Come To Me (Matthew 1:11, 25-30)

Come To Me

March 22, 2026

Matthew 11:1, 25-30

By: Pastor Mike Conner

I want to express my gratitude for the many people who preached, led worship, and worked with the youth Sunday School class the past two Sundays: Marlys McCurdy, John Gribas, April Mills, Trudy Pink, and others. It continues to be a source of joy and humility that I am able to lean on and learn from others. When other people lead and share their prayerful perspective on God’s Word all of us get to see and to hear the Gospel refracted through the prism of our community. That diversity gives us a fuller sense of who God is, how God works, and what God is up to in our world. So, thank you.

Thank you. Expressing gratitude is transformative. If we do it regularly as a practice, saying ‘Thank you’ can rewire our neural pathways. Our minds can learn to sift for the good even as we take in disheartening news or move through challenging experiences. Over time, we start to anticipate that, even in the midst of failure or opposition or the unfolding of scary events beyond our control, we will catch the glimmer of God’s goodness in our daily lives.

That’s what Jesus is doing here in Matthew chapter 11. He is deep into his Galilean ministry. He has passed through many of its major towns and smaller villages, healing, preaching, and performing miracles. But in verse 20 of this chapter, Matthew writes, “Then [Jesus] began to reproach the cities in which most of his deeds of power had been done because they did not repent” (11:20, emphasis mine).

He reproached them… Even though Jesus had done great things for the people, he was not seeing the change of heart that he wanted to see.

Instead of growing bitter about this apparent failure, Jesus sensed that God was mysteriously at work. Surprisingly, he says ‘Thank you.’ And we would do well to listen, because this is one of the moments in the Gospels where we are brought inside the prayer life of Jesus and get to hear him as he communes and communicates with his Source.

Here’s verse 25 in the New Revised Standard Version: “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” Here’s that same verse in the New Living Translation: “O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding these things from those who think themselves wise and clever, and for revealing them to the childlike.” And here’s how Eugene Peterson’s puts it in The Message: “Thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. You’ve concealed your ways from sophisticates and know-it-alls, but spelled them out clearly to ordinary people.”

Infants, the childlike, ordinary people—Jesus thanks God for presenting the things of salvation to them. But the wise, the intelligent, and the clever; sophisticates and know-it-alls? Well, Jesus thanks God for hiding the things of salvation from them.

Jesus saw the prevailing arrangements of power remaining fixed. Gripped by an addiction to the status quo, the dominant culture would not embrace the gentleness and justice of the kingdom of God that Jesus was revealing. Maybe they were afraid of Roman retribution. Maybe they preferred a vision of God that was domesticated and aligned with “the way things had always been.” Maybe it was something else. Either way, this is the first real indication in Matthew’s Gospel that the masses are going to eventually turn their back on Jesus at the cross.

Yet there were a few, a very few, whose hearts were in alignment with the movements of the Spirit, including the twelve apostles. So Jesus thanked the Lord of heaven and earth, whose thoughts are higher than our thoughts and whose ways are higher than our ways, for foiling expectations for worldly success and for overturning the value systems of the world.

     God’s work of overturning the world’s value systems is a thread that runs throughout all of scripture. God initiated salvation history by calling Abraham and Sarah, an elderly couple, to leave their homeland and travel in faith to a land yet to be revealed, where they would start a family. God took Moses, a reclusive outcast, and made him the liberator of the Hebrews. God took David, the youngest son of a shepherd, and made him King.

In Mary’s Magnificat, the mother of God sings: “[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly / [God] has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” And in the opening chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, we’ve seen how Jesus’ ministry incarnated this great reversal. He, a poor carpenter’s son was revealed to be the Son of God. He welcomed and healed everyone who came to him. He revealed God’s universal love for all people. He saw through externals to the intentions of the heart.

     There is a scene in the New Testament book of Acts in which two of Jesus’ apostles, Peter and John, are arrested for preaching about Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple. This happens after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. They are brought before the “rules, elders, and scribes,” including some of the individuals who had a direct hand in Jesus’ crucifixion, and are asked, “By what power or by what name did you do this?”

“Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, ‘Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are being asked how this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead.’

“…Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus” (from Acts 4, emphasis mine).

Notice the reversal: boldness and joy and moral integrity from those who had no social privilege. Surely this was a sign of their fellowship with Jesus, the one who was crucified and who yet lives. Those who had arrested Peter and John had nothing to say in response to this. As the Apostle Paul writes in First Corinthians, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

“Consider your own call, brothers and sisters,” Paul urges, “not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God” (1:25-29 NRSV).

It is God’s will that the good news be the pearl of great price hidden in the field, the narrow way that leads to life, the invisible salt seasoning the world. The only condition to finding it, and living it, is that we come to Jesus as the ordinary people that we are, in need of grace. God has revealed these things to infants. Infants don’t work to distinguish themselves from others. They don’t compete. They don’t manage their image in the eyes of others. They don’t possess anything other than the will to live and the need to be cared for. And they are bold in making their needs known.

Jesus says, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

And anyone, any of us, can do this.

You are never too young, and you are never too old to come to him.

You do not need to be self-sufficient, a straight-A student, or a standalone success to come to him.

You do not need to have it all together or have clean record to come to him.

You do not need to be wealthy or witty, perfect or popular.

You do not need to have white skin or American citizenship, or speak English perfectly, or at all.

You don’t need to know ahead of time where the journey is going to take you.

You don’t need to have achieved all the things you thought you were setting out to achieve at the beginning.

You don’t need to be able to do all things today that you used to be able to do yesterday.

You don’t need to be understood or to understand.

All Jesus asks is that you come to him, really come to him, to his presence, to his humility and lowliness, and that you experience his delight in showing you the source of pure Love at the center of everything, the Love that knows and wants you, the Love that wants magnify itself in the world through you. The Love that Jesus called Father.

What good news! – that to inherit the kingdom of God we simply need to be honest with Jesus about being weary and burdened. We only must feel our need for him and receive his rest.

Friends, whether for the first or the thousandth time, may each of us come to him, trusting it is precisely through our imperfections and false starts and emptiness that the kindness, the mercy, and the pure of love of God are revealed.

Thanks be to God. Amen.