The passage: At that time Jesus answered and said (Luke adds that in that hour he rejoiced in spirit): “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes. Yes, Father, for so it seemed good in your sight. All things have been delivered to me by my father; no one knows who the son is except the father, nor who the father is except the son and whoever the son chooses to reveal him to.” And: “Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.” (Matthew xi. 25-30; Luke x. 21, 22.)
Matthew and Luke both place the first two of these sayings after the Lord’s denunciation of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum; Luke alone puts the return of the seventy between, and there the rejoicing over the Father’s revelation to babes seems to refer to them. Since the return of the seventy is mentioned nowhere else, the words may well have been spoken then. But the circumstances matter little for understanding the words.
The Lord makes no complaint against the wise and prudent. He only recognizes that his father does not reveal his best things to them, and he thanks, or praises, his father for this and its reasons. The Greek word seems to carry something of each: “I bless your will; I see you are right; I am of one mind with you.”
“Why not reveal true things first to the wise, the fittest to receive them?” Only if these things and their wisdom lie in the same region. Skill in physical science does not fit a man to argue a metaphysical question, and the wisdom of this world, the philosophy of prudence, self-protection and precaution, specially unfits him to receive what the Father reveals: the more we care for our own well-being, the less we can understand and welcome the Father’s care. With all their energy of thought, the wise and prudent could never see the Father’s things well enough to know them as true. Absorbed in their own earthly questions and conclusions, they cannot see the eternal foundations God laid in man or the necessities of their own nature. They are proud of discoveries that are all less than themselves, imagine them the goal of the human intellect, and count whatever lies beyond out of reach or not worth interest. They gather by the senses and deduce the prudential, probable, expedient and protective, and never think of the essential, what must be in itself. Cautious and shy of enthusiasm, they take things for the universe and love of facts for love of truth. They know nothing deeper in man than surface mental facts and their relations, and turn from any truth the intellect cannot formulate. Zeal for God will never eat them up; he does not interest them, though theology may, for religion to them means theology. How should the Father’s treasure be open to them? In their hands his rubies would lose their fire. They never go past the porch of the temple, unsure there is any adytum and not caring to look. Even when they know their duty, they must dissect it and weigh its claim before obeying. All the evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness originate in the brains of the wise and prudent, not the hearts of children. Careful to make the words of his messengers rhyme with their conclusions, they interpret God’s great heart by their miserable intellects, postpone the obedience that alone gives understanding power, and press on men’s minds their wretched interpretations of the Father’s will instead of the doing of it. They call their philosophy the truth of God and say men must hold it or stand outside. They are slaves of the letter in all its weakness until the spirit of obedience sets them free.
The babes must beware lest the wise and prudent come between them and the Father. They must yield no claim to authority over their belief, from man or community, church or synagogue alike. They are to believe only what the Lord reveals to their souls as true; only that is belief as he counts it. The one divine object of teacher or church is to persuade the individual heart to come to Jesus, the spirit, to be taught what he alone can teach.
Terribly has his gospel suffered in the mouths of the wise and prudent. Had its first messages been committed to persons of repute instead of simple fishermen, it would be nowhere, or unrecognizable: from the first we would have had a system built on human interpretation, and the gospel itself would have vanished. As it is, one dull, miserable human system after another has usurped its place, yet, thank God, the gospel remains, and the little child, heedless of his trailing cloud of glory and aghast in an unknown world, may still see and run to the arms open to children. How often has a New Testament symbol been forced into service for some contemptible scheme of redemption, which were no redemption, while the truth the symbol was meant to convey lies unregarded beside the heap of rubbish! Had the wise and prudent been God’s confidants, the letter would at once have usurped the spirit’s place, and a system of religion with its rickety, malodorous plan of salvation would have replaced a living Christ, and kept the place. The great brother, the human God, would have been as hidden from the weary and heavy-laden as if he had never come to call the children home out of the shadows of a self-haunted universe. But the Father revealed his things to babes, who loved and began to do them, and so began to understand them, and grew in knowledge and in power to communicate; while to the wise and prudent the deepest words of the most babe-like of them all, John Boanerges, are even now a finger-worn rosary of platitudes. The babe understands the wise and prudent, but only the babe understands the babe.
The Father revealed his things to babes because they were his own little ones, uncorrupted by the wisdom or care of this world and so able to receive them. The others, though his children, had not begun to be like him; his things could not have entered their minds without leaving all their value and spirit outside the unchildlike place. The babes are near enough to where they came from to understand a little how things go in their father’s presence, and so to interpret the Son’s words. The child who has not yet “walked above a mile or two from” his “first love” is not out of touch with his Father’s mind, and will quickly seal the old bond when the Son, the first and one perfect babe of God, leads the children out of the lovely “shadows of eternity” into the land of the “white celestial thought.” As God is the one real father, only to God can anyone be a perfect child.
