NOTES for Mat 11:27

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.

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.

The inhabitants of the towns where Jesus' signs and wonders had been shown did not believe in Him, while among His disciples were "infants" - simple, uneducated people, often with an "imperfect" past: the sick, the unclean, the desperate, the "poor in spirit." This brings us face to face with the question of knowing God and receiving true faith. It turns out that miracles play a very small role in the inner upheaval that the Gospel calls repentance. God can be known only when He reveals Himself: the Son reveals the Father, and the Father brings people to faith in the Son. This revelation is a kind of inner miracle, a sign invisible to others and often even to the person himself. It happens in the experience of rest that the Lord Jesus gives to those who "labor and are heavy laden," in an intuitive encounter with the One who is truly meek, when a person's life becomes discipleship under Christ and the acquiring of a humble heart.

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.