had first refused to join in with our funeral march, the girls retort! Each group blames the other: you wronged me before I wronged you!

The context of Jesus’ childish tale is this. John, the baptiser, had been put in prison. He would, eventually, be executed. But for now, he is imprisoned, and had sent messengers to Jesus in search of answers to doubts that troubled him. You see, Jesus was so different from John, as different as a wedding from a funeral. Had John got it all wrong? Or was it Jesus that had got it wrong: had John served God faithfully, only for Jesus to let it all fall away again? Jesus sends back his reply to John, and then turns to the crowd around him, asking them, what did they make of John’s ministry?

John and Jesus were so different from one another, at least on the surface. John was aesthetic, extreme. Many had been drawn to his call to repent. Others had found it all too much: this man was clearly under the influence of a demon; those drawn to his cult, themselves demonic. Jesus, on the other hand, was all about having a party, eating and drinking with sinners. Jesus was not religious enough for the Pharisees who passed judgement on those who had gone to John; and, ironically, not religious enough for those who had gone to John, who had repented of their sins.

Here’s the situation:

Those who had followed John were wailing repentance, and the good religious people wouldn’t join in: it was tawdry and excessive and beneath them.

The good religious people were proclaiming the wedding celebration of God and his people, but needed to keep the people—the bride—pure: sinners must be excluded.

Those who had followed John in the funeral march didn’t want to follow Jesus in the wedding dance, because it was too joyful.

And those who wanted a wedding dance didn’t want Jesus in it, because he brought sinners with him.

Things have reached an impasse: and Jesus starts to tell a story about children playing in the marketplace, a scenario everyone would recognise. They, too, have reached an impasse. But both groups bring something that the other needs. Lament, repentance, is not an end in and of itself: there is no point in repentance if it does not lead into participation in celebration [Confession and Absolution leads into the Gloria]. But there is no celebration, no inclusion, without repentance. You can’t have either one without the other!

Oh, and it doesn’t matter whether you joined the game when it was a wedding dance or when it was a funeral march. Neither one is better than the other. The point to the game is not to move from one to the other as you mature—journeying from celebration to mourning, or from lament to rejoicing. The point of the game is that we become increasingly attuned to what is needful in the given moment, and increasingly confident and competent in our participation.

Jesus says: John leads to me; his ministry flows into mine.

And Jesus continues: 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.

Some of us have found our way here with an inclination—whether nature, or nurture, or both—to noticing what is wrong (as we perceive it) with the world, to judging people—including ourselves—quickly and harshly, to setting ourselves standards we can never live up to. And we find it quite disconcerting that there are other people here who frankly don’t seem that bothered about it all; who are all about love and acceptance and inclusivity and letting God sort the rest of it out.

And, if we are honest, we are weary from being good, and feeling bad; we are weighed down by the burden of it—and affronted that others won’t share the load.

And Jesus says to us: Let me come alongside you; allow yourself to be yoked to me, as a young ox is yoked to an experienced ox at the plough. Let me be the other ox, and let me train you in the art of celebration, of thankfulness, of enjoying God’s good gifts and sharing them with others.

On the other side of the marketplace, some of us have found our way here with an inclination—whether in our upbringing, or in rebellion against our upbringing—to self-justification, to believing that who we are—and who others are—is already the full realisation of God’s plan for us. We are already seated at the wedding banquet at the End of the Age, when God has wiped away every tear; but if we are honest we want to keep crying because of the other people here who keep calling us to repent, to change our outlook and direction, to become something other than what we are.

And we worry about the gap, between the banquet we proclaim and the joylessness displayed by some Christians: it makes us look like hypocrites—and who would be drawn to that anyway? We, too, are weary.

And Jesus says to us: Let me come alongside you. Let me be the other ox, and let me train you in the art of lament, of repentance; of dying to self, in order that you be transformed from the person God accepts as you are, into the person God hopes and dreams you might be.

Presumably the children find a way to move beyond their impasse, if only that they slope off home and reconvene again the next day, leaving yesterday’s quarrel to yesterday, where it belongs. I say presumably because Jesus holds them up as our model and invites us to learn from them. Today is a new day. If you are weary, come: come to Jesus, whatever your burden.

Come, together with the boys with their flutes and the girls who wail. Come and join in the game, that together we might learn, that together we might grow into maturity, the fullness of Christ. Amen.


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