The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, 2014 – Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Psalm 45:11-18; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
There’s nothing quite like a warm lazy summer’s day by the lake, at ease in a hammock perhaps inside a screened–in porch. It’s a state in which a mind easily turns to love. Beautiful dreamy summer can be a state of mind. A couple of years ago our own Jeff Boldt took a break from academic studies and went to work for the Bishop of Saskatchewan at a small parish beside a lake. When he returned in September I asked him how things had gone and he said, “I will never go back without a wife”. And so it came to pass. A warm summer in the country and your thoughts turn to love it seems.
When I turned to the texts for this Sunday it was so easy to notice the themes of love. Look at that wonderful account of Rebekkah, and Isaac, a love match in a culture where love was simply not a factor in match-making. Our Psalm today is a hymn about the love and devotion of a royal bride and her kingly husband. How nice it would be to have a summer sermon about love that has elements of God’s longing and love for his people. Besides, is not the Church the beloved and beautiful bride of Christ?
But as I read and re-read the gospel passage from Matthew 11:25-27, rather than the OT texts for this Sunday, I found myself drawn to the words of Jesus. Let me say first of all, how indebted I am to the rich commentary by Frederick Dale Bruner, which I have used extensively for this sermon. There is much packed into this short gospel text and especially into verse 27.
We find here the very heart of Jesus’ claims. It represents something that we must hold on to in our languid summer reveries. How do we know anything true about God? And what is Jesus’ role in God’s self-disclosure?
These are compelling questions whether you are in a hammock, in love or just caught up in the business of life. Verse 27 reads as follows:
“Absolutely everything has been handed over to me by my Father
And no one really knows the Son except the Father,
And no one really knows the Father except the Son and the one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
One could paraphrase this, as Frederick Dale Bruner has done to say this: God’s whole truth, absolutely everything about it – has been placed in and revealed through Jesus the Son. Thus the key to divine revelation is Jesus. Elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel and in John’s gospel, also this same theme is emphasized – we have all there is to have of God in Jesus and nowhere else. Let’s try to understand the depth of each sentence in turn.
Absolutely everything was handed over by the Father to his Son. And what did the Son do with this? The Son became the man Jesus and ever since history has been flooded with the knowledge of God. Behind our text is this question, “What is wisdom and where is she to be found”? And Matthew’s answer is simple: ‘Wisdom is the person of the Son and his teaching; wisdom is to be found at the ‘school’ of Jesus’.
Many commentators have noticed that the line of the wisdom and knowledge of God in our text from Matthew goes from the Father to the Son and only then to human beings. This sequence Father-Son-human beings is deliberate and irreversible. Without Jesus, God’s God-ness is unthinkable. Everything was handed from the Father to the Son. And without the Father there is no way to Jesus. No one really knows the Father except the Son. Both belong together. For those seeking wisdom, God is understandable only as a gift of the Son, and knowledge of God consists only in what is revealed in and through him, Jesus (Bruner p.531).
You just might be asking yourself, if no one really knows the Son except the Father, how are we to know Jesus and put our faith in him? The answer isn’t provided till later in the gospel when Peter famously confesses, “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16) and Jesus immediately replies, “you are a blessed person, Simon, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven did.” From this we can be certain that whenever a person comes to know who Jesus is, it is always by the work of the Father. That’s a sobering thought for someone in ministry. People come to know Jesus as the Son of God not by any stirring preaching or brilliance of mind. Of course the Father uses flesh and blood to make the Son known. And indeed there are God’s instruments in the process, scripture read and preached, the lives of holy men and women, the Eucharist, the faithful worship of his people, the way the whole church lives as a community of faith. These are all God’s instruments, but the work of the Father must be recognized as pre-eminent.
Finally we come to the pinnacle of Jesus’ teaching here – something that has been famously offensive at times – “no one really knows the Father except the Son and the one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” If you look at it carefully you may not be able to doze off in your hammock. What is this text saying? That the only person who really knows God is Jesus Christ his Son and that all other persons come to know God through the sovereign decision of the Son. Bruner has this to say: “This is the scandal of particularity, and an affront to other religions. The statement is a wound to all other claims of spiritual sensitivity and intellectual power.” Bruner advises that the Christian church must simply carry this offense as her cross if she wishes to be faithful to the revelation given her by her Lord, the Son.
Do these exclusive claims make sense in the light of everything we know about Jesus in the gospels? “If Jesus alone is the only-begotten Son of God, it figures that this Son alone really knows the Father,” (Bruner p. 533).
Why, for instance, did the people in Palestine hearing this for the first time from Jesus, accept this and not dismiss him as crazy? Because of at least two things: First, he seemed to carry authority in his teaching – look at the staggering authority of the Sermon on the Mount; Second, because of the miracles and signs of power done in the Father’s name, including raising the dead and a boldness to forgive sins. Such things one would only expect of God. Jesus was not considered crazy. Rather, he was accused of being a blasphemer because he claimed to be one with God.
