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In our Gospel for last week we had some “hard sayings” of Jesus—sayings about not loving father or mother or son or daughter more than Jesus; sayings about taking up our cross and following Jesus. Today, by contrast, our Gospel gives us some comforting sayings of Jesus—in fact, these verses were even called the “Comfortable Words” in the 1928 Prayer Book version of the Eucharist. Jesus says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Those are comforting words indeed; and yet, just before Jesus gets to them, he says some other words that strike me as kind of a hard saying after all: “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.” Now, when I hear those words—and maybe this is true for some of you, too—my first reaction is, “Hey, wait a minute! What’s so bad about being wise and intelligent? I happen to think it’s pretty good to be wise and intelligent. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort and money in school and in college and in seminary to become wise and intelligent. Don’t go telling me that the revelation of God is hidden from the wise and the intelligent! That doesn’t seem very fair!” So these words leave me with a question: What was it about Jesus that the wise and intelligent couldn’t see? What was it that made them cling to their weariness and their heavy burdens and refuse to come to Jesus and take on his easy yoke and learn the lightness of God’s love from him?

Well, when you put it that way, the answer is almost immediately obvious: The revelation of God in Jesus was hidden from the wise and the intelligent because they thought they already knew about God everything they needed to know. The wise and the intelligent—which in Jesus’ time meant the scribes and the Pharisees and the teachers of the law and the priests—the wise and the intelligent had spent a great deal of time studying God’s will as it was revealed in the Torah, they’d spent a great deal of time praying to God in the formal rituals of the Temple liturgy, they’d spent a great deal of time—especially the Pharisees—interpreting and expanding on the Torah so that its rules for holiness could be applied to every single aspect of daily life. They knew the way to please God inside and out. So when this uneducated carpenter’s son from Nazareth shows up, telling them that what matters is not that you know how to please God, but that you know God is pleased with you, what matters is knowing God loves you, and God wants to love you into becoming the whole person that God gave you the potential to be, and God wants you to share that love in order to build a community of right relationships and well-being and compassion and joy for everyone—when Jesus shows up, offering a new wisdom about God, the wise and the intelligent don’t want to hear it. They’ve invested so much in the intelligence about God they’ve built up for themselves that they don’t want to see the new thing God is doing in Jesus. They are so sure of their own wisdom about God that they don’t want to know the deeper wisdom God is offering to share with them in Jesus. In the end, it’s not God who hides the revelation of Jesus from the wise and the intelligent, but the wise and the intelligent who hide it from themselves.

And that’s the part of today’s Gospel that goes right to my heart. That’s when I have to stop myself and ask, “And when have I been so sure of my wisdom and intelligence, when have I been so sure that I know what God wants and God demands and God expects, that I have missed the love and the learning and the rest-from-weariness and the sheer gift of deeper wisdom that Jesus wants to share with me? How often have I been so sure I knew what I had to do for God that I have hidden from myself the revelation of what God is doing for me and in me and through me for others?” And I know the answer to that question is: I’ve hidden it from myself more often than I care to admit.

And I think that’s probably true of a lot of us. Like the scribes and the Pharisees and the teachers of the law and the priests, we can get so caught up in what we think God wants from us, that we end up hiding from ourselves the wonderful things that God is already doing, the unfolding of God’s grace and God’s mercy and God’s love all around us, the invitation from God to join with Jesus and to set our minds on the Spirit and to live from the deep wellspring of grace that is always already there for us in Christ. The invitation of the Gospel to us today is to hear Jesus say, “Come to me; learn from me; put down the heavy burdens you impose upon yourselves; and let God love you into becoming the people God wants you to be.”

And that’s a message many of us need to hear, over and over and over again. I knew a woman once who said that for most of her life, she was absolutely sure that what God wanted from her was that she should be a caregiver for other people—it was her wisdom, her intelligence about herself, that God’s vocation for her was to support other people so that they could grow and flourish in the gifts and skills and talents and potentials that God had given to them. And she was a very good caregiver; she had a genuine compassion and a spontaneous generosity that touched the hearts of everyone who knew her. So she built her life around being a good daughter for her parents, and a good wife for her husband, and a good mother for her children. And for many years that brought her a very deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. But she reached a point in mid-life, she told me, when she realized she’d never made an important life decision all on her own, for her own reasons—all her decisions had been based on what would help bring out the potentials of her parents or her husband or her children or her church or her community or anybody but her. And she began to wonder if maybe God had given her gifts and skills and talents and potentials, too, and maybe God wanted her to grow and flourish and become someone more than she had been. At first, she said, she was afraid that was a very selfish thought, suddenly thinking about herself rather than the people all around her. But the more she thought about it and prayed about it and wrote in her journal about it, and talked to her prayer group about it, the more she became convinced that God was calling her to a new phase in her life, a new stage of growth where she would love herself, not instead of loving others but as well as loving others, a time to love herself as she loved her neighbor. It was a big change for her, and not an easy way to adjust her self-image, it wasn’t easy to go beyond what she’d always thought God wanted from her; but she told me it was as if she had heard Jesus say to her, “Come to me, you who are weary and carrying a heavy burden; lay down the burden you have imposed upon yourself; and learn from me the love that will help you become more the you God wants you to be—and in the process become an even more loving person.”

My friend had to give up one kind of wisdom, one kind of intelligence, one idea about what God wanted from her, in order to be able to receive the revelation of a deeper wisdom, another kind of intelligence, a bigger idea of what God wanted for her. And that call of Jesus—that call to come to him, and lay down the burdens of our ideas of what God wants, and to take on his yoke of learning the realities of what God gives—that call of Jesus comes to all of us. That call comes to the man (like Paul in the Epistle) who has always thought that what God wanted from him was the highest moral purity and the strictest ethical behavior, and who is shocked and surprised to discover that God has called him to a place where the most important thing of all is mercy, and not insisting on the letter of the law, and practicing the difficult art of forgiveness. That call comes to the elderly couple who have always been used to doing things for themselves and taking care of their own needs and calling their own shots, and who discover that God has brought them to a place where they need to accept the things that others do for them, and rely on the care that others give to them, and be thankful for the chance to let someone else have the joy of being the instrument of God’s grace for them. That call comes to the parish community that’s always thought God’s will for them is best summed up in the words We’ve always done it that way, and who find quite to their surprise that God has put them in a place where new things are happening, and new doors for ministry are opening, and new potentials are being revealed, and new people want to hear Good News. That call of Jesus comes to us, to you and to me, here and now, today—and how do you hear Jesus calling you?

Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens.” All we have to do is take that first step.

In the Name of God: the Holy One, the Holy Word, the Holy Spirit. Amen.