Dr. H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
April 6, 2008

THE DAZZLING DARKNESS; THE EASY YOKE

Texts: Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 6:19, 24-29 (From the Old Testament Apocrypha, written around 200 BC); Matthew 11:25-26, 28-30

        We have at the end of Matthew 11 two of the most sublime and profound sayings of Jesus, a prayer and an invitation.  They are found only in Matthew.  I entitle them: The Dazzling Darkness and the Easy Yoke.

I

        First the prayer:
        I thank you, Abba,
        Lord of heaven and earth,
        that you have hidden these things
        from the wise and intelligent
        and revealed them to little ones;
        Yes, Abba, for such was your gracious will.
       
“Give thanks in everything!”  Paul wrote, and this sounds a bit too pious or pollyanna.  But Jesus gives us eyes to see more deeply.  Henry Vaughan, seventeenth-century Welsh poet, wrote:

        There is in God (some say),
        A deep but dazzling darkness.
Jesus shows us the deep but dazzling darkness.
        This prayer is a window into the spirituality of Jesus tested by life.  The tide was turning against him.  He knew it was serious, as serious as a Roman cross, and he prays, I thank you, Abba.

        Abba was how he began all of his prayers recorded in the Gospels, save one, his prayer from the cross which quoted Psalm 22.

        Abba, Father, he prayed with the confidence, intimacy and trust of a child to a perfectly loving parent.  “Beloved” might be as good a translation as I know.

        “I thank you, Abba,” then added a familiar Jewish description of God: “Lord of heaven and earth.”  And he goes on:

        ...that you have hidden these things
        from the wise and intelligent
        and revealed them to babes, to little ones;
        yes, Abba, for such was your gracious will.
       
        Jesus was looking at a great reversal of fortune.  He came proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom: The kingdom of the heavens has drawn near!  He preached, taught and healed in the power of that kingdom.  But here is what was happening: The wise and intelligent, the best and the brightest, the people of power, privilege and position were saying no.  Some were already seeking to destroy him.

        And this was happening.  There were those who were saying yes: The nepioi, the little ones, sometimes translated “babes” or “infants.”  The ones of little status or position, women, children, outcast, sinner, the poor, the sick and unclean -- those Jesus called the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, those hungering and thirsting for God’s righteousness, God’s justice.  Flannery O’Conner once wrote: “You accept grace the quickest when you have the least.”¹

        “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of the heavens,” Jesus said in Matthew 18 (Matthew 18:3).  Come, he was saying, with your need, like the simple need of a child.  Come with your hunger.  Come with your life a blank slate ready to be written by God.  Come with eyes wide open to wonder.

        The wise and powerful were turning against Jesus and the little ones were saying yes.  Everything was changing, and Jesus prayed, “Yes, Abba, for such was your gracious will.”

        No matter what!  Jesus was saying, praying.  No matter what, I will thank you and trust in your will.  No matter how dark the future, I will trust in your gracious will:

        There is in God (some say),
        A deep but dazzling darkness.
       
        Some people think of God’s will as a fixed immutable law, and history an unfolding of God’s precise plan.  But perhaps God’s will is more dynamic than that, because the life God made is itself is more dynamic.  Ulrich Luz, New Testament scholar, in his commentary on Matthew says that the most Jewish way to understand Jesus’ words is to translate: Yes, Abba, for such became your gracious will.  Such has become your gracious will.²

        God’s will is a dynamic reality at work in a universe where freedom and chance, moral choice and random event are part of the fabric of reality.  It is there from the smallest cell to the “ruins of time,” as one historian described human history, to galaxies in space.

        God’s will is like what Joseph said to his brothers who had sold him into slavery in Egypt.  Years later they came to Egypt for food and discovered that the prince before whom they stood was their brother.  They were afraid that he would take revenge upon them.  But Joseph said:        

Do not be afraid!  For am I in the place of God?  No you, you planned ill against me, (but) God planned-it-over for good.

                                                Genesis 50:14-20 (Everett Fox translation)
It is what Paul was able to see when he said:

I know that in everything, God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.

                                                Romans 8:28
It was how God could use even the hideous cross for the redemption of the world.
        God’s gracious will is at work in the midst of it all, including chance.  Chance happens at the cellular level, in chromosomes and weather systems and meteor flight.  There is weal and woe, health and sickness, good fortune and ill.  And God is at work in it all, toward what Acts 3:21 calls the restoration, the completion, the apokatastasis, of all things. 

