NOTES for Mat 11:20-30

Why do wisdom and understanding become an obstacle to salvation? Why was this God's good pleasure? We are used to seeing wisdom and understanding as a source of virtue. And this habit is not groundless, for every culture, and culture is precisely what forms our habits, is built on the multiplication of what is reasonable. This includes biblical culture: in it, understanding becomes an indispensable condition for knowing God, and therefore for salvation: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding" (Prov. 9:10). And this is very understandable to us.

But then Christ comes, and it turns out that something here is not right. Let us try to understand what exactly. Let us turn again to the book of Proverbs, this truly chief canonical book devoted to reason: "Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, and the man who gains understanding, for her profit is better than the profit of silver, and her gain than fine gold" (Prov. 3:13,14). And again: "Get wisdom, get understanding; do not forget, and do not turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, and she will preserve you; love her, and she will keep you. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding. Exalt her, and she will promote you; she will bring you honor when you embrace her. She will place on your head an ornament of grace; she will deliver to you a crown of glory" (Prov. 4:5-9). In these quotations, the greatness of the human being clothed with reason is expressed in the most obvious way.

Greatness... Yes, but Christ calls us to humility, for He Himself is meek and humble in heart. And for what purpose? The weightiest answer would come from the same book of Proverbs. Precisely while singing of human reason, it suddenly says, as if by chance: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding" (Prov. 3:5). With Christ, this glimmer will become a radiant stream of light, the stream of love ready to humble itself before its Beloved, because it wants nothing else.

At the end of today's Gospel reading we hear an astonishing word from the Lord Jesus Christ, one that is rather difficult to translate into Russian. Our Synodal text offers the rendering "I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth". The Slavonic text is closer to the original, saying "I confess You, Father". In Greek the verb here is exomologeo, literally meaning "to agree, to promise, to acknowledge, to confess." The Latin translation gives us the verb confiteor, which chiefly means "to acknowledge, to confess." It is important to listen closely to this word, because its shades of meaning help us understand what the "confession" of the One God is, the confession to which we are called.

So the Lord turns to the Father with thanksgiving because the mystery of salvation, the mystery of faith, rejected by Capernaum and other cities, rejected by the wise and understanding, has been revealed to infants in faith, to people who are simplehearted and straightforward. This is truly a gift of the Father's good pleasure, mercy toward us. At the same time it is a manifestation of God's great wisdom, because one cannot come to the Almighty with pride and self-satisfaction. What translation options do we see, taking the possible shades of meaning into account?

"I praise You, Father" is the most capacious Russian option, chosen by the authors of the Synodal text. It is a proclamation of God's greatness and an announcement of His glory, His presence, and His rule in the world. This aspect was central in the Old Testament tradition and remains central in the New Testament tradition. "I agree with You, Father" is another option, and a very important one in our standing before God. After all, one can become a participant in God's life only by agreeing that God's work is beautiful. The aspect of acknowledgment is also important in this word. We confess what we have done, but here, of course, that is not what is meant. One possible translation is, "I confess my love to You, Father"; it is suggested by the excellent interlinear translation of the Russian Bible Society, published in 2001. And New Testament Greek also uses this verb in the sense of promising, of making vows. "I promise to be faithful to You, Father..." is how this shade of meaning can be expressed.

So the text of today's Gospel gives us several inseparably connected aspects of what the confession of faith is. It is praise of God, acknowledgment of His Truth and Wisdom, love for Him, and a promise of faithfulness to Him. This, apparently, is the worship in Spirit and truth to which we are all called. And it is also important that all of this, especially the promise of faithfulness, requires active service to the One whom we praise, by whose wisdom we are guided, whom we love, and to whom we are faithful.

The cities in which the Lord preached and performed miracles did not accept Him. Most of the Jews to whom the word of God had been entrusted hardened themselves against Christ. Does the terrible warning from the Gospel of Matthew not refer to them: "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them" (Matt 7:18-20)?

But it also refers to us. We too have heard His word and read the Gospel. And we call ourselves His people and preserve the faith handed down to us from the Apostles. But a tree is known by its fruit, and the fruit may fail to match the Gardener's expectations. Let us therefore be attentive to ourselves.