The leader of the great array of little ones, himself first recipient of his father’s revelations by virtue of his firstborn childhood, having given thanks and said why, breaks out afresh, renewing his delight that God willed it so: “Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in your sight!” I venture to translate it, “Yea, O Father, for thus came forth satisfaction before you!” and think he meant, “Yea, Father, for at this all your angels were filled with satisfaction.” The babes were the prophets in heaven, and the angels were glad that it was to be so on earth; they rejoiced to see what was bound in heaven bound on earth. Compare Matthew xviii. 10 and 14, and Luke xv. 10: their angels in heaven always behold the face of my father; it is not the will before your father in heaven (among the angels who stand before him, I think he means) that one of these little ones should perish; there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.
Having thanked his father for doing his good and perfect will, he turns to his disciples and says that he knows the Father, being his Son, and he alone can reveal the Father to the rest of his children: all things are delivered to him by his father; no one knows the son but the father, nor the father but the son and whoever the son wills to reveal him to. It is almost as if the mention of babes brought his thoughts back to himself and his father, between whom lay the secret of all life, all sending, all loving. The relation of Father and Son contains the idea of the universe. His father had no secrets from him; he knew the Father as the Father knew him. Only the Son could know the Father, and so reveal him, making the other, imperfect children know the Father and become such as he. All things were given him because he was the Son, and for the same reason he could reveal the Father’s things to the Father’s child. The child-relation is the one eternal, unchanging relation.
Note that while the Lord describes the knowledge his father and he have of each other as limited to themselves, he states a fact, not a design: he is in the world to remove that limit. The Father knows the Son and sends him that we may know him; the Son knows the Father and dies to reveal him. The glory of God’s mysteries is that they are for his children to look into.
When the Lord took the little child before his disciples and declared him his representative, he made him the representative of his father too; but only the eternal child can reveal him. To reveal is immeasurably more than to represent: it is to present to eyes that know the true when they see it. Jesus represented God; the spirit of Jesus reveals him. A represented God a man may refuse, as many refused the Lord; no one can refuse the revealed God, for to see God and love him are one. He can be revealed only to the child, perfectly only to the pure child. All the world’s discipline is to make men children, that God may be revealed to them.
No man, when first he comes to himself, can truly know God, only desire to; and while he does not know him he cannot become God’s child in his heart. So the Father draws nearer, sending his firstborn, who knows him, is exactly like him and can represent him perfectly. The children, drawn to him, receive him, and then he can reveal the Father. No wisdom of the wise can find out God, no words of the God-loving reveal him; the simplicity of the whole natural relation is too deep for the philosopher. The Son alone can reveal God; the child alone understand him. The elder brother keeps company with the younger and makes him more a child like himself, interpenetrating him with his obedient glory. He lets him see how he delights in his father, and know that God is his father too. He rouses in his little brother the sense of their father’s will, and the younger, hearing and obeying, begins to see that his elder brother must be the very image of their father. So he becomes more a child, and the Son reveals more of the Father; for the Son knows that to know the Father is the one thing needful to every child. To see the Father is the cry of every child-heart, and the need, where not the cry, of every living soul. Comfort yourselves, brothers and sisters: he to whom the Son will reveal him shall know the Father, and the Son came to reveal him. “Eternal Brother,” we cry, “show us the Father. Be yourself to us, that in you we may know him. We too are his children: let the other children share with you in the things of the Father.”
Having spoken to his father and then to his disciples, the Lord turns to the whole world and lets his heart overflow. St Matthew alone has saved the eternal cry: “Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” It is as if he said, “I know the Father; come to me.” He is not calling here those who want to know the Father; his cry goes far beyond them, to the ends of the earth. He calls the weary, who do not know that ignorance of the Father is the cause of all their labour and the weight of their burden.
This is the Lord’s own form of his gospel, more intensely personal and direct, yet wider in inclusion, than what he took from Isaiah at Nazareth, and interfused with the strongest persuasion to the troubled to share his own eternal rest. I will turn his argument a little: “I have rest because I know the Father. Be meek and lowly of heart toward him as I am; let him lay his yoke on you as on me. I do his will, not my own. Take the yoke I wear; be his child like me, a babe to whom he can reveal his wonders. Then you too will find rest for your souls, the same peace I have, and be weary and heavy laden no more. I find my yoke easy, my burden light.”
