Jesus Changes His Accent – Part 1
Four Calls Of Christ – Part 1
Matthew 11:16-30
There are a lot of areas of Bible knowledge where I am very settled in my views – perhaps too much so. It’s so easy to get comfortable with what I think I know about something or someone in the Bible. Once in a while, God brings me to the place where he shakes me up; He makes me feel totally unsettled about something and gets me to rethink everything I assume I know about a subject.
Sometimes I run across something in the Scriptures that rocks me back a bit. This week, that happened to me again.
Have you ever had that happen? Do you ever read something in the Bible, maybe something you have read many times before, that makes you come to a complete stop and say, “Whoa! Wait a minute! This sounds a lot different than it should. I really need to think about this for a minute!”
Does that happen to you? Do you have those times when it’s almost a smack on the head to get your brain recalibrated? This section of Scripture did that to me this week. Feel like sharing one of those times with me today?
There were two main things I saw in our text for this week as I was studying and preparing for our time together today.
The first one is that there are Four Calls Of Christ in this passage. Not so different; maybe just opened my eyes to something more that I’d missed before.
The second is that Jesus seems to go through a change here, a change in tone, a change in attitude; one that rocked my world and made me really rethink the picture I had of Jesus in my head.
First, let me summarize the four “calls”. We’ll talk about them as we go through the passage, but here they are for now. They are: A call to remember; a call to realize; a call to repent; and a call to rest.
The second thing I want to look at is what I have been thinking of as Jesus changing His “accent”.
Have you ever known anyone who went away to another area of the country and, when they came back or the next time you spoke to them, they didn’t sound like themselves anymore but like one of the people from where they had gone?
I have two cousins who moved around a lot, just like my family did when my sisters and I were young. They were gone for a couple of years when I was about 5 or 6, or so. They were pretty close to me in age – within a couple of years.
I was probably 8 or 9 when they came back from North Carolina and stayed with us for a couple of months, and I couldn’t understand most of what they said! They both had a twang and an accent, and words and phrases, “the like a’witch I-ent aherd afore”.
One Sunday, we were all getting ready to go to “chyuch”. My younger male cousin was looking for his older sister. He turned to his mother and asked, “Sissy gettin’ huh dudz own?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and it took a little while to get anyone to explain it to me in a way I could understand.
We laugh about it now, but it was confusing and not a little bit intimidating for me. There was a lot of confusion for quite a while.
Well, this week while I was reading and rereading this text, I got the sense of a new accent to Jesus’ voice – and this one isn’t a bit funny! The process has been a little confusing and somewhat intimidating for me. I’ve seen glimpses of this before – even talked about it before. But, this week it really crashed into my way of thinking. This all started to get kicked loose for me when I prepared last week’s message about, “Listen up!” without me even realizing it.
If you remember back that far, maybe you got a bit of an unsettled feeling about the strong sense of force and warning that was in Jesus’ tone in that message. This week, it gets even stronger.
Matthew 11:16-30, is a call to remember His life and His deeds and His words, a call to remember the mercy of God, the prophets of God, the heart of God.
It is a call to realize who He really is and what that really means to us and to the world and that it is our tendency to resist and distort the truth to suit ourselves.
It is a call to repent that is stronger than any other warning from Jesus recorded so far.
It is a call to rest; not just to remember and realize all those things, to repent of our foolish refusal to be and do exactly what His Word tells us to be and do, but to remember His mercy as well; to flee to it, to cling to it, to abandon our folly and to stand in awe of the wrath averted from our lives and to rest in it.
In this section of Matthew, Jesus speaks of the Gospel of His coming in a way that is much avoided in our day, but one that we need desperately to hear and heed.
We always seem to see Jesus as kind and gentle, meek and mild, unruffled and soft-spoke – especially when it comes to “His children”. This is the message in my head almost all the time about how to speak to people about God and the things of God. If I get an edge to my voice or sound impatient, I feel guilty and “un-Christ-like”.
Last week and this week, however, my world got rocked some. God helped me to see an aspect of Jesus Christ that doesn’t fit the “acceptable” portrayal of Him today. It doesn’t fit the “image” that I keep trying to live up to but fail to so often. It doesn’t fit the image in the minds of people with bumper stickers on their cars that ask, “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”
What I saw this week is; there actually is an answer to that. Let me explain.
