Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 – 7/5/2026 – Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’
Matthew 11:18-19 (NRSVue)
Jesus famously promises in today’s reading that his yoke is easy and his burden light. For the Lutheran there is a clear straightforward theology behind this promise of Christ. There is nothing we can do to earn the love, grace, and blessing of God who always already loved us. Whatever our duties, obligations, and acts of good, these are not the earning of God’s favor, which is already ours, through the promise of God in Christ his Son. Jesus’s burden is easy because whatever it is we do or fail to do, we cannot lose the favor God promised us.
This is not the whole story when it comes to discipleship. Jesus indeed offers rest and an easy yoke, but there is something difficult about following Jesus as well. Later in Matthew he teaches “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24). This means that there is something easy and restful about following Jesus, and at the same time there is something difficult and painful about following him as well. This tension is in keeping with the Gospel as a whole, which is full of tensions. These tensions are important because they allow us to inhabit a world that is in itself ambiguous and full of tensions, so that the tensions in Scripture are creatively productive of new and liberating ways of looking at the world. As creatively productive as this tension between the ease of follow Jesus and the difficulty of following him might be, it also creates of a problem for the theologian and follower of Jesus. Which parts are difficult and which are easy? How can we tell the difference?
This reflection will not resolve this tension completely (other than to point generally at the Lutheran understanding), but I want to point out one way that following Jesus is an easy, light, restful burden. Just before Jesus teaches that his burden is light, Jesus’s critics condemn Jesus’s eating and drinking habits. He enjoys food and drink and does so with sinners. How can a glutton and a drunkard can be God’s chosen servant and prophet? Jesus catches these critics in hypocrisy when he points out that they criticized John the Baptist for being precisely the opposite; he was too austere and ascetic. They claimed he had a demon, he was being so devout in his self-denial. The ironic thing about these criticisms is that both Jesus and John the Baptist were living in ways that were pleasing to God, Jesus by eating and drinking with gusto among all sorts of people and John who lived in the desert and ate bugs and wild honey.
Religion, the human relationship with the divine, has always had regulations and restrictions around eating and drinking. At the same time, religion has always upheld and acknowledged the joyfulness and blessedness of enjoy nourishing and pleasurable food and drink. The restrictions vary from time to time and religion to religion, but there has always been an idea that a certain amount of austerity and self-denial with food and drink has spiritual benefits. This gets taken to extremes by ascetics who believe self-denial is the best way or even the only way to find and connect with the divine. In these ways of living out faith, asceticism about food and drink can be a burden and can become quite unhealthy, not an easy yoke to be sure.
Jesus’s teaching is simply that one does not have to stop enjoying food and drink, one does not need to take on the burden of self-denial, in order to connect with God. Jesus does not deny the value of fasting. He fasted and held up John, who made fasting a way of life, as an example to follow. The lesson here is that sometimes and in some circumstances fasting or self-denial is the best thing for us, but we should never take this truth to the point where it weighs us down or becomes too much. Joyful enjoyment of food and drink with others is just as holy as fasting in the desert. The good news is that we do not need to fret about how little we fast or how much we might enjoy. That is one of the ways Jesus offers rest; we no longer need to worry if we are “getting it right” in our spiritual practices or our enjoyment. Enjoyment and self-denial are both holy, both good, and both held up by Jesus as part of the life of a disciple.
Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 7/5/2026, the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost:
Zechariah 4:1-7
Luke 10:21-24
Psalm 145:8-14
Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis
Dionysus on a Bike 
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