Christ rebukes the very cities whose inhabitants had already seen His works and heard His word. The rebukes sound severe; it was not easy for the inhabitants of those cities, who were certainly present, to accept the comparison that they were worse than the Gentiles, since Tyre and Sidon were not only strongholds of paganism but also major ports, with all the sin that usually took root in such places. Even so, their inhabitants were placed above the pious residents of the cities where Jesus' preaching had sounded, but had "merely" not been heard.

This is not about who should be sentenced to what degree of punishment, or about which sins are more serious, but about responsibility for preserving the truth that has been received. The "if" spoken in relation to Tyre and Sidon was not simply a contrast between one group of sinners and another, but also a prophecy of the coming repentance and conversion of the Gentiles.

Centuries have passed, and now it is useful for us, the heirs of the Church's centuries-long experience, to ask ourselves from time to time: do these severe warnings, originally addressed only to Jews, now apply to us? Do we routinely let pass by our ears what should shake us and turn us upside down? What if many of those whom we are used to seeing as ungodly, once they repent, become more receptive to the Word of God?

Jesus' comparison of the cities where He preached with ancient cities known for their looseness and immorality may at first glance seem excessively harsh. But it seems so only at first glance.

It would seem that one cannot compare people who, even if they reject the Messiah, are nevertheless religious and, in their own way within that religiosity, pious, with the immoral, for whom God's commandments are an empty sound. But things are not so simple. Indeed, every sinner who sins openly knows who he is and what he is doing. He may not think he is doing something sinful; he may not understand at all what sin and righteousness are. But he has no doubts or delusions about the essence of what he is doing. If such a person, under the influence of some internal or external factors, decides that what he is doing is sin, he has every chance to change the situation, because he does not mistake sin for righteousness.

That is why, as we can see, Jesus says that if the residents of cities known for their looseness and depravity had seen what the people surrounding Jesus saw, they would have repented of everything and turned back. They were not deceived about themselves. But those who heard Jesus and saw the miracles He performed were being crafty and deceiving themselves. Many of the Pharisees, for example, tried to assure not only themselves but others too that they rejected Jesus and His witness for purely principled reasons, and not at all from a desire to protect their own religious and theological tradition, which was dearer and more important to them than the Messiah and the Kingdom.

Such self-deception became a spiritual dead end. There was no reason to count on quick repentance and conversion here if sinners considered themselves righteous people and defenders of orthodoxy. Hidden sin is always more frightening than obvious sin. It is no accident that Jesus thanks the Father for revealing this to infants: the wise and understanding are too dependent on their tradition, while the "infants" are not burdened by it and perceive everything more simply and clearly.

As we can see, every tradition is spiritually ambivalent: it can help a person on the path into the Kingdom, and it can also hinder him on that path. And if one must choose, it is better to have no tradition at all than to have one that hinders, because no tradition, even the most ancient and profound, is worth more than the Kingdom.

It is strange to hear that what is inaccessible to the wise and prudent is revealed to infants. Of course, we are already used to the fact that Jesus' words contain not only a direct meaning but also a parable. And yet: how can infants contain what proved beyond the strength of the wisest?

Here Christ's words once again do not fit the logic of our everyday life. But human wisdom proclaimed already in antiquity: "I know only that I know nothing." Only by recognizing one's own limits can one hope to overcome them, and in order to begin understanding something, one must admit oneself to be ignorant. Meanwhile the scribes and Pharisees of every age find it hard to admit their own ignorance, and this pride blocks their ability to see something new with an unclouded gaze. And although the most important thing, as we know, cannot be seen with the eyes, much can be sensed by a soul not clogged with pseudo-knowledge, a soul that has preserved childlike openness.

When we hear Christ's promise to give rest to those who labor and are burdened, this rest first appears to us simply as relief from heavy labors. Only later do we remember the rest of the Seventh Day, communion with the Lord, who grants the possibility of entering His rest.