This passage was bothering me a bit, and then I heard a little blip on the radio about a book someone has written titled, “Jesus Mean and Wild”. That got me to thinking and digging. Here is what I came up with.
We don’t see and do not want to see Jesus as “mean and wild”, just as “meek and mild”. We don’t want to see Jesus as untamed and unpredictable; we just want to se Him unruffled and soft-spoken. We don’t want to see Jesus as fearsome and persistent, just as kind and gentle.
But, we need to see Him in these ways because that is how He was and is! We need to see that apparently foreign “accent”, if you will.
For this is the Jesus of the Bible. This is the Jesus who chastised Peter and called him Satan’s spokesman (Matthew 16:23). Does that sound kind and gentle to you? Do you think it sounded that way to Peter?
This is the Jesus who called the self-righteous religious people of His day children of “your father the devil” (John 8:44). Does that sound kind and gentle? Does that sound like He’s trying to convert His listeners? Sounds to me like He’s purposely alienating them.
This is the Jesus who made a whip out of cords on two separate occasions and drove the money changers out of the temple, turning over the tables, completely disrupting things and wrecking the place (Matthew 2; Mark 11; John 2). Does that seem unruffled and soft-spoken? Doesn’t that sound like an angry outburst? Don’t you think Jesus looked fearsome that day? Don’t you think everybody who witnessed it thought of it that way?
This is also the Jesus who openly and personally chastised His disciples with words like, “Oh, you of such little faith! How long shall I put up with you?” (Matthew 6:30; Matthew 8:26; Matthew 14:31; Matthew 16:8; Luke 12:28). Does that sound unruffled and soft-spoken to you, or does it sound like He is pretty impatient at the moment?
Some want to say, “Well, Jesus didn’t talk that way to people who weren’t like the Pharisees or who weren’t supposed to know better like His disciples.” That’s a convenient device, but it isn’t true to the Scriptures.
In three of the gospels, there is the account of the boy whose father had brought him to the disciples to have a demon cast out of him. The disciples couldn’t do it and Jesus demands, "You unbelieving and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him here to Me." He wasn’t speaking to the disciples as some like to claim, but to the Jews around Him in general. His admonishing of the disciples comes a couple of verses later.
I bring all of this up to make the point that we very often have the view of Jesus Christ that is comfortable, a view that is warm and fuzzy and sweet and gentle, but one that isn’t altogether accurate or true – it isn’t the complete, real Jesus.
As believers, we have little difficulty seeing the God of the Old Testament as the One who is angry at sin and who punishes the wicked. But, Jesus Christ? The One who died for my sins and the sins of all mankind? There’s no way He’s like that! He came to save us, not punish us!
What Jesus makes clear to us in this passage in Matthew is that there are very real and very personal wages to be paid for sin. The price is rarely spoken of today, but it is there nonetheless. And, lest we forget, He is the same God as the God of the Old Testament.
Jesus Christ is the Living Word of God – and it was God’s “Word” that commanded the Israelites, “Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey (1 Samuel 15:3).”
The personal and national price for rebellion against God is pooh-poohed today. There is hell to pay for sin, both personally and nationally, but the remedy is minimized and modified because the penalty is minimized and modified. Jesus Christ paid that very price, but only for the repentant; only for the obedient.
The message gets changed into a “feel good” message instead of a “be good” message. The wrath of God, the wrath of Jesus Christ who is God, is downplayed or just outright ignored today.
We want to separate gentle Jesus from Almighty God – but we dare not.
Jesus is telling us here, “There is no getting away from my anger over sin. Repent or perish – those are your only choices.” Not a very “Christian” message, is it?
This is part of what rattled me this week. This is part of what made me realize that I don’t really understand the nature and character of Jesus Christ as well as I thought I did. Maybe you’ll be feeling that way, too, by the time we’re through today. I don’t know.
Let’s look at the text and see how the message crescendos to that very implication.
First, we see Jesus pointing out the perversity and the contrariness of sinners. By “perversity”, I mean stubborn and unreasonable behavior, willfully persisting in doing wrong. By “contrariness”, I mean obstinacy, obstructing and hindering progress, willfully disobedient and uncooperative, wanting to move in the opposite direction.
That’s what Jesus’ word picture about the children in the marketplace is describing. One group calls to the other, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn (11:16).”
