How to Defy Expectations with Hope
Proper 9A | Genesis 24, Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
Last week’s terror no doubt lingers. When Abraham took his son up a mountain intending to offer him as a sacrifice. We can imagine the nightmares that followed. For both of them. But mostly for Isaac. He was to be the victim. And in a very real way, he was anyway. For one does not simply move on from such horror without psychic residue. I mean, we try, but doctors’ offices are filled with people who tried to ignore the pain of trauma.
Scripture doesn’t dwell on these things, but it is there nonetheless. It’s unavoidable. You can find trauma responses peaking out through the cracks. We see it in the last line of Genesis 24, “So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.”
This is our only marker of his grief. But it is so telling, isn’t it?
The text doesn’t offer a timeframe for these chapters, but it might be a decade that passes between chapter 22 and 24. From the boy who went up the mountain with his dad to the following chapter, which measures the death of Isaac’s mother, Sarah, and Abraham’s seeking land to bury her on. It doesn’t say that Isaac is grieving his mother, but it doesn’t need to. Nor does it need to explain how strained the father’s relationship to his son has become. How his son turned to his mother for comfort. How her absence is felt so differently by these two men now.
After Abraham is Gone
There’s something, too, in the father’s meddling. He wants to get his affairs in order because he also is not long for this world. He wants to make sure his heir, his true heir, has a wife, offspring, protection.
This is natural, isn’t it? Familiar? Even if this isn’t your life or my life, this is a family dynamic we all know. And it is one that takes center stage in the narrative, which is all the more true as the narrative stresses the details of real estate in chapter 23 and the dowry negotiation in chapter 24. These particular elements charge this moment like the ice clinking in a glass can enhance the tension of a conversation.
And what this narrative reveals are real characters with depth and familiarity. We get the meddling dad and the distant son. A son who seems to be rejecting the project that nearly cost him his life and yet seems to have cost him his father. And we meet a young woman, Rebekah, who seems comparatively eager to engage in a measure that makes up for Isaac’s disengagement.
We could take these pieces in so many directions because they play with honor codes, gender, and societal expectations. And this is so very much like the character of God, who rejects those same concepts with spectacular grace.
Shortly after Isaac marries Rebekah, Abraham dies. And his first son, Ishmael, will be there to help bury him, surrounded by sons. And Isaac has none.
The Truth is Particular
I’ve long sensed a tendency from the church to want conclusions to draw from every excerpt of scripture we read. As if there is a strong, singular moral teaching to be had from part of a chapter from Genesis. It’s a weird expectation. And just as weird is the inverse, which seems content to draw nothing from these moments. This is why I think our focus on details, actions, and behaviors can give us a profound sense of character. And just as importantly, a sense of what the story seems to value.
As much as the institution values the genealogy and the path that ensures an heir is found, the blessing is passed down, the covenant is maintained, it is the distance from it that makes Isaac a more compelling figure than we take him for. Rebekah’s keenness is similarly telling. That neither of these two is moved by tradition or their own families nearly as much as their parents are, or offspring are for that matter, is also telling. These are people who know suffering and because they accept this opportunity, they also know love.
A Teaching Moment
We’ve got a two-for-one today. Because our gospel is really different and I’m not sure I can connect them seamlessly, so I’m not going to try. We’ll jump in and see where it goes.
Jesus has just prepared his disciples to go out into the world as apostles, telling them that they are like laborers in the fields and that God will be with them in the work. And then he moves forward, teaching and healing. And some of the disciples of John the Baptist come along to check on him. And it isn’t a super friendly check-up. It’s more like a what-the-heck-is-he-doing kind of deal.
This exchange between Jesus and John’s disciples and then the crowds is important because it allows Jesus to shift the attention from himself to the common work of the people. It’s like in sports: it’s easy to blame the coach for a team’s losing and not deal with the toxic fanbase that makes the players hate playing there or the owner who refuses to build a good team.
Then Jesus gives a poignant illustration to the crowd.
“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.’
It is such judgement. There is no generosity or understanding or meeting somewhere where they are at in this. It’s entirely setting expectations and determining that they have not been met.
In the same tone, this is not to judge children or to judge the people by calling them children (and therefore using such a thing as an insult, thereby insulting children). Jesus has the opposite view of children. He believes adults should be more like children, not less.
Jesus is making this a teaching moment for everyone.
Judgement and Expectation
We are familiar with sayings like “there are two sides to every story” which is an attempt to say that there are often two bodies to inhabit in an exchange between two people. So the one who plays the flute and the one who does not dance. Of course, there are often people who observe the exchange and each of these people have their own upbringings which determine their understanding of the moment. A son who was almost sacrificed for no reason, for example, has PTSD that nobody else has. My guess is he’s not dancing. And probably not on the side of those kids who expect people to.
Another way to describe this, though, is to speak to how individualistic this expectation is. To say I played the flute, why didn’t you dance? Umm…because I don’t dance? Like, why is that even your expectation, dude? Why don’t you dance?
But we do see this expectation a lot. This is the “I was in trouble and nobody noticed” thing. And when that’s you? It stinks. It stinks to not be noticed.
The thing about this move, however, to expect others to notice, is that it creates an expectation for everyone who isn’t you. Or for particular people who aren’t you. And this isn’t participatory. It is to produce the conditions which justify judgment rather than to build the conditions which produce participation in each other’s lives. It is to want without giving and judging without communicating.
Jesus is Particular
I think the sin Jesus is trying to describe here has multiple dimensions to it. It isn’t generic judgment, which could be too easily applied to what he is doing. He is speaking to a relationship posture which leads people to dysfunction. And what it is about it that causes us to break with one another.
The way some people expect others to serve them is one. He also offers another: the idea that John should be condemned for following tradition too closely and Jesus for not following it close enough. The ol’ Goldilocks Phenomenon. Gotta get that adherence to tradition just right or total judgement is coming your way!
And here I think we ought to remind ourselves of the historical moment Jesus is in with these crowds. How oppressed they were by Roman occupation and how removed they felt from their own tradition. Remember how Rome would bribe the leaders of occupied countries to keep the people docile. How they protected the temple structure to ensure precisely that kind of false peace by subordination. So that the people Jesus is talking to include some of the people judging and some of the people being judged and that he wants them all to learn from this. He wants them all to see a way forward.
Our Particularity
I think it’s the same for us, too. That we might see a way forward here and now.
And it always starts from these teachings and the particularity of our contexts. That each of us and all of us have different experiences, but we can know something about what others are going through. And because of that, we can peer into their story and see some of our own. That we can see ourselves in Isaac or Rebekah. Or perhaps in the one playing the music or the ones not dancing. In John or Jesus. That we can see it and know what that feels like and want to participate in a life that connects us.
Because of that particularity. It isn’t the same as ours. But it reveals a way of seeing in a context that can help us see how it might work in a different one.
If the sin is the dysfunction: the judgement and isolation: then the grace is the function. It’s the love and connection. The participation and the commitment to being with others in the way we are called to be.
And here I want to reiterate that it is about participation not evaluation and we can get so lost in trying to name the right thing or declare our relationship to the right thing and that isn’t it! It isn’t about the job you are doing or how much time or money you can offer. It’s about commitment to being with people, loving them, encouraging them, even in spirit, in prayer.
This, Friends, is where the mission fields lead. What the labor itself looks like. And why Jesus can call it labor and that with him, the burden is light. When we are yoked to him, it is way easier. Easier to love. To trust. To do incredible works of mercy.
How different our expectations are, then. For God and one another. For the blessing and the nation and all the stars in the sky. To love and be loved. In our particular circumstance and in every other one, too.