At first it looks paradoxical that Christ calls precisely those who labor and are burdened to take His yoke upon themselves. Yet this apparent contradiction is removed by the Savior Himself: He is the only One whose burden, when accepted freely, does not bend us down but straightens us up. His burden is light precisely because it gives strength and removes from us the unbearable weight of the burden of sin.

Translating this text into Russian is not easy. The Synodal translation offers the wording, "I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth." The Slavonic text is closer to the original, saying, "I confess Thee, Father." In Greek, the verb here is exomologeo, which literally means "to agree, promise, acknowledge, confess." The Latin translation gives us the verb confiteor, meaning chiefly "to acknowledge, to confess." It is important to listen to this word, because its shades of meaning help us understand what the "confession" of the One God, to which we are called, really is.

So the Lord turns to the Father with thanksgiving because the mystery of salvation, the mystery of faith, rejected by Capernaum and the other cities, rejected by the wise and understanding, has been revealed to infants in faith, to simple-hearted and straightforward people. This is truly the gift of the Father's good pleasure, mercy toward us. At the same time it is a manifestation of the great wisdom of God, because one cannot come to the Almighty with pride or self-satisfaction. What translation options do we see, then, taking the possible shades of meaning into account?

"I praise You, Father" is the most comprehensive option in Russian, chosen by the authors of the Synodal text. It is a proclamation of God's greatness and an announcement of His glory, His presence, and His rule in the world. This aspect was central in the Old Testament tradition and remains central in the New Testament tradition. "I agree with You, Father" is another option, and a very important one as we stand before God. A person can become a participant in God's life only by agreeing that God's work is beautiful. The aspect of acknowledgment is also important in this word. We confess what we have done - but that is plainly not the point here. One translation option is, "I confess my love for You, Father"; this is offered by the excellent interlinear text of the Russian Bible Society, published in 2001. And the Greek of the New Testament also uses this verb in the sense of promising, of making vows. "I promise to be faithful to You, Father..." - this is how one can express that shade of meaning.

The Gospel text gives us several inseparably connected aspects of what a confession of faith is. It is praise of God, acknowledgment of His Truth and Wisdom, love for Him, and a promise of faithfulness to Him. This is evidently the worship in Spirit and truth to which we are all called. It is also important that all of this, especially the promise of faithfulness, requires active service to the One whom we praise, by whose wisdom we are guided, whom we love, and to whom we are faithful.

Jesus sometimes describes the Kingdom in a completely astonishing, paradoxical way. What, for example, are we to make of a "good yoke" or a "light burden"! And yet such definitions very accurately describe what the Kingdom is for fallen humanity.

For a normal person, hardly anything positive can be associated with a yoke: in the original sense of the word, a yoke is a collar symbolically placed on an enslaved person as a sign of the person's new condition. And a burden is more readily associated in our minds with a weight that must be carried simply because it cannot be thrown off, and certainly not with the lightness of being. Yet for fallen human nature the Kingdom really is a burden, just as the fallen person can walk the path into the Kingdom only by taking upon himself what the learned rabbis of those times called the "yoke of the Torah."

On Jesus' lips, the "yoke of the Torah" becomes the "yoke of the Kingdom," for the same inner struggle is in view, the struggle characteristic of every fallen person who wants to walk the way of righteousness. It is no accident that Paul also said that through the Torah comes the knowledge of sin: it is precisely the attempts to walk the way of righteousness, to follow the Torah, that reveal to a person his true sinful nature, and then the way of righteousness becomes hard, and the Torah becomes a yoke voluntarily taken upon oneself.

But Jesus speaks of more: He brought into the world not the Torah, which the world knew before His coming, but the Kingdom, where the one walking the way of righteousness could finally receive relief by reaching the goal. Now even the burden of one's own sinfulness, which begins to be felt only when one tries to keep the commandments, becomes light, for now not only the fallen world is real, but also the Kingdom with its life; and the heavier one's own sin becomes, the more one senses the breath of the Kingdom easing its weight. This duality is inevitable. It will remain until the end of time, until the complete transfiguration of human nature. But this duality itself inspires hope, for it testifies that the Kingdom entering the world is not fiction, but reality.