        This is the deep but dazzling darkness.  Howard Thurmond reports the experience of deep sea divers who penetrate through waters of complete blackness and begin to panic, but then as they descend their eyes slowly begin to pick up “the luminous quality of the darkness.”³  Their fear is relaxed.  Jesus has reached this place in his prayer.

        Priest/cosmologist Michael Heller was given recently the 1.6-million-dollar Templeton Prize for his work in science and philosophy.  In a New York Times article he says that the religious objection to teaching evolution is “one of the greatest misunderstandings” because “it introduces a contradiction or opposition between God and chance.”⁴  God the Creator is still at work creating, incorporating everything, including chance, into the divine plan for the redemption, the restoration, the completion of all, when all things will be one and God will be “all in all.”

        Jesus, facing a great reversal and looming cross, prays
        I thank you, Abba,
        Lord of heaven and earth,
        that you have hidden these things
        from the wise and intelligent
        and revealed them to babes;
        yes, Abba, for such was your gracious will.
       

II

        Now the invitation:
        Come unto me, you who are weary and heavy laden,
                and I will give you rest.
        Take my yoke upon you and learn of me;
        for I am gentle and lowly in heart,
        and you will find rest for your souls.
        For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

The easy yoke is a paradox like the dazzling darkness.  Jesus’ way is the most demanding I know.  I’m not sure we ever get there, not in full.  So how can it be easy?

        It is easy because of the nature of the one who fashions it for us: Jesus, who is gentle and lowly in heart.  He knows our frame.  He understands our weakness.  He is kinder to us than we are to ourselves, far kinder.

        It is easy because it is fitted to our nature, not just our human nature but our own specific temperament and abilities.  It is a yoke designed specifically for us.  French priest, the Abbe de Tourville, had a breakdown early in his career because he attempted a spiritual path too strenuous for him, placed on him not by Jesus but by others.  When he recovered he discovered the way Christ offered him, one that fit his temperament, his own strengths and weakness, a way generous and kind.⁵

        The yoke is easy because it matches the reality of our life.  Wendell Berry writes: “there is relief and freedom in knowing what is real,”⁶ the givens which “come to me to us out to the perennial nature of the world.”  We struggle and strain against what is real, even rebel at times, but there is indeed relief and freedom in knowing what is real.

        The yoke is easy because Jesus bears it with us, like a two-ox yoke, we side by side with Jesus.
        The yoke is easy because we are becoming as we wear it our true self.  The false self chafes under it.  It does not fit.  It feels too heavy, but as we put Christ’s yoke on we begin to discover our true self for which it was made.

        There is a legend about the birds, that at in the beginning they had no wings.  At first when given their wings they rebelled.  The wings were too heavy, a burden to carry on their backs, too much for their spindly legs.  But then they saw a bird at flight.  Jesus is the bird we’ve seen at flight.

       
        “Come unto me, you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  It is the rest of one who has discovered the deepest wisdom of their life and of life itself, the wisdom of God that brings healing, wholeness and peace.

        The book of Sirach, written two hundred years before Christ, develops the image of the Wisdom of God as the daughter of God.  Her name is Wisdom, Hochma in the Hebrew.  We see this image as far back as the book of Proverbs.  Listen to the words from Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, as it is sometimes called:

        Come to her like one who plows and sows
                and wait for her good harvest....
        Put your feet in her fetters
                and your neck in her collar....
        Come to her with all your soul
                and keep her ways with all your might....
        And when you get hold of her
                do not let her go.
        For at last you will find the rest she gives,  
                and she will be changed into joy for you.
        Then her fetters will becomes to you a strong defense
                and her collar a glorious robe.
                                                Sirach 6:19, 24-29
       
Jesus is the wisdom, the Hochma, the daughter of God made flesh.  The yoke he offers will become our strong defense, a glorious robe, our rest.  As St. Augustine prayed, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”

       
        Where we discover the easy yoke and put it on, it is an experience of grace, like a writer finding at last the right word, the right line.  This is how Annie Dillard describes it:

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace.  It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.  You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then -- and only then -- it is handed to you.  From the corner of your eye you see motion.  Something is moving through the air and headed your way.  It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings.  It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it.  If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park.  It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.⁷

       
This is the deep but dazzling darkness, this is the easy yoke.  And by the grace of God and the grace of life itself, it is headed our way.  Even now.

¹ Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), p. 291.
² Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8-20 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), p. 162.
³ Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. viii.
⁴ New York Times, March 13, 2008.
⁵ Abbe de Tourville, Letters of Direction (Wilton: Morehouse, Barlow, 1939), p. 9.
⁶ Standing by Words (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), p. 200.
⁷ Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), p. 75.