​The thematic readings for this Sunday are all fragmentary, especially the Gospel, which is not a single extract but two short extracts stuck together.  This makes them quite hard to understand, and harder still to connect. How are we to interpret the image of children playing in the market place, and the analogy of the yoke that was used to harness oxen? Are these images related in some way, and if so, what is the link between these Gospel verses, the Old Testament prophesy from Zechariah, and Paul’s reflections on sin and the will in the Epistle?

Scholars have long debated about the passages from Matthew. It seems reasonably clear that the ‘children’ in the market place are to be identified with the audience described as ‘this generation’. They thus represent the Jews of Jesus’ day. But are they calling to each other, or does the passage imagine a dialogue between ‘this generation’ on the one hand, and John and Jesus on the other? There is no straightforward answer. Possibly that does not matter very much. Either way, the essential element turns on the sharp contrast between Jesus’ proclamation of ‘Good News’ and John the Baptist’s call to repentance. The ‘children’ reject Jesus’ ‘dance music’ because it is not austere enough. Yet previously they rejected John’s invitation to ‘wail’ because they did not want to be mournful. John’s ascetic way of life – 'neither eating nor drinking' -- did not please them, but then when Jesus comes ‘eating and drinking’, they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' In short, whatever the message, ‘this generation’ has found a way to respond negatively.
 Their negative attitude, however, is not just bloody mindedness. Neither John nor Jesus doubted the religious seriousness of the highly educated Pharisees they encountered. The problem was that far from being liberated by their faith, these devout people were encumbered by the vast and complex system that comprised the Judaic law. Their deep engagement with this system prevented them from seeing what a child could see – that the Messiahship of Jesus was offering them a different way to salvation, one that their heartfelt desire to serve God ought to have inclined them to welcome.

​This is where the image of the yoke comes into play. The expression ‘the Yoke’ was often used to refer to the Jewish law. All its detailed rules for the conduct of life had been developed as a means of ensuring that people could lead useful lives while living in harmony with each other. This is what makes the analogy of the yoke relevant. Yoked together, the strength of the harnessed oxen can serve a greater purpose than any single ox could serve alone. Yet, as pictures of yoked oxen often reveal, this device is immensely heavy and highly restricting. So when Jesus says, ‘My yoke is easy’, by implication he is making a twofold claim. First, he is claiming continuity with Moses and the Mosaic law, a continuity that the brief lesson from Zechariah – which Matthew quotes elsewhere – serves to underline. Second, he is offering a way to salvation that by comparison with the Law, is ‘easy and light’. This, one would think, ought to be good news to any one wearied by a constant effort to keep all the rules. Yet ‘the children’ who do not want to ‘wail’, are not willing to ‘dance’ either.
     Paul was a Pharisee of his generation par excellence. His famous encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, brought about a dramatic change of heart and mind. The short passage from Romans that is this week’s Epistle is a reflection of that change. Looking back Paul could see that even as a Pharisee of the strictest kind, his most ardent determination to keep the law failed. ‘I agree that the law is good’, he says, and ‘I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ Sheer will power, it seems, will not effect a rescue, and the constant effort to observe ‘the law’ simply burdens him more and more. It is only when he abandons this effort, and accepts the fact that Christ has redeemed him, that his burden is lightened.
​    But what is the meaning and message of all this for us? We are neither steeped in, nor tempted to lead our lives by the detailed requirements of the Mosaic law. Yet, curiously, we are tempted by something similar. The rules and regulations of modern life – in health, safety, security, protection, finance, and education, for example – are even more extensive than the Mosaic laws and no less burdensome. While their introduction and application is always intended to do help us lead good lives and live successfully in community, just like the Mosaic law, they easily become a ‘yoke’ that first captures and then kills the spirit. The truth is that letting go of rules, trusting in the providential love of God, and living by faith, is as much a challenge for us as it was for those complaining children in the market place.
 