We must not imagine that “Take my yoke upon you” means a yoke he lays on those who come to him. “My yoke” is the yoke he wears himself, which his father lays on him, and out of which, at that very moment, he speaks, bearing it with glad patience: “Take the yoke I have taken; the Father lays it on us.”
The best of the good wine remains; I have kept it to the last. A friend pointed out that the Master does not mean a yoke like his, but the very yoke he is carrying.
Dante, describing how on the first terrace of Purgatory he walked stooping, to be level with Oderisi, who went bowed to the ground by the burden of the pride he had cherished on earth, says, “I went walking with this heavy-laden soul, just as oxen walk in the yoke.” This picture almost always comes to me with the Lord’s words “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me,” whose intent is, “Take the other end of my yoke, doing as I do, being as I am.” Think of it: to walk in the same yoke with the Son of Man, doing the same labour and sharing the same feeling! This alone is offered to the man who would have rest to his soul, required of him who would know the Father, and pressed on him by the Lord who would give him the peace of his own eternal heart.
But a yoke is for drawing: what is the cart laden with that he would have us help him draw? What but the will of the eternal, perfect Father? How should the Father honour the Son but by giving him his will to embody in deed, making him hand to his father’s heart, and hardest of all, in bringing home his children? His yoke-fellow must share especially in this load, and learn how from him who draws beside him.
Whoever, in the commonest duties that fall to him, does as the Father would have him do, bears the Father’s yoke along with Jesus, and the Father takes his help for the redemption of the world, delivering men from the slavery of their own rubbish-laden waggons into the liberty of God’s husbandmen. Bearing the same yoke, he learns to walk step for step with Jesus, rejoicing with his joy. The glory of existence is to take up its burden and exist for Existence eternal and supreme, for the Father who does his divine and perfect best to share his glad life with us, making us sharers of the nature which is bliss and the labour which is peace. He lives for us; we must live for him. The little ones must take their full share in the great Father’s work, which is the business of the family.
Does your soul start and your brain tremble at the thought of such a burden as the will of the eternally creating, eternally saving God? “How shall mortal man walk in such a yoke,” you say, “even with the Son of God bearing it too?”
Why, brother, sister, it is the only burden bearable by mortals! Under any other, the lightest, he must at last sink outworn, his very soul gray with sickness!
He on whom lay the other half of God’s burden, the weight of his creation to redeem, says, “The yoke I bear is easy; the burden I draw is light,” and said it knowing the death he was to die. The yoke did not gall his neck, nor did the goal on Calvary frighten him from the straight way to it. His father’s will was his strength as well as his joy; the one thing worth living for was the share his father’s love gave him in his work. He loved his father even to the death of the cross, and eternally beyond.
When we give ourselves up to the Father as the Son gave himself, we shall find our yoke easy and our burden light, and also that they communicate ease and lightness, giving rest even from all other weariness. Let us not waste a moment asking how; that rest is a secret for every heart to know and no tongue to tell, and the only way to know it is to take the yoke on us. If that seems impossible, let us attempt the impossible: lay hold of the yoke, bow our heads, and try to get our necks under it. Give our Father the opportunity and he will not fail to help. He is helping us every moment, when we least think we need it; when we most think we do, then we may most boldly, as we must most earnestly, cry for it. God alone understands what his creatures can do or bear; when it seems most impossible, we must be most confident that he will neither demand too much nor fail with the vital creator-help, which will be there the moment it can be help. To imagine beforehand ourselves doing or bearing, we have neither claim nor need.
It is vain to think any weariness or burden, however slight, can be got rid of except by bowing the neck to the Father’s yoke. There is no other rest for the heart and soul he created. That yoke frees us from every burden, anxiety and dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself.
These words of the Lord, the thanksgiving and the statement about the mutual knowledge of his father and himself reported in common by Matthew and Luke, meet me like a well-known face unexpectedly encountered, like heavenly bread cut from the gospel of St John. The words are not in John, nothing more of the kind is in Matthew or Luke, and nothing like them in Mark. The passage seems to me one solitary flower testifying that Matthew and Luke have the same root of thought and feeling that blossoms everywhere in John. It looks as if it had crept out of the fourth gospel into the first and third, a true sign, though no proof, that however unlike the others the fourth is, they all have one origin. Some disciple remembered one such word, of which the promised comforter brought many to John’s remembrance. I do not see how the more phenomenal gospels can be understood without a right perception of the Lord’s relation to his father, the main subject of John’s gospel.
As for the loving cry of the great brother to the whole weary world, which Matthew alone has set down, I seem aware of an indescribable individuality in its tone, distinguishing it from all his other recorded sayings.
Those who come at the Lord’s call and take the rest he offers, learning of him and bearing the Father’s yoke, are the salt of the earth, the light of the world.