It’s hard for even some Christians to believe what Jesus asserts here – that the only persons who really understand God the Father are those “to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.” Hmmm…you may be saying to yourself, “Do only Christians know God then?” Not quite. Others are drawn to the true knowledge of God outside the company of God’s explicitly called people – think Naaman and Job (Bruner p, 534). But Christians do confess that even the knowledge of God the Father outside the church is communicated through the Son who is always, everywhere, the exclusive revealer of the Father. “No one really knows the Father except the Son”. Jesus is the necessary link to the knowledge of God.
The Second Vatican Council in the 1960s worked this out beautifully: “All this [about God’s salvation given in Jesus Christ] holds true not only for Christians but for all [persons] of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way. For since Christ died for all…we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to all the possibility of being associated with the paschal mystery – that is to say salvation through Christ.”
The classic conviction based on our text from Matthew is this: there is no knowledge anywhere of God the Father that is not mediated through God the Son and that is not brought to the individual heart through God the Holy Spirit.
But God is free. God may reveal himself to whomever he chooses. But, we still believe, instructed by this text, that only the Son makes the Father known anywhere.
The non-Christian world and many contemporary Christians find this claim to be unbearably arrogant. But Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican and other churches of the Reformation, nevertheless would have to say that to claim anything less is to show stupendous ingratitude for what God has done in Jesus. What else could the Church say? The Father, at immense cost, gave himself to the world in the Incarnation, death and resurrection of his Son. To say, then, that apart from this self-giving of God, God can still be known is to deliberately cover up what happened on the cross and on Easter morning. Here’s Bruner on this point:
“[Christians] have not been authorized to say that there is salvation anywhere else than in faith in Jesus Christ, God’s Self-Gift. We have not been empowered to preach to the world that as long as people are sincere, that for as long as Hindu’s will be sincere Hindus, Buddhists sincere Buddhists, secularists sincere searchers, or atheists sincere servants of people, they will be saved. All of these salvations by sincerity bypass the one truly sincere thing that Christians believe has ever happened in history: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.”
Such a confession is the offense of the Cross, the almost unbearable hubris of true Christianity, as Bruner puts it. These things can be confessed but how we do so is another matter. We make a mockery of our faith and of the Lord when other people are told that their beliefs are inferior to ours, or that they are ignorant: “Disciples must learn – and the Holy Spirit is able to teach them – how to honour Jesus Christ without dishonouring others.”
We have to realize something about this text – that there will never be a completely inoffensive witness to the exclusiveness of Jesus Christ. Jesus’ own life is evidence of such a difficulty – his testimony was not gladly heard and many of the devout leaders of the day felt that the harsh treatment he received was well-deserved.
This has been a long sermon for a hot day, but if we are to be faithful witnesses to Jesus the foundation of our faith must be sure. Jesus is the Son of God and he reveals the heart of the Father. He seeks for us with a love like no other lover, deeper than that of a bridegroom for his bride. It’s the relationship of love he wants, not simply an adherence to law. He calls us by name, engraves it on his hand, goes to the cross bearing our sins out of love. Sometimes we cannot grasp love itself.
There’s an old folk tale, sometimes told, of a young prince who goes out riding and falls in love with a maiden who lives in the forest. He finds her house and knocks and a voice from within asks, ‘Who is it?’ He responds with confidence, ‘Harold the Prince, we spoke just days ago.’ The door remains shut. Again he comes a few days later and knocks. ‘Who is it?’ asks the voice from within. ‘It’s your friend. Don’t you remember how we sat under the tree that summer afternoon? Please open the door.’ But there is no answer. The next time he weeps and says he cannot sleep, he cannot live without her. Again there is silence. Finally, after much reflection and perhaps even prayer, he returns to the cottage and lovesick he knocks. The voice asks, ‘Who is it?’ This time he says simply, “It’s you”. There’s a long pause. Then the door slowly opens.
There’s wisdom in such a fable, because it speaks of a love that takes the beloved out of himself. He sets aside himself, as it were, for the sake of the other. Who could fail to respond to such love. If the Bible says anything at all it is that God sought out his people with a love that is hard to fathom – forgiving over and over again, faithlessness and indifference in his people and finally entering this world in Jesus. The Gospels contain eye-witness accounts of this man. We do well to draw near and look at this man Jesus, hear him speak in the gospel record, imagine ourselves standing in the crowd, hearing his voice, allowing the Father to reveal the Son to us. This is a God who loves us and cares for us. Hear again the words of Jesus that follow directly upon verse 27 of our gospel text:
“Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Come walk along with me as I we bear together the burdens of life, for I am gentle and you will find rest for your soul.” Such is the voice and the love and the wisdom of God. It is the Father’s work that will make Jesus known to you even in the wonderfully sleepy days of summer. Amen.