​This is one of those Sundays when the so-called ‘thematic’ readings leave us wondering about what the underlying theme could be. To begin with, the Old Testament and Gospel readings are very short, just a few verses extracted from the broader context that gives them meaning. Looked at closely however, there is indeed a connection. The first two readings concern situations of conflicted choice, and the Gospel offers a measure of resolution for these.
      The passage from Jeremiah occurs within a chapter that tells of a conflict between Jeremiah and a rival prophet, Hananiah. The land of Judah had been invaded by the Babylonians, whose military victory Jeremiah had correctly predicted. But he also predicted that Babylonian control would last three generations. Consequently, the people of Judah would have to learn how to be faithful to God throughout that time. Hananiah, on the other hand, had predicted the overthrow of Babylon within two years, when the Temple and its sacred vessels would restored to full use. For Jeremiah this was not simply false hope; it was a failure to understand that the Babylonian victory only occurred with God’s consent. It must therefore be seen as a time of testing. The people of Judah were being challenged. Could they be faithful to God under the yoke of Babylonian occupation? Hananiah’s ‘quick fix’ solution was tempting, but shallow, and as time would tell, it would fail. The prophets, then, were in conflict, and the people had a choice. Were they to commit to Jeremiah’s hard way or to Hananiah’s much easier one?

​in the Epistle Paul also addresses a conflicted choice. His audience are new converts to Christianity. They have responded to the good news that Christ has saved them from the consequences of the sensual indulgence characteristic of their pagan ways. But those pagan ways retained some of their attraction. If they now had the assurance of salvation, couldn’t they just continue with some of the things they liked? Paul aims to disabuse them of this thought. The choice is not, as they might think, between bodily slavery and spiritual freedom. Rather, it is one between two competing forms of slavery. ‘Having once been slaves of sin, and thus set free from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness’. ‘I am speaking in human terms’ he tells them ‘because of your natural limitations’. Human beings are simply unable to serve two masters. It is not possible to indulge the desires that paganism celebrated but only a little bit. Given human weakness, they will take over. The only solution is an absolute obedience to the service of God in Christ.

​Nowadays, we are – perhaps – less likely to be slaves to sensuous desires. But we can be slaves to other things that dominate our lives to our spiritual detriment. Conventional behaviour, popular opinion, bureaucratic procedures, social conformity all exercise remarkable influence. Paul’s message is the same. Your choice is to be enslaved to these, or to be enslaved to the righteousness of God revealed in Christ. Which is it to be? Whose side are you on?

​It takes great strength of mind and character to be a Jeremiah or a Paul – steadfastly holding to God in the face of pressures to conform with attitudes and behaviour that the world approves and rewards. Could many of us hope to do that? If the answer is No, then the Gospel has some comfort for us. Here again context matters. Jesus has sent the disciples out as missionaries in a culturally hostile world. But he offers them this comfort “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me”. This is good news for those Christians who do not have the resilience to stand out from the crowd, to resist ‘correct’ opinions, and take a stand. This is how Christian witness should be. Yet, if we can stand apart from their ridicule and condemnation, whether in political statements or on social media and welcome those who have the strength to bear witness in an indifferent or even hostile world, then we are assured by this week’s Gospel, we will have welcomed the one who sent them. Though we are often too weak to commit wholeheartedly to God, God perpetually embraces us -- only, that is , if in whatever poor a way, we can acknowledge and support those ‘saints’ who more adequately honour him.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and one's foes will be members of one's own household.”
    These words from this Sunday’s Gospel stand in very sharp contrast with the Jesus Christians usually talk about -- the inspirational figure of love whose forgiving embrace can unite everyone in the sort of peace and harmony that marks the Kingdom of Heaven. Can it really be true, as Jesus seems to say here, that he has come not to bring harmony but division, and even to bring it right into the heart of the family?

