Proper 9: Zechariah 9.9-12; Psalm 145.8-15; Romans 7.15-25a; Matthew 11.16-19,25-30

THE meaning of Matthew 11.16-19, according to one commentary, has been “contested for centuries”. To understand it, we must take account of what precedes it: Jesus’s proclamation about the prophetic identity of John the Baptist (11.2-15). After that, the text moves on to other matters (11.25-30).

This teaching of Jesus exists from two perspectives: Luke’s (7.31-35) and Matthew’s. They both make mention of a generation and of children playing, and of wisdom (Mark does not mention anything like it). The simple conclusion is surely the right one: this passage comes from the lost source, “Q”. The end of the section, though, contains a difference of words, such that we may have to choose between versions: which is more authentic, Matthew’s text or Luke’s?

First, evaluating 11.16-19 as a whole, we should ask what its target may be. Jesus is highlighting a failure on the part of people he refers to as “this generation”. In scripture, “this generation” can refer to both past history and present time. It is not simply equivalent to “people nowadays”. Rather, it stirs memories of what had come to be seen as that most perverse of Israelite generations — those who wandered in the wilderness. Why are the people of Jesus’s time like them? Because they fail to recognise God’s truth and reality, even when those gifts are set right in front of them and bestowed especially, repeatedly, for their benefit.

Jesus’s teaching about John the Baptist confirms the belief that he is a prophet, a new Elijah; then he comments on how people respond to prophets. The game in his parable is one that figures in almost every childhood: “Let’s pretend.” The children in Jesus’s parable are doing what children always do: exploring the adult world that they observe around themselves, but are not yet fully part of. Daily life consists of rejoicing and mourning; so that is what the children imitate. They see weddings, and so some want to play at weddings. They see funerals, and so others want to play at lamentation. Both instances would be imitations of a vivid kind, involving music and movement, not sitting still and behaving calmly.

The ministries of John and Jesus could not be more different. John comes with a stern warning: “Repent!” Jesus comes as a bridegroom (Matthew 25.6), eating and drinking. And what does “this generation” do? How does it react to their contrasting messages? It grumbles about them both: “‘He has a demon.’ . . . ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard.’” Their perverse determination to find the downside makes me think of the Noël Coward song celebrating “bad times just around the corner” and “black birds over the greyish cliffs of Dover”. I could repurpose another song and refer to “Reasons to be cheerless”. It is not so much that “this generation” (which is really “every generation”) wants to “have its cake and eat it” as that it wants to have the cake, eat it, complain about the ingredients and calories, and say that it never liked cake anyway.

In the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, Ecclesiastes says, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (3.1). It mentions “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (3.4). But the children in Jesus’s parable cannot agree on what it is time for. For them, time is always the wrong time, the opposite of the Greek word kairos (“right time”). They are incapable of co-operating with one another. Each side wants to play its own game, but cannot get the other to join in. Instead, they sulk and complain at one another, as they spurn mourning and dancing alike. They have no idea what they really want.

Now to that discrepancy between Matthew’s version of the teaching and Luke’s (Matthew 11.19; Luke 7.35). Matthew’s Jesus says that wisdom is “vindicated by her deeds”; Luke’s that she is vindicated by “all her children”. If the “works of Wisdom” refers back to the “works of the Messiah” (11.2, my translation), Matthew is identifying Jesus himself as Wisdom. Most commentators, though, consider that Luke’s version is closer to what Jesus said. That would make Matthew’s identification of Jesus with Wisdom more like teaching that we carry away from a sermon: it may not be the message as originally intended, but it can still be inspired, and therefore truly authentic, in its own way.