Nobody's Playing Along

This Fourth of July weekend, we've been surrounded by a particular set of images.

Flags. Fireworks. The pageantry of national power. And there's nothing wrong with any of that, exactly. But images like these do something to us over time. They train the eye. They teach us, without our noticing, what victory is supposed to look like. What strength is supposed to feel like. What winning means.

Which is why the Sunday readings this week feel almost like a provocation.

In Matthew's gospel, Jesus describes a crowd in the marketplace — children calling out to each other, complaining that nobody will play along. It's a picture of his own generation. John the Baptist was too severe. Jesus is too permissive. Neither one fits what people expected. And so both of them get dismissed.

The crowd wasn't careless. They had studied. They had waited. They had built, from everything they'd been taught and promised, a clear picture of how God's messenger was supposed to arrive. And that picture was exactly what kept them from seeing what was standing right in front of them.

Zechariah had described this king centuries before. Triumphant and victorious — those are his words. And then the king arrives on a donkey, cutting off his own side's war horses, dismantling the battle bow. This is what triumph looks like in the economy of God. From the outside, it looks exactly like weakness.

Jesus thanks God — genuinely thanks God — that the wise and the intelligent can't see it. The ones who see it are the infants. The ones without the picture already fixed in their heads.

I keep thinking about who those people might be. The ones who aren't carrying the wrong image. The ones who have stopped waiting for the war horse, not because they gave up, but because they've been too busy surviving to hold onto a picture of how this was all supposed to go.

Zechariah calls them prisoners of hope. Held by something they can't prove yet, in the waterless pit, waiting for home.

This Sunday we'll sit with what it means that the king showed up for them. That he's been looking for them all along. Wherever you are this weekend — I hope you'll join us.