​This is one of those Gospel passages that it is tempting to avoid. Yet here it is in our lectionary, and it has to be addressed. As we begin to do so, the first thing is to notice that Matthew could only write this passage with the benefit of hindsight. A few verses on, he invokes the image of ‘taking up one’s cross’. Obviously, this familiar metaphor gets its meaning from the Crucifixion. Yet it will be another sixteen chapters before Matthew’s readers are told about the trial and death of Jesus. So Matthew’s main purpose, it seems, cannot be that of recording accurately the words that Jesus actually spoke. Who, after all, would have been there at the time, ready with a notebook? Rather, his aim, like all the evangelists and especially John, is to give faithful expression to the mind of Christ. And the most compelling way of doing this, is to put words into his mouth.

Those who knew Jesus were best placed to do this. But even they could only do it with hindsight. They gradually came to a much better understanding of who Jesus really was in the light of their own experience. And that experience, quite soon, confronted them with this daunting fact. Some people, strangely, hate and fear a Gospel of love.

Who wants to be set against father and mother? No one, and there is no evidence that the early Christians in any way relished the pain and strife that resulted from their faith in Jesus. Yet, neither could they abandon or deny that faith. Just like Jesus himself in the Garden of Gethsemane, they were caught in a painful dilemma.
     Such dilemmas are at the heart of religious faith. In the Old Testament lesson, Jeremiah gives powerful expression to the same experience. “The word of the LORD has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, "I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name," then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

Fortunately, we modern Christians are rarely confronted with the kind of choice that Matthew and Jeremiah describe. At the same time, it is easy to overlook or otherwise avoid the more modest contexts in which we are invited to ‘take up our cross’.  The image of a cross we have to bear is easily misunderstood. It is not simply a burden that dogs us in our daily life, which is how the expression is often used. Rather, it is like Christ’s own Cross – something we would wish to be spared, but since we cannot, we must grasp it as a unique opportunity to show forth the reality of God in our lives.

​In the Epistle, Paul asks the new Christians at Rome: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Our old self”, he tells them, “was crucified with him, so that we might be freed from sin”. Whenever, and in whatever way, the call comes for us to ‘take up our cross’, that is a special opportunity to “consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus”. But we can always choose not to.

• Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7) and Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19  • 
• Exodus 19:2-8a and Psalm 100  • 
• Romans 5:1-8  • 
• Matthew 9:35-10:8, (9-23)

On the Sundays that follow Trinity, the Revised Common Lectionary offers alternative Old Testament readings and Psalms. The first is a ‘Continuous’ reading that takes us through major sections of the Hebrew Scriptures week by week and may bear little direct relation to the Epistle and Gospel. The ‘Thematic’ alternative is a passage chosen for its relation to the other two readings, though the connection is not always easy to see. On this Sunday there is even more choice, because the Gospel can be read in a long or short version.

​The thematic readings for this Sunday are linked by something paradoxical, a call that is to both obedience and to leadership. In the passage from Exodus, God puts into the mouth of Moses this message for the Israelites.  ‘If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. The whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ It is a message repeated again and again in the Hebrew Scriptures. ‘Deep darkness covers the land’, Isaiah tells his people, ‘but over you the Lord will rise, and nations will steam to your light’. This supreme distinction -- serving the whole earth as a holy nation -- is a matter of great pride. Yet at the same time it springs from humility, the willingness to show complete subservience to God.

​With the coming of Jesus, the message remains the same at heart, but also undergoes a radical change. ‘When Jesus saw the crowds’, this week’s Gospel says, ‘he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’. So he summoned his twelve disciples and sent them ‘to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’. In the end, though, the lost house of Israel rejected him, and his disciples, handing him over to the Romans for execution. As a consequence, God’s call to obedience and leadership ceases to addressed to a single ethnic group. Instead, ‘the holy nation’ becomes a universal church, drawn from all peoples and all nations, yet retaining the same role -- to be a light in places of ‘deep darkness’ wherever human beings find themselves ‘harassed and helpless’.