Here there are very difficult words that require a very careful approach: they crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. These words are generally seen as a basis for every kind of asceticism. This theme itself appears very often in the Apostle Paul. There are many other words related to these: "But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal 6:14). I have heard it said that these words mean: I have died to the world and the world to me. But if the apostle had wanted to say that, he would have said exactly that, whereas he said something different.

Here is what Fr. Georgy Chistyakov says: "The point is that the Bible has no orientation toward fighting the passions. The New Testament, through the mouths of the holy apostles, calls us not to fight anger, rage, malice, and so on, but to 'put off,' that is, to take off like old clothing, or to 'strip off' all these vices from ourselves. These two words are used many times in Scripture when it speaks of passions and vices, but nowhere here is there talk of fighting the passions. One must think that everything concerning the struggle with the passions that rule over us and nest inside us entered Christian literature from Stoic and, more generally, ancient philosophy at a later time.

The holy apostles see the Christian's path not as a road of fighting the passions, but precisely as the throwing off of old clothing, as growing out of that clothing... But if we begin to take sin apart bone by bone and subject it to analysis, then we are inevitably seized or sucked in by the very process of struggle, we turn into fighters, and at that point our Christianity simply comes to an end. From the depths of our consciousness we transfer the struggle into the outside world and begin to fight everyone who, as it appears to us, thinks the wrong way, does the wrong thing, and so on."

Let us feel the important circumstance that our Lord Jesus did not derive pleasure from His suffering, the pleasure that we at times derive from our own asceticism. After all, there is such a mental disorder as masochism - that is where Freud had grounds to accuse us. And this is, in fact, essential.

Is possible to be so immodest? One ought to, if that worth the truth. Jesus is very immodest in His ministry, although He is gentle and humble in heart (V.29). If Jesus was too modest, the essence of His relation with the Father would have remained hiding to us, where and why He will have called us then for? We would have been till now considering the gulf between God and us essentially insuperable.

The Lord calls all those who are struggling and hurting to come to Him. These words are about all of us, as Alexander Blok would later write, "about all who are weary in a foreign land, about all the ships that have gone to sea, about all who have forgotten their joy." We are called to Himself by a caring God, the Father, in whose image and likeness we were created and who is hurt when we hurt. We are called to Himself by God, who knows what suffering and pain are, by Christ, who passed through more suffering than each of us and showed that even beyond death there is a breakthrough into Resurrection. The Holy Spirit awaits meeting us, God who gives rest and strength to hope and believe that the breakthrough will certainly come...

The Lord perhaps has no stronger desire than for His children to come to Him so that He can pour out all His love on them. He wants to remove our burdens from us, everything that prevents our gaze from being constantly turned toward Him, and in exchange to give us something far more precious. Something that has many names, but the main one, probably, is Love. This is the good yoke and the light burden of which He speaks. And at the same time, as Christ Himself showed us, His burden is the Cross... The Cross and the breakthrough into Resurrection: this is the real life that God offers us.

The Lord understands that we are always inclined to evade the need to make a clear choice. We find this almost physically unpleasant, and we begin to protest: Help, they are taking away our freedom! How can they do this?! What if we do not want to give an answer? This is an assault on the individual! But God does not play such games with us. He knows that freedom does not mean making no decision at all, and that what matters is not the ability to evade, but a courageous decision—agreement with either one option or the other. Of course, it is not hidden from Him that until the very end we can keep finding counterarguments and rejecting every option He offers: we do not like the place here, the time there, or the company elsewhere… Although He allows us to carry on misbehaving, He still waits persistently and with astonishing, incomprehensible patience—humanly speaking, “without losing His temper”—for the moment when we will finally make our choice. He is ready to wait until the very end, until the very last moment when we are still capable of an effort of will. All the more so because His will for our salvation must eventually be fulfilled!

The Pharisees refused to recognize either John the Baptist or the Lord Jesus Himself as messengers of God. Each of them, despite all their differences, displeased the Pharisees in some way. John the Baptist displeased them with his asceticism and his call to renew faith. The Lord... The Lord pleased them in nothing, in particular because He did not reject the repentance of sinful people whom the Pharisees considered doomed to perdition.