No matter what one group offered the other in the way of play and entertainment, the other group was opposed to. By this example, Jesus is telling His listeners that He saw them just as opposed to the way John dealt with society as they were the way Jesus dealt with society – nothing pleased them (11:18-19). The stiff and the grumpy are seldom reasonable and never easily pleased.
John neither ate bread nor drank wine, but lived in the wilderness on locusts and wild honey. He exempted himself from all invitations to people’s houses and shunned all feasts and festivities. John the Baptist abstained from every form of free and sociable conversation and entertainment. On the other hand, although the Scribes and Pharisees gave the pretense of much abstinence and frequent fastings, they had no interest in following his very rigorous, disciplined and austere way of life. They accused him of having a demon.
Jesus, on the other hand, was the opposite. He came being fully involved in the life and times he lived in, going to feasts and weddings and attending sumptuous meals in the homes of the wealthy. Jesus and John were extreme opposites, you might say. John was divorced from society while Jesus was fully engaged. John they accused of having a demon, but Jesus they accused of being a drunkard and a glutton.
Jesus points out their inconsistency and disingenuousness with His little ditty about the children in the market, and everyone listening knew it.
But then He assures us that the truth will always shine through when He says, “Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds." The proof is in the pudding, so to speak. No matter how unwilling to play the obstinate children are, no matter how cantankerous and critical the critics, the proof of the truth will be obvious and evident by what takes place that glorifies God.
Isn’t it remarkable how the ungodly will distort things in order to hold on to their distorted view of things?
We do the same thing when we are being ungodly, too, so we need to be careful with our own attitude here. I know I have just as much of a leaning to pre-judge and have criticalness about things that do look like I think they should look. Maybe you have, too. We need to be watchful of that.
Okay, so here we have the Living Word of God, the Prince of Heaven, opening His heart and almost pleading with the people to “get it”! That’s what we saw last time when we looked at verse 15, with the “Listen up!” message. There is a forcefulness, an impatience and an edge of righteous anger in His voice at this point.
So far, we have seen the call to remember, and the call to realize. Now we see the call to repent.
This is a section that we need to look at with fresh eyes. God is speaking from the depths of His heart here, and we need to hear what He has to say.
Is there an edge to His voice? Sure there is. Is there a sense of anger and impatience and impeding doom? Yes, those are here, too. But there is a deep and profound sense of the love and compassion of God through it all. Let’s look and listen.
Matthew 11:21-24; let’s read this again.
God is not cruel and unreasonable. He doesn’t rule and reign by fear and the dread of arbitrary and random outbursts. But He does demand repentance, and He will not settle for anything less.
Does He heal the brokenhearted? Absolutely. But, does He also break hearts so that he can shape those hearts? Absolutely, too. Does He comfort us in our suffering? Sure He does. But He also leads us into suffering to make us strong in our faith and to purify our souls.
When we listen closely to what Jesus is saying today, we see all of these things. And, this is an important picture for us to see.
The very first words out of Jesus’ mouth are, “Woe to you!” Woe means “deep sorrow, grief and affliction”. Then He says it again, “Woe to you!” Not much of a gentle message of peace and reassurance, is it? Jesus here is refusing to pamper us, refusing to mollycoddle us.
Jesus reminds everyone that He had done great and mighty works of power and that ancient cities that God had promised to wipe out would have repented and been broken before God if those same works of wonder had been done in them. The Promised One that they had long been waiting for had appeared and they had just shrugged their collective shoulders.
Oh, a handful of people paid attention and were converted to faith in Jesus Christ, but the vast majority of the people went on about their lives as if nothing was really different at all. Jesus is telling them that heathens would have behaved more appropriately than the Chosen Children of God had, and He was angry about it!
Jesus names three towns that were very close together: Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum. All three were in the same area near the Sea of Galilee, and we only have a couple of miracles done by Jesus in Capernaum mentioned in the Scriptures. Evidently, Jesus had done a great deal of miracle working in those towns, but He didn’t move His apostles to record much of it at all.
This gives great weight to John’s closing verse in his gospel: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written (John 21:25).”