​Alongside this call, though, is a warning. Discipleship comes at a cost. ‘You will be dragged before governors and kings because of me and you will be hated because of my name’. As the reading from Paul’s Epistle confirms, this warning applied not only to the twelve disciples, but also to those who responded to the Gospel through Paul’s preaching. For Paul, the suffering that may result from Christian conversion also brings consolation. ‘Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope’. In other words, the very difficulty of being a Christian can itself be the means by which we come to experience afresh God's love being poured into our hearts.

​Few Christians in the West today are likely to undergo the persecution and suffering these readings anticipate. Instead, Christianity’s modern enemies are indifference or contempt, and  the name of Jesus is most often used as a dismissive swear word. This leads to a different, but no less serious issue. It would not be any exaggeration to say that our current, covid-19 dominated world, is one in which large numbers of people are ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’.  Scientists and politicians have stepped into, and been accepted in, the role of ‘shepherd’, while religions (and not just Christianity) have been completely side-lined. This generates a great problem. How is the Church to be a light in this new form of darkness?

When Jesus tells his disciples that he is sending them out like sheep into the midst of wolves, he gives them strange advice. ‘Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves’. According to normal ways of thinking, cunning is the opposite of innocence, and while the reward for cunning, it is widely supposed, may be success, the price of innocence is just as often failure.
     If we believe in a God-given, providential order beyond anything that science and politics can offer us, in which love, not medicine or technology, ultimately governs all things, we need to find a practical way of working with a world that denies this, while at the same time holding on to Christian truth or integrity. It goes without saying that this is very hard to do. It is much easier to keep our heads down and follow the rules prescribed by scientists and politicians. Moreover, when Christians do act in the name of their faith, these readings tell us, they are by no means assured of an easy ride. That is not the way God works. At the same time, they have this profound assurance – ‘it is not you who speaks, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you’. Our human weakness and vulnerability will not go away. But by the grace of God they can be transformed.

Compared to other ‘high days’, a feast day dedicated to the Holy Trinity came relatively late in the Church’s history and was not made official until 1334. The intention was to conclude the liturgical commemorations of the life of Jesus Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit with a commemoration focusing on the whole nature of God. Trinity was taken up with particular enthusiasm by the church in England, and came to be specially identified with the Anglican Church that resulted from Henry VIII's break with Rome in the 16th century.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity -- that there are Three Persons in One God -- is central to orthodox Christianity. It figures in the Creeds and in confessions of faith that Christians are required to affirm at baptism and confirmation. Yet, though we are asked to affirm it again and again, it is an immensely difficult doctrine to understand, and perhaps can never be understood completely. So how did Christians end up in the position of being required to believe a doctrine they struggle to understand?

The answer is: they found they had no choice. All the early Christians were Jews, deeply committed to monotheism, the belief that God is One, Creator of all that is made – the implication of the creation story that provides the first lesson this Sunday. At the same time, the Gospel they preached was about Jesus’ unique relationship to God, and how the Resurrection set him apart from even the greatest Jewish prophets. Then they had to do justice to their experience at Pentecost when, even with Jesus no longer present among them, his spirit empowered them to set aside their fears and anxieties and confront persecution in the name of the Cross. If all these elements are essential to the Gospel the Apostles felt compelled to preach, something like the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is inescapable. That was why Christians had to find a theological formula that would allow them to acknowledge God in the Father who created them, the Son who redeemed them, and the Spirit who sanctified them. Father, Son and Holy Spirit were not three gods, but three different 'Persons' in one God. This assertion may be mystifying, but it proved inescapable.

​We owe the doctrine's most familiar version – in the form of a blessing – to St Paul, who ends the brief Epistle for this Sunday with these words --“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all”. But Paul’s blessing is not his own invention. It simply echoes the “great commission” that Jesus gives his disciples in the Gospel – “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. Each year, Trinity Sunday comes as reminder of this continuing commission.