Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
Jesus said to the crowd, “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces 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.”
At that time Jesus said, “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. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
“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.”
I was in college during a time when we were all very intense. Like college students at other times, we all went to class and learned about T. S. Eliot or human physiology or Keynesian economics. But unlike other the generation of college students before us, what we were really there to do was to discover who we were, to ferret out the meaning of life and to figure out how these could fit together in the paths we chose. And so my friends and I routinely had lengthy conversations about all this over coffee, over lunch, and over pizza into the wee hours of the morning.
One night a group of us were up late when the following question arose. “If you could only have one of these—intelligence, a compassionate heart, imagination or wisdom, which would you choose?
My friend Paul chose intelligence. A rogue and natural wit, his rationale was that intelligence could be used against others in arguments with intelligence one could solve the problems of the world.
John went next. A sweetheart himself, he chose compassion because it was only through compassion that one cared about the world anyway.
Then George went. A cartoonist and artist now living in Southern California, he chose imagination mostly because imagination had already chosen him.
And then it was my turn. “Wisdom, I stammered. “I want wisdom.”
“Why wisdom?” my friends asked.
“It just sounds good to me—more valuable than those the other things--like something you can’t really get for yourself, like something that only comes to you after many years and lots of experience in the school of hard knocks.”
This prompted the others to start talking again about their choices: why one might be superior to the other. It was then that I began to have another thought:
“Oh my God” I said to myself, “What if our choices are real? What if each of us has actually chosen a path for ourselves today?”
And then I had another thought; “What have I done in asking for wisdom? What will wisdom cost me?”
Jesus is all about wisdom in our gospel for today: what it is, who has it and who doesn’t. He starts by saying some pretty harsh things about the people of his time. According to Jesus they are not very wise for they don’t recognize what is of God when it’s standing right in front of them. They labeled John the Baptist a lunatic when he fasted and called others to repent and turn again to God. They called Jesus a glutton and a drunkard when he ate and drank with insiders and outsiders to extend God’s hospitality to all.
And then Jesus is goes on. Not only is Wisdom not recognized when it shows up but Wisdom, it seems, hides herself from those who consider themselves wise and intelligent, choosing instead to manifest herself to infants, those who cannot speak (this is what the word “infant” means), those who in fact are only good at one thing: being dependent upon others.
All of this then leads to an invitation. Speaking as Holy Wisdom, Jesus says to the people: “Come to me, you who are carrying heavy burdens, the burden of being intelligent, the burden of trying to do everything right, the burdens that can even come of a compassionate heart or an overactive imagination, come to me you who are stumbling under the weight of any of these things. Come to me and, as the Wisdom of God, I will give you rest while you live, while you work.”
It all sounds great. But what makes it hang together? How are repentance, hospitality, dependence and rest while in motion connected?
“Wisdom,” I stammered. “I want wisdom.” But then I thought, “Oh my God, what have I asked for? What will wisdom cost me?”
In my college days I thought Wisdom was something that I might get after years of experience in the school of hard knocks, and that what it would cost me was my youth, my naiveté, that this would be replaced by the proverbial older and wiser outlook on the world, something that would come in handy for me as I dispensed advice to younger folks.
But the Wisdom that Jesus embodies and invites us into is not really that kind of Wisdom.
The Holy Wisdom that Jesus is and entices us into is more like a kind second naiveté, a radical and humble dependence on God which leads to a fresh and active responsiveness to the world.
This Holy Wisdom does not come without a cost. We do have to give something up to enter it. We have to “get over ourselves.” We have to get over our overly narrow and restrictive way of seeing the world and its possibilities, we have to give up the rigid positions that we may have acquired from some of our sessions in the school of hard knocks, we have to give up the burdensome expectations we have of ourselves and others, and finally, we have to give up our need to control the future. We have to get over ourselves.
But when we do get over ourselves, when we learn to live bit by bit within God’s Holy Wisdom, what can come to us is a kind of bearable lightness of being—a lightness that comes from rediscovering that all around us is gift, is grace upon grace that we and others did not earn but that has our name on it all the same. Grace upon grace.
Yesterday morning I took a walk with Teddy on the back of Queen Anne Hill. I fell off a ladder a week ago and am still aching from it as well as beating myself up for being on that ladder in the first place. You might call it my most recent school of hard knocks. But I decided that aches or not, we were going for that walk.
I decided to go down a street I hadn’t walked down before, and I noticed a small bungalow of a house coming up on my right surrounded by a wonderful effusive Seattle garden. But what is more, the owners of house had not stopped with the yard proper. They had decided to extend their lush plantings to the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street. And so walking by their house was like walking into refreshment, as a complete stranger, being led both into the beauty of nature and into the generosity of those who had taken the time to do the plantings. As I walked on (and, believe me, I didn’t to walk on) I looked back at the house and noticed a small oval plaque hung beside the door bearing one word: “Grace.”
And so to come full circle, I’m still on a quest for wisdom, but it’s not for the lessons learned and advice I might give others from my time in the school of hard knocks. Rather my quest which I hope is your quest has something to do with opening our eyes to all that is around us, to the grace given and, therefore, the grace asked of us—to the bearable lightness of being that God wants us to have as we live and work, as we do difficult and important things.
And so:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)….
Works Cited or Consulted
T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” from The Four Quartets