We know a great deal about the other cities He mentions here: Tyre, Sidon and Sodom. All three were destroyed by God for their decadent, perverse, immoral and ungodly behavior and arrogance. They are the cities of history that represent the greatest human decline into depravity and unrighteousness. In God’s mind, two of those cities were so disgusting that they not only had to be destroyed but no one would ever be allowed to build where they had sat again.
Tyre had been prophesied against in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, and in Ezekiel. They never got it, and God prophesied that Tyre would suffer such devastation that “They will destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers; and I will scrape her debris from her and make her a bare rock. She will be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea, for I have spoken,’ declares the Lord GOD, ’and she will become spoil for the nations (Ezekiel 26:2ff (4-5)).”
When you read the details of the prophecy, there is little doubt about how specific God is about how He is going to deal with the refusal to turn from unrighteousness.
This prophecy came true in every exacting detail centuries later when the Greeks invaded the area and destroyed the one city that no other nation had ever been able to defeat for long. It always seemed to rise from the ashes, so to speak, and was one of the most ancient cities in the world.
They were famous for many things, including the first ocean-going ships, for this was the capitol city of ancient Phoenicia. They were even more famous and wealthy, though, for the purple die they made from mollusks that lived in only one place in the entire world – the banks of the Mediterranean at Tyre and Sidon.
They became proud and arrogant and refused to turn from their worship of idols and turn to God. Much of their idol worship involved human sacrifice, especially babies. God hates that!
Sidon was a city that was actually older than Tyre. But, it, too, had become proud and arrogant and this is where Jezebel came from, the one who introduced Baal worship and other pagan worship into Israel with such proliferation that Israel’s chastisement became another severe action God would undertake.
Sodom we know of from Sodom and Gomorrah fame in Genesis 19. The sexual practices of Sodom became synonymous with homosexuality. In fact, up until a few years ago, homosexuals were often called “sodomites”. Still today, the legal term for a certain type of sexual act is called “sodomy”.
The evil of Sodom was so vile that God destroyed it, its sister city Gomorrah, and the surrounding towns on that plain with “fire and brimstone” rained down from heaven. Then He covered them and the other decadent cities of the plain with what is now the southern end of the Dead Sea.
Imagine considering yourself part of the chosen, part of the protected and the privileged children of God and hearing this warning. Do you think they heard it? Well, we need to hear this warning!
And, we need to pay close attention to Who it is that is making these statements. We need to think carefully about Who is it that is telling His “little ones”, “Nevertheless I say to you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the Day of Judgment, than for you."
We have to realize that God isn’t fooling around when it comes to righteousness and holiness. We need to realize that gentle Jesus isn’t always gentle. We need to realize that Jesus “meek and mild” is sometimes Jesus “mean and wild”.
Here are four truths that we need to come away with from our study today about the nature and character of Jesus Christ and how He deals with us:
• Suffering is our preparation for ministry in a world of suffering. This is not a world for shallow people with soft character. It needs tested, toughened disciples who are prepared, like their Lord, to descend into hell to redeem the lost;
• One reason a life of holiness frightens us, why an encounter with the real Jesus can be so unnerving is that, when we come into His presence, when we really and truly encounter Him, we sense the chasm between his holiness and our uncleanness;
• Sometimes the most honest, truthful and lovingly Christ-like response to foolishness or evil is anger. Jesus couldn’t have any integrity if He was indifferent to either one. The person who is always nice, always demure, always even-keeled is like a person who ultimately does not care about what God cares about. This is not a license for viciousness or vengefulness, but it is a wake-up call to call sin, “sin”, and to be passionate about what He is passionate about;
• The risk in loving the theologically or morally wayward is that we may become tempted to compromise our values to be nice to them. But true love is robust; it includes compassion and confrontation, empathy and truth-telling, kindness and sternness.
We’re not talking about shame and fear here, but we are talking about the very real and very unfeigned anger that God has toward unrepentance and continuing in sin – especially when it is knowing and willful.
The good news? Jesus doesn’t leave it at that. Leaving someone to Him is many times the kindest and most loving thing we can do for them. Protecting their feelings is often not only a disservice, but is actually more un-Christ-like than open honesty.
Next time we will look in-depth at His call to us to rest.
Let me leave you with the words of Jesus that we will study at length next time. Let these words recorded for us in Matthew 11:28-30, saturate your soul as you consider the message from today:
"Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, 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."
There is a balance and we have to find it and live in it.
Let’s pray.