In reality, of course, behind this stood an unwillingness to accept the Good News, first of all because the Pharisees most wanted to look better than everyone else in their own eyes. The Gospel gives neither them nor anyone else such an opportunity. The Lord applies to them the image of children who do not weep at sad songs and do not rejoice at joyful ones. God, the Lord is saying by this, tries to communicate His word, His will, the Good News to the Pharisees in this way and that, by many different paths. But they react to nothing, and this reveals precisely their unwillingness to respond to God's call.

The point is not what John the Baptist is like or what Jesus Himself is like. Those who seek the Word of God will in one way or another be able to find and accept it, the Lord concludes with His words, "wisdom is justified by her children": some came to Christ through the Baptist's preaching, others recognized the Savior in Him for themselves... Whoever has ears and wants to hear will hear.

In our time this Gospel fragment remains exceptionally relevant. People often say: "I would believe, but..." Something is always unsatisfactory to the person who does not want to believe. Either there is too much bad in the Bible, since the truth about history is written there, or Christians are bad, or the commandments are strange... Christ's words apply precisely to such a position.

Speaking about the realization of the Kingdom of God, the evangelist clearly emphasizes Christ’s own central role in it. He proves to be the principal content of the Baptist’s proclamation—for it was precisely for this that people from all over the country came to him, not to watch the wind sway a reed in the wilderness! He stands at the center of the proclamation in the towns of Galilee: with His coming Capernaum is “exalted to heaven,” but when it refuses to hear His preaching it is “brought down to hell.” Finally, He gathers the divine law and the divine will in Himself. This can be seen in the vocabulary of the final verses of this chapter. “Weary and burdened” was what pious people called themselves when they took upon themselves the “burden” of keeping all the commandments of the Law. Thus, this is not at all about the working class going to church after work to soothe the soul through worship. Jesus, however, calls the disciples to take Him upon themselves as their “burden,” to live by Him and to serve God through Him, because unlike the fixed and unchanging commandments of the Pentateuch, His “burden” is easy and light: He has an individual approach for everyone, and in addition there are faithfulness, love, and forgiveness.

Today's reading tells us much about wisdom in the sense in which Jesus understands it. It begins with an episode describing John the Baptist's strange, at first glance, perplexity over the Savior's ministry (vv. 2-6). Indeed, the question was asked by the very man who first pointed to Jesus as the Messiah-Christ (Matt 3:13-17). And for Jesus Himself this episode became the occasion for bitter words about human wisdom. The issue is not the limitation of human reason: there is nothing terrible in such limitation in itself, for from the beginning God did not intend man to be omniscient. The issue is how and for what purpose a person uses the reason given to him by God. And fallen man, it turns out, most often uses it for self-justification and self-assertion.

The Old Testament authors look at wisdom as the art of building relationships with God and with people, as the science of righteous life. But it often happened that it degenerated into something like intellectual games serving only for entertainment and, in this sense, little different from children's games (vv. 16-17). Worst of all was that these games, taken with complete seriousness, at a critically important moment blocked the "wise men" from the living Truth that had come into the world, and blocked them from the Kingdom.

What kind of Messiah did believing Jews expect in those days? There were many messianic theological concepts, but it happened that the real Messiah did not fully fit into any of them. Even John the Baptist himself may have expected something different from the Messiah-Christ whom he had recognized.

In any case, it is impossible to please those for whom their theories are dearer than the truth: if He fasts, then He is possessed; if He does not fast, then He is a glutton, a drunkard, a sinner (vv. 18-19). Here only one thing matters: does the person being evaluated meet the criteria of "one of us," does he fit within the framework of the concept or not? If not, then one can always find reasons to declare such a person "wrong," a sinner, a violator of the Torah, and a servant of Satan. And supporters of the "right" theory will always be able to justify its "rightness" (v. 19). Only at the Judgment such "theorists" will have a harder time than those who simply sinned without any theories (vv. 20-24). This is, in general, not surprising: the wise person who has used his wisdom for evil bears greater responsibility than the one who makes no claim to any wisdom.