Calling Jesus Names....And hearing our own (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30) Jerrod H. Hugenot

Have you been to the movies lately? A new Disney/Pixar film called WALL-E awaits you, but, for a children’s film, it might seem a bit bleak at first. A jaunty tune plays, juxtaposed over a junk-filled landscape. Set sometime in the future, abandoned by the human race, Earth is desolate, with only robots left to clean up the trash. The camera zeroes in on a robot toiling away, gathering trash, compacting it into neat little cubes, and then busily stacking the cubes into piles taller than the skyscrapers of the abandoned city. Day in and day out, the robot (perhaps the last one still functioning) gathers, compacts, and stacks the seemingly endless trash.

Yet, there is still that music playing away, the song drifting across the dunes of rust and refuse. The little robot itself turns out to be the source of the music, playing the song on a tape deck augmented onto its body. The robot gathers curious trinkets of a human race in absentia, collecting light bulbs, garden gnomes, Rubik’s cubes, old videotapes that the robot retrofits to play on an I-pod screen. The little robot, known as “WALL-E” (Waste Allocation Load Lifter—Earth class) but sounds more like “Wally”, has created a homey little life for itself, doing his work and then returning to a storage bunker at night to entertain itself (and its little cockroach friend) with whatever “treasures” it has found that day.

The apocalyptic scene is not due to war or atomic devastation. Instead, the earth has fallen victim to humanity’s consumerism and thoughtless treatment of the world’s resources. Oh yeah, humanity still exists, off in the stars, living a plump and vacuous existence on a colony ship, and so with some irony, it is implied that WALL-E is the most “human” character of the film, finding beauty and meaning even in the middle of the abandoned public square.

Jesus said,

But 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.’

Jesus is under duress, insulted by his detractors among the religious establishment. Fiery old John the Baptist is tossed in prison, and all indications are evident that Jesus is somewhere near the top of the list to go there next. Called all sorts of names, dismissed by the recognized religious “powers that be”, Jesus is being disregarded and considered an irrelevant nuisance. Even John has started to wonder himself, struggling with the jailhouse blues.

Jesus sends word back to depressed John. “Go and tell John what you hear and see,” he tells John’s disciples, “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

Jesus is frustrated with the inattentiveness of those around him. The religious leaders think him an unclean, unorthodox lout who mixes too casually with the folks from the wrong side of the tracks. The people around him (even his own disciples) keep thinking that Jesus ought to be something “more”, trying to pigeonhole him into the most expected understandings of “messiah”. He has shown his message through his teachings, healings, and other acts of ministry, yet the people around him seem complacent with their own expectations and disinclined to see something else being possible as the sign that God’s kingdom was being brought about. God is hearing the mournful pain of the world in Jesus’ ministry. The tune of messianic hope sounds out in Jesus’ words and deeds, yet few wish to rise up and join the dance.

A little later in the film, WALL-E finds itself blasted off into space, and soon on the colony ship where he encounters the descendants of the human race. Floating around in lounge chairs, busily chatting away to a computer screen hovering in front of their faces (sometimes to the person right beside them!), these humans are big, doughy grownup babies, uncertain what to do if the screen shuts off or they fall out of their floating chairs. They are so caught up in their comfort that several hundred of them can be around the ship’s hospitality area and never realize once that it was created for them to exercise, play games, or even wade in the area’s huge swimming pool.

The captain of the ship, likewise obese and oblivious, is charged with preparing the ship for a return to earth once any evidence comes back that life has returned to earth. When a probe returns with a plant sample, the captain is dumbfounded at the thought that seven centuries later, they could return. More perplexing, however, is the captain’s lack of knowledge about what life on earth looks like. Not just the sea, the soil, and the vegetation, but the culture of a people who work, play, and live out the day-to-day life that was once the common experience of human existence. The captain becomes enraptured as the ship computer continues to answer his questions patiently, explaining simple things like how plants grow and “how to dance”.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus and his disciples are seen as outsiders. Jesus freely moves among those otherwise written off by Temple and Empire alike. The claim that the blind, the lame, the deaf, the dead, and the poor are evidence of Jesus’ ministry would be an encouraging word to John and a befuddling riddle to the establishment. John came preaching a message of repentance, and Jesus came preaching of a Kingdom of heaven. The parables, the miracles, the healings, the other times of teaching, all of this works together to be signs of God at work in the world. Yet, only a few were stirred enough in their encounters with Jesus to learn the Gospel-shaped life that Christ offers. As Jesus would say, “Those with ears to hear, listen!”

Jesus says,

“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.”

A healthy religion asks hard questions of us. While Jesus is offering an open-handed invitation to discipleship, he also speaks of us taking up his yoke. Yokes were used to hitch up animals like oxen to plows and till the ground. Jesus emphasizes the lightness of this labor, yet one might shy away from the idea of being tethered. To be a disciple of Jesus means to reorient one’s way of thinking and living. You take seriously a worldview that finds the poor and the dispossessed to be the blessed ones among us. You read the Sermon on the Mount not as wishful thinking but as an invitation to live more freely. You start finding yourself yearning for things to be “as on earth as it is in heaven”.

I find that there is a certain danger to religion becoming a list of duties, responsibilities, and a vague sense of guilt to go along with it. Later in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 23, Jesus offers a criticism of the Pharisees and scribes, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them”. Garrison Keillor once described his religious upbringing in a very conservative pietistic Christianity as the type of religion where “you never felt like you were forgiven, just on parole”. The saying of Jesus here is a note of grace to those who take his words to heart. Words of grace, not guilt, are the signposts along which the Christian disciple follows the path set before them.

The yoke given by Christ is not one that diminishes or wears us down. Jesus does not burden us, even if his followers inadvertently told you something to the contrary along the way. Indeed, if you take Matthew’s word, taking this yoke offered to you allows a person to start a different sort of pace to life. We go about living the life of the gospel, tending this broken world, hearing a graceful little tune that causes us to find a bit of beauty in life. We move along to the rhythms of the Gospel, helping till the indifferent soil of the human heart so that the kingdom of heaven